The Moon and Sixpence

The Moon and Sixpence – W. Somerset Maugham

The Mind of an Artist

Genius is defined as a very great ability or skill in a particular subject or activity. It is tempting to speculate that a talent that is exceedingly rare must be inborn. This lends an ethereal remoteness to the facility and enhances its appeal. An ability that can be improved by diligence appears too worldly to be called extraordinary.

A closer look at the acclaimed geniuses reveals the truth of the cliched adage that genius is more hard work, i.e., perspiration, and only a little gift, i.e., inspiration. Michaelangelo, Newton, Beethoven and innumerable others, all undisputed prodigies in their fields, practiced their metier for decades to sharpen their skills. World saw the finished goods and marvelled at the unworldly nature of its beauty.

Word genius immediately conjures image of Einstein in our minds. His theory of General Relativity is celebrated as one of the most elegant conceptions in modern science. Einstein worked for a decade to arrive at its concise mathematical formulation. J.K. Rowling first had the idea for Harry Potter while delayed on a train for London. For next five years she worked on the idea, and then presented to the world her stupendously successful book. Ramanujan, perhaps the greatest mathematician of twentieth century, believed that Namakkal Devi, his family deity, placed the mathematical truths on his tongue while he slept. It required years of intense collaboration with G.H. Hardy at Cambridge, to beat these gifts of Namakkal Devi into mathematical theorems.

The chrysalis of an idea may be born in the womb of an inspiration. But it needs vision, skill, and unflagging work to transform it into the beauty of a butterfly.

W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 novel, The Moon and Sixpence, is a story of one such genius, the painter Charles Strickland. Maugham, allegedly relating facts, declares in the beginning that Strickland had many faults but today ‘these are accepted as the necessary complement to his merits…one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius’.

Charles Strickland is a successful stock broker in London, where he lives with his wife and two teenaged children. His wife likes to cultivate company of artists. Maugham, who is the narrator of the tale, has recently published a moderately successful novel. Mrs Strickland befriends him. Charles Strickland one day suddenly deserts his wife and children to live in Paris, leaving a note to Mrs Strickland, not to look for him hereafter. It is rumoured that forty-five-year-old Strickland is accompanied by a girl and substantial money from his firm. A devastated Mrs Strickland requests young Maugham to travel to Paris to find the reasons why her husband has abandoned them and to implore him to return. In Paris, Maugham learns that Strickland lives alone in a shabby hotel and is hard-up for money. Strickland informs Maugham that he has come to Paris to paint and his decision to leave this wife is irrevocable. He is unrepentant and heartlessly indifferent to his wife’s future. ‘I’ve supported her for seventeen years. Why shouldn’t she support herself for a change?’ he replies when Maugham asks him how his wife will now live. In London, Strickland was known to be dull, inarticulate, and awkward in the company of artistic people his wife courted. None knew him to harbour any feelings for art.

Latter, Maugham often meets Strickland in Paris, when he lives there for a few years. Strickland leads a reclusive life. He is foul of temper and can barely manage to keep body and soul together. He lives on occasional charity of his acquaintances. He is not interested in selling his paintings or showing them to other painters. All he wants is to paint. An accident of fate brings him to South Pacific and he settles in Tahiti. He dies here aged fifty-five. After his death art critics recognise his talent and soon, he is acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of his time. Maugham visits Tahiti in the course of his work, many years after Strickland’s death. In the island he meets people who had known Strickland. Strickland, it appears, had been immensely happy in Tahiti. He painted his best canvasses here. People left him to his own business and most had a genuine respect for the ascetic painter, who had left his country to live on their island and paint his dreams. Strickland had married a native girl and fathered many children through her. He was contended in her company.

Maugham was known to carve the characters of his stories on the life of people he had known; close acquaintances as well as people he met briefly in his travels. In Summing Up, his sort-of autobiographical book, he says, ‘I had small power of imagination. I have taken living people and put them into situations, tragic or comic, that their characters suggested. I might well say that they invented their own stories’.

Self-portrait of Paul Gauguin

Maugham’s inspiration for The Moon and Sixpence came from the life of the French painter of nineteenth century, Paul Gauguin. Gauguin too was a stockbroker in Paris. He decided to take up painting when he was forty. This led to separation from his wife. Gauguin spent a decade in Tahiti. His most famous paintings show Polynesian landscape and people. His acclaimed masterpiece ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ was painted in Tahiti. Gauguin was known for his pugilistic temperament. But he did not shun society. Painters Edgar Degas and Vincent Van Gaugh were his friends. He exhibited his paintings in Europe, throughout his life. But it was only after his death, the world woke up to the great artist who had lived among them. Paintings which fetched him little, now sell for millions.

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? by Paul Gauguin

Maugham was interested in arts. He believed that it is only love and art that can justify a human being. He had developed a critical understanding of the craft by mixing with the best artistic people in Paris, London, and New York. Over the years he came to acquire invaluable works of artists like Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and Leger. It was rumoured that in mid-twentieth century he had the largest private collection of paintings in Europe. He displayed these proudly in his luxurious bungalow in Cap Ferrat, on the shores of Mediterranean in French Riviera.

Eve with apple by Gauguin

(Maugham found this painted on the glass panels of a door in a hut in Tahiti, where Gauguin lived in his last days. Maugham paid two hundred francs for these priceless paintings, immediately got the door unhinged and shipped to France. He had an acute sense not only of art but finance too.)

Maugham wanted to write a book on the life of Paul Gauguin for long. He travelled to the distant Pacific islands in 1916-17 to collect material for the book. He visited these islands on many occasions thereafter. This became his El Dorado, a place he mined for his incomparable short stories on the lives of expatriate people living a drab life in the far-off outposts of a fading colonial Empire. As book-lovers associate Spain with Hemingway, Africa with Conrad, and South America with Graham Greene, the South Pacific islands will always remain a Maugham country.

But Maugham was more interested in the inner world of an artist. He said that personality of an artist lies hidden in his work. He says in the novel, ‘To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults.’ Throughout the book he reminds us of Strickland’s faults. He talks of his art, but little. Strickland we are told was rude, uncouth, and selfish. He was poor with words and the commonest phrase in his vocabulary was, ‘go to hell’. In awe of artist’s art, Maugham seems to condone and romanticise his brutish behaviour. He tells us that Strickland used all his friends and colleagues for his urgent needs and then discarded them without a thought. One of his rare admirers in Paris, a Dutchman – a poor painter himself but an astute connoisseur of art – brought him home during one of his acute illnesses, when Strickland lay dying in the cubbyhole of his seedy hotel. He tended to him for weeks. Strickland in return, seduced his wife.

It is clear in the book, that Maugham wants to portray the process of the creation of art. He repeatedly, though in vague words, writes about the vision which haunted Strickland. ‘I had an inkling of a fiery, tortured spirit, aiming at something greater than could be conceived by anything that was bound up with the flesh. I had a fleeting glimpse of a pursuit of the ineffable.’

If Maugham depicts the inner world of the painter indistinctly, he doesn’t write a word on how Strickland gave shape to his great vision. Maugham portrays artistic ability as inspiration. Reading the pursuit of art by Strickland it would seem, mercilessly abandoning your relations who are your dependent, shunning society, being callously selfish and ruthlessly rude are the essential prerequisites of a genius. True, Strickland did not care for the world’s opinion of his art and for the material comforts. He lived life of abject penury and subjected his body to relentless privations. But of his quest to master his chosen medium to express his ideas, Maugham tells us nothing. Strickland doesn’t learn from masters, does not discuss art with his painter colleagues, does not study the subtleties of their techniques, neither does seek – rather shuns – their criticism of his work. It then stretches your credulity thin, to believe that he painted some of the best paintings in the world.

A portrait of W. Somerset Maugham

Art – a product of inspiration, was not Maugham’s credo in life. He has written on many occasions how he struggled for decades to master the art of writing. He was unsparing in his efforts. He wrote for four hours every morning, unfailingly – when at home or abroad, travelling in the jungles of Burma or on a ship in a tumultuous sea, in his own house or as a guest at friends’ – for six decades, stopping only when senile dementia dulled his mental powers. He produced a vast oeuvre of work: novels, short stories, plays, essays, criticism, travel books, and memoirs. He travelled to far off lands in search of material for his stories. What lay behind his enviable success was his indefatigable perseverance to write. He is the epitome of an artist who early in his life, discovered his limitations – in his own words ‘I had no lyrical quality, I had a small vocabulary…I had little gift of metaphor…poetic flights and the great imaginative sweep were beyond my powers’. And also, his abilities – ‘I had an acute power of observation…I could see a great many things that other people missed; I could put down in clear terms what I saw. I had a logical sense…a lively appreciation of sound’. He meticulously honed these advantages ‘I knew that I could never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed.’ These are not the words of an artist who waits for divine inspiration to create something.

I feel, Maugham has employed inspiration only as a tool in this book, to lend an aura of mysticism to the protagonist and an acute sense of drama to the story. In Summing Up, he says, ‘…production of a work of art is not the result of a miracle. It requires preparation. The soil, be it ever so rich, must be fed.’

Maugham is acclaimed – and also much criticised – for his beguilingly simple and plain prose. In this book he writes many paragraphs of obfuscating details to convince the reader of the animal like spirit which he thought possessed Strickland and which, he felt, made Strickland oblivious of the material world. ‘He gave the impression of untamed passion…that sinister element which had made me think of those wild beings of the world’s early history when matter, retaining its early connexion with the earth, seemed to possess yet a spirit of its own.’ It doesn’t read convincing.

Novel is short. It has an interesting plot. Written in Maugham’s trademark, first person singular, it reads like Maugham’s real-life interactions with Charles Strickland. Facts are inseparable from fiction. Many characters of Maugham’s latter novels appear with the same name and personalities. Racy dialogues, swift and suave humour, and the sardonic wit of Maugham mocking the hypocrites in society, make it a memorable story. I read the book for the third time, a few weeks back. If I am a little disappointed, it is because in my earlier readings I had reckoned it as one of Maugham’s best. I noticed its failings too, this time. And I’m aghast at this learning. Some illusions, innocent in their effects, are better left intact.

World today sees Paul Gauguin, one of the greatest post-Impressionist artists of twentieth century, in the image of the hero of the book, Charles Strickland. What better accolades can a book receive? Book may be a fanciful study of the process of creation – though I’d believe, this was not Maugham’s intention – but as a work of fiction it is fascinating. It is not one of Maugham’s best, but surely one of the great English novels of the twentieth century.