The Summing Up - W. Somerset Maugham

Urge to peep behind the stage to witness how your favourite author wrote the books you have adored to distraction must be common among obsessive readers. But books are produced not merely in the process of writing them out. A writer’s workshop is much larger than his study, the chair he sits upon, and the table on which he writes. Life is his workshop. Every experience is grist to the mill that produces his work.

The Summing Up is W. Somerset Maugham’s expression of his thoughts on the art he practiced all his life. He wrote the book when he was sixty. In it he indulges the peeping Tom among his readers; but only those who are curious about his writing. He believed it was 'dangerous to let public behind the scenes'. If, in this book, he loosens the guard a little, it is because at sixty he feels that for him ‘the race now is nearly run and it would ill become' him to conceal the truth.

‘This is not autobiography nor it is a book of recollections. In one way and another I have used in my writings whatever has happened to me in the course of my life,’ he says in the beginning and adds, ‘In the book I’m going to try to sort out my thoughts on the subjects that have chiefly interested me during the course of my life.’ All his life he spoke his thoughts - 'through the creatures of my invention'. He assures the reader that he had wanted to write this book for long - ‘I have long thought that it would exasperate me to die before I had written this book … When I have finished it I can face the future with serenity, for I shall have rounded off my life’s work.’

True to his word, Maugham eschews details of his life barring few references that are pertinent to the subject he is elaborating upon. ‘I have no desire to lay bare my heart, and I put limits to the intimacy that I wish the reader to enter upon with me,’ he declares drily in the beginning. Instead, he speaks on various facets of writing. Book is thus an autobiography not of Maugham but of his craft.

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Humans evolved to communicate through speech. It comes to us naturally. We are genetically wired to be chatterboxes. Writing is an unnatural skill. Every person who has ever tried to put his thoughts on the paper knows how frustrating it is to write clearly. The picture which shines brilliantly in your mind refuses to be captured in the squiggle on the paper. The vivid castle in your thoughts crumbles like a house of cards in a jumble of words. Ability to convey the story in your mind, to a person removed from you, in words that preserve its original form, is learned through the sweat of one's brow. Only a few masters, almost negligible, ever wrote how they acquired the nuts and bolts of their trade. The Summing Up is a unique book by the most proficient practitioner of plain-prose style, wherein he honestly, sincerely, and unaffectedly lays bare the processes of his craft.

Maugham’s prose is severely unadorned and straightforward. Meaning unobtrusively pops out from his sentences. He writes at length how he came to acquire this style. He informs that he had ‘never had more than two English lessons’ in his life and ‘have had to teach himself’. He realised early in his carrier that the ornate prose did not suit his limited capabilities. ‘My language was commonplace, my vocabulary limited…’, he said of his limitations and it occurred to him ‘that the only sensible thing was to aim at what excellence he could within them’.

Maugham believed lucidity, simplicity, and euphony the worthiest ideals a writer must pursue in his writing. He explains these concepts in a breathtakingly clear prose. He cautions against the lure of rich prose that wanders away from the theme of the moment. For in a prose written only for its beauty ‘the appeal is sensuous rather than intellectual, and the beauty of the sound leads you easily to conclude that you need not bother about the meaning’. He warns, ‘words are tyrannical things, they exist for their meanings, and if you will not pay attention to these, you cannot pay attention at all.’

We can instantly recognise a writing that is lively, yet would find it difficult if asked to state the features that make it so. Lively writing is easy and unaffected. Reading should be a pleasure. A writer should be grateful for the attention reader bestows on his work. To also demand his effort is ill-mannered. But prose that reads effortlessly demands herculean efforts from the writer. It has to be learned painstakingly and never becomes a habit. Every plain sentence is wrung from writer’s mind, word by word, in the dreary hours he devotes to the lonely business of writing.

Maugham worked indefatigably to cultivate the style he thought was the only way to write good English. ‘A good style should show no sign of effort,’ he says, ‘what is written should seem a happy accident’. ‘Effect of ease’ in prose doesn’t come easily. It is encouraging when Maugham writes about spontaneity in his writing – ‘for my part, if I get it at all, it is only by strenuous effort. Nature seldom provides me with the word, the turn of phrase, that is appropriate without being far-fetched or common-place’.

Maugham stresses the need for a vivid imagination in writing. And admits 'I have had small power of imagination. … My fancy, never strong, has been hampered by my sense of probability. I have painted easel pictures, not frescoes'

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Themes in Maugham’s books are not varied – be they his novels, short stories, travel books, or essays. There is little of nature, politics, war, suffering of masses, the changing zeitgeist of society, or the conflicts because of shifting ideologies. But in spite of this limited canvas, majority of his work has one consistent quality; It is never uninteresting. Maugham’s literary worth may be uncertain. But his impeccable craftsmanship is incontrovertible. His extraordinary competence as a writer is undeniable. When such an artist speaks about his craft, writes how he came to acquire his skills, and dilates on sundry subjects that occupied him in the course of his professional life, an aspiring writer, a tottering scribbler must pay attention. The book is a manna for every soul smitten by the lure of words.

Maugham informs the reader that he wanted to see his life unfold in a particular manner. He took stock of his many disabilities and few merits – and then set upon imposing a pattern on his life. It is worth to quote him at length on this journey, which he describes with his trademark aloofness, concision, and lucidity.

‘…I made up my mind that, having but one life, I should like to get the most I could out of it. It did not seem to me enough merely to write. I wanted to make a pattern of my life, in which writing would be an essential element, but which would include all the other activities proper to man, and which death would in the end round off in complete fulfilment. I had many disabilities. I was small; I had endurance but little physical strength; I stammered; I was shy; I had poor health. … and I had … an instinctive shrinking from my fellow men. … I have loved individuals; I have never much cared for men in the mass. … I have never liked anyone at first sight. … The weakness of my flesh has prevented me from enjoying that communion with the human race that is engendered by alcohol; … These are grave disadvantages both to the writer and the man. I have had to make the best of them. I have followed the pattern I made with persistence. I do not claim that it was a perfect one. I think it was the best that I could hope for in the circumstances and with the very limited powers that were granted to me by nature.’

Deliberate imposition of an objectively calculated design on your own life sounds affected and metaphorical. But Maugham’s body of work and his life is a testimony to the pattern he speaks about. He quit school and lived for a couple of years in Heidelberg and Germany, to witness life in the raw. He earned a degree in Medicine but never practiced, for before joining the college he knew that he wanted to be a writer. His first book Liza of Lambeth, earned him a moderate success. Publishers wanted him to write on the same theme i.e., the life of working-class people. He didn’t think this was his metier. Instead, for the next ten years he wrote some perfectly insipid novels and ten plays that no theatre would agree to buy. He hit the jackpot, fortuitously, in one of his old plays. And soon was the most popular playwright in London. He was at the peak of his popularity when – ‘I began to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life’. He temporarily retired from the stage because he had then – ‘made up my mind that I could only regain my peace by writing it (his memories) all down in the form of a novel’. Thus was his masterpiece Of Human Bondage born. He switched to novels and short stories when he knew that he didn’t have more plays in his head. He travelled to South seas, for many months at a time and over many years, to gather material for his novels and short stories. A pattern conspicuously stands out in Maugham’s work and his life.

Personality of an author is inextricably mingled with his writing. Conscious effort to conceal it only produces stilted prose. Though, Maugham refrains from sharing his life story with the reader, he reveals his personality, matter-of-factly, and with utmost honestly, as he describes why he wrote the way he did.

‘My sympathies are limited. … I am not a social person. … I cannot get drunk and feel a great love for my fellow-men. Convivial amusement has always bored me. … I do not much like being touched … The hysteria of the world repels me, and I never feel more aloof than when I am in the midst of a throng surrendered to a violent feeling of mirth or sorrow. Though I have been in love a good many times I have never experienced the bliss of requited love. … I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me, and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed. … I have been jealous of my independence. I am incapable of complete surrender. And so, never having felt some of the fundamental emotions of normal men, it is impossible that my work should have the intimacy, the broad human touch and the animal serenity which the greatest writers alone can give.’

This is a starkly succinct expression of self by a writer; honesty so brutal that one instinctively cringes from its plain truth. One sees the echo of this personality in Maugham’s numerous stories. Maugham revealed himself unabashedly in his books. He chose themes which did not warrant suppression of his personality. And here is a lesson for all who delve in words; a lesson not found in any style manual or writing guide – honesty in writing is essential to write convincing prose. If reader feels he can read author's mind without hindrance, writer wins his trust.

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Maugham was enamoured of characters who were unreformed crooks but possessed a pure virtue too. Critics called him a cynic because they felt he condoned evil in his stories. He writes on this aspect of human narure. ‘I have never seen people all of a piece. … It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me. … I am not my brother’s keeper. I cannot bring myself to judge my fellows; I am content to observe them.’ Maugham evolved this style to almost perfection in his stories; an aloof, tolerant narrator observing the anguish and joys in the life of his characters with supreme indifference. He is content to narrate the facts as he knows them. Reader can arrive, or not, at judgement on the actions of the protagonists, as per his sensibilities. This form of writing requires a seamlessly compact structure of the story and considerable skill to keep reader's interest riveted to the action being narrated.

Five years Maugham spent at medical school gave him a rich experience of human condition. He witnessed unadulterated human emotions. For, a patient in agony does not hide his feelings. He learned that unlike the common wisdom, suffering makes a man petty - 'I knew that suffering did not ennoble; it degraded'. He felt that there was no 'better training for a writer than to spend some years in the medical profession'.

Maugham believed that a writer must always be interested in human nature. He considered himself 'very fortunate in that though I have never much liked men I have found them so interesting that I am almost incapable of being bored by them'. A writer, he felt, must be tolerant of human folly - 'He does not moralize; he is content to understand'. He must not expect congruency of various traits in a person.  'The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. … Selfishness and kindliness, idealism and sensuality, vanity, shyness, disinterestedness, courage, laziness, nervousness, obstinacy, diffidence, they all exist in a single person and form a plausible harmony. It has taken a long time to persuade readers of the truth of this'.

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Maugham called himself a professional writer. He meant that writing was his source of livelihood. He was disparaged for claiming such lowly motivation for writing. He was unperturbed. 'I am a writer as I might have been a doctor or a lawyer,' he writes. Reader is only concerned with the end-product and not the motivation of the author, he asserted. Being a professional, a writer must strive to give readers complete satisfaction. It was a myth in his opinion that 'if their books do not sell the fault is not with them but with the public'.  Being a professional writer means ' to write must be the main object of writer's life'.

Maugham was unsparing in his efforts to give his profession his best. He followed a laborious schedule of relentless daily work - writing for four hours every day, regardless of any other claim on his time. For writing was his work like medicine is a doctor's. A doctor does not wait for divine inspiration before seeing his patients - '...no professional writer can afford only to write when he feels like it. … The professional writer creates the mood'.

Awards of the profession of writing are meagre and uncertain for majority of its practitioners. What then can keep the passion of the author alive? In Maugham’s view, 'He does well to write to liberate his spirit …if he is wise he will write only for the sake of his own peace'. If fame and riches are fickle in writing, isn't there one source of eternal solace too? Maugham held it was 'to find his satisfaction in his own performance. If he can realize that in the liberation of soul which his work has brought him and in pleasure of shaping it in such a way as to satisfy to some extent at least his aesthetic sense, he is amply rewarded for his labours, he can afford to be indifferent to the outcome'.

If profession of writing entails much dangers and disadvantages, it offers incomparable recompense too. Maugham is unabashedly personal when he talks of these – ‘It (writing) gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis, the purging of pity and terror … For his sins and his follies, the unhappiness that befalls him, his unrequited love, his physical defects, illness, privation, his hopes abandoned, his griefs, humiliations, everything is transformed by his power into material, and by writing it he can overcome it’. It is this honesty which gives the book an intimacy, which Maugham, perhaps because of his intensely private nature, tried to discount.

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Maugham was one of the most travelled authors of his time, in company of Graham Greene and Herman Melville. Though only four of his 78 books are formally classified as travel books, his travels provided him theme for numerous short stories and novels including novels like Moon and Six Pence, The Painted Veil, The Narrow Corner, The Razor’s Edge and his unforgettable short stories like ‘The Fall of Edward Bernard’, ‘The Book Bag’, ‘The Vessel of Wrath’.

He writes how he came to adopt travel to escape from the monotony of his life – ‘I was tired of the people I lived with and the life I was leading. I felt that I had got all that I was capable of getting out of the world in which I had been moving … It was stifling me and I hankered after a different mode of existence and new experiences. … I was tired of the man I was, and it seemed to me that by a long journey to some far distant country I might renew myself’.

Maugham fleetingly mentions his unhappy marriage when he describes his travels – ‘… for some time I had amused my imagination with pictures of myself in the married state. … I conceived these notions when I was still at work on Of Human Bondage, and turning my wishes into fiction, as writers will, towards the end of it I drew a picture of the marriage I should have liked to make. Readers on the whole have found it the least satisfactory part of my book’. This unhappiness, he says, fuelled his longing for travel to distant seas – ‘I went, looking for beauty and romance and glad to put a great ocean between me and the trouble that harassed me. … but I found also something I had never expected. I found a new self. … I entered a new world, and all the instinct in me of a novelist went out with exhilaration to absorb the novelty. … what excited me was to meet one person after another who was new to me.’

Maugham travelled in luxury but was indifferent to privations if these were unavoidable. South Sea islands in Pacific were his most favoured country. He mined these extensively and left behind a treasure of some incredibly beautiful tales for the posterity. The image of the author that emerges from these stories – many of which are written in first-person-singular – is quite close to Maugham’s personality; A detached, unillusioned author dispassionately observing the drama of life rocking the lives of expatriate colonial officials of a disintegrating empire, in their dreary, commonplace lives, thousands of miles away from home.

Maugham is unpretentious in his travel accounts. He forthrightly declares that he travelled to South Sea islands to escape his tedious life in England and to gather material for his stories. ‘I have never been much of a sight-seer. … My interest has been in men and the lives they led. I am shy of making acquaintance with strangers, but I was fortunate enough to have on my journeys a companion who had an inestimable social gift. … through him I was able to get into easy contact with an immense number of persons.’ Using these people and the vicissitudes in their lives, he created a plethora of memorable characters and alluring plots in his numerous stories; Sadie Thompson of ‘Rain’, Mrs Grange of ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’, Jack Almond of ‘A Casual Affair’.

A book of Maugham’s recollections – on his art or his life – without a word on short story is like Darwin’s life sans evolution. He was the most proficient and popular practitioner of this literary form in the first half of twentieth century. Every little word he has to say on the subject is an edict for the novice. A story's principal objective is to entertain, was his firm belief. ‘As a writer of fiction’, he likens himself ‘to the teller of tales round the fire in the cavern that sheltered neolithic men.’ He does not see much merit in the story of ideas, that critics had begun to patronize in his time. He bemoans the modern trend which ascribed ‘very small value to the plot’. Writer of fiction who scorns plot is staring at his ruin. For a plot ‘is a line to direct the reader’s interest. That is possibly the most important thing in fiction, for it is by direction of interest that the author carries the reader along…’. He advises that a story ‘should have coherence and sufficient probability … it should have completeness, so that when it is finally unfolded no more questions can be asked about the persons who took part in it. It should have … a beginning, a middle, and an end’. Maugham scrupulously followed these maxims in his incredibly well-structured short stories.

‘In my twenties the critics said I was brutal, in my thirties they said I was flippant, in my furies they said I was cynical, in my fifties they said I was competent, and now in my sixties they say I am superficial.’ This accurately describes majority critical opinion on Maugham in his lifetime. He claims to accept this with equanimity – 'I know just where I stand. In the very first row of the second-raters’. He advises writers to read criticisms carefully. When he writes, ‘It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise; for of course it is easy so shrug one’s shoulders when one finds oneself described as a genius, but not so easy to be unconcerned when one is treated as nincompoop’, he seems to be describing his predicament. His huge popularity and unequalled riches that his writings brought him, would not have been a small solace in face of this neglect.

In the last section Maugham sums up his views on philosophy. He writes how he gained the world view which is a constant background in all his books. Philosophy and science books were his passionate hobbies. From this reading he wanted to know if there is a meaning and a purpose in life? What is the worthiest objective one should aspire for? He surmises that ‘Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward.’ He fears that his answer to such vital query is a commonplace view, ‘With my instinct for effect I should have liked to end my book with some startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my readers would have recognized with a chuckle as characteristic. It sems I have little more to say than can be read in any copybook or heard from pulpit. I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone knew already.’

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Maugham spoke of the need to bind reader’s attention to the story - 'direction of interest' he called it. In a book containing disparate thoughts on varying subjects, as they flit across the mind of an ageing author, this seems too tall an objective to achieve. But The Summing Up is as fascinating to read as any of Maugham’s stories; a masterly performance of a virtuoso. For an apprentice besotted with the magic of written word, it opens a window into the workshop of one of the greatest sorcerers.

To wearily plod the dreary monotony of a workaday life is a lot, humans cannot forsake. A flawless piece of writing, evidently composed with scrupulous care, that says what it purports to say with an unassuming elegance and a refined tongue-in-cheek humour, is one oasis of comfort in this bleakness.