Books |
Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage
By
Published: Mar 21, 2023
Category:
Fiction
The Modern Library ranked this book 65th on its list of the best 100 English-language novels of the 20th Century. Who am I to disagree?
It starts like this:
The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child’s bed.
“Wake up, Philip,” she said.
She pulled down the bed-clothes, took him in her arms, and carried him downstairs. He was only half awake.
“Your mother wants you,” she said.
Philip’s mother wants her eight-year-old son because she knows she is about to die. She holds him for the last time, kisses his eyes, runs her hands over his good right foot and his clubbed left foot, and the doctor takes the boy away. A page later, she’s dead, and Philip is off to live with his aunt and uncle.
There’s a good reason I raced through “Of Human Bondage.” Maugham had taken a crack at it a decade earlier, and couldn’t master the material. He’d abandoned fiction for the theater, and soon he had four plays on the London stage at once; even Shakespeare had never done that. So when he tackled the story of his life again, he knew how to write it:
I no longer sought a jeweled prose and a rich texture…. I sought on the contrary plainness and simplicity. With so much that I wanted to say…I could not waste words, and I set out now with the notion of using only such as were necessary to make my meaning clear. I had no space for ornament.
Maugham’s easy, direct style — the style of a man telling you a story over a dinner table after the dishes have been cleared and another bottle of wine has been opened — is a large reason he became rich and famous. A century after “Of Human Bondage’ was published, I think his is still the kind of writing most readers crave.
“Of Human Bondage” is, as Maugham was the first to admit, autobiographical fiction. The novel loosely follows the story of his youth: the loss of his beloved mother, unhappy years at his uncle’s vicarage, boarding school, a sojourn in Germany instead of a university in England, a season as an artiste in Paris, abortive stabs at romance, total abasement with a vulgar woman who loathes and uses him, and, and, and…. Every twist and turn of that story is the attempt of a tortured, grieving soul to be free. [To buy the mass market paperback from Amazon, click here. To buy the slightly larger, better bound, more expensive paperback, click here. For the Kindle download, click here.)
What about the club foot? It’s usually said that Maugham used that invented deformity in place of his real infirmity — the stutter that made its home in his mouth after his mother’s death. More recently, it’s said that abnormality stands for his homosexuality.
This may explain one of the best episodes of the novel, Philip’s one-sided romance with the horrible Mildred. Because it’s so exactingly written, it’s painful to read. And the pain makes it feel true, the way a life sometimes takes a wrong turn and suddenly becomes a soap opera. If Maugham was gay, how could he know all that? Well, duh — in all probability, Mildred is a stand-in for a masochistic romance Maugham had with a young man.
In the 1934 film, Mildred is played by Bette Davis. It was her first starring role, and she killed it — she was a strong contender for an Academy Award. Watch her in this brief scene, as she tells Philip exactly how little she thinks of him: “And after you kissed me I always used to wipe my mouth! Wipe my mouth!”
“Of Human Bondage” is filled with lines like that. “She loved him now,” Maugham writes about Philip’s stepmother, “because he had made her suffer.” Or this phrase: “the wretched monotony of pleasure.” Or, about the poor: “Philip discovered that the greatest tragedy of life to these people was not separation or death, that was natural and the grief of it could be assuaged with tears, but loss of work.”
I could go on, but I am keeping you.
