The Razor's Edge
W. Somerset Maugham, 1944
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400034208
Summary
The Great War changed everything and the years following it were tumultuous—most of all for those who lived the war first-hand.
Maugham himself is a character in this novel of self-discovery and search for meaning, but the protagonist is a character named Larry. Battered physically and spiritually by the war, Larry's physical wounds heal, but his spirit is changed almost beyond recognition.
He leaves his betrothed, the beautiful and devoted Isabel. He studies philosophy and religion in Paris. He lives as a monk. He witnesses the exotic hardships of Spanish life. All of life that he can find—from an Indian Ashrama to labor in a coal mine—becomes Larry's spiritual experiment as he spurns the comfort and privilege of the Roaring '20s.
Maugham's theme is the contrast of spiritual content between Larry and the growing materialism and sophistication of those he left behind—and the surprising irony of where both of those paths lead. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1874
• Where—Paris, France
• Raised—England, UK
• Death—December 16, 1965
• Where—Cap Ferrat, France
• Education—Univerity of Heidelberg (no degree); M.D., St. Thomas's Hospital (Kings College)
William Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s.
Boyhood
Born in Paris to English parents, Maugham lost both mother and father by the age of 10. He was sent to England where he was raised by an aunt and paternal uncle, the vicar of Whitstable, who proved a cruel and emotionally distant guardian. As a boy, his short stature and a severe stutter hampered him socially.
At King’s School in Canterbury he became the victim of bullying and retreated into his studies. Unhappy both at his school and his uncle's vicarage, the young Maugham developed a talent for wounding remarks to those who displeased him, a trait reflected in some of Maugham's literary characters.
Medical school
Rather than continuing on to Oxford to study law as had his father and three older brothers, Maugham traveled instead to Germany where he spent time as an unregistered student at the University of Heidelberg. To appease his uncle, he eventually trained and qualified as a physician; however, he had already decided he would be a writer. Although he earned his medical degree, he never practiced. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth, came out in 1897, the same year he graduated. Its initial run sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full-time.
While studying medicine, Maugham kept his own lodgings and took pleasure in furnishing them. He filled many notebooks with literary ideas, and continued writing nightly while also studying. His first novel drew on details from his experiences doing midwifery work in Lambeth, a South London slum.
Later, Maugham would recall those years in St. Thomas's Hospital (now part of King's College London), viewing them not as a detour from writing but as vaulable inspiration. He met a swath of humanity he would not have met otherwise, seeing individuals at a time of anxiety and heightened meaning: "I saw how men died. I saw how they bore pain. I saw what hope looked like, fear and relief."
Writing life
His book earnings enabled Maugham to travel and live in places such as Spain and Capri for the next decade, but his next ten works never came close to rivaling the success of Liza.
This changed, however, in 1907 with the success of his play Lady Frederick. By the next year, he had four plays running simultaneously in London. The plays gained such popularity that Punch published a cartoon of Shakespeare biting his fingernails, looking worriedly at the billboards.
By 1914, Maugham was famous—with 10 plays and 10 novels to his name. Too old to enlist when the World War I broke out, he served in France as a member of the British Red Cross—in what became known as the "Literary Ambulance Drivers," a group of some 24 well-known writers, including the Americans John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Ernest Hemingway.
During this time, he met Frederick Gerald Haxton, a young San Franciscan, who became his companion and lover until Haxton's death in 1944. Throughout this period, Maugham continued to write. He proofread Of Human Bondage at a location near Dunkirk during a lull in his ambulance duties.
When first published in 1915, Of Human Bondage was criticized in both the UK and the US. The New York World described the romantic obsession of the protagonist Philip Carey as "the sentimental servitude of a poor fool." It took Theodore Dreiser, the influential American novelist and critic, to rescue the novel's reputation. Dreiser referred to it as a work of genius, likening it to a Beethoven symphony. His praise gave the book a needed lift, and it has never been out of print since.
Maugham indicates in his foreword that he derived the novel's title from a passage in Baruch Spinoza's Ethics:
The impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master...so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he see the better before him.
Of Human Bondage somewhat parallels Maugham's life: Philip Carey has a club foot rather than Maugham's stammer, the vicar of Blackstable resembles the vicar of Whitstable, and Carey becomes a medic. The close relationship between fictional and non-fictional became a Maugham trademark. In 1938 he wrote: "Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other."
Intelligence work
Maugham returned to England from his ambulance duties to promote Of Human Bondage. But he was eager to assist the war effort again and was introduced to a high-ranking intelligence officer known as "R" Maugham and recruited in 1915. He began work in Switzerland as part of a network of British agents, operating against the Berlin Committee. He lived in Switzerland as a writer.
Quiet and observant, Maugham had a good temperament for intelligence work; he believed he had inherited from his lawyer father a gift for cool judgement and the ability to be undeceived by facile appearances.
In June 1917, he was asked to undertake a special mission in Russia. It was part of an attempt to keep the Provisional Government in power—and Russia in the war—by countering German pacifist propaganda. Two and a half months later, the Bolsheviks took control. Maugham subsequently said that if he had been able to get there six months earlier, he might have succeeded.
Maugham later used his spying experiences as the basis for Ashenden: Or the British Agent, a 1928 collection of short stories about a gentlemanly, sophisticated, aloof spy. The character is considered to have influenced Ian Fleming's later series of James Bond novels.
Marriage and family
Although attracted to men, Maugham entered into a relationship with Syrie Wellcome, the wife of Henry Wellcome, an American-born English pharmaceutical magnate. They had a daughter named Mary Elizabeth Maugham (1915–1998). Henry Wellcome sued his wife for divorce, naming Maugham as co-respondent.
In May 1917, Syrie Wellcome and Maugham were married. Syrie Maugham became a noted interior designer, who in the 1920s popularized "the all-white room." But the couple was unhappy, and Syrie divorced Maugham in 1929, finding his relationship and travels with Haxton too difficult to live with.
1920s and 30s
In 1916, during the war, Maugham had traveled to the Pacific to research The Moon and Sixpence, his novel based on the life of Paul Gauguin. It was the first of numerous journeys that would continue through the late-Imperial British world of the 1920s and 30s. The trips served as inspiration for his novels.
Maugham became known for his portrayal of the waning days of colonialism in India, Southeast Asia, China, and the Pacific. On all his journeys, he was accompanied by Haxton, whom he regarded as indispensable to his success as a writer. Maugham was painfully shy, and Haxton, ever the extrovert, gathered human material which the author converted to fiction.
On A Chinese Screen, a collection of 58 ultra-short story sketches, was published in 1922. Maugham had written them during his 1920 travels through China and Hong Kong, and he dedicated the book to Syrie.
In 1926, Maugham bought the Villa La Mauresque, on nine acres at Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera. It became home for most of his life, and it was where he hosted one of the great literary and social salons of the 1920s and 30s. He continued to be highly productive, writing plays, short stories, novels, essays and travel books.
In his 1933 novel, An Appointment in Samarra, death is both the narrator and a central character. It is based on an ancient Babylonian myth, and the American writer John O'Hara credited Maugham's novel as a creative inspiration for his own 1934 novel, titled Appointment in Samarra.
By 1940, with the collapse of France and its occupation by the German Third Reich, Maugham was forced to leave the French Riviera, he was a refugee—but certainly one of the wealthiest and most famous in the English-speaking world.
Maugham spent most of World War II in the US, first in Hollywood, where he was one of the first authors to make significant money from film adaptations, and later in the South. Then in his 60s, he was asked by the British government to make patriotic speeches in an effort to induce the US to aid Britain, if not necessarily become an allied combatant.
Grand old man of letters
When his companion Gerald Haxton died in 1944, Maugham moved back to England. In 1946, after the war, he returned to his villa in France, where he lived, interrupted by frequent and long travels, until his death.
Maugham began a relationship with Alan Searle, whom he had first met in 1928. A young man from the London slum area of Bermondsey, Searle had already been kept by older men. He proved a devoted if not a stimulating companion. One of Maugham's friends, describing the difference between Haxton and Searle, said simply: "Gerald was vintage, Alan was vin ordinaire."
Maugham's love life was almost never smooth. He once confessed:
I have most loved people who cared little or nothing for me and when people have loved me I have been embarrassed ... In order not to hurt their feelings, I have often acted a passion I did not feel.
In 1962 Maugham sold a collection of paintings, some of which had already been assigned to his daughter Liza by deed. She sued her father and won a judgment of £230,000. Maugham publicly disowned her and claimed she was not his biological daughter. He adopted Searle as his son and heir, but the adoption was annulled.
In his 1962 volume of memoirs, Looking Back, Maugham attacked the late Syrie Maugham and wrote that Liza had been born before they married. The memoir cost him several friends and exposed him to much public ridicule. Liza and her husband Lord Glendevon contested the change in Maugham's will in the French courts, and it was overturned.
But, in 1965 Searle inherited £50,000, the contents of the Villa La Mauresque, Maugham's manuscripts and his revenue from copyrights for 30 years. Thereafter the copyrights passed to the Royal Literary Fund.
Maugham died in 1965, at the age of 91, in Cap Feret, France. There is no grave: his ashes were scattered near the Maugham Library, The King's School, Canterbury. Liza Maugham, Lady Glendevon, died in 1998 at the age of 83, survived by her four children (a son and a daughter by her first marriage to Vincent Paravicini, and two more sons to Lord Glendevon).
Reputation
Commercial success with high book sales, successful theatre productions, and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Even as a boy, small in stature, Maugham had been proud of his stamina, and in his adult years, he was openly proud of his ability to continue turning out book after play after book.
Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality," his small vocabulary, and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.
Maugham wrote at a time when more experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. His own view of his abilities remained modest—toward the end of his career he placed himself "in the very first row of the second-raters."
Maugham began collecting theatrical paintings before the World War II and continued building his collection through the years until it became second only to that of the Garrick Club. From 1951, some 14 years before his death, his paintings began their exhibition life. Bequeathed to the Trustees of the National Theatre, they were were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden in 1994. (Adapted from Wikipedia and Penguin Random House. Retrieved 12/4/2105.)
Book Reviews
The story is carried forward with Maugham's usual deftness and ingenuity of manipulation. Everything has been provided for from the start: no loose ends are left trailing. In some points the technique is tiresome and outmoded—the set elaborate descriptions...nothing left to the imagination. The writing is direct.... [T]here is no attempt to avoid the conventional turn; the reader has no impulse to dwell on a passage for its special rightness of phrasing or perception... [and] few intentions that life much deeper than the surface.
New York Times
[Maugham’s] excessively rare gift of story-telling...is almost the equal of imagination itself.
Sunday Times (London)
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham.... He was always so entirely there.
Gore Vidal
Maugham remains the consummate craftsman.... [His writing is] so compact, so economical, so closely motivated, so skillfully written, that it rivets attention from the first page to last.
Saturday Review of Literature
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Razor's Edge:
1. What is the significance of the novel's title and epigraph?
The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over;
thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.
What does the proverb mean, and how does it compare to the Christian belief in salvation—is it similar or dissimilar?
2. How would you describe Larry Darrell? What drives him: is he searching for something, or running away from something? Are you sympathetic or unsympathetic toward him? What do you think of the fact that Larry has a small inheritance? Does that make his rejection of materialism less courageous...or is it irrelevant?
3. What are the differences between Elliot Templeton and Larry Darrell? What aspect of society does Elliot represent? At the end of his life, Elliot's friends dessert him. What does that suggest about the path he has chosen in life?
4. A follow-up to Question #3: How do Elliot Templeton's religious beliefs differ from Larry's? Consider Larry's attraction to John of Ruysbroeck—what draws him to the Flemish mystic?
5. Is Isabel a sympathetic character? If you were Isabel, how would you react to Larry—would you be understanding...or impatient...or angry? Would you agree to delay the marriage? Would you accept, or reject, his later request to travel and give up a life of material comfort? Does your attitude toward Isabel change during the course of the novel? Larry appears to forgive her at the end. Why? Would you forgive her...do you?
6. What is the spiritual connection between Sophie Macdonald and Larry? Why does Larry ask Sophie to marry him? How are the two alike...and what path does Sophie take to alleviate her vision of evil?
7. Larry meets Kolti in the mines. How does he influence Larry—what does Larry learn from him? (Is there some symbolic significance to the mines?)
8. Larry spends several months with the Benedictines. Why does he eventually reject their conception of God? In what way does their religious faith not fulfill his needs?
9. What is elightement? What is its purpose. Why do people seek it? Is enlightenment the same as salvation?
10. A central question of the novel is, how can the spirit maintain itself in a world of corruption? What answer to that question does Hindu mysticism offer? Do you find the selflessness of mysticism a satisfying alternative to materialism? Are there other paths, different alternatives, for those who seek to live a good life in a corrupt world?
11. What is Maugham critiquing in both European and American society? Where does his eye alight to find satire? Do those same failings exist today? Are things better...or worse in the 21st century?
12. A follow-up to Question #1: Has Larry traveled along the razor's edge? Has he achieved salvation? Does he, at least, find what he's looking for?
13 What about your own spiritual state? Are you enlightened? Have you traveled along the razor's edge? Do you wish to?
14. Why would Maugham have written himself into the novel? What role does he play?
15. Do you find the ending satisfying? Do characters get what they want? Is fairness or, perhaps, goodness, achieved?
16. Have you read other novels or short stories by Maugham? If so, how does this novel compare? If not, are you inspired to do read more of him?
17. Consider playing clips from either film version (1946 Tyrone Power; 1984 Bill Murray). Compare the book and film.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)