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Somerset Maugham: The Razor’s Edge

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Feb 10, 2020
Category: Fiction

Do you know anyone in his/her early 20s who knows exactly what career is just right — and who proves it by scoring a plum job and working a zillion hours a week. If he/she doesn’t collapse from the strain, we’re looking at a CEO by 30. And then there are kids who are just as smart but not as driven. They’re thinking. They’re wishing. But the moment hasn’t arrived when they know how they want to spend the next few decades. So, for now, they are the most talented gig-workers in our history. Larry Durrell, the main character in “The Razor’s Edge,” isn’t even that industrious. He seems, as they used to say, “bone idle.” Some write him off. Somerset Maugham doesn’t make that mistake…

“The Razor’s Edge” seems to be a love story. Isabel Bradley, beautiful and rich, has waited for her war hero fiancé Larry Darrell to return home to Chicago after World War I. He’s slow to do so, and when he does, he seems in no rush to marry and start making a fortune in the brokerage business. What’s Larry’s problem? A friend died saving his life in the war; now Larry wants to “loaf” and find out what really matters. Looking on is Elliott Templeton, an expatriate of a kind now obsolete: a snobbish climber who, near the end of his life, will say, “I have always moved in the best society in Europe, and I have no doubt that I shall move in the best society in heaven.” And, not least, Somerset Maugham, as narrator and minor character.

If the locations aren’t limited to Chicago and Paris and the salons that define the boundaries of the social set, it’s because Larry becomes a “seeker.” He takes grubby work so he’ll have more time to read and think, and then he goes to India and more or less abandons himself to ultimate questions. At length, he returns to Paris, runs into Maugham and explains himself. [To rent the video stream from Amazon Prime, click here. To buy the paperback of “The Razor’s Edge” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]

About this chapter, Maugham writes: “I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of the story as I have to tell, since for most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation that I had with Larry. However, I should add that except for this conversation, I would perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book.”

Take that, shallow reader!

“The Razor’s Edge” was published in 1944, when the world wasn’t focused on spiritual transcendence. So you might think readers didn’t line up for this novel. Wrong. It was Maugham’s biggest hit. Twentieth Century Fox paid $250,000 — that would be $6 million in today’s dollars — for the film rights. A smart purchase: The film made a fortune and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Watch Maugham, in a cameo, besting his snobbish friend.

What did Larry learn? I’m giving nothing away by quoting him — you know what he learned. It’s this:

What he [the guru] taught was very simple. He taught that we are all greater than we know and that wisdom is the means to freedom. He taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are the opportunities offered to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self. But it wasn’t his teaching that was so remarkable; it was the man himself, his benignity, his greatness of soul, his saintliness. His presence was a benediction. I was very happy with him. I felt that at last I had found what I wanted.

Keep a notepad handy — there’s delicious stuff here. Here’s a description of a minor character: “He combined irreproachable connections with notorious immorality.” And this, my favorite: “American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.”

In sum, 320 pages of exquisite storytelling.