Of Human Bondage-W Somerset Maugham

****/*****                                                                                                                                                       Novel

Of Human Bondage

W Somerset Maugham

I first read Of Human Bondage about twenty-two years back. I was then in my late twenties, studying for MD in Pune. I bought it from a pavement on MG road. The vendor who must have known of its popularity would not sell it to me for less than fifty bucks, an amount not modest then, for a second-hand paperback, a 1983 reprint of a 1975 edition in PAN books. I had discovered Maugham around that time and had fallen head over heels for his books. I am yet to recover from that infatuation. Later I learnt that most book lovers had read him in adolescence and thus I came by him late in life, about a decade late. Perhaps that is why I was so impressed by his fiction. I was at a stage of life when old relations are continuously re-examined in light of new evolving bonds. I could relate intimately with the psychological turmoil that devastated Maugham’s characters in his vast oeuvre of fiction, all narrated in his masterfully aloof, non-judgmental style. Over the next couple of years, I read almost all his fiction and non-fiction works, barring his plays. I read Of Human Bondage again about a decade back and until my memory is swayed by the lure of nostalgia, I still found it ravishing. I read it for the third time now. I have read many more books in last decade than I had read in the preceding two. On this occasion I read it with a calm heart and a little more discerning eye.

Of Human Bondage was published more than a century back, in 1915. Maugham was then at the peak of his popularity as a playwright which matched that of George Bernard Shaw. He has written in his somewhat sketchy autobiographical writings that the fame and money that attended his successful career as a playwright did not afford him complete peace of mind. His past life constantly gnawed in a nook of his heart. He took a couple of year’s sabbatical from theater and set upon this work. Book did not achieve instant success. Although in later years it acquired great fame and apart from his short stories, this is one book by which Maugham is remembered by most readers today. But it succeeded in exorcising the demons of past life that had tormented Maugham till then.

Fact and fiction are inextricably mixed in Maugham’s works, according to his own admission. But Of Human Bondage is by far the most autobiographical of his fiction, more than his autobiographical non-fiction books Summing Up and A Writer’s Notebook. When asked by a critic ‘why did he write one book that was full of candour and human warmth’ his reply was ‘because I’ve only lived one life. It took me thirty years of living to possess the material for that one book.’ The intimacy with which author relates the emotions and their effects on the protagonist of the book, Philip Carey sets it apart from Maugham’s later fiction. In later years Maugham cultivated and successfully acquired the image of a keenly observant author who watches the drama of human life as it is being moulded by the passion of its lead actors and relates these dispassionately. Author is not experiencing these affects first hand and consequently he can adopt a distant manner.

Of Human Bondage narrates the growth of Philip Carey from his childhood till he is moving on to fourth decade of his life. It does not merely relate the events as they occur in his life but deals with the effects of these happenings and the way they influence his personality, development of his beliefs and his understanding of himself and the world he inhabits. Philip is orphaned while still a boy of seven and responsibility of his care falls on his elderly uncle and aunt. His uncle is the grasping, self-seeking, vain, vicar of Blackstable. His wife, though well-meaning towards the loveless boy, has never had a child of her own and now in her dotage does not know how to deal with an introverted child who is extremely shy in revealing his feelings to anyone. Philip suffers from club foot and this disability has marred his growth as a person. He is constantly mocked by his colleagues and teachers. Invocation of his disability is the ultimate slander that is hurled at him in any argument or a fight. In an attempt to counter the cruelties of his companions Philip finds pleasure in self-pity and withdraws deeper in the dark recesses of his mind with each innuendo. Maugham himself suffered from a disabling stammer all his life that made him shy of conversation in public. He believed that but for this affliction he may have been a different person. This enforced isolation from the masses might have sharpened his skills of observing people’s behaviour and the way they reacted to different situations, an invaluable instrument in the armamentarium of an author of fiction. Maugham portrays Philip’s lonely childhood, his cruel victimization for a disability which is not of his making with a genuine sensitivity and poignancy that can come only from personal experience of similar vicissitudes. Considerable length of the novel- Maugham’s biggest book- deals with Philip’s childhood at the vicarage of Blackstable, his schooling at King’s school at Tercanbury, his infatuation with one of his classmates, a friendship that begets him more misery than joy in the end. Philip is not satisfied with the formal education being imparted in schools and seeks freedom of spirit. He decides to forego university education and to his Uncle’s much chagrin who exercises a tight and capricious control over the minor legacy left to Philip by his parents, he goes to Heidelberg and then to Paris in search of knowledge that will reveal to him his true self and the nature of the world that surrounds him. He gradually forsakes his religious beliefs and evolves an agnostic creed to guide him in his daily chores. But nothing prepares him for the tempestuous life that awaits him.

He ultimately joins a Medical college in London for the sake of learning a profession to earn his living. In a bar in London he develops an obsessive craving for a slatternly waitress Mildred, anaemic and sickly in disposition, slovenly in habits and dull of wit. Philips masochistic relation with Mildred is the mainstay of the book. With ingenious skill Maugham describes how Philip gets entangled in the web of self-destructive emotions, in spite being aware deep in his heart that he hates Mildred all the while. Philip is released from the tyranny of his oppressive infatuation for Mildred when he befriends the lively and jovial Altheny, a working-class man. Altheny and his large family welcome Philip to their home with unassuming warmth and Philip decides to marry Altheny’s daughter Sally.

In the course of a fairly long narration of about six hundred pages, Maugham has created some very fascinating characters in the book: the conceited, self-absorbed, egoist vicar of Blackstable; his prim, shrivelled-up, cadaverous wife, her hair done perpetually in the fashion of yesteryears, longing for Philip’s affection; Philip’s companion at Heidelberg , the effete Hayward, living off the wealth of his rich relatives, a self-styled intellectual & aesthete who had failed in every worldly pursuit because these were beneath the contemplation of his pure, supreme intellect; the quarrelsome, abrasive Fanny Price, Philip’s co-student of art in Paris who strangely falls in love with him, who has the most sincere passion for painting but no talent; Poet Cronshaw, who never wrote anything of worth, lived in abject penury in Paris, drank day and night, held court amidst young art students regaling them with his wit and died of cirrhosis in Philip’s London flat, realising in the end his worthlessness and the shallowness of his life; and many more such splendid personalities.

Maugham has invented many memorable characters in his vast writings. Personalities that are unimaginably nuanced, people who exhibit an astonishing contrast in their behaviour and thought process, characters that excite our admiration, opprobrium, affection and hatred almost simultaneously, persons with a bizarre kink in their mind that compels them to perceive the world in a singularly eccentric manner. But barring a few most of these marvellous characters are men. Women in Maugham’s fiction seem like props that just provide scaffolding for the multifarious growth of its male character. Thus, women in his books are monochromatic lacking in subtle nuances of personality, either too kind towards all humanity or just plain vile. I find Of Human Bondage also exemplifies this. Mildred is hare-brained, rapacious and of easy virtue. Sally is simple minded, of composed disposition and capable of accepting and giving unalloyed love.

When I first came across Maugham, I was most fascinated by his plain story-telling, his unadorned prose that is beguilingly simple and breath-taking in its lucidity. There are a few cumbersome passages in the book when Maugham has succumbed to the temptation of garnishing his considerably long novel with ornate prose. But this in not his forte. These passages stand apart like eyesore. But these unsavoury digressions are minuscule in this six-hundred-page saga.

Title of the book is taken from Spinoza’s Ethics, where a chapter on the role of emotions in influencing human life is titled Of Human Bondage or The Powers of Affects. Book is truly the story of Philip’s enslavement by his emotions and his struggle to break free of these shackles. It is one of the most powerful books that I have read. I enjoyed it immensely on each occasion that I read it. A foreknowledge of Maugham’s life added vastly to my pleasure as I read it this time.

Feb 2017