Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [3]
But closest to the book’s imaginative core, of course, is Philip Carey’s schooling in human attachment and love. Like many of us, he’s a slow learner in this sector of life; unlike most of us, he has an excuse for ineptitude, namely a physical affliction that heightens self-consciousness. (His clubfoot is commonly taken as a disguise for Maugham’s own stammer.) Carey’s sensitivity, ego and naïveté regularly multiply his miseries and occasionally rouse impatience in the reader. (At his worst—best to be candid—Philip Carey qualifies as a wimp.) Partly because of the hero’s limited vision, partly because Maugham looking back from literary fulfillment on his own seedtime wasn’t bounded by that vision, Of Human Bondage becomes a sort of inventory of wrong relations between self and others (child and child, man and man, man and woman). And the book provides oblique guidance, as well, on how to set wrong relations right.
A commonplace of moralists is that moderating self-involvement and opening oneself to others fosters right human relations. A principal feature of Philip Carey’s nature is that he’s hugely self-preoccupied, and disposed to conceal “his shyness ... under a frigid taciturnity.” His flaws are most salient in the bondage of the book’s title—his obsession with Mildred Rogers; the wrong human relations that the flaws engender are those of domination and dependency. (In the early phases of his connection with Mildred, Carey is a dependent, craving to be dominated; in time the pair reverse roles.)
But the catastrophe of Philip and Mildred is only one strand of Maugham’s inquiry into the psychology of self-absorption. Beginning with Carey’s boyish demand for exclusivity (in his friendship with Rose), the novelist moves on to scrutinize a number of other troubling personality traits: Carey’s compulsive classification and ranking of the intelligence and gifts of friends and associates, his frequent obliviousness (as in his dealings with Fanny Price), the faintly abstract, mechanical quality of his kindness. And toward the end Maugham immerses his reader in the positive processes that ultimately induce in Carey a more welcoming, objective mental outlook—a realization that claims, values, and emotions at odds with one’s own can inspire respect and even affection.
The chapters that draw us close to these processes are both powerfully composed and firm in their rejection of simplicities that tyrannize the immature. Working as a hospital outpatients’ clerk under the downright but not heartless supervision of Dr. Tyrell (Chapter LXXI), Carey copes day by day with a world too “manifold and various” for interpretation in the languages of morality (good and evil) or art (tragedy and comedy). Later, on his own, delivering babies in London slums, he’s further educated not only in the world’s cruelty but in the existence of class perspectives—class satisfactions—hitherto beyond his imagining. Breaks appear in the puerile self-concern that once enclosed him.
The most winning moment in his progress, perhaps, is the evening on which he breaks bread with a working class couple soon after he’s delivered their first child (Chapter CXIII). The scene is brief and the narrator’s commentary is sparing. ‘Erb and Polly, the married couple, speak a tongue that instantly opens their personalities to clear view. Like Philip’s schoolboy friend years before, ‘Erb has an athlete’s confident affability and self-respecting certainty of his worth, and Polly, for her part, is cheerful, hardworking, and kind; the couple’s teasingly humorous affection and pride in their newborn are