‘Bondage’ Revisited

Some of the problem is that there is a great deal of accumulated error about the novel and its author. Born in 1874, Somerset Maugham had one of the longest writing careers on record. When his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), appeared, Maugham was a rival and contemporary of Rudyard Kipling. Not quite a generation later—after Maugham had become the first playwright to have four plays running simultaneously in the West End—Of Human Bondage was recommended for American publication by an unknown editorial assistant named Sinclair Lewis. Thirty-two years after that, when Maugham’s superb short story collection Creatures of Circumstance came out in 1947, he was competing with John Cheever, and he was publishing essay collections and monographs up through the late 1950s. He died in 1965, five years after Albert Camus and four years before Jack Kerouac.

Such tenure offered him time in which to make money and enemies, and he acquired a mother lode of each. One particularly fierce band of foes was composed of the great number of Communist fellow-travelers, the set that dominated tastemaking during the interwar period. The cause of their enmity lies in a now-forgotten but prescient Maugham novel entitled Christmas Holiday (1939). Its story concerns a young Englishman on vacation in Paris who runs into an old friend, a journalist who wishes to be the secret police chief in a future Communist regime. Unabashedly bloodthirsty, this would-be Dzerzhinsky predicts that a barbaric war is coming and believes that, while he places himself behind the Soviet cause, the differences between the Nazis and Bolsheviks are largely semantic. Motivated in equal parts by resentment and desire for power, this journalist is depicted too honestly to have not gravely wounded the feelings of his confreres. 

The most influential attack on Maugham was a withering 1946 piece by Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker. Yet while the article has had a vast influence, it is also a compendium of errors. Wilson had two prompts: First, Maugham had just given an address to Congress and had provided the members with an inscribed copy of Of Human Bondage. And second, he had permitted the publication of a revised version of an early novel, Then and Now, which he had written in his mid-20s and rightly dismissed as inferior. Wilson, however, reviewed it as a new work—and something that no person of Maugham’s maturity should have written. Still devout in his Marxism, Wilson explained that, while many people had told him that he ought to take Maugham “seriously,” he could not, citing Maugham’s (obviously correct) observation that no one read Marcel Proust any longer for his incorporation of Henri Bergson’s philosophy but rather for his characters and social portraiture. Wilson wrote off Maugham as unworthy of serious status in literature, and yet, in his diaries, he admitted what was implicit in his review: He had never actually read any of Maugham’s major novels.

Maugham had few writer-friends, and few of them stepped forward to defend him. The damage was done—and it was magnified by the animus of the modernists and aesthetes.

The plaints of the modernists are akin to those rendered against Bach in his lifetime: Maugham had written in the same period as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce; was it not an indictment that had he not adopted their avant-garde methods? More compelling is the claim that he lacked a good style. One problem with this, though, is that Maugham had a number of styles. Most of his plays are imitative of Oscar Wilde, but his short stories are usually written in the third person and are meant to be read in a single sitting. As such, they aim for maximum readability and deliberately employ some of the clichés to which their characters would have been unconsciously drawn in their thoughts and expressions. By contrast, several of his novels, written in his own voice, are sententious and elegant, dressed up in part by the suggestions of his friend Edmund Gosse.

For Of Human Bondage, Maugham used a style that he never employed again: Purposefully avoiding adjectives, he aimed for supreme transparency and directness, a modern evocation of Caesar’s Commentaries brought to an account of Parisian garrets and tatty East End restaurants. This is a novel that has been lived. Although description is kept to a minimum, we see and know the central characters, Philip and Mildred, as much as any in fiction. Philip’s masochism, which draws him towards the rapacious waitress who takes his money and repeatedly humiliates him, is depicted without reserve. The hero’s skin is pulled off by an author who wishes to instruct his readers and steer them away from his own missteps.

Most critics have focused on the influence of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, in the sense that this is a coming-of-age story. But a more profound, if less obvious, influence is Leo Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy, Maugham had been orphaned in childhood and sent to live with relatives, had seen an older sibling die young, had been trained to read and speak French over and above his native tongue, and, in early manhood, had taken up an occupation other than literature. These experiences gave Maugham what they gave Tolstoy: keen ambition, an ever-present consciousness of tragedy, deep feeling for the importance of precision in writing, and a broad experience of life apart from the narrowness of the literary world.

For Maugham, his first calling had been medicine—and it is to medicine that his hero eventually turns after an unsuccessful attempt to paint in Paris. Familiar with medical settings, Maugham describes London clinics faithfully and accurately, just as Tolstoy used his own time as an officer in the Russian Army to inform his fiction. Maugham emulated Tolstoy in other ways as well: Recognizing that a third-person narrator who guides the reader directly may provide a stronger authorial voice, he followed Tolstoy’s example in freely violating the principle of “show, don’t tell.” Like Tolstoy, Maugham also deliberately avoided simile and metaphor; literary artifice is stripped away.

The first section of Of Human Bondage concerns Philip’s youth: We see him orphaned, and learn about his clubfoot. Then we step alongside him as a painfully self-conscious student in a public school, at a university in Germany, and as an artist in Paris. His deformity is a recasting of the struggles Maugham faced in these same locales because of his childhood stammer and his homosexuality. The hero’s indigence as a bohemian parallels Maugham’s own youthful poverty in Paris; a female friend’s suicide in the novel is closely based on the suicide of an older brother. A boy to whom Philip is attracted at school, whose last name is Rose, appears to have been based on an actual boy Maugham knew—also named Rose.

The second section deals with Philip’s relationship with Mildred. It is nearly certain that this recounts a self-destructive relationship that Maugham himself had with a man—and Mildred is described in androgynous terms. But this shift hardly minimizes the relationship’s impact, or its effectiveness in warning others naturally drawn to cruel and indifferent lovers. Here, too, Maugham follows Tolstoy’s advice that fiction should have a didactic function. The final section depicts Philip’s return to life after his affair with Mildred; it is the one section that is not especially autobiographical and is probably the weakest. 

Of Human Bondage persuades us of a real and particular series of places, and draws us towards an intensely realized group of characters. It also pulls us into a realm where the unconscious mind’s most intimate fears and desires are alive, providing at once quotidian detail and something almost mythical. That’s what great novels do.  

Jonathan Leaf is a playwright in New York.