Somerset Maugham's Reality

 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.

'Flotsam and Jetsam' by Somerset Maugham from the collection 'Creatures of Circumstance'

 I think of Somerset Maugham as the consummate story teller.  You are brought in to a well lighted place shown the furniture which reflects the characters who go on their way as dumb as falling stones beset by their constitutional gravity.  He doesn’t often love his personae but anyone with knowledge by acquaintance, as Bertie Russell said, knows that distaste is a standard correct response.  His Malay stories are often a vision of humid hell.  

In the story entitled ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ from the collection called ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Skelton,a youngish anthropologist on his way to the Borneo coast, a three week trip, is struck down by malaria.  A rubber planter Grange and his wife who live nearby take him in while he recuperates.  Aha I thought anthropologist now gets to study OP (orang putay/white man) in his native habitat.  I won’t go into the story which is classic Maughamish  operative secret.  During the day while the anthropologist is recovering he talks to the wife who at one point seems to be about to reveal the source of the extreme nervous ticks that oppress her.  She tells a lot but holds that back.

When the sick man recovers he departs:  

“He was glad now that Mrs. Grange had not told him the story that was on the tip of her tongue to tell.  He did not want some tragic tale of sin or folly to connect him with them in a recollection that he could not escape.  He wanted to forget them as one forgets a bad dream.

It is left to Mrs. Grange to tell us the story talking to herself in the mirror as if in her past as an actress she was delivering a soliloquy.  A secret that is untold retains its power to trap one in that continually recurring scene of horror.  Skelton does not want this unloaded on to him even if this might free the teller of the secret.  Anthropology has its limits.

Is that direct address to the reader a weak ending, though I will grant screen playable?  Has Maugham slipped?  I’m not entirely happy that an observer has been removed from the scene but yes the response to incontinent sharing of ‘please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’ is a real one.

The next story in the collection is called ‘Appearance and Reality’ which sent me to F.H. Bradley’s book.  Maugham was a reader of philosophy and he liked the book.. The title of his novel ‘Of Human Bondage’ is taken from Spinoza’s ‘The Ethics’.

I’ve just started that and I have the distinct feeling that there may be more of appearance than reality in this tale.

Larry Darrell Speaks

"One day I said to him: 'You, who are so liberal, who know the world, who've read so much, science, philosophy, literature—do you in your heart of hearts believe in reincarnation?'
"His whole face changed. It became the face of a visionary.
" 'My dear friend,' he said, 'if I didn't believe in it life would have no meaning for me.' "
"And do you believe in it, Larry?" I asked.
"That's a very difficult question to answer. I don't think it's possible for us Occidentals to believe in it as implicitly as these Orientals do. It's in their blood and bones. With us it can only be an opinion. I neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it."

(from The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham)

That latter paragraph has been my ‘rap’ for a while and whether I learned it from this source or not I don’t know. I would never approach a teacher with firewood saying 'I am tired of the endless transmigration’. Because I’m not and because the simple knowledge of continuity without a felt identity is an abstraction without living force. What is certain is the practice of the presence. ‘Everything shall perish save his face’ (Koran 28:88)

The Killer and the Slain by Hugh Walpole

It needs also a cynical humour; although Roy laughed so much I never thought he had a very quick sense of humour, and I am quite sure that he was incapable of cynicism.

This is Maugham’s verdict on Kear/Walpole and it seems borne out in the novels. The situations he describes are bizarre but he foregoes the humorous possibilities that might lighten the story and make it flow better. Of course the grotesque, baldly related, has its own grim comedy and the restricted length of The Killer and the Slain brings out the irony of juxtaposition. He is not allowed the luxury of length that might dissipate the effects. Those are many.

First of all the dedication:
THIS MACABRE IS DEDICATED IN LOVING MEMORY AND HUMBLE ADMIRATION TO THE GREAT AUTHOR OF THE TURN OF THE SCREW.

That is a significant nod as they share the theme of spiritual oppression and possession.
jolly corner

The novel is related in the form of narrative statements by the protagonist John Ozias Talbot now 36 years of age. He begins with an account of his schooling and his first encounter with his bete noir who at first seems a saviour. John Talbot as a shy and timid schoolboy is taken up by Jimmy Turnstall who is popular and burly enough to prevent the other being bullied. It becomes very clear that he guards him only to have exclusive tormenting rights.

He was always laughing, joking, calling out, on the move. As a small boy (he was the same age as myself, born in the same month) he was friendly to all the world. I suppose, to use modern rather cheap terms, you would say he was an extrovert. I was an introvert. But there was more in it than that. He used his breeziness and heartiness to cover his secret designs. Even then, at ten years of age, he was plotting how he could use everybody and everything to his own advantage. He was helped, of course, by the fact that he never had any morals whatever.

He begins to oppress Talbot and it is his chief amusement to claim a special affinity with him even though Talbot loathes him. ‘Jacko’ is the contemptuous name Tunstall gives him:

‘You know, Jacko, I DO like you, although you’re such a goup. I think you really like me too, although you’re a bit afraid of me. I like that as well.’

‘I hate you! I hate you!’ I cried, breaking away from him.

In time Tunstall moves away to London and Talbot remains in the seaside town of Seaborne in the county of Glebeshire running the antique shop established by his deceased father and writing novels. At the date of the First Narrative, 1936, he has had 3 published, the last of which The Gossip-monger is a success. He has married by this time, a beautiful if cold woman called Eve who takes over the antique business running it successfully and allowing him to focus on his writing. Then Turnstall turns up. He is now a well known portrait painter and has taken a house where he intends to stay for part of the year. When they inevitably meet Talbot makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with him:

Then he said: ‘Don’t you want to know what’s been happening to me all this time?’
‘I don’t particularly care.’
‘That IS a rude thing to say. All the same I’ll tell you. I’m quite a successful painter. Hadn’t you heard? Especially with portraits. I paint people as they’d like to be. That’s the thing. That’s what you ought to do. What’s the use of writing these books that nobody wants to read? Simply wasting your time. I’ve made quite a bit of money, and, like a wise man, I married a woman with money.

This is the beginning of a pervasive occupation of the weaker man’s mind and spirit. The title of the book is an indication of where this leads but there is a Mr. Hyde twist to it that does not require a special potion. Is Talbot’s transformation a psychotic delusion or the absorption by an incubus?

There are excellently realised minor characters. Cheeseman aka The Rat a loathsome blackmailer is fascinatingly repellant.

I heard all this from Basil Cheeseman, a friend of his, and about Cheeseman, known to myself and some others as ‘The Rat’, I must say a word or two. Physically he resembled a rat, for he was a little man with very prominent white sharp upper teeth. He had reddish-brown hair and restless whisky-coloured eyes. When he smiled his teeth jutted out over his lower lip. He was, and is, an evil little man; a journalist by profession who had settled down in a ramshackle cottage near Seaborne and there indulged in shabby orgies with girls from London or visitors to the resort. He made a living by picking up paragraphs and sending them to London and the provincial papers. He had, and has, as malicious and dirty-minded a soul as exists in the world to-day. He was the very man for Tunstall. He was more evil, I don’t doubt, than Tunstall and yet I did not hate him half as much. He had no power over me. I thought of him possibly as a kind of emanation from Tunstall. When Tunstall couldn’t come to me himself he sent the Rat instead, and I can see him now with a faint shiny stubble on his cheeks, his projecting teeth and false grin, his restless cat-like eyes. ‘He’s come back and he’s going to stay,’ the Rat said, eyeing me curiously. His malicious curiosity knew no limit. He had long ago discovered my hatred and fear of Tunstall, but what was Tunstall’s hold over me? I did not look as though I had any vices. And, farther than that, why did Tunstall bother about me at all? What was my attraction for Tunstall?

This is an excellent novel and should be on a list of the neglected classics of the macabre.

What of the retort to Maugham that I mentioned previously?
witch's hat
One of the novels Talbot had published was called The Gridiron that Rose the well known novelist had liked although the public did not concur.

The Gridiron, into which I put so much good work—a novel, I am still convinced, with something unique in it, something that has never been done before and will never be done again—appeared and was dead as soon as born. And yet not quite so! For it roused the interest of certain critics, and Rose, the famous novelist, wrote me an enthusiastic letter concerning it. Now I consider Rose’s novels very poor indeed—old-fashioned, romantic, platitudinous— but he IS a very well known writer and when he reviews a novel he helps, undoubtedly, its popularity. I have often enough inveighed against the practice of one novelist reviewing another novelist and have especially criticised Rose in this connection, but after he had said some fine quotable words about The Gridiron in The Message I felt rather differently about him. His letter to me was kind and enthusiastic, if patronising, and when I next saw the picture of his high and shining forehead in a newspaper I felt, I must confess, quite friendly towards it.
……………

There was in The Gossip-monger a certain dry humour and irony and it happened that the public fancied in one of the figures of my story a caricature of Rose himself. This helped its sale, and Rose was very magnanimous, alluding, humorously, in his review to the caricature as though he had enjoyed it; as a matter of fact I heard afterwards from a friend of his that it hurt him very much. It was Rose’s great ambition in life, I think, to be considered a noble character without being thought at the same time a prig—no easy ambition

Somerset Maugham dips his nib in the witch's hat

When penmanship was taught via the medium of steel nibs and ceramic ink wells like witches hats set into the oak desks bound each to their seats with cast iron brackets, the boy behind if wanting to annoy would jab your arse with a pen. I have been from time to time been discussing such literary jabs given by Hemingway to Ford and Anderson. I believe that the more famous writer can affect the reputation of the other. It has the effect of a scorn barrier which our admiration for the jabber creates about the jabee. I felt that about Ford and also I must admit about George Moore who quarrelled with W.B . Yeats.

Somerset Maugham similarly had barefaced innocent sport with Hugh Walpole in his novel Cakes and Ale and it is said ruined the man’s reputation in the process. Seeing as I had never heard of Walpole my ignorance could be accounted for by this pasquinade which turned a successful writer into a footnote. The parsimonious explanation is merely ignorance. Alroy dit Roy Kear is the assiduous networker, a type which anyone with the slightest acquaintance with literary circles will recognise. There may and probably should be many more such characters in fiction, Lady Carbury in Trollope’s The Way we are Now is one. However it is only those established authors who feel their reputation is secure dip their nib in the witches hat.

The portrait of Roy Kear is etched with acid on the elegant burnished copper of Maugham’s prose.

I had watched with admiration his rise in the world of letters. His career might well have served as a model for any young man entering upon the pursuit of literature. I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent. This, like the wise man’s daily dose of Bemax, might have gone into a heaped-up tablespoon. He was perfectly aware of it, and it must have seemed to him sometimes little short of a miracle that he had been able with it to compose already some thirty books. I cannot but think that he saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Charles Dickens in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. He pondered the saying. If that was all, he must have told himself, he could be a genius like the rest; and when the excited reviewer of a lady’s paper, writing a notice of one of his works, used the word (and of late the critics have been doing it with agreeable frequency) he must have sighed with the satisfaction of one who after long hours of toil has completed a cross-word puzzle.

That is the beginning of so many ink laden jabs that a tattoo is drawn on the Knight’s posterior. Cakes and Ale was published in 1930 and only in 1942 in the posthumous The Killer and the Slain does Walpole reply. Of that curious work of macabre genius more anon.

Addendum 7/9/13: Selena Hastings has a post about the Kear/Walpole slag:alroy maugham