Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham [4]
On parting, visitor and couple shake hands warmly, and just then the perspective widens, as it hasn’t often done in this book. Philip’s undeliberated perception of the pair—people whom he’ll never dominate and on whom he’ll never depend—takes its place on even terms with their perception of him: “He saw that it had given them pleasure that he shared their meal, and they saw that he had thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Of minor consequence in the narrative as a whole, this outward turn from self has large meaning in the development of a sensibility. Crossing a border, the hero steps beyond the self-anxiety (including a sometimes too desperate compassion) in which he’s been long entangled. And the emotional movement is registered with brilliant exactitude: Philip Carey relaxes into fellow feeling.
Sadly, Somerset Maugham’s own life seems not to have been rich in experiences of fellow feeling. It was a long life (Maugham died in 1965 at the age of 91), and during its course the novelist inhabited many different selves. In an exemplary biography, Ted Morgan writes that “Maugham was all of these: an alienated child, a medical student, an avant-garde novelist and playwright, a bohemian in Paris, a successful West End dramatist, a London social lion, an ambulance driver on the Flanders front, a spy in Russia, a promiscuous homosexual who paid for the favors of boys in remote lands, a cuckolded husband, a host to the famous persons of his time, a World War II propagandist, the most widely read novelist since Dickens, a living legend kept alive by cellular therapy, and a senile old man who tried to disinherit his daughter and adopt his secretary.” Maugham’s time of greatest contentment—his fullest realization of the happiness and ease of unselfconscious fraternity—seems to have occurred during his relatively brief stretch of service in World War I as an ambulance driver and hospital aide.
Sadly, too, Maugham’s reputation has been in steady decline for a half-century. There are, to be sure, few pages in the dozens of novels, story collections, and plays that he published in his lifetime that begin to match the humanity or power of a dozen different chapters of the work at hand. And Maugham’s preference for plain, straight-on, linear narrative is only one of several barriers cutting him off from the main currents of modernism.
The likelihood remains strong, though, that his masterpiece will survive. Fascinated with discontinuity, we nevertheless continue to believe, at some level, in the possibility of stable knowledge, and continue to need—and savor—evidence that it’s attainable. Twentieth-century writers have produced only a handful of novels that meet this need: books in which intelligent people achieve advances in understanding, and succeed in learning things truly worth knowing. Of Human Bondage remains, triumphantly, one of them.
I
The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child’s bed.
“Wake up, Philip,” she said.
She pulled down the bed-clothes, took him in her arms, and carried him downstairs. He was only half awake.
“Your mother wants you,” she said.
She opened the door of a room on the floor below and took the child over to a bed in which a woman was lying. It was his mother. She stretched out her arms, and the child nestled by her side. He did not ask why he had been awakened. The woman kissed his eyes, and with thin, small hands felt the warm body through his white flannel nightgown. She pressed him closer to herself.
“Are you sleepy, darling?” she said.
Her voice was so weak that it seemed to come already from a great distance. The child did not answer, but smiled comfortably. He was very happy in the large, warm bed, with those soft arms