Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [2]
The novelist understands—here as elsewhere in the book—that feeling can be tinged with self-pity and still not deserve contempt. He also understands that, in a writer, terror of the déjà vu is proof neither of talent nor genius. When Of Human Bondage (the ur-version) was begun, in 1899, the shedding of religious faith had become a near-cliché, but, happily, Maugham wasn’t intimidated. He renders the event with a delicate particularity that makes it new—reveals it, moment by moment, as a complex, ceaselessly evolving configuration of emotion and reflection.
Philip Carey’s first daring utterance—“I don’t see why one should believe in God at all”—takes his own breath away “like a plunge into cold water. ” He’s startled, puzzled at himself; he feels fear (“a mistake might lead to eternal damnation”), and hungers for solitude in which to think matters out. The time frame expands and the reader enters the “strange and lonely” days and weeks that follow for the hero, grasping how the very risks of unbelief nourish him (“he was upheld by the excitement; it seemed to make life a more thrilling adventure”). Out on the frontier called atheism, Carey experiences “wild exhilaration,” and a transformation of nature into a “tremendous spaciousness.” Scorn breathes in him at the timidity of the weakly faithful among his friends; he feels the onset of “pride in his intelligence and fearlessness”; at length he commits himself highmindedly to practice Christian virtues for their own sake:
There was small occasion for heroism in the Frau Professor’s house, but he was a little more exactly truthful than he had been, and he forced himself to be more than commonly attentive to the dull, elderly ladies who sometimes engaged him in conversation.
The tone bespeaks the worldly narrator’s awareness that, while Philip Carey as born-anew skeptic has been seized with a heroic imagination of himself, he’s miles removed from any recognizably heroic venue. But the narrator’s proportioning, smiling realism is in no respect satirically reductive; even as he acknowledges the extravagance of youthful idealism and self-congratulation, Maugham centers attention on the importance of what lies behind them. It’s as individuals, his tempering voice seems to say, It’s one by one that we cease to believe, and jaded retrospective views of our veerings obscure the truth that the death of faith can indeed be individually momentous. When detached observers concentrate only on the relative invariability of human patterns of rupture and rebellion, refusing to install themselves within the single naive soul at its felt hours of crisis, they pay a price. They lose touch with the insides of the reality called adolescence and growth.
If this novelist’s scrupulousness about details of feeling were a factor only in the handling of major turning points of belief or conscience, Of Human Bondage would be less telling as a chronicle of growth and less poignant, from page to page, as a work of fiction. As it is, the author’s standard of observation—his dedicated yet un-fussy attentiveness—is uniform throughout, alert to back-currents and intricacies in the slightest movements of the heart. The effortful reserve, for instance, that Philip Carey maintains in the first days of intimacy with his schoolboy friend Rose: “He would not let himself yield entirely to the proud joy that filled him ...” Or the odd inhibition which, when Carey writes his first love letter to Miss Wilkinson, prevents him not only from speaking the “vehement things” he imagines to be appropriate, but from using any salutation more affectionate than “dear.” (The inhibition is named almost offhandedly, but with fine precision: Carey is afflicted with “some inexplicable modesty.”)
The most compelling proof