Razor's Edge - W.S. Maugham

Worldly author’s unworldly tale of renunciation

 

‘The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to passover

Thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard’

Katha-Upanishad

This epigraph opens the book Razor’s Edge, twentieth century English novelist, W. Somerset Maugham’s most successful novel. The edge of a razor symbolises the path to enlightenment, which is as painful and narrow.

 

Maugham was fascinated by the character who renounces worldly pleasures for a spiritual life of deep joys and lasting contentment. This theme recurs in his writings. Fall of Edward Barnard is one such fabulous tale of another American youth. In Of Human Bondage, his most acclaimed novel, protagonist Philip Carey is forever entangled in search of truth that will reveal to him the true nature of the world. In Moon and Six Pence, Charles Strickland, forswears life of a successful stockbroker and comfortable marriage, to follow his passion of painting. Maugham was taken by the idea of renunciation of material pleasures in search for freedom in life. 

But apparently, he was not convinced of the utility of this path for realizing the joys of living. He was an unapologetic hedonist. Nowhere in the autobiographical references in his books, does he hide this fact. He sought every pleasure that world affords a rich person. He was the most well-paid writer of his time – His short story Rain was to earn him a million dollar in his lifetime through publications, movies, plays and musical rights. He amassed an invaluable collection of paintings, rumoured to be the best in a private collection in Europe then. He was unrestrained in seeking sexual gratification outside marriage. He owned a palatial villa on the shores of Mediterranean in France, where he lavishly entertained the glitterati of this fashionable corner of Europe.

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Maugham had perfected the art of narrating a story in the first person singular – a form where writer is a minor character in the story. No other writer, of those I’ve read, has employed this technique to better effect. It lends an amazing reality to the tale. When you know that the narrator is none but the writer, characters and their vicissitudes ring with a novel truthfulness. His collection of Ashenden spy tales, short stories Letter, Bookbag, and Flotsam and Jetsam, novels Cakes and Ale and Moon and Six Pence are few such among many. But nowhere in his earlier works narrator is so candidly and unpretentiously Maugham as in Razor’s Edge. Here the narrator is an English writer named Maugham, has never been to university, has stayed in Heidelberg in his youth taking private tutions, has studied medicine, has authored Moon and Six Pence, has seen success as a playwright, visits East often for his work, and owns a house in Cap Ferrat in French Riviera. This reflects the supreme confidence of the writer who has enjoyed immense success for decades and now at the end of the seventh decade of his life, has no qualms in slipping in between the pages of his book, undisguised.

 

Protagonist of the book, Lawrence Darrell, Larry, was a pilot in US air force during the First World War. He was then only nineteen. Larry was once injured in a dogfight in France. One of his friends died saving Larry. He was irrecoverably affected by his friend's death, who had breathed his last in his presence. He suddenly found that the life he had been leading till then was meaningless. On his return to America, he didn’t find his earlier life satisfactory. He didn’t want to take up a job, neither did he intend to pursue his unfinished university education. He had been engaged to his childhood friend Isabel Bradley. Larry’s friends, including Isabel, now found Larry changed. But none could say how. When Isabel pestered him to take up a job, he replied he was not inclined for one. On being asked what he wanted to do, he answered, ‘Loaf’. Isabel thought with passage of a little time he will forget the traumatic war-experiences and recover his earlier playful disposition. Larry went to Paris and led a reclusive life, immersing himself in studies. At the end of two years, he was still unwilling to adopt the life society expects from a youth in his position. Instead, he invited Isabel to marry him and live with him on his small inheritance. Their engagement was broken. Isabel married another of her friend, the millionaire stockbroker, Gray Maturin.

 

Larry loafed the world, working in a Belgian coal mine and spending many months with Benedictine monks in their monastery at Bonn. He took up a job in an ocean liner and found himself in Bombay. His travel in India brought him to the ashram of Shri Ganesh, the saint of Travancore. In Shri Ganesh, in his unselfconscious personality, in his ever-smiling face, in his complete understanding of Vedanta, and in his enunciation of this philosophy in laconic conversations, Larry discovered the teacher he had been looking for years. At the ashram he eventually realised the supreme reality of existence that had eluded him till then. His search being over, he returned to America, donated his small source of private income and began life as a taxi-driver.

…

 

Maugham visited India in 1936. He has said that he had not gone to India ‘to shoot a tiger, or to sell anything, nor especially to see the Taj Mahal, the caves of Ajanta or the temple of Madura, but to meet scholars, writers, and artists, religious teachers and devotees’. At Tiruvannamalai, he visited the ashram of Ramana Maharshi. In his essay, The Saint, he has written of his encounter with the sage and given a fairly long account of Maharshi’s life and philosophy. Shri Ganesh of Razor’s Edge is Ramana Maharshi, in every revealed detail.

 

In 1939, Maugham was forced to flee his villa in French Riviera, as the Axis forces approached French Mediterranean coast. He spent war-years in America, mainly at Beverly Hills, working on scripts for movies based on his stories, and in a farmhouse of his American publisher, Nelson Doubleday, in South Carolina, at a place called Parker’s Ferry. In the austere and solitary surroundings of a yet-to-be-completed farmhouse on the banks of Yemassee river, thousands of miles from the hubbub of Hollywood, where his celebrity status did not afford him the privacy he needed for his writing, his life fell into his old worn-out routine. He wrote for four hours every morning, walked the ‘bedraggled, abandoned woods’ behind the farmhouse and occasionally entertained a friend who came visiting. Here, towards the end of 1942, he began work on a subject he had cherished for long. Once, when asked how long it took him to write Razor’s Edge, he replied, ‘Sixty years’. The saga of American Larry Darrell was completed in 1943 and was published in 1944, the year he turned seventy.

 

Maugham’s research for the book, it is said, ran into forty volumes. He saw the novel as the culmination of years of thought he had devoted to the deepest queries on existence. He was excessively concerned with authenticity of the story. Philosophy of Vedanta, around those years, had entered drawing room-discussions of Hollywood society and the minds of few intellectuals in America. At Beverly Hills, Maugham had befriended Gerald Heard, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isherwood. All three were well-known writers and were ardent followers of this esoteric Eastern thought. As he wrote the book, Maugham continued to correspond with Isherwood – A young English novelist he admired and for whom he once said that 'he holds the future of English novel in his hands'. After book's publication Times alleged that Isherwood was the model for Larry, an assertion vehemently denied by Isherwood. Isherwood knew Maugham and his epicurean ways. He resented, what he thought, was a cursory interpretation of Vedanta in Maugham’s novel.

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Razor’s Edge is not one of Maugham’s best works; not even the second or the third best. Though Larry is the hero of the story, his character doesn’t sound convincing. Maugham once said that he lacked vivid imagination that great writers possessed. He needed real people and situations to create his stories. Though there are many speculations about the person on whom the character of Larry is modelled, I do not think Maugham ever met Larry in flesh and blood. Moreover, the philosophy of Vedanta, the alleged lynchpin of the book, never appealed to Maugham. He says in his autobiographical Summing Up that he was enamoured of Hindu philosophy but had found it inadequate to explain the mystery of life, the presence of evil in the world. Maugham was a sceptic at heart – ‘life has no meaning’ he believed.

 

In the book he does not bring out these shortcomings of the philosophy – as perceived by him – but attempts to give them a patina of profundity in his simple but meaningless enunciation. Larry is here explaining the concept of Absolute – ‘You can’t say what it isn’t. It’s inexpressible. The Indians call it Brahman. It’s nowhere and everywhere. All things imply and depend upon it. It’s not a person, it’s not a thing, it’s not a cause. It has no qualities. It transcends permanence and change, whole and part, finite and infinite. It is eternal because its completeness and perfection are unrelated to time. It is truth and freedom.’ Writer’s lack of belief in the lines he puts in his character's mouth is clearly seen. When Shri Ganesh tells Larry, ‘By meditation on the formless one, I found rest in the Absolute,’ Larry comments, ‘I didn’t know what to think’. Larry’s dilemma precisely mirrors reader’s bafflement. I think, had Maugham employed his unbeatable skill for a merciless satire and sardonic wit, to tell the story of Larry and his infatuation with Vedanta, he would have produced a vastly better book.

 

If Larry comes across as a cardboard character, a marionette being pulled by the strings of a writer's imagination, book is strewn with some memorable characters, drawn with unparalleled perspicacity. Foremost is the self-styled aesthete, a quintessential snob, Elliott Templeton. His flamboyant materialism enhances the starkness of Larry’s search of truth. He has risen in society by cultivating appropriate people and has amassed large fortune dealing in transaction of expensive paintings of his once rich patrons – whom he insists on calling his friends – who are for the time impecunious. He is the uncle of Isabel and it is through him Maugham is acquainted with the people of his story. His personality is so vividly drawn, his fetishes and his snobbery so carefully crafted, that Elliott Templeton irrepressibly peeps out from the pages of the book.

 

Though, Larry is the protagonist, real hero of the book is Elliott. Maugham has been ruthless in portraying Elliott – ‘He was a colossal snob. … He would put up with any affront, he would ignore any rebuff, he would swallow any rudeness to get asked to a party he wanted to go to or to make a connexion with some crusty old dowager or great name. … He took no interest in people apart from their social position.’ Though Maugham is unsparing in his depiction of Elliott’s snobbery, he is not malicious. There is no rancour for the elites of the society. He is rather sympathetic to Elliott – ‘Society was what he lived for, a party was the breath of his nostrils, not to be asked for one was an affront, to be alone was a mortification, and, an old man now, he was desperately afraid.’ Maugham sees the tragedy in Elliott’s largely make-believe inner world – ‘It was lamentable to see that old man, with the grave yawning in front of him, weep like a child because he hadn’t been asked to a party; shocking and at the same time almost intolerably pathetic. … It made me sad to think how silly, useless, and trivial his life had been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and had hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts.’ Elliott Templeton is one of the finest characters in the twentieth-century English novel.

 

Isabel's is also a character, flush with blood and vigour of life. She is madly in love with Larry. But her feet are firmly planted on earth. She is perplexed and not a little peeved with Larry’s choice to spend life in search of truth – ‘Isn’t all that awfully morbid. One has to take the world as it comes. If we’re here, it’s surely to make the most of life.’ she is an unabashed sybarite who wants Larry’s love but does not want to share the privations his dreams might entail. ‘I want to have fun. I want to do all the things that people do. I want to go to parties, I want to go to dances, I want to play golf and ride horseback. I want to wear nice clothes.’

 

Maugham brings out Isabel’s lust for Larry in some adroitly conceived situations. I first read the book about three decades back. I was struck by the brilliance of a paragraph that depicts Isabel’s naked passion for Larry. Maugham, the narrator, describes an occasion when he, Gray, Larry, and Isabel are driving in a car. Gray is at the wheel, Larry besides him, Maugham and Isabel are in the back of the car.

‘Larry sat with his arm stretched out along the top of the front seat. His shirt-cuff was pulled back by his position and displayed his slim, strong wrist and the lower part of this brown arm lightly covered with fine hairs. … Something in Isabel’s immobility attracted my attention. … Her eyes were fixed on the sinewy wrist with its little golden hairs and on that long, delicate but powerful hand, and I have never seen on a human countenance such a hungry concupiscence. … it was a mask of lust.’

 

Maugham modelled Isabel’s husband Gray Maturin’s character on his publisher, Nelson Doubleday, on whose farmhouse he lived when he wrote Razor’s Edge. Gray was a classmate of Isabel and Larry in Chicago. He is the son of Chicago’s richest man, a stockbroker. He had loved Isabel for long, but stood no chance in the face of Isabel’s intense love for Larry. Later, he proves her a worthy husband. He is dull and predictable. His views on life are banal. Maugham writes of him with great humour but affectionate indulgence – ‘Gray’s conversation was composed of cliches. However shop-worn, he uttered them with an obvious conviction that he was the first person to think of them. He never went to bed, but hit the hay, where he slept the sleep of the just; if it rained, it rained to beat the band. … But he was so kindly, so unselfish, so upright, so reliable, so unassuming that it was impossible not to like him’.

 

Other notable persons in the story are Suzanne Rouvier and Sophie Macdonald. Suzanne is a woman of a sunny disposition. She was born in a poor home but with her common sense and will, has made efficient use of faculties she possessed. She is a model and companion of young fledgling painters in Paris. Maugham lovingly brings her alive in the witty conversations, narrator shared in her company. Sophie is an intelligent, introverted friend of Isabel and Larry. After tragic death of her child and husband, she is unable to steady her upended world. Her life runs to seed in horrid circumstances. Both Suzanne and Sophie have a brief, unexpected encounter with Larry in Paris.

 

This is a fairly long novel of Maugham, only exceeded in length by Of Human Bondage. I read it again a few days back and noticed a fact I hadn’t earlier. Maugham steers the story through dialogues. This is an intense tool to write fiction. It is effortless to read and a natural means to know the lot of people – the way we learn about them in real life. But it is an extremely difficult skill to master. Maugham, perhaps because of his successful career as a playwright, wrote scintillating dialogues and in a language his characters would have spoken in a real world. Many great stories have been marred by the stuffy, flat, and pompous dialogues writers put in the mouths of their characters. On an occasion, Isabel wants to know what Maugham, the narrator, thinks of her. And he replies thus, ‘My dear, I’m a very immoral person. When I’m really fond of anyone, though I deplore his wrongdoing it doesn’t make me less fond of him. You’re not a bad woman in your way and you have every grace and every charm. I don’t enjoy your beauty any the less because I know how much it owes to the happy combination of perfect taste and ruthless determination’.

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Book fails as an odyssey of the hero in search of eternal truth and meaning in life. Maugham was too hardened a pragmatist to believe in the concepts of Absolute and Brahma – concepts which he chose to eulogise, unconvincingly, in his story. He almost concedes this in the end as the narrator admits his inability to peep into the depths of Larry’s mind, ‘I am of earth, earthy; I can only admire the radiance of such a rare creature, I cannot step into his shoes and enter into his innermost heart as I sometimes think I can do with persons more nearly allied to the common run of men.’

 

With the exception of Of Human Bondage, this is the book Maugham is most remembered by. It sold more than three million copies in the first decade of its publication. Written when Maugham was at the threshold of old age, it proved his last major work of fiction, swansong of the writer who, throughout his long life, was not only the most well known English author, but also a bête noire of highbrows in the literary world - who only saw him 'in the very front row of the second-raters'. Long after the books of these hallowed literary giants, had passed into oblivion and their names forgotten by posterity, Maugham's books – many, first published a century ago - continued to be read and admired by the reading hoi polloi. I'm sure, the worldly author, was cocking a snook at his critics from his grave.

 

Notwithstanding its faults, Razor’s Edge is a very entertaining book, an English classic of twentieth century. Maugham's spellbinding grasp of the craft of story-telling is amply evident in the book: a taut, fascinating plot; full-blooded characterisation; fantastic settings – moving with ease from Chicago to Paris, New York to London, French Riviera to the hills of Arunachala; riveting dialogues; all told in Maugham’s lucid words and urbane wit.