D.
V. S. R. MURTY
Somerset
Maugham is yet to become an accepted glory in English fiction, and the opinion
is veering round the charisma of Maugham, a prolific writer of the twentieth
century. Undoubtedly he is one of the most popular novelists of world-wide
reputation. It is quite interesting to note that he has not been so much
attacked by his detractors as ignored. At eighty Maugham complains: “I have
seen essays by clever young men on contemporary fiction who would never think
of considering me. I no longer mind what people think.” Moreover he avows: “I
know just where I stand in the very front row of the second-raters.” There is a
slow but steady understanding of his achievement which is no mean one in a
world of fast changing values.
Richard
Cordell points out that Maugham is a best seller South America, Turkey, Japan,
Italy and Spain. He mentions that in 1959 more than forty thousand people
mostly students and teachers thronged an exhibition of Maugham’s works in
Tokyo’s leading book-store. Such world-wide popularity may not be a mark of
greatness but obviously an indication of some uniqueness. There is a sincere
appreciation of his novels, and one is ranked with David Copperfield and
Anna Kerenina; and the tide is slowly turning in his favour.
William
Rose Bennet calls Maugham “one of the world’s leading writers of fiction,” and
remarks that his mind is “agreeable amusing and entirely civilized.” Glenway
Wescott opines that Maugham is the only writer, who for more than a generation
has held the respect and admiration of an “elite of highly cultivated
sophisticated readers and of a sufficient number of good fellow writers”; and
does not hesitate to declare that there is no twentieth century novelist who
will be so widely read in the twenty-first century.
Somerset
Maugham rouses the curiosity of his readers not so much by the stories current
about him or by the facts that are shrouded in mystery as by the theme of love that pervades
his novels from beginning to the end and illuminates the entire field like the moonlight
on a clear night. Indeed Maugham shuts the most interesting part of his life from
public view, and especially his contacts and association with the fair sex, who
steal the show in his novels.
To
man, critics he is the personification of mystery and concealment and is, therefore,
called an ‘enigma’, ‘riddle’, ‘mystery’, ‘puzzling’ and so on; and the words
are freely used time and again with the result that considerable interest is
evinced in probing the darker regions or his life. According to Cordell the ‘irresponsible
journalists’ are partly responsible for creating such an image which drew a
world-wide interest, for Maugham is spoken of as a ‘sybarite’ and ‘gourmand’
and ‘a character out of Huysmans or the picture of Dorian Gray.’ The critics
and readers, perhaps, tried to read him through his works as they knew pretty little
about the part of life in which they are interested. Especially they know
little about his love-life that went into his fiction so profusely, and it is
still a mystery because he disenchants one, if one endeavours to pinpoint him.
Fact and fiction, love and romance are so blended that one can be hardly
differentiated from the other, and this seems to be the abarcadabra of Maugham’s
art.
II
Darwin’s Origin of Species ushers in a new epoch; and the myths
are exploded, and Man is bowled out or his pride of place. He is no more the
noblest creation, but is simply a product of evolution. The ideas let loose by
Darwin smacked off disbelief in religion and doubt about the authenticity of
the Bible; and gave a leg up to science. Science is the god of the moderns and
he is reason and physical facts. The ideas of science are called in to analyse
man especially his psyche, and a new science has stepped in to fill up the gap.
A new dimension is added to literature by psychology without which modern
literature cannot be apprehended. The human psyche is dissected and is divided
into the conscious and the unconscious. They constitute the ego, which is
identical with the conscious flow of our thoughts, the expressions we receive
and the sensations we experience.
The ego was explored by great psychologists like Freud and
Jung. Freud opened new vistas with the conception of repression. According to
him the so-called forgotten experiences ale not completely forgotten, but are
repressed. There is also a conscious attempt to repress the unpleasant or not
so pleasant experiences, and consequently there is resistance. The repressed
and the resisted find an outlet in the dreams, and the most repressed and
resisted is the ‘libido’ which is meant a totality of sexual desire for Freud.
The sexual preoccupation of childhood and the consequent repression conflict
with the healthy growth of personality, and give rise to inhibitions,
which form the basis of character. Psyche, therefore, is impulse and
inhibition; and a liberation from them is a panacea for
all human ills.
The modern psychology made inroads
into fiction, and the shutters were down on the novel of incident and
character. The novel, whose aim is to laugh mankind out of their follies and
foibles reached its highest watermark in the eighteenth
century. Fielding, the father of the English novel, relieves a whole humanity
before the reader’s mind, and makes a clean breast of
vanity and hypocrisy. Hypocrisy’s long history seems from Blifil, and Fielding
shows human nature in close ups and in vast expanses. The historic battle
between Molly and Mrs. Brown or the plight of Joseph Andrews when brought to
the coach ate but a few examples to illustrate the superb art or Fielding. The
growth of the Industrial Revolution and the can. sequent fall of moral
standards arrest the attention of writers like Goldsmith who display the
dangers and deleterious effects, when a lovely woman stoops to folly.
Jane Austen makes a significant step
forward by projecting the “aspects of the human situation from a point of view”
and introduces romantic love. Marriages are contracted for money and social
standing. She insists on treating love as the only allowable basis of marriage,
because loveless marriages lead to conflict and frustration. Illegitimacy,
seduction, adultery and open keeping of a mistress are familiar matters, though
condemned. Her treatment of ‘sexual attraction’ reflects her firm view that a
turning loose of strong impulses and intensely emotional states results in
moral degeneration, and so they must be curbed, controlled and regulated. The Sense
and Sensibility clearly illustrates the need for control of passion and the
refusal to yield to it.
The Victorian Age breaks new ground
in the field of love. Dickens is content to “make’em (people) laugh, make’em cry,
make’em wait” with his humanitarian novel. Hardy thinks that pleasure is an “occasional
episode in the general drama of pain” and takes wind out of the sails of the
reader by incidents like a husband selling his wife. He makes his novels
interesting love-stories, where love is a ‘sexual combat’. But Meredith treats
love as “a leading episode in the drama of life, the most critical passage in
the making, testing and ennobling of men and women.” It is Thackeray, who goes
the whole hog to satirise love and marriage, for people married for rank rather
than for love. There is an honest and sincere attempt to analyse relationships
based on love, and his Rebecca heralds modern women like Violet
Whitefield, whom Shaw congratulates for being a mother before becoming a wife.
The impact of psychology on
literature is perceptible in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The
writer and the life around him are degenerated; and the writer lives a low
life, and reflects the same in his novels. France stole the march, and
novelists like Flaubert and Zola took people by surprise. Zola’s first English
publisher was a casualty of the Eighties, and he was imprisoned and ruined.
There was a consorted effort to suppress erotic literature, and prosecutions to
suppress it gave rise to underground erotica. The erotic novels increased in
numbers, and grew steadily all through the first half of the twentieth century.
The twentieth century is significant
in letting loose the seamy side of life in fiction. The growth of science and
technology completely revolutionised life on earth. Consequently there is the
breakdown of public values. The novelist, a product of the new civilization,
reflects, what he perceives in society, which is immoral. Therefore the modern
novel is in the ordinary sense ‘immoral’ or ‘amoral.’ Its tendency is to
encourage its readers to get what they can out of life while it lasts, and to
miss no ‘experience’. It appears like a canker worm, which eats out the moral
life and purity of the youth. There is hue and cry against such novels, and “the
Clean Books League” sprung up, and it was followed up by “decent literature
drives” in the United States of America during 1957-’58.
The changed status of women playa
vital role in providing material for modern fiction. There is the decline of
home as a centre for the family members, when women competed with men in every
walk or life. The loveless homes created a big gap in their lives, and they
sought to fill it up outside the home. Especially women have ample opportunities
to satisfy their thirst for sex outside the wedlock. The modern novelist turned
the searchlights on their behaviour and attitude. So Percy Wilson rightly
remarks that there is the “exploiting as well as the
understanding of sexual behaviour and sexual motivation” by modern novelists.
Hence we have a Lawrence or a Farrel
or a Hytes. Lawrence points out love-paralysis, and suggests remedies, which
are as dangerous as the disease. Farrel puts in the mouths of the infants
description connected with the “forbidden acts” to show the curiosity of the
children and the repression highlighted by Freud. Hytes shows nymphomnia at its
heights tracing the sexual motivation in worldly actions too. Modern fiction,
thus, has exploited psychology full, for the themes.
III
Somerset Maugham is Dantesque in
suggesting a noble fusion of the sexual and the religious in society, for it is
the only way to the healthy growth of the society. He is essentially a thinker,
and not to find imagination, philosophy and progress in him is to lack them.
Maugham was at cross-roads at the beginning of his life, and he could have peace
and tranquillity at the end, and it is manifestly a perfect growth of the
artist to that rounded perfection, where doubt and dispute, depression and
distraction, and yearning and spurning disappear like fog before sun. He
grappled with the problem of life from his eighteenth year, and he read many
writers to find the meaning of life. He thought that right and wrong were mere
words, and were for selfish pragmatists. Bertrand Russel appeared to him a sure
guide for sometime; but he was forced to depend upon
himself ultimately. He exults in Kant’s philosophy for a while because he says
that all human actions suggest an Author or Cause, and it is,
therefore, morally necessary to believe in God. None-the-less the problem of
God troubled him much. He could not find any reason for the existence of evil.
He remained an agnostic because he could not penetrate the mystery. But Maugham
felt the presence of God, when he sat in a deserted mosque in Cairo. There is
the dispelling of disbelief and a development of an attitude to life. A
novelist without an attitude to life or without having a significance in life
can neither write Catalina nor stop writing novels with such a fine
literary work which sums up the artist’s entire world throwing light on the
cardinal principles of life that help win peace in this troubled world.
Every man is the prisoner of his own
private consciousness, which is the product of his memories. When he is left
alone, the past impinges on his mind, and he feels the loneliness which is
unbearable. The easiest way to escape from it, is to seek the company of the
opposite sex, which naturally develops into sex-relationship. Love is not possible
between them, for it is much more than passion, and it seeks something higher
and nobler. The looked-up ego cannot come out to share the pleasures and
sorrows of others. To Maugham “real love surrenders, real love is selfless, real love is tender”,
and he could find no real love in the world. People marry also for convenience,
and not for love, and it knocks the very bottom out of human happiness. To Lawrence marriage must make “one complete
body out of two incomplete ones.” Maugham says: “Marriage is an affair of perpetual compromise, and how could they be
expected to compromise when egoism was of the essence of their natures?”
People have ‘sexual desires’ only because there is the death of love. Writing on Fielding Maugham says: “Sexual
desire is an animal instinct, and there is nothing more shameful in it than in thirst or hunger, and no
more reason to satisfy it.” Unbridled sexual hunger or thirst, though sought
for pleasure and escape, is the root cause of many mental and bodily ills. There is absolute need to control
the passion to regenerate love, and Maugham comes to the conclusion when he
writes his last novel.
Passion shoots up with Liza of
Lambeth, and there is the
death of love and Mrs. Craddock marks it. After the death there is the exploration
to find out a lasting basis for love, but Maugham stays into a magician’s world,
and is caught in love’s spell. The human bondage follows, for passion keeps Philip in bondage, and the novelist
breaks it at the end. Then there is unbridled adultery, which seems to be a
stately pleasure boat, which goes into the matter of
sex with a fine toothcomb. After the orgy there is realisation that there are
more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by the novelist. He understands that life is but walking on a razor’s edge. There is wooing and choosing for a happy
life based on understanding and sacrifice. Ultimately the love-cripple is
uncrippled with the help of religion and ‘Catalina’ illustrates
it. Love and religion must go hand in hand for a moral regeneration, and it is
Maugham’s theme of love.