I was saying that in his collection of short stories entitled ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Maugham has a story entitled ‘Appearance and Reality’ in which he mentions the famous book of the same name by the Idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley. This is not just a flaunting of his extensive reading or a mere adventitious entree into a story told him by a Frenchman which bizarre as it sounds makes sense to the French. If you want to be technical this is a ‘detached observer’ framing. ‘This is what I was told, you may believe it or not. To my native informant it makes sense. Let me then commence’.
There is no filler or narrative putty applied to present a smooth surface to the reader in the work of Somerset Maugham. In his ‘Writers Notebook’ and ‘The Summing Up’ he refers to the compression, simplicity, precision, and exactitude of his favourite writers. How then does ‘Appearance and Reality’ apply to the story?
Bradley asks: where does the reality of what is presented to us by our perception reside. In the object? We can’t by definition know that. That would be the God’s Eye view. Essentially what we experience is an appearance or the object as it appears to us. How he deals with Berkeley’s demurral on this point I don’t know, I haven’t come to that point yet in the book. A chapter at a time savoured for its clarity is the way to read this extensive work which includes reality.
The idea as Maugham develops it is that we are informed by our experience. What pops out as significant for us depends on our souls or the way we live our world. There is a collectively learned aspect to this which we can recognise as French soul, Irish soul, Black soul. It is an internally coherent way of living the world which the denizens of any particular cultural sector can recognise. There are no neutral data.
Now read on.
