Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [349]
So we know Philip Carey. But do we know Somerset Maugham from this story?
He always maintained that it was not a real autobiography but had aspects of his own life experience threaded through it. Like Philip Carey, he had a wretched, lonely childhood, and was raised by his uncle. Like Philip, he lived in Germany and Paris and studied medicine. Though he did not have a club foot, he had a terrible stutter that hindered him for years. Like Philip he was thin-skinned, imagining hurt and offense where none were really intended, and like Philip he had been disappointed by friends and betrayed in love and spent years searching for some kind of meaning to life.
Maugham certainly must have stayed in many a cold and lonely house as he is able to conjure them up so well for us. He must have eaten a thousand horrible, inadequate meals to be able to describe that first supper at the vicarage, where Philip thinks he is going to get an egg for himself but instead is offered only the top of the vicar’s egg—a tiny teaspoon of white of egg when he had been expecting so much more.
All of Maugham’s descriptions are so vivid that we cannot help but feel we know the characters and settings intimately. The German guesthouse becomes as familiar as our own homes, with the comings and goings of the visitors, the language lessons, and the stern attitudes. The Bohemian days in Paris, with the strange, loose association of artists and the friendships that blow hot and cold are as recognizable as our own last year’s holidays. When Philip goes to work in a hospital, our hearts open with his at the heartbreak and fear he sees all around him. (I cannot be the only person who has read this absorbing story with a sense of huge relief that the world moved on to better medicine, better education, and more open and honest communication among people than Philip Carey knew during his convoluted life!)
Maugham wrote Of Human Bondage in two parts, the first, when he was only twenty-three, under the title The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey. But even though he had put his heart into describing this young man’s angst, it didn’t appeal to any publishers. He smarted over the rejection and put the manuscript away in resentment.
As time went by, Maugham learned to cope with failure, rejection, and also fame and success as a playwright, so fifteen years later, he got the courage to take out his manuscript again and have a fresh look at it. And for this, we all have to be very grateful.
At least the real Maugham could bring himself to look at something again, to see where it could be improved on and to ask if there was something to be learned from it. Philip Carey finds it very hard to revisit anywhere or anyone, and frequently loses out because of his inability to rethink a situation. Once a person or activity becomes boring to Philip, he can never go back. Let us be thankful that his creator did not feel the same way.
I find this by far the most satisfying in all Somerset Maugham’s body of work. Even though I love the stories of faithless passion in colonial outposts and shipboard dalliances and the view of Maugham himself as the all-knowing Ashendon, the quiet observer, nothing else he has written has the power of this story.
In it he resisted the temptation to make Philip the hero of a moral tale, learning from his mistakes, conquering all obstacles. Philip is a complex character doomed to repeat his mistakes and drop himself further into pits of dissatisfaction. And as for the great love affair of his life with the terrifying Mildred! Don’t we all know someone who has headed blindly and determinedly for a relationship so utterly and totally disastrous? It’s as if we and everyone else can see the mines dotted about the minefield, and only Philip thinks that he is walking through