Of Human Bondage

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham

The Eternal Story

Apart from the freedom to say truthfully that grey in your hair bespeaks your experience, age brings many compensations. Not the least of these is the ability to contemplate past calmly and indulge once again in certain innocent exploits that gave one much joy in the past. For past now looms large in life where future seems to be shrinking fast. I now find indescribable pleasure in books that I read many years back, and whose memory, I would hate to part with.

 

I first read Of Human Bondage about three decades back. I had discovered Maugham recently and had fallen headlong for his books. Until my memory is swayed by the lure of nostalgia, I can claim that I found it ravishing. I read it again last year and once again relished every word.

Of Human Bondage was published in 1915, when Maugham was forty. In preface to an early edition of the book, Maugham tells us how the book ‘came to be written’. He wrote it first when he was twenty-three and called it The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey. Fisher Unwin, his publisher at the time, refused him hundred pounds he demanded for the book. Maugham said he was fortunate in this because if the book were published, he would have ‘lost a subject which’ he was ‘too young to make proper use of’. After a decade of struggle as a fledgling writer, he hit the jack-pot as a playwright. At the age of thirty-seven he was the most successful playwright in London; Theatres in the city at one time were showing more of his plays than those of George Bernard Shaw. A few years into this fame, he felt that the immense success and wealth he was earning didn’t afford him complete joy. A vague unease troubled him constantly, ‘…I began once more to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life…I made up my mind there was only one way to be free of them and that was to write them all down on paper.’ He took a sabbath from plays for two years. The fruit of his effort was the book, Of Human Bondage, his universally acclaimed masterpiece, that has never gone out of publication even after a century of its being written. He claimed that ‘book did for me what I wanted…I found myself free from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me’.

Book did not receive instant fame. In the war-torn England of 1915, it got only tepid reviews, some openly hostile, mainly on moral and social grounds. Critics found the hero and the principal characters weak and corrupt, hankering after inconsequential material joys, neglecting edification of their souls. And some were amusingly uncertain, ‘I am not sure he has not written a highly original book. I am not even sure he has not written almost a great one.’  Theodore Dreiser’s review of the novel, ‘As a Realist Sees It,’ published in New Republic in America, made critics in US take notice of the book. Dreiser was himself a novelist, a pioneer of realism in the American novel. Gradually, over a period of a decade, book gained more supporters and ultimately came to be recognised as Maugham’s magnum opus the world over.

It is difficult to sift facts from fiction in Maugham’s stories. He admitted that literary invention was not one of his forte. Most of his short stories and novels are precise depiction of his experiences or of the people he met in his travels. Of Human Bondage is by far the most autobiographical of his books. In the preface I referred earlier, he admits this. ‘Facts and fiction are inextricably mingled; the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents are related as they happened, and some of them are transferred to my hero not from my own life but from that of persons with whom I was intimate’. Critic Malcolm Cowley once asked, ‘Why did he write one book that was full of candour and human warmth?’ Maugham’s answer as reported by his friend, the screenwriter Garson Kanin was, ‘Because I’ve only lived one life. It took me thirty years of living to possess the material for that one book.’  Book throbs with the intimacy with which Maugham relates the emotions and their effects on the protagonist of the book.

Of Human Bondage is a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, a popular literary form of narrating a young person’s moral and psychological growth. Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, J.D. Sallinger’s Cather in the Rye, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, and perhaps also J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories, are in the same genre. Most such books interpret protagonist’s experience, in the light of author’s wisdom. Characters in the book are thus the lens to project author’s view on to the paper. Maugham has deviated from this practice. He is content to narrate the events in the hero’s life in considerable detail, without attempting to elucidate the reasons and the effects of these. It is a credit to his immense talent as a teller of tales that rarely does reader’s attention wanders off the page.

Book narrates the growth of Philip Carey from his childhood till he is about thirty. Through discreet incidents and occurrences in his life, Maugham shows how these shaped his personality, his beliefs, and his world view.

Philip is orphaned while still a boy of seven and the responsibility of his care falls on his elderly uncle and aunt. His uncle is the vain, grasping, self-seeking vicar of Blackstable – in reality Whitstable, where Maugham’s uncle was a parson. 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. Philip suffers from club foot and this disability has marred his growth as a person. He is continually 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. He suffers constantly in anticipation of these insults. ‘Tell him I’ve a club-foot’, he anxiously pleads with his uncle as they wait for the headmaster on the first day of his school.

Maugham himself suffered from a disabling stammer – alike Philip’s club foot – 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. He was drawn to the solitary company of books due to this disability. Philip’s exaggerated sensitivity to his infirmity is the hallmark of his character as was Maugham’s unsociability and latter, bitterness. Maugham portrays Philip’s lonely childhood, his cruel victimization for a disability which is not of his making with a genuine sensitivity and poignancy.

Considerable length of the novel – Maugham’s biggest book – deals with Philip’s lonely  childhood at the vicarage of Blackstable, his schooling at King’s school at Tercanbury, and 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 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. Philip ultimately joins a medical school in London for the sake of learning a profession to earn his living. But nothing prepares him for the tempestuous life that awaits him.

In a bar in London, he develops an obsessive craving for a coarse waitress Mildred, slovenly and sickly in disposition, and dull of wit. Philips masochistic relation with Mildred is the mainstay of the book. Maugham has portrayed Philip’s self-destructive devotion to Mildred in spite of his knowledge of her worthlessness, with incredible perception and skill.  Though, Philips knows that Mildred is unworthy of him, ‘He could not get her out of his mind. He laughed angrily at his own foolishness; it was absurd to care what an anaemic little waitress said to him, but he was strangely humiliated.’ He seeks her acceptance even when he knows that he doesn’t love her. ‘He did not think her pretty; he hated the thinness of her, only that evening he had noticed how the bones of her chest stood out in evening dress…he did not like her mouth, and the unhealthiness of her colour vaguely repelled him.’ Philip bears humiliation after humiliation but cannot stop hankering after her. He is released from the tyranny of his oppressive infatuation when after a long separation from her, he learns that she is into prostitution.

In his hospital, Philip befriends a patient Thorpe Altheny, a lively and jovial, working-class man. Altheny’s simple wisdom, his complete acceptance of his lowly position in society, and his uninhibited indulgence in simple pleasures of life, show Philip what he is missing in life.  Altheny and his large family welcome Philip to their home with unassuming warmth. In company of his new friends, he discovers the pleasures of loving and being loved. He develops an affection for Altheny’s daughter, Sally. Foregoing his earlier plans to take up a position as a medical officer on a tramp steamer and roam the world, he decides to marry Sally and settle to the life of a small-town English doctor in the Kentish countryside. Philip’s entanglement with Altheny family and his marriage to Sally feels one contrived plot in a breathlessly realistic narrative. It also doesn’t reflect the events of Maugham’s life. Maugham married the woman he knew he didn’t love. And after his marriage he didn’t settle in England but increased his travels around the world. In between his travels he lived in a luxurious bungalow in French Riviera on the Mediterranean coast.

In the course of a fairly long narration of more than six hundred pages, Maugham has created many fascinating characters: 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 and 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.

In his youth, Maugham struggled bitterly to cultivate the literary style that was in fashion then. His books written in this period, none of which are remembered now, reflect his attempts to write an ornate prose. Of Human Bondage is the first book written in a plain simple prose that became his hallmark and which he honed to a breathless perfection. He writes that in this book he, ‘No longer sought a jewelled prose…I sought on the contrary plainness and simplicity. With so much that I wanted to say within reasonable limits I felt I could not afford to waste words and I set out now with the notion of using only such as were necessary to make my meaning clear.’ Maugham believed in telling a story as it is and considered himself foremost a teller of tales. He said, ‘my prepossessions in the arts are on the side of law and order.  I like the story that fits.’ He liked a ‘story to have a beginning, a middle, and an end’. Perhaps this is the reason his books are such an effortless source of joy.

Cronshaw, the failed drunken poet, writes Maugham, once gave Philip a Persian rug with an intricate pattern, hinting that the rug hides a profound meaning. Philip learns this at the end of the story. Designs in rugs have no meaning of their own. Weaver chooses colours and patterns to affect a pleasing experience. Life, suggests the author, through Philip’s example, is like a Persian rug, meaningless in its essence. Each individual, through the colours of their unique joys and sorrows, creates a design that bestows meaning to their lives.

Maugham first chose Beauty from Ashes, a quotation from Isaiah as the title of the book. But having learnt that it had already been used for another book, settled for Of Human Bondage, title of one of the books in Spinoza’s Ethics, which deals with the role of emotions in influencing human life. 

Emotions colour every experience in our lives. We seek a life for ourselves in light of these colours. Book is truly the story of Philip’s enslavement by his emotions and his struggle to break free of these shackles. But in life there is no freedom from this serfage. Freedom from one bondage is usually surrender to another. Emotions, feelings, and their effects, distinguish us from our nearest cousins in the animal world. I’m not sure if human life will be a life as we recognise it, if freed from these bonds.

In the hands of a master story teller these universal – although banal – truths, have been transformed into an enduring tale of spectacular beauty.