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The Moon and Sixpence
Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes sacrifices that leave the lives of those closest to him in tatters. Through Maugham's sympathetic eye, Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in humans' lives it sometimes demands.
187 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 1919
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About the author
W. Somerset Maugham
1,697books5,801followersWilliam Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.
At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.
His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.
Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.
During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.
At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.
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August 3, 2021
Life isn’t long enough for love and art.
Years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed W. Somerset Maugham’s , so when I found a copy of The Moon and Sixpence in the bookcase, it looked the perfect breezy weekend diversion I was looking for before I would embark on the finale of Thomas Mann� s . Imagine my surprise having by chance run into a novel which also turned out to be a Künstlerroman , both novels sketching the development of two men who come to live only for their art, the (fictitious) composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s novel, and Charles Strickland, a painter modelled on Paul Gauguin, in The moon and Sixpence - finding quite a few parallels between both novels.
Apart from narrators cultivating a peculiar friendship with the respective artists and who plead for compassion and understanding for the ordeal of the artists they admired, both novels in some sense have a common view on the Artist, the key � Romantic- belief that one cannot have it both ways, the Artist has to choose between love and art (Maugham makes this belief explicit from the very beginning, his narrator declares that the artist's personality is the most fascinating aspect of his art, however repulsive his character or numerous his flaws ). The outcome of that choice doesn’t have to come as a surprise, as Life isn’t long enough for love and art.While Adrian Leverkühn sorely forsakes love in his pact with the devil in exchange for granting him creative genius, Strickland is portrayed as indifferent to love, abandoning his wife and children for his artistic obsessions, which also have a demonic touch. In both cases their choice will have fatal consequences, at least for others. Both are portrayed as monsters in the sense that they are dedicated artists, whose life is totally devoted to their art and so they display monstrous features, even if only in the eyes of those around them. They both consciously choose a hermit's existence, rejecting commonplace life and participation in society, claiming the freedom to live in an ivory tower for themselves � whether on a farm in Germany or a mansard in Paris (and Tahiti later on). Unlike Charles Strickland, however, Leverkühn is vexed by the monstrous nature of his artistry � Charles Strickland couldn’t bother less.
There are many brilliant reviews and analyses of The Moon and Sixpence to find around here which do great justice to this novel as an outstanding work of literature. Nevertheless I am more on the side of these perspicacious reviews (here and here) which point out its inner contradictions and word astutely some of the impressions the novel left me with, encapsulating what becomes visible once the colours of Maugham’s glowing prose have stopped to bedazzle.
As much as the psychological portrayal of the selfish and obsessed painter is well done � from the little I recall from reading about the life of Gauguin the credibility is supreme (whereas assuaging some of the facts, for instance on his health condition, substituting syphilis by leprosy - it wasn’t the uncouthness, egoism and brutality of artist protagonist Charles Strickland that put me off� after all, haven’t those personality features turned into something one has almost come to expect in the Romantic view on the artist (the contrasts and tension between the ugliness and brutality of the personality versus the beauty he � as the genius is of course a man - pursuits to create)?
It were mostly the rather nauseating generalisations on the nature of women, by Strickland and by almost every character featuring in the novel including the narrator, a writer in who one can recognise Maugham himself which simply baffled me (and made me imagine the narrator/Maugham as an even less likeable person than Strickland/Gauguin, which is quite a feat). At times this misogyny turns so pathetic it becomes rather fascinating � even raking up the discussion if women actually have a soul (which was apparently a ). So this novel left me puzzled and with plenty of questions buzzing in my mind. What was the status quaestionis with regard to misogyny in 1919? Was Maugham representative for his times, or was it mostly the bitterness because of his personal situation (trapped in loveless marriage while being homosexual) that made him spit out his loathing so viscerally that it came to overcast whatever points he makes on conventionalism and creativity? I hope to find some answers in , even if it seems too brief to have the space to mention Maugham.
When reading Deborah Levy’s I almost suspected myself of having turned into a sweet water feminist, as her recurrent blaming of patriarchy didn’t much resonate with me. If one however would feel the need to fuel feminist energy, The Moon and Sixpence would make good material to give to one’s children or simple anyone who thinks feminism has become evident or superfluous nowadays, if only to see where we have come from. It must have been from the moment a co-worker started to sing from the Beastie boys in the nineties (‘girls do the dishes�) I was confronted with something as blatantly misogynist/sexist as this book (admittedly, apart from this forum dedicated to books and some newspapers I read little on the internet and so am only vaguely aware of trolling of women who twitter as happened to Mary Beard).
Just a few examples of statements to savour:
When a woman loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.
It requires a female temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.
Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.
I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.
Women are strange little beasts... You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you. He shrugged his shoulders. Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.... In the end they get you, and you are helpless in their hands. White or brown, they are all the same.
Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s an insignificant part. I know lust. That’s normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure.
What I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognizes its strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow.
On the plus side, the novel made me look more closely at some of the paintings of Paul Gauguin, which I now appreciate more, particularly the vitality of the colours in his still lives (Gauguin’s painting never particularly spoke to me, I find it particularly hard not to look at his paintings through the lens of an exoticism that reeks of a mythologizing of the noble savage; I admit my not so favourable view on him was also negatively affected by reading this loosely biographical graphic novel some years ago, by Maximilien Le Roy).
Maugham’s novel offers lots of food for thought and could serve as an excellent exercise when one tries to consider a work of art independently from the personality of the creator � whether painter or writer. It made me aware I need more exercise on these issues and so I will definitely read more by Maugham.
January 15, 2022
The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham first published in 1919. The story is in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.
It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)»؛ «ماه و شش پنی»؛ «قلبِ زن»؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و چهارم ماه دسامبر سال1970میلادی، و خوانش با عنوان: «قلب زن در ماه فوریه سال1991میلادی
عنوان: ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم پرویز داریوش؛ تهران، انتشارات پیروز، سال1333؛ در263ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، امیرکبیر، سال1344؛ در263ص؛ چاپ دیگر اصفهان، زمان نو، سال1362؛ در334ص؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، اساطیر، سال1370؛ در355ص؛ چاپ دوم سال1376؛ چاپ سوم سال1388؛ شابک9789645960108؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده20م
عنوان: ماه و شش پنی؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم: الهه مرعشی؛ تهران، فرهنگ جاوی، سال1393؛ در284ص؛ شابک9786006182216؛
عنوان: قلب زن؛ نویسنده: ویلیام سامرست موآم؛ مترجم: حسین بدلزاده؛ رشت، انتشارات روزنامه سایبان، سال1336، در220ص؛
رویدادهای این داستان پرورده ی خیال نیست بلکه از یادمانها و دیدارهای نویسنده در جزایر جنوب الهام یافته است؛ «چارلز استریکلاند» قهرمان داستان، همان «پل گوگن» نقاش نامدار فرانسه است که «موام» با قلم توانا و سحر انگیز خود شرح زندگانی عجیب توام با عشق و سراسر ماجرای او را به رشته نگارش درآورده اند؛ در این داستان «ویلیام سامرست موام» آنچه را که در قلبِ زن میگذرد، مورد واکاوی و بررسی قرار داده، و جلوه های آن را در زمانهای گوناگون، هنگامی که بر سر لطف و وفا است، و یا آن زمان که دستخوش خشم و کینه است، با مهارت شگفت انگیزی بازنگاری کرده است؛ «ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)» را، «سامرست موام»، براساس زندگی «پل گوگن» نقاش، نگاشته اند، و با ترجمه زنده یاد «پرویز داریوش» به زیور نشر آراسته شده، در کتاب «قلبِ زن» که عنوان فارسی دیگری برای همین کتاب، «ماه و شش پشیز» است؛ پس از مقدمه ها از مترجم و نویسنده؛ فصل نخست کتاب با عنوان: «در محفل ادبی»، چنین آغاز میشود (هنگامی که اولین داستان خود «جنون عشق» را که خوشبختانه سر و صدای زیادی در محافل ادبی برانگیخت نوشتم؛ جوان بودم ...)؛ پایان نقل؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/02/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 24/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham first published in 1919. The story is in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.
It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)»؛ «ماه و شش پنی»؛ «قلبِ زن»؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز بیست و چهارم ماه دسامبر سال1970میلادی، و خوانش با عنوان: «قلب زن در ماه فوریه سال1991میلادی
عنوان: ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم پرویز داریوش؛ تهران، انتشارات پیروز، سال1333؛ در263ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، امیرکبیر، سال1344؛ در263ص؛ چاپ دیگر اصفهان، زمان نو، سال1362؛ در334ص؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، اساطیر، سال1370؛ در355ص؛ چاپ دوم سال1376؛ چاپ سوم سال1388؛ شابک9789645960108؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان بریتانیا - سده20م
عنوان: ماه و شش پنی؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم: الهه مرعشی؛ تهران، فرهنگ جاوی، سال1393؛ در284ص؛ شابک9786006182216؛
عنوان: قلب زن؛ نویسنده: ویلیام سامرست موآم؛ مترجم: حسین بدلزاده؛ رشت، انتشارات روزنامه سایبان، سال1336، در220ص؛
رویدادهای این داستان پرورده ی خیال نیست بلکه از یادمانها و دیدارهای نویسنده در جزایر جنوب الهام یافته است؛ «چارلز استریکلاند» قهرمان داستان، همان «پل گوگن» نقاش نامدار فرانسه است که «موام» با قلم توانا و سحر انگیز خود شرح زندگانی عجیب توام با عشق و سراسر ماجرای او را به رشته نگارش درآورده اند؛ در این داستان «ویلیام سامرست موام» آنچه را که در قلبِ زن میگذرد، مورد واکاوی و بررسی قرار داده، و جلوه های آن را در زمانهای گوناگون، هنگامی که بر سر لطف و وفا است، و یا آن زمان که دستخوش خشم و کینه است، با مهارت شگفت انگیزی بازنگاری کرده است؛ «ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)» را، «سامرست موام»، براساس زندگی «پل گوگن» نقاش، نگاشته اند، و با ترجمه زنده یاد «پرویز داریوش» به زیور نشر آراسته شده، در کتاب «قلبِ زن» که عنوان فارسی دیگری برای همین کتاب، «ماه و شش پشیز» است؛ پس از مقدمه ها از مترجم و نویسنده؛ فصل نخست کتاب با عنوان: «در محفل ادبی»، چنین آغاز میشود (هنگامی که اولین داستان خود «جنون عشق» را که خوشبختانه سر و صدای زیادی در محافل ادبی برانگیخت نوشتم؛ جوان بودم ...)؛ پایان نقل؛
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 11/02/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ 24/10/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
March 25, 2025
I liked the writing and the story; maybe I'm not on the right track, but I take away that everyone deep down can hope for something else, a changing total of his life. Still, it will be too excessive if he does it too late; it will be too extreme (this is happening here). This man had been taken by his passion, which undoubtedly devoured him before, but he could not express remorse for not doing so earlier. It was a form of guilt that he left behind him, hence this way of life, this violence in his relations with society and others, and a destroying state.
This husband offered nothing flattering for a woman trying to find a place for herself in the world of letters and the arts. Nothing salient saved from the banality of this character is undoubtedly irreproachable but hopelessly ordinary.
One day, however, the insignificant Charles Strickland abandons his wife and home, leaves for Paris, begins a career as a painter, and reveals himself to be an enigmatic, fanciful, and sometimes hurtful being.
Misogynist, cruel to himself and others, he sacrifices everything to work doomed to the incomprehension of contemporaries, treating with equal contempt those who love him and those who hate him, exercising an inexplicable fascination with all.
The author draws a portrait of this character, who is less seduced by the artist than by the man. The banality of the surrounding characters makes the picture even more strange.
The delicacy of the writing and the conciseness of the exemplary anecdotes give the novel an allure of worldliness and oddity that perfectly suits the subject.
This husband offered nothing flattering for a woman trying to find a place for herself in the world of letters and the arts. Nothing salient saved from the banality of this character is undoubtedly irreproachable but hopelessly ordinary.
One day, however, the insignificant Charles Strickland abandons his wife and home, leaves for Paris, begins a career as a painter, and reveals himself to be an enigmatic, fanciful, and sometimes hurtful being.
Misogynist, cruel to himself and others, he sacrifices everything to work doomed to the incomprehension of contemporaries, treating with equal contempt those who love him and those who hate him, exercising an inexplicable fascination with all.
The author draws a portrait of this character, who is less seduced by the artist than by the man. The banality of the surrounding characters makes the picture even more strange.
The delicacy of the writing and the conciseness of the exemplary anecdotes give the novel an allure of worldliness and oddity that perfectly suits the subject.
July 20, 2015
Fair warning, this is going to be a long review for this is a book that is close to my heart written by an author whom I deeply admire.
The Right Time
There are some books that walk into your life at an opportune time. I'm talking about the books that send a pleasant shiver down your spine laden with “Man, this is meant to be!� as you flip through its pages cursorily. Or those that upon completion, demand an exclamation from every book-reading fibre of your body to the effect of “There couldn't have been a better time for me to have read this book!� Now, I come from deferred-gratification stock. So books like these, you don't read immediately,. You let them sit there on your table for a while. You bask in the warm expectant glow of a life-altering read. You glance at the book as you make your way to office, take pleasure in the fact that it'll be right there on your table when you open the front-door wearily, waiting to be opened, caressed, reveled in. And when that moment of reckoning arrives, you don't stop, you plunge yourself straight into the book, white-hot passionate.
The Moon and Sixpence was just that kind of a book for me. I had just completed (and thoroughly enjoyed) a course on Modern Art in college and could rattle off the names of Impressionist painters faster than I could the Indian cricket team. I was particularly intrigued by Paul Gauguin, a French Post-Impressionist painter, after reading one of his disturbingly direct quotes. “Civilization is what makes me sick�, he proclaimed, and huddled off to Tahiti to escape Europe and “all that is artificial and conventional�, leaving behind a wife and five children to fend for themselves, never to make contact with them again. This struck me as the ultimate expression of individuality, a resounding slap to the judgmental face of conservative society, an escapist act of repugnant selfishness that could only be justified by immeasurable artistic talent, genius, some may call it. My imagination was tickled beyond measure and when I discovered there was a novel by W.Somerset Maugham (the author of The Razor's Edge no less!) based on Gauguin, my joy knew no bounds. I was in the correct frame of mind to read about the life of a stockbroker who gave up on the trivial pleasures of bourgeois life for the penury and hard life of an aspiring painter without considering him ridiculous or vain. Supplied with the appropriate proportions of awe that is due to a genius protagonist, I began reading the book. I have to admit I expected a whole lot from it. I had a voyeuristic curiosity to delve into the head of a certified genius. I was even more curious to see how Maugham had executed it. At the same time, I was hoping that the book would raise and answer important questions concerning the nature of art and about what drives an artist to madness and greatness.
The Book
The book's title is taken from a review of Of Human Bondage in which the novel's protagonist, Philip Carey, is described as "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet."
I admired Maugham's narrative voice. In his inimitable style, he flits in and out of the characters' life as the stolid, immovable writer who is a mere observer, and nothing more. His narrator defies Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as in observing his characters, he doesn't change their lives or nature one bit. He has a mild disdain for the ordinary life of a householder and relishes his independence.
“I pictured their lives, troubled by no untoward adventure, honest, decent, and, by reason of these two upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously destined to carry on the normal traditions of their race and station, not without significance. They would grow old insensibly; they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due course � the one a peretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy, not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would sink into the grave. That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the patter of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognized its social value. I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change � change and the excitement of the unforeseen.�
In Maugham's hands, Gauguin becomes Charles Strickland, an unassuming British stockbroker, with a secret unquenchable lust for beauty that he is willing to take to the end of the world, first to Paris and then to remote Tahiti. He is cold, selfish and uncompromising in this quest for beauty.
“The passion that held Strickland was a passion to create beauty. It gave him no peace. It urged him hither and thither. He was eternally a pilgrim, haunted by a divine nostalgia, and the demon within him was ruthless. There are men whose desire for truth is so great that to attain it they will shatter the very foundation of their world. Of such was Strickland, only beauty with him took the place of truth. I could only feel for him a profound compassion.�
However words such as these serve to romanticize Strickland's actions which at first glance, remain despicable. Maugham paints him as a rogue loner, an unfathomable apparition, compelled to inhuman acts by the divine tyranny of art.
“He lived more poorly than an artisan. He worked harder. He cared nothing for those things which with most people make life gracious and beautiful. He was indifferent to money. He cared nothing about fame. You cannot praise him because he resisted the temptation to make any of those compromises with the world which most of us yield to. He had no such temptation. It never entered his head that compromise was possible. He lived in Paris more lonely than an anchorite in the deserts of Thebes. He asked nothing from his fellows except that they should leave him alone. He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only himself � many can do that � but others. He had a vision. Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.�
In these beautiful words he describes Strickland's strange homelessness and suggests a reason for his subsequent escape to Tahiti.
“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strange surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scnes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.�
By the end of the book, Maugham's narrator somewhat loses his grip over the reader and I could picture him in my mind floundering around the island of Tahiti, interviewing the people who came in contact with Strickland, trying to piece together a story. He finds himself in the “position of the biologist, who has to figure out from a bone, not only a creature's body, but also its habits.�
The reader is promised the ineffable, a study of genius and is only delivered an admission of its elusive nature. Also the tone of the novel tends to get slightly misogynistic in places. But I suppose that is more a failing of the protagonist rather than the author. As compensation, Maugham offers delicious crisp cookies of wisdom throughout. In simple lyrical language, he penetrates to the core of the human condition and offers invaluable advice to the aspiring writer, the hopeful lover and the wannabe genius.
For its unpretentious, sympathetic and humane portrayal of a deeply flawed protagonist, its quotable quotes and its ironic humour, this book shall rank as my one of my favourite books on the life and development of an artist in search of the unknowable.
My Master Maugham
I strongly believe that the adjectives one throws around are a barometer of one's sensitivity or at the minimum, one's desire to be accurate. Both of these qualities are indispensable to the aspiring writer because honestly, what is there to writing except fresh verbs, evocative adjectives, searing honesty and an unbounded imagination. Also, that it's easier said than done.
In this context, there are moments when I feel utterly stupid and unimaginative. My inner monologues resemble the chatter of teenage girls in their lack of content and use of worn-out adjectives. I mean, awesome and amazing, like seriously? Bleeuurghh!! During such exasperating times, my inner world aches to devour a mouthful of good-looking words in the Queen's English. I head to my dusty book-closet and roughly displace its contents until I find a book either by one of the barons of British literature, a W.Somerset Maugham/PG Wodehouse or a laid-back satire along the lines of Yes Minister. The book usually serves its purpose admirably. It manages to extract me from my predicament by either making me split my sides laughing or by drowning me in a stream of sentences so beautifully constructed that I completely forget my insecurities and start shaking my head ponderously at the writer's virtuosity instead.
Coming to the topic of the writer himself, W.Somerset Maugham is one of my favourite writers in the English language. Being an aspiring writer who's yet to find his voice myself, his novels never fail to stab me with a hopeful optimism. My premature belief, that I can write well, is reinforced when I read Maugham. He never intimidates me or bores me, commonplace sins many writers will have to go to confession for. While reading his prose, he possesses the singular ability of making the difficult art of writing seem pretty doable. This, I've realized with the passing of time, is due to one simple reason. It is because W.Somerset Maugham never shows off! Never! Never does he ramble pointlessly. Never does he merely graze the point instead of hitting it fair and square because he was too busy fooling around with the language. Never! He hits bulls eye with eloquence and a kind of frugal, flowing lyricism. There is always a single-minded purpose behind his writings. It is to spin a mighty good yarn by getting the point across without making his readers consult a dictionary. He even propounds profundity in a manner that typically makes me re-read the paragraph(and underline it) to admire the economy and ease with which the thought was expressed in words. I find the writing styles of Hemingway and Maugham similar in form, but while Hemingway's writing is austere to the point of being skeletal, Maugham clothes his words until they can be considered passably pretty.
For his remarkable abilities, Maugham's opinions about his own writing were always modest. He believed he stood "in the very first row of the second-raters." Asked about his method of writing, he simplified it to a matter of keen observation and honest reproduction. ""Most people cannot see anything," he once said, "but I can see what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating."
My favourite excerpts
Advice to aspiring writers
� I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed. But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times. It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these book are well and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thoughts; and indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.�
“Until long habit has blunted the sensibility, there is something disconcerting to the writer in the instinct which causes him to take an interest in the singularities of human nature so absorbing that his moral sense is powerless against it. He recognizes in himself an artistic satisfaction in the contemplation of evil which a little startles him but sincerity forces him to confess that the disapproval he feels for certain actions is not nearly so strong as his curiosity in their reasons. The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.�
On the ironic humour of life
“Dirk Stroeve was one of those unlucky persons whose most sincere emotions are ridiculous.�
On the nature of art
“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.�
The Right Time
There are some books that walk into your life at an opportune time. I'm talking about the books that send a pleasant shiver down your spine laden with “Man, this is meant to be!� as you flip through its pages cursorily. Or those that upon completion, demand an exclamation from every book-reading fibre of your body to the effect of “There couldn't have been a better time for me to have read this book!� Now, I come from deferred-gratification stock. So books like these, you don't read immediately,. You let them sit there on your table for a while. You bask in the warm expectant glow of a life-altering read. You glance at the book as you make your way to office, take pleasure in the fact that it'll be right there on your table when you open the front-door wearily, waiting to be opened, caressed, reveled in. And when that moment of reckoning arrives, you don't stop, you plunge yourself straight into the book, white-hot passionate.
The Moon and Sixpence was just that kind of a book for me. I had just completed (and thoroughly enjoyed) a course on Modern Art in college and could rattle off the names of Impressionist painters faster than I could the Indian cricket team. I was particularly intrigued by Paul Gauguin, a French Post-Impressionist painter, after reading one of his disturbingly direct quotes. “Civilization is what makes me sick�, he proclaimed, and huddled off to Tahiti to escape Europe and “all that is artificial and conventional�, leaving behind a wife and five children to fend for themselves, never to make contact with them again. This struck me as the ultimate expression of individuality, a resounding slap to the judgmental face of conservative society, an escapist act of repugnant selfishness that could only be justified by immeasurable artistic talent, genius, some may call it. My imagination was tickled beyond measure and when I discovered there was a novel by W.Somerset Maugham (the author of The Razor's Edge no less!) based on Gauguin, my joy knew no bounds. I was in the correct frame of mind to read about the life of a stockbroker who gave up on the trivial pleasures of bourgeois life for the penury and hard life of an aspiring painter without considering him ridiculous or vain. Supplied with the appropriate proportions of awe that is due to a genius protagonist, I began reading the book. I have to admit I expected a whole lot from it. I had a voyeuristic curiosity to delve into the head of a certified genius. I was even more curious to see how Maugham had executed it. At the same time, I was hoping that the book would raise and answer important questions concerning the nature of art and about what drives an artist to madness and greatness.
The Book
The book's title is taken from a review of Of Human Bondage in which the novel's protagonist, Philip Carey, is described as "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet."
I admired Maugham's narrative voice. In his inimitable style, he flits in and out of the characters' life as the stolid, immovable writer who is a mere observer, and nothing more. His narrator defies Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as in observing his characters, he doesn't change their lives or nature one bit. He has a mild disdain for the ordinary life of a householder and relishes his independence.
“I pictured their lives, troubled by no untoward adventure, honest, decent, and, by reason of these two upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously destined to carry on the normal traditions of their race and station, not without significance. They would grow old insensibly; they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due course � the one a peretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy, not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would sink into the grave. That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the patter of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognized its social value. I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change � change and the excitement of the unforeseen.�
In Maugham's hands, Gauguin becomes Charles Strickland, an unassuming British stockbroker, with a secret unquenchable lust for beauty that he is willing to take to the end of the world, first to Paris and then to remote Tahiti. He is cold, selfish and uncompromising in this quest for beauty.
“The passion that held Strickland was a passion to create beauty. It gave him no peace. It urged him hither and thither. He was eternally a pilgrim, haunted by a divine nostalgia, and the demon within him was ruthless. There are men whose desire for truth is so great that to attain it they will shatter the very foundation of their world. Of such was Strickland, only beauty with him took the place of truth. I could only feel for him a profound compassion.�
However words such as these serve to romanticize Strickland's actions which at first glance, remain despicable. Maugham paints him as a rogue loner, an unfathomable apparition, compelled to inhuman acts by the divine tyranny of art.
“He lived more poorly than an artisan. He worked harder. He cared nothing for those things which with most people make life gracious and beautiful. He was indifferent to money. He cared nothing about fame. You cannot praise him because he resisted the temptation to make any of those compromises with the world which most of us yield to. He had no such temptation. It never entered his head that compromise was possible. He lived in Paris more lonely than an anchorite in the deserts of Thebes. He asked nothing from his fellows except that they should leave him alone. He was single-hearted in his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only himself � many can do that � but others. He had a vision. Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.�
In these beautiful words he describes Strickland's strange homelessness and suggests a reason for his subsequent escape to Tahiti.
“I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strange surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scnes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.�
By the end of the book, Maugham's narrator somewhat loses his grip over the reader and I could picture him in my mind floundering around the island of Tahiti, interviewing the people who came in contact with Strickland, trying to piece together a story. He finds himself in the “position of the biologist, who has to figure out from a bone, not only a creature's body, but also its habits.�
The reader is promised the ineffable, a study of genius and is only delivered an admission of its elusive nature. Also the tone of the novel tends to get slightly misogynistic in places. But I suppose that is more a failing of the protagonist rather than the author. As compensation, Maugham offers delicious crisp cookies of wisdom throughout. In simple lyrical language, he penetrates to the core of the human condition and offers invaluable advice to the aspiring writer, the hopeful lover and the wannabe genius.
For its unpretentious, sympathetic and humane portrayal of a deeply flawed protagonist, its quotable quotes and its ironic humour, this book shall rank as my one of my favourite books on the life and development of an artist in search of the unknowable.
My Master Maugham
I strongly believe that the adjectives one throws around are a barometer of one's sensitivity or at the minimum, one's desire to be accurate. Both of these qualities are indispensable to the aspiring writer because honestly, what is there to writing except fresh verbs, evocative adjectives, searing honesty and an unbounded imagination. Also, that it's easier said than done.
In this context, there are moments when I feel utterly stupid and unimaginative. My inner monologues resemble the chatter of teenage girls in their lack of content and use of worn-out adjectives. I mean, awesome and amazing, like seriously? Bleeuurghh!! During such exasperating times, my inner world aches to devour a mouthful of good-looking words in the Queen's English. I head to my dusty book-closet and roughly displace its contents until I find a book either by one of the barons of British literature, a W.Somerset Maugham/PG Wodehouse or a laid-back satire along the lines of Yes Minister. The book usually serves its purpose admirably. It manages to extract me from my predicament by either making me split my sides laughing or by drowning me in a stream of sentences so beautifully constructed that I completely forget my insecurities and start shaking my head ponderously at the writer's virtuosity instead.
Coming to the topic of the writer himself, W.Somerset Maugham is one of my favourite writers in the English language. Being an aspiring writer who's yet to find his voice myself, his novels never fail to stab me with a hopeful optimism. My premature belief, that I can write well, is reinforced when I read Maugham. He never intimidates me or bores me, commonplace sins many writers will have to go to confession for. While reading his prose, he possesses the singular ability of making the difficult art of writing seem pretty doable. This, I've realized with the passing of time, is due to one simple reason. It is because W.Somerset Maugham never shows off! Never! Never does he ramble pointlessly. Never does he merely graze the point instead of hitting it fair and square because he was too busy fooling around with the language. Never! He hits bulls eye with eloquence and a kind of frugal, flowing lyricism. There is always a single-minded purpose behind his writings. It is to spin a mighty good yarn by getting the point across without making his readers consult a dictionary. He even propounds profundity in a manner that typically makes me re-read the paragraph(and underline it) to admire the economy and ease with which the thought was expressed in words. I find the writing styles of Hemingway and Maugham similar in form, but while Hemingway's writing is austere to the point of being skeletal, Maugham clothes his words until they can be considered passably pretty.
For his remarkable abilities, Maugham's opinions about his own writing were always modest. He believed he stood "in the very first row of the second-raters." Asked about his method of writing, he simplified it to a matter of keen observation and honest reproduction. ""Most people cannot see anything," he once said, "but I can see what is in front of my nose with extreme clearness; the greatest writers can see through a brick wall. My vision is not so penetrating."
My favourite excerpts
Advice to aspiring writers
� I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed. But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times. It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these book are well and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thoughts; and indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.�
“Until long habit has blunted the sensibility, there is something disconcerting to the writer in the instinct which causes him to take an interest in the singularities of human nature so absorbing that his moral sense is powerless against it. He recognizes in himself an artistic satisfaction in the contemplation of evil which a little startles him but sincerity forces him to confess that the disapproval he feels for certain actions is not nearly so strong as his curiosity in their reasons. The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.�
On the ironic humour of life
“Dirk Stroeve was one of those unlucky persons whose most sincere emotions are ridiculous.�
On the nature of art
“Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.�
April 13, 2024
Remember your first taste of beer as a kid? Sour, not sweet like a soft drink, it was hard to swallow. Still you tried. That was me reading The Moon and Sixpence. I hated Strickland, the stockbroker turned painter who deserts his wife and children to go off to Paris and Tahiti. His every word was repellent as a bubbly drink going up my nose.
But something told me not to give away or sell my copy. It waited on a shelf up high. Then, today, I read it again the way you do. Dipping in here and there. And that did it. I knew why I still gave it a home.
Free of caring what anyone thinks of him, Strickland is a Bartleby. He knows his life's course and will follow it. Explanations are justifications and he is not offering any. Yet, unlike Melville's "scrivener" whose only words are "I would prefer not to," Maugham's protagonist tells us what he does prefer to do. "I want to paint," he repeats. "I've got to." In these words Strickland speaks for every artist whether the painter, writer, composer, or actor. He speaks for us in our compulsion to create because it is breath itself. Like Strickland, we've "got to" and must embrace our audacity.
"The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic," Maugham decides. "He disturbs and arrests." Whether successful in our lifetimes or after our deaths, artists who pursue their "got to" drive are an unsettling bunch. So, expect it to be an unsettling read.
Strickland isn't a Shirley Valentine running off to a Greek island to escape the doldrums of life not to mention rain in Liverpool. Strickland is monstrous. I liked his Dutch friend better. But the brush goes to Strickland if I had to choose. I'd toss it like a lifeline to the drowning genius and shout "Catch!"
But something told me not to give away or sell my copy. It waited on a shelf up high. Then, today, I read it again the way you do. Dipping in here and there. And that did it. I knew why I still gave it a home.
Free of caring what anyone thinks of him, Strickland is a Bartleby. He knows his life's course and will follow it. Explanations are justifications and he is not offering any. Yet, unlike Melville's "scrivener" whose only words are "I would prefer not to," Maugham's protagonist tells us what he does prefer to do. "I want to paint," he repeats. "I've got to." In these words Strickland speaks for every artist whether the painter, writer, composer, or actor. He speaks for us in our compulsion to create because it is breath itself. Like Strickland, we've "got to" and must embrace our audacity.
"The greatness of Charles Strickland was authentic," Maugham decides. "He disturbs and arrests." Whether successful in our lifetimes or after our deaths, artists who pursue their "got to" drive are an unsettling bunch. So, expect it to be an unsettling read.
Strickland isn't a Shirley Valentine running off to a Greek island to escape the doldrums of life not to mention rain in Liverpool. Strickland is monstrous. I liked his Dutch friend better. But the brush goes to Strickland if I had to choose. I'd toss it like a lifeline to the drowning genius and shout "Catch!"
August 13, 2018
W. Somerset Maugham's Charles Strickland might not be heading onto my list of the most likeable characters in literature, but one thing is for sure, he is certainly one of the most memorable. Strickland, a bourgeois city gent living in London has a dull, soulless exterior that conceals the fact he just may be a genius. He devotes himself to himself, and hides within him a passion for painting that no one else seems to knows about. He doesn't give a stuff about anybody, including his family, and his wife is left baffled when Charles suddenly travels to Paris (and then later on Tahiti) with no intentions to ever come back. She believes he has run away with another woman, but the truth leaves her totally perplexed, after the narrator of Maugham's novel is sent after him, having only meet Strickland briefly before.
Derived from the life of Paul Gauguin, our main character is a man insensible to ordinary human relations, who lives the life of pure selfishness which is sometimes supposed to produce great art, which has always had its fascination for novelists inspired only by the unusual. Accordingly there have been novels in plenty depicting the conflict of the abominable genius with the uncongenial environment, and Mr. Maugham has followed a recognised convention in this story of an imaginary artist of posthumous greatness. He treats him throughout with mock respect, and surrounds his affairs with contributory detail. Maugham's story takes a respectable man who deserts his wife after seventeen years of marriage to get fully behind a great idea - to turn himself into a famous artist, having previously had no experience. His break is succeeded by living destitute with a stubborn determination, and by long periods of work and outbursts of savage behaviour.
Now, here's the thing, does Maugham convince us that Strickland is a real man and a real artist with which we can absorb his traits as part of the essential human creature who lives eternally by his work? It seems he does not. Where every detail should be pungently real, one is constantly checked in belief by the sense of a calculated and heightened effect, and by the passion of Maugham for his subject. Such a passion is sometimes defeated by it's object. Here one is repelled, not so much by Strickland's monosyllabic callousness, but by the knowledge that this callousness is seen and represented without subtlety. This does eventually change towards the end, but what I liked about Maugham's narrative is he never succumbs to the obvious temptation to seek to explain Strickland’s actions to us, we are left in the dark to his motives just like the other characters. Another positive is that he uses the minor elements in the story with an extremely effective manner. There are deeper themes going on here, if you dig hard enough.
The novel is one of a destructive nature, and presents a really terrible philosophy on Modernism which it propounds, but I found it compulsively readable. Maugham’s writing manages to be both powerful and austere, with not a moment wasted. I particularly liked the first-person narrative voice, which captured me with a mix of admiration and disdain for Strickland, something that Maugham struck a masterful balance with.
Derived from the life of Paul Gauguin, our main character is a man insensible to ordinary human relations, who lives the life of pure selfishness which is sometimes supposed to produce great art, which has always had its fascination for novelists inspired only by the unusual. Accordingly there have been novels in plenty depicting the conflict of the abominable genius with the uncongenial environment, and Mr. Maugham has followed a recognised convention in this story of an imaginary artist of posthumous greatness. He treats him throughout with mock respect, and surrounds his affairs with contributory detail. Maugham's story takes a respectable man who deserts his wife after seventeen years of marriage to get fully behind a great idea - to turn himself into a famous artist, having previously had no experience. His break is succeeded by living destitute with a stubborn determination, and by long periods of work and outbursts of savage behaviour.
Now, here's the thing, does Maugham convince us that Strickland is a real man and a real artist with which we can absorb his traits as part of the essential human creature who lives eternally by his work? It seems he does not. Where every detail should be pungently real, one is constantly checked in belief by the sense of a calculated and heightened effect, and by the passion of Maugham for his subject. Such a passion is sometimes defeated by it's object. Here one is repelled, not so much by Strickland's monosyllabic callousness, but by the knowledge that this callousness is seen and represented without subtlety. This does eventually change towards the end, but what I liked about Maugham's narrative is he never succumbs to the obvious temptation to seek to explain Strickland’s actions to us, we are left in the dark to his motives just like the other characters. Another positive is that he uses the minor elements in the story with an extremely effective manner. There are deeper themes going on here, if you dig hard enough.
The novel is one of a destructive nature, and presents a really terrible philosophy on Modernism which it propounds, but I found it compulsively readable. Maugham’s writing manages to be both powerful and austere, with not a moment wasted. I particularly liked the first-person narrative voice, which captured me with a mix of admiration and disdain for Strickland, something that Maugham struck a masterful balance with.
Read
January 27, 2025On the first page of this novel, the narrator, who is a young English writer and playwright like Somerset Maugham himself was when he wrote this book, says, "To my mind the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to excuse a thousand faults."
That statement made me stop and think.
You see I used to believe that artists are luckier than writers in not always having their work judged in relation to the facts of their lives and their personalities, whereas writers don't get away with the same anonymity. I rarely read biographies of writers for that very reason, preferring to experience their work independently of the details of their lives just as I enjoy the paintings I most admire for what I see on the canvas, and totally separately from the artist's personality or the circumstances they might have been living through when they painted them. Ok, it helps to know what century, movement, or manifesto of artistic intention an artist belonged in, but beyond that I want to know nothing. And the same with writers.
So Somerset Maugham and I seemed to get off on the wrong foot from the first page of this book—as we also did on the first page of which I read recently.
But I turned over to the second page of The Moon and Sixpence anyway and persevered with Maugham's fictionalised biography of enigmatic French artist Paul Gauguin, whom Maugham turns into an English man called Charles Strickland, but to whom, in all other respects, he gives a similar destiny to Gauguin's.
I was amused that Maugham made his artist character English because of his determination in the The Razor's Edge to deliberately create characters that were outside of his own experience, i.e., American characters, but who didn't feel fully realised to me.
However, I could understand his choice to make his artist character English in this novel. It was going to be hard to get inside the mind of a Paul Gauguin-like person (little is known about his thoughts or feelings), and making him French was probably going to complicate the task further—though Maugham was born in France, even if to English parents.
I was amused too in the early pages by the amount of footnotes referencing fictional monographs in real journals on Charles Strickland's work by various authors with funny names. I suspect Maugham may have sewn a whole layer of private jokes into those footnotes!
My mood improved further when Charles Strickland entered the picture because Maugham didn't try to get inside his mind at all. He kept him perfectly enigmatic by the simple means of limiting his speech to the briefest monosyllabic answers to other characters' questions. Strickland never initiates any dialogue himself. Neither the narrator nor any of the other characters know what he thinks, and few get to have extended conversations with him. Anything we learn about him is via the narrator's own observations of his behavior or the extensive reports he gets from other people who've been in contact with Strickland. That's where this novel resembled the parts of The Razor's Edge (also about an enigmatic and unknowable character) that I found most unlikely and most artificial: the amount of recollections of extensive word-for-word conversations the narrator goes in for, as in reporting to us a meeting he had with someone who recalls meeting Strickland and who in turn recalls every detail of their encounters with him. Strickland's slight but interesting story seemed swamped by all the padding it was wrapped in.
If you're a fan of The Moon and Sixpence or of The Razor's Edge, you might think I'm very hard to please, and that I seem to be searching too hard for flaws while ignoring both novels' merits. Well, that's actually funny in the context of the The Moon and Sixpence title (I had to look up its meaning as, like Maugham's other titles, it escaped me completely).
The Wikipedia article about this book says:
It's true that while reading both The Razor's Edge and The Moon and Sixpence, I wanted to be reading something else: Of Human Bondage!
It was the first book in my Maugham binge and it remains my favourite. I'm more like Philip Carey than I realised. Then again, maybe I’m more like grumpy Charles Strickland!
That statement made me stop and think.
You see I used to believe that artists are luckier than writers in not always having their work judged in relation to the facts of their lives and their personalities, whereas writers don't get away with the same anonymity. I rarely read biographies of writers for that very reason, preferring to experience their work independently of the details of their lives just as I enjoy the paintings I most admire for what I see on the canvas, and totally separately from the artist's personality or the circumstances they might have been living through when they painted them. Ok, it helps to know what century, movement, or manifesto of artistic intention an artist belonged in, but beyond that I want to know nothing. And the same with writers.
So Somerset Maugham and I seemed to get off on the wrong foot from the first page of this book—as we also did on the first page of which I read recently.
But I turned over to the second page of The Moon and Sixpence anyway and persevered with Maugham's fictionalised biography of enigmatic French artist Paul Gauguin, whom Maugham turns into an English man called Charles Strickland, but to whom, in all other respects, he gives a similar destiny to Gauguin's.
I was amused that Maugham made his artist character English because of his determination in the The Razor's Edge to deliberately create characters that were outside of his own experience, i.e., American characters, but who didn't feel fully realised to me.
However, I could understand his choice to make his artist character English in this novel. It was going to be hard to get inside the mind of a Paul Gauguin-like person (little is known about his thoughts or feelings), and making him French was probably going to complicate the task further—though Maugham was born in France, even if to English parents.
I was amused too in the early pages by the amount of footnotes referencing fictional monographs in real journals on Charles Strickland's work by various authors with funny names. I suspect Maugham may have sewn a whole layer of private jokes into those footnotes!
My mood improved further when Charles Strickland entered the picture because Maugham didn't try to get inside his mind at all. He kept him perfectly enigmatic by the simple means of limiting his speech to the briefest monosyllabic answers to other characters' questions. Strickland never initiates any dialogue himself. Neither the narrator nor any of the other characters know what he thinks, and few get to have extended conversations with him. Anything we learn about him is via the narrator's own observations of his behavior or the extensive reports he gets from other people who've been in contact with Strickland. That's where this novel resembled the parts of The Razor's Edge (also about an enigmatic and unknowable character) that I found most unlikely and most artificial: the amount of recollections of extensive word-for-word conversations the narrator goes in for, as in reporting to us a meeting he had with someone who recalls meeting Strickland and who in turn recalls every detail of their encounters with him. Strickland's slight but interesting story seemed swamped by all the padding it was wrapped in.
If you're a fan of The Moon and Sixpence or of The Razor's Edge, you might think I'm very hard to please, and that I seem to be searching too hard for flaws while ignoring both novels' merits. Well, that's actually funny in the context of the The Moon and Sixpence title (I had to look up its meaning as, like Maugham's other titles, it escaped me completely).
The Wikipedia article about this book says:
"According to some sources, the title, the meaning of which is not explicitly revealed in the book, was taken from a review of Maugham's novel, 'Of Human Bondage', in which the novel's protagonist, Philip Carey, is described as being "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet." According to a 1956 letter from Maugham, "If you look on the ground in search of a sixpence, you don't look up, and so miss the moon." Maugham's title echoes the description of Gauguin by his contemporary biographer, Meier-Graefe (1908): "He [Gauguin] may be charged with having always wanted something else."
It's true that while reading both The Razor's Edge and The Moon and Sixpence, I wanted to be reading something else: Of Human Bondage!
It was the first book in my Maugham binge and it remains my favourite. I'm more like Philip Carey than I realised. Then again, maybe I’m more like grumpy Charles Strickland!
April 23, 2025
This book marked a sudden seismic shock in my fractured autistic life.
Reeling from burnout - but finally having swept up the badly burned scrambled eggs that were my brains from off the floor - I hastened with Dante Alighieri into Hades Proper.
It was one of my first Amazon orders after reaching the summit of full retirement.
Having paid off the mortgage and outstanding debts at retirement, I suddenly realized that once again - for the first time in twenty years - we had a decent disposable income.
But it was a tarnished freedom.
I say tarnished, because the hitherto hidden inner lives of folks in my extensive environs were now becoming readily apparent on our peripatetic rounds throughout it.
And with this book, Minos curled his black and smoky tail to show me which Circles of Hell I must now navigate to find a penultimate modicum of tranquility out of it all.
That Peace was long in coming.
But it was worth it.
But my first retirement self-assignment, the Moon and Sixpence - for Fate was calling the shots - flung me into the flames!
For this thinly-veiled Roman a-clef is a portrait of that (Beautiful? You’ll see!) painter Paul Gauguin.
And Maugham goes Wilde with his brushwork, creating a Picture of Dorian Gray outa Gauguin’s Real-Life tarnished Personality!
Read it if you dare.
You know, sometimes we see all the bright colours of our life fade into the drab street talk of low-level mediocrity...
And if you’re as sensitive as me -
It could TRANSMOGRIFY your worldview:
And begin your own Spiritual Journey toward the Freedom of Peace.
Reeling from burnout - but finally having swept up the badly burned scrambled eggs that were my brains from off the floor - I hastened with Dante Alighieri into Hades Proper.
It was one of my first Amazon orders after reaching the summit of full retirement.
Having paid off the mortgage and outstanding debts at retirement, I suddenly realized that once again - for the first time in twenty years - we had a decent disposable income.
But it was a tarnished freedom.
I say tarnished, because the hitherto hidden inner lives of folks in my extensive environs were now becoming readily apparent on our peripatetic rounds throughout it.
And with this book, Minos curled his black and smoky tail to show me which Circles of Hell I must now navigate to find a penultimate modicum of tranquility out of it all.
That Peace was long in coming.
But it was worth it.
But my first retirement self-assignment, the Moon and Sixpence - for Fate was calling the shots - flung me into the flames!
For this thinly-veiled Roman a-clef is a portrait of that (Beautiful? You’ll see!) painter Paul Gauguin.
And Maugham goes Wilde with his brushwork, creating a Picture of Dorian Gray outa Gauguin’s Real-Life tarnished Personality!
Read it if you dare.
You know, sometimes we see all the bright colours of our life fade into the drab street talk of low-level mediocrity...
And if you’re as sensitive as me -
It could TRANSMOGRIFY your worldview:
And begin your own Spiritual Journey toward the Freedom of Peace.
August 9, 2024
سامرست موام در کتاب ماه وشش پنی حکایتی پرشور و متفاوت از زندگی پل گوگن � نقاش فرانسوی بیان کرده ، البته او نامی از گوگن نبرده اما او را در کاراکتری به نام چارلز استریکلند مجسم کرده ، مردی که در لحظه ای خاص از زندگی به همه چیز پشت پا می زند و به دنبال غریزه ای می رود که گویا به تازگی در خود کشف کرده است .
استریکلند کتاب حال عجیبی دارد ، با این که در بیشتر کتاب تفاوتی با یک هیولا ندارد اما به شدت دوست داشتنی ایست ، گفت و گوهای پینگ پنگی او با راوی داستان زهری عجیب دارد ، مشخص نیست استریکلند چه زمانی و چگونه استعداد شگفت انگیز نقاشی را در وجود خود کشف کرده و چرا در میانه زندگی به این نتیجه رسیده که خود را از گرداب زندگی عادی نجات دهد و دل به کاری جدید دهد ؟
با این وجود چارلز کتاب ، از خانواده ، زن و بچه ، شغل و حرفه ، شهر و دیار و پول و ثروت گذشته و رهسپار سرنوشت جدید خود شده ، او گویی دوباره متولد شده ، در دیار جدید ، در اتاقی مخروبه و محروم از غذای کافی ، استریکلند نقاشی می کشد و از زندگی خود لذت می برد ، داستان او حدیث
دیگری ایست ، حال او حال تشنه دیر به آب رسیده است ، حال فقط شوق نوشیدن دارد
اما شوق و عطش استریکلند الزاما از او انسان بهتری نمی سازد ، زایش دگر بار او دردناک است و چارلز این رنج را در رفتار با دیگران و تحقیر آنان ، بی تفاوتی کامل ، فراموش کردن اخلاقیات و خودخواهی نشان می دهد ، استریکلند زندگی نقاشی دیگر را ویران می کند ، سبب مرگ و خودکشی همسر نقاش می گردد اما شاید در دل این ویرانی او به درک و فهم شهودی ازهنر و یا هر آن چه به دنبال آن است دست یافته باشد .
اما استریکلند تاب هیاهو جامعه را دیگر ندارد ، او به تاهیتی مستعمره فرانسه در دل اقیانوس آرام می رود ، همرنگ بومیان آن جزیره شده و در آن جا ازدواج می کند ، معروفترین و زیباترین کارهایش را در تاهیتی می کشد ، شاید او در این دوره گوهر خود را پیدا کرده باشد .
مرگ و پایان استریکلند همانند فاجعه ای تلخ بیان شده ، مردی که روزگاری به دنبال زیبایی و حقیقت بوده خود بر اثر بیماری مهلک جذام و با رنجی بی پایان و به کریه ترین و زشت ترین صورت ممکن جان داده است . بی تفاوتی مطلق استریکلند گویی پس از مرگ او هم ادامه داشته ، او وصیت کرده که دیوار نگاری های خانه محقر او را ، جایی که حماسی ترین و زیباترین نقاشی دوران هنریش را با چشمان نابینا کشیده ، به آتش بکشند ، استریکلند خود می داند چه کار کرده و به کجا رسیده است و همین برای او کافی ایست . او تنها پس از مرگ است که جاودان می شود .
سامرست موام شخصیت شگفت انگیز چارلز استریکلند را با استادی توصیف کرده ، منشی ستیزه جو و جامعه ستیز ، کم حرف و عمیق که مسیر خود را می رود ، در حقیقت همان اندازه که شخصیت لاری کتاب لبه تیغ پر حرف ، سطحی و شعاری ایست ، استریکلند اهل مبارزه ، عمل و میدان است . استریکلند هدف دارد و در پی شور نقاشی انزوا را به خود تحمیل می کند و به تاهیتی می رود ، او چندان اهل ولگردی نیست .
موام در کتاب ماه و شش پنی تلاش کرده است معنی زندگی را از دیدگاه افراد مختلف بیان کند ، راوی داستان در خلال گفتگوهای خود با استریکلند بارها با استدلالهایی منطقی کوشیده او را به زندگی عادی بازگرداند ، زنده بودن و نه الزاما زندگی کردن ، امری که با شور و حال افسانه ای به نام استریکلند منافات دارد .
در پایان راوی داستان خواننده را با یک پرسش اساسی مواجه می کند :
آیا دست زدن به دلخواهتری� کارها، زیستن در شیرینتری� حاله� و خاطرآسوده داشتن به معنی به گند کشیدن زندگی است و جراح برجستها� بودن و سالی دههزا� پوند درآمدداشتن و با زنی زیبا زندگی کردن به معنی کامروایی؟
استریکلند کتاب حال عجیبی دارد ، با این که در بیشتر کتاب تفاوتی با یک هیولا ندارد اما به شدت دوست داشتنی ایست ، گفت و گوهای پینگ پنگی او با راوی داستان زهری عجیب دارد ، مشخص نیست استریکلند چه زمانی و چگونه استعداد شگفت انگیز نقاشی را در وجود خود کشف کرده و چرا در میانه زندگی به این نتیجه رسیده که خود را از گرداب زندگی عادی نجات دهد و دل به کاری جدید دهد ؟
با این وجود چارلز کتاب ، از خانواده ، زن و بچه ، شغل و حرفه ، شهر و دیار و پول و ثروت گذشته و رهسپار سرنوشت جدید خود شده ، او گویی دوباره متولد شده ، در دیار جدید ، در اتاقی مخروبه و محروم از غذای کافی ، استریکلند نقاشی می کشد و از زندگی خود لذت می برد ، داستان او حدیث
دیگری ایست ، حال او حال تشنه دیر به آب رسیده است ، حال فقط شوق نوشیدن دارد
اما شوق و عطش استریکلند الزاما از او انسان بهتری نمی سازد ، زایش دگر بار او دردناک است و چارلز این رنج را در رفتار با دیگران و تحقیر آنان ، بی تفاوتی کامل ، فراموش کردن اخلاقیات و خودخواهی نشان می دهد ، استریکلند زندگی نقاشی دیگر را ویران می کند ، سبب مرگ و خودکشی همسر نقاش می گردد اما شاید در دل این ویرانی او به درک و فهم شهودی ازهنر و یا هر آن چه به دنبال آن است دست یافته باشد .
اما استریکلند تاب هیاهو جامعه را دیگر ندارد ، او به تاهیتی مستعمره فرانسه در دل اقیانوس آرام می رود ، همرنگ بومیان آن جزیره شده و در آن جا ازدواج می کند ، معروفترین و زیباترین کارهایش را در تاهیتی می کشد ، شاید او در این دوره گوهر خود را پیدا کرده باشد .
مرگ و پایان استریکلند همانند فاجعه ای تلخ بیان شده ، مردی که روزگاری به دنبال زیبایی و حقیقت بوده خود بر اثر بیماری مهلک جذام و با رنجی بی پایان و به کریه ترین و زشت ترین صورت ممکن جان داده است . بی تفاوتی مطلق استریکلند گویی پس از مرگ او هم ادامه داشته ، او وصیت کرده که دیوار نگاری های خانه محقر او را ، جایی که حماسی ترین و زیباترین نقاشی دوران هنریش را با چشمان نابینا کشیده ، به آتش بکشند ، استریکلند خود می داند چه کار کرده و به کجا رسیده است و همین برای او کافی ایست . او تنها پس از مرگ است که جاودان می شود .
سامرست موام شخصیت شگفت انگیز چارلز استریکلند را با استادی توصیف کرده ، منشی ستیزه جو و جامعه ستیز ، کم حرف و عمیق که مسیر خود را می رود ، در حقیقت همان اندازه که شخصیت لاری کتاب لبه تیغ پر حرف ، سطحی و شعاری ایست ، استریکلند اهل مبارزه ، عمل و میدان است . استریکلند هدف دارد و در پی شور نقاشی انزوا را به خود تحمیل می کند و به تاهیتی می رود ، او چندان اهل ولگردی نیست .
موام در کتاب ماه و شش پنی تلاش کرده است معنی زندگی را از دیدگاه افراد مختلف بیان کند ، راوی داستان در خلال گفتگوهای خود با استریکلند بارها با استدلالهایی منطقی کوشیده او را به زندگی عادی بازگرداند ، زنده بودن و نه الزاما زندگی کردن ، امری که با شور و حال افسانه ای به نام استریکلند منافات دارد .
در پایان راوی داستان خواننده را با یک پرسش اساسی مواجه می کند :
آیا دست زدن به دلخواهتری� کارها، زیستن در شیرینتری� حاله� و خاطرآسوده داشتن به معنی به گند کشیدن زندگی است و جراح برجستها� بودن و سالی دههزا� پوند درآمدداشتن و با زنی زیبا زندگی کردن به معنی کامروایی؟
July 30, 2019
I may not be able to tell a post-impressionist painter from a post hole digger, but if I see a painting by Paul Gauguin I can usually identify it correctly.
W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 novel about fictional artist Charles Strickland is loosely based on the life of the French painter, but let’s be honest, even though this is a novel and something of a caricature, it is the slings and arrows of Gauguin’s outrageous life that make this so damn entertaining.
That and Maugham’s gifted writing and his deft ability to describe human emotion and to add impressionistic detail to complex relationships. Maugham’s dialogue, always good, is here almost Dickensian in its narrative quality. There are several scenes that were hypnotic, drawing the reader into an exchange between two characters.
Maugham introduces us to Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who leaves his wife and children to move to Paris to learn to paint and to realize his dream, late in life, of being an artist. Told in first person observations about Strickland over the course of many years, we follow Strickland’s roguish adventures to Tahiti where his mastery is recognized.
But Maugham describes a complicatedly simple man who just wants to live in his work. Undesiring of money or fame, he simply wants to create and to express his artistic vision. His philosophy, appearing on the surface to be hedonistic and misanthropic, is more than an esoteric isolation from society but is an all-encompassing, passionate devotion to his work.
This is not a biography of Gauguin, but more of an examination of the spirit of his life, similar to how the Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations, using symbolism and abstraction to depict its subject.
For Maugham readers, art lovers and the rest of us: a good book.
W. Somerset Maugham’s 1919 novel about fictional artist Charles Strickland is loosely based on the life of the French painter, but let’s be honest, even though this is a novel and something of a caricature, it is the slings and arrows of Gauguin’s outrageous life that make this so damn entertaining.
That and Maugham’s gifted writing and his deft ability to describe human emotion and to add impressionistic detail to complex relationships. Maugham’s dialogue, always good, is here almost Dickensian in its narrative quality. There are several scenes that were hypnotic, drawing the reader into an exchange between two characters.
Maugham introduces us to Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who leaves his wife and children to move to Paris to learn to paint and to realize his dream, late in life, of being an artist. Told in first person observations about Strickland over the course of many years, we follow Strickland’s roguish adventures to Tahiti where his mastery is recognized.
But Maugham describes a complicatedly simple man who just wants to live in his work. Undesiring of money or fame, he simply wants to create and to express his artistic vision. His philosophy, appearing on the surface to be hedonistic and misanthropic, is more than an esoteric isolation from society but is an all-encompassing, passionate devotion to his work.
This is not a biography of Gauguin, but more of an examination of the spirit of his life, similar to how the Post-Impressionists extended Impressionism while rejecting its limitations, using symbolism and abstraction to depict its subject.
For Maugham readers, art lovers and the rest of us: a good book.
December 16, 2016
"Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand."- W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence
I'd only ever read one Maugham before this ("Of Human Bondage") but even with just that one read I could tell Maugham was a very special writer and destined to be one of my favourites. I picked up this thin book thinking it would be a quick, simple read, but I wasn't prepared for the depth and profundity in it. There is a lot going on in this little book, lots to think about.
Reading the back of the book you'll know that the main character in this book, Charles Strickland, was modelled after Paul Gauguin. There's no way I would have guessed that for most of the book, until Strickland/Gauguin moved to Tahiti.Even without knowing much about Gauguin's life, this book was interesting as it took us on a tour of his life, done by a narrator who operates as an unofficial biographer, taking us through Strickland/Gauguin's life from England to Paris, and finally Tahiti.
Strickland is an awful person and extremely misogynistic. It's been a while since I've read such an odious character in literature. I despised him:
"He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce and cruel."
It was surprising to witness how the passion in Strickland seemed to remain dormant for years but eventually caused him to act like a man possessed and completely re-evaluate his life as that passion needed an outlet:
"That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values, I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change -- change and the excitement of the unforeseen."
Gauguin comes up a lot in discussions on primitivism and orientalism, and reading up on his time in Tahiti really leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. The discussion on place and how we might be searching for a place where we are free to be really spoke to me, but Gauguin being himself meant taking child brides in the tropics, and that reminded me of the fact that Europeans had/have free reign in some parts of the world all due to their perceived power. But still, the idea that we can be perceived differently in different areas, and therefore be more suited to one area than another, is interesting:
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."
It's hard to summarize this book without bringing up the racist language. There were quite a few racial epithets which, I'm not sure spoke of Maugham's insensitivity to different races, or just that he was reflecting the language and sentiments of the time. Either way, they were shocking, and I could have done without them.
I'd only ever read one Maugham before this ("Of Human Bondage") but even with just that one read I could tell Maugham was a very special writer and destined to be one of my favourites. I picked up this thin book thinking it would be a quick, simple read, but I wasn't prepared for the depth and profundity in it. There is a lot going on in this little book, lots to think about.
Reading the back of the book you'll know that the main character in this book, Charles Strickland, was modelled after Paul Gauguin. There's no way I would have guessed that for most of the book, until Strickland/Gauguin moved to Tahiti.Even without knowing much about Gauguin's life, this book was interesting as it took us on a tour of his life, done by a narrator who operates as an unofficial biographer, taking us through Strickland/Gauguin's life from England to Paris, and finally Tahiti.
Strickland is an awful person and extremely misogynistic. It's been a while since I've read such an odious character in literature. I despised him:
"He was a man without any conception of gratitude. He had no compassion. The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming the tiger because he is fierce and cruel."
It was surprising to witness how the passion in Strickland seemed to remain dormant for years but eventually caused him to act like a man possessed and completely re-evaluate his life as that passion needed an outlet:
"That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days, that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values, I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously. I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if I could only have change -- change and the excitement of the unforeseen."
Gauguin comes up a lot in discussions on primitivism and orientalism, and reading up on his time in Tahiti really leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. The discussion on place and how we might be searching for a place where we are free to be really spoke to me, but Gauguin being himself meant taking child brides in the tropics, and that reminded me of the fact that Europeans had/have free reign in some parts of the world all due to their perceived power. But still, the idea that we can be perceived differently in different areas, and therefore be more suited to one area than another, is interesting:
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest."
It's hard to summarize this book without bringing up the racist language. There were quite a few racial epithets which, I'm not sure spoke of Maugham's insensitivity to different races, or just that he was reflecting the language and sentiments of the time. Either way, they were shocking, and I could have done without them.
December 3, 2022
W. Somerset Maugham is one of those prolific, craggy-faced British writers who seem rather irrelevant and fusty today. No one reads or discusses him anymore, and I’m sure he’s not taught in schools, although he enjoyed decades of success and wrote many novels, plays, collections of short stories and � a term that perfectly captures his particular era � “belles-lettres.�
(I think his problem was he was writing around the time modernist writing � Joyce, Faulkner � broke through. And his style is definitely not as “innovative,� although in some ways it has aged better.)
That said, I’m glad I picked up this engrossing, compact and well-written novel. It’s “inspired� by the life of post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin, whose Tahitian works I of course have seen in galleries and reproductions.
Maugham sets up the novel as if it consists of memories from an unnamed semi-autobiographical figure who’s also a young novelist and playwright. (I think it’s a device he also used in The Razor’s Edge, at least according to the Oscar-winning film version I’ve seen.)
Charles Strickland is a perfectly ordinary, comfortable, middle-class 40-something London stockbroker who one day leaves his wife and children to go to Paris to become a painter. His wife, believing he’s run off with another woman, asks the narrator to locate him in Paris, which he does. But instead of finding a man caught up in a torrid mid-life-crisis affair, he discovers a loathsome, hateful, irritable man living in a garret and learning how to paint. Strickland isn’t the most articulate man, but he believes painting is his calling. He doesn’t care about his wife, or his reputation, or even money, although he needs it to live.
The narrator also meets another artist, the corpulent Dutch immigrant Dirk Stroeve, who is commercially successful but a bit of a fool. A lot of poor Parisian artists sponge off him, including Strickland. Stroeve is one of the few people, however, to recognize Strickland’s genius. And he goes out of his way to help him, including opening up his apartment to the man when he falls ill; he and his wife, Blanche, help restore him to health. Not that Strickland is in any way grateful.
I appreciated this novel not as a biographical portrait of Gauguin but rather as a ruthless, unromanticized look at the idea of the artist. Should it matter if an artist is brilliant but a complete and utter asshole? Strickland’s calling almost seems religious, and I liked thinking about this theme as well. Maugham wasn’t as experimental as his modern contemporaries, but I found his use of the narrator figure fascinating. And his writing about sex was telling, especially knowing that Maugham was a closeted gay man, which added depth and richness to his depiction of an outsider figure.
Finally, the idea of someone leaving their comfortable job to pursue something more meaningful felt very timely during this moment, which has been dubbed “The Great Resignation.�
I was all set to give the book 5 stars� until I got to the final section, which felt anti-climactic. And warning: there are some racial and cultural epithets that will seem offensive to contemporary eyes and ears. Plus it’s important to keep in mind that, like Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings themselves, this book � especially the final part � is deeply influenced by colonialism.
One interesting note: the title never comes up in the book. Apparently it comes from a review of Maugham’s earlier book, Of Human Bondage. It’s about being “so busy yearning for the moon that [you] never see the sixpence at [your] feet.� That sentiment in itself is a thoughtful statement about art, idealism, ordinary life and commerce.
This is a remarkable novel. I’m definitely going to read more Maugham.
May 13, 2024
How much do we forgive a great, talented artist who is also a despicable human being? Will his admirers look the other way, thinking since he is no longer around and no more harm can be done by him, it is all right now to forgive and forget, besides he didn't do anything to their family but to other people...Shakespeare said, "The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones"... Englishman Charles Strickland a thinly disguised Paul Gauguin, is one of those men, selfish, cruel, disloyal an unfeeling cad you would loathe if you had ever met, nothing matters but his art, everyone else he can and does step on to reach his higher calling, being a superb painter yet nobody believes in his abilities, they see only a primitive man with the same tendencies on canvas, besides there are hundreds of better painters in Paris. Strickland had abandoned his wife and two children in London, leaving his family without any means of support if they starved he wouldn't care, nothing is really important but his destiny, set at the turn of the 20th century, Somerset Maugham does not try to hide the fact that he is the person narrating this novel. Having briefly met Strickland in London when the future legend was just another boring, ordinary, nonentity a monosyllabic stockbroker, who could guess of his later fame. Maugham is more impressed by the charming Mrs.Strickland though not pretty, she does radiate what the perfect Englishwoman should be in that era. Later the shocked lady embraces the rumors that her husband had fled with a young shopgirl to France , she could not face the truth which would be humiliating....Mr. Strickland had secretly gone because he needed to paint. In Paris living in squalor in an one room, filthy, pungent, airless apartment he ekes out a living by guiding curious Englishmen, to the sordid sections of the city that no respectable person would go, the kind of areas policemen hate foreigners to see. This or any other jobs which puts money in his hands, more so for buying things to continue painting than to eat or pay the rent, he has lost much weight to rather an unhealthy level . None buys his paintings however he doesn't care. Finally meeting a bad Dutch painter the humane Dirt Stroeve, who actually sells his mediocre paintings, short, plumb, gregarious he never takes it personally when fellow artists disparage his product. Still his English wife Blanche does, she has a checkered past and this type of woman can't forgive the man that saved her, Dirt. An ailing Strickland becomes dangerously ill, he is nursed by the generous Dutchman, the only person who perceives his genius in is own home, the reluctant wife helps, the life of this scoundrel will not end here, he pays back his huge debt by taking away his Blanche ... Maugham is now living in Paris, and becomes friends with the always kindly Dirt, writing a play there, is more upset than her husband, he will forgive if she returns... but tragedy ensues. Strickland somehow gets on a ship and after much travels arrives in the beautiful, tropical, south seas island of Tahiti...Years pass, nothing is heard about this fugitive from civilization until during WWI, Somerset Maugham at his government's request, goes to the same island that Strickland was on, there the paintings he had been indifferent to shocks his senses, the sparkling, plethora of colors, the blues, greens, yellows, reds, violets, and whites, bright, brilliant, a glorious stream of unending shades it teases the mind and makes him dizzy, this, never captured before so well on canvas...now he has seen the real Strickland.
April 17, 2018
“Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.�
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.�
In addition to plenty of witty bon mots, Maugham dropped several lengthy quotes on the nature of beauty and how relative it is, especially through the eyes of the artist. Maugham’s protagonist, Charles Strickland grows indifferent to pretty much everything in his life: wife, children, luxury, polite society and focuses his passions like a laser on the creation of a vision that’s perceptible to pretty much only him. Few others see it, but Strickland doesn’t care; he’s too focused on the creative process to pay anyone any mind. He’s kind of a brute, who can only articulate his inner perception on the canvas.
Strickland’s a complete ass, losing pretty much all sense of propriety, not caring whether he’s mortally offended anyone who’s willing to lend him a hand, biting that hand with a furious chomp � leaving broken lives in his wake. The further he runs from society (to Tahiti � “a magical place�) and it’s distractions, the closer he comes to being able to extract his conception of “pure� beauty from the dark recesses of his mind.
I’ve known people like Strickland � talented, brilliant, corrosive � people who have that weird light surrounding themselves. Friends and family that have been taken advantage of, cheated, hurt, yet still can’t shake being in the presence of this person; it’s like having one foot in a tornado. The narrator, a writer, who’s been offended by Strickland on numerous occasions still comes around for the proverbial bitch slap. Strickland doesn’t achieve success and recognition until after he’s dead, his family willing to whitewash his transgressions, something that probably wouldn’t surprise or bother him.
The only other Maugham I’ve ever read is , that one was a passable read with the same format (first person narrative observer, main character in search of some sort of truth), but this book has a kinetic energy and spirit. You might loathe Strickland and want to throat punch him, but you still have a deep unspoken understanding of his motivations, that although you don’t fully condone, you still respect his vision.
Buddy Read with the artsy, occult branch of the Pantsless Legion of Indecency: Ginger, Kristin, and Stepheny.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.�
In addition to plenty of witty bon mots, Maugham dropped several lengthy quotes on the nature of beauty and how relative it is, especially through the eyes of the artist. Maugham’s protagonist, Charles Strickland grows indifferent to pretty much everything in his life: wife, children, luxury, polite society and focuses his passions like a laser on the creation of a vision that’s perceptible to pretty much only him. Few others see it, but Strickland doesn’t care; he’s too focused on the creative process to pay anyone any mind. He’s kind of a brute, who can only articulate his inner perception on the canvas.
Strickland’s a complete ass, losing pretty much all sense of propriety, not caring whether he’s mortally offended anyone who’s willing to lend him a hand, biting that hand with a furious chomp � leaving broken lives in his wake. The further he runs from society (to Tahiti � “a magical place�) and it’s distractions, the closer he comes to being able to extract his conception of “pure� beauty from the dark recesses of his mind.
I’ve known people like Strickland � talented, brilliant, corrosive � people who have that weird light surrounding themselves. Friends and family that have been taken advantage of, cheated, hurt, yet still can’t shake being in the presence of this person; it’s like having one foot in a tornado. The narrator, a writer, who’s been offended by Strickland on numerous occasions still comes around for the proverbial bitch slap. Strickland doesn’t achieve success and recognition until after he’s dead, his family willing to whitewash his transgressions, something that probably wouldn’t surprise or bother him.
The only other Maugham I’ve ever read is , that one was a passable read with the same format (first person narrative observer, main character in search of some sort of truth), but this book has a kinetic energy and spirit. You might loathe Strickland and want to throat punch him, but you still have a deep unspoken understanding of his motivations, that although you don’t fully condone, you still respect his vision.
Buddy Read with the artsy, occult branch of the Pantsless Legion of Indecency: Ginger, Kristin, and Stepheny.
August 2, 2024
Этот роман перекликается с "Творчеством" Золя. Стрикленд - вымышленный герой, но какие-то фрагменты совпадают с биографией Поля Гогена (биржевой маклер, Таити), кроме, конечно, самого очевидного, Гоген не был англичанином.
Стрикленда поначалу одна из героинь романа характеризует его, как биржевого маклера: "Он человек смирный. И нисколько не интересуется литературой и искусством." Миссис Стрикленд называет его в ту пору "типичнейшим обывателем". А сам рассказчик после знакомства с ним характеризует его: "Это был просто добродушный, скучный, честный, заурядный малый. Некоторые его качества, может быть, и заслуживали похвалы, но стремиться к общению с ним было невозможно. Он был равен нулю. Пусть он добропорядочный член общества, хороший муж и отец, честный маклер, но терять на него время, право же, не стоило!"
Бросив в середине жизни жену и детей, он уезжает в Париж, чтобы стать художником. Он подрабатывал гидом для знакомства англичан с ночной жизнью Парижа, переводил рекламы патентованных лекарств, работал маляром во время забастовки. Деньги на краски у холст у него всегда находились, а большего ему и не надо было. "Он стремился к чему-то, к чему именно, я не знал, да навряд ли знал и он сам, и я опять еще яснее почувствовал, что передо мною одержимый. Право же, он производил впечатление человека не совсем нормального. Мне даже почудилось, что он не хочет показать мне свои картины, потому что они ему самому не интересны. Он жил в мечте, и реальность для него цены не имела. Должно быть, работая во всю свою могучую силу, он забывал обо всем на свете, кроме стремления воссоздать то, что стояло перед его внутренним взором, а затем, покончив даже не с картиной (мне почему-то казалось, что он редко завершал работу), но со сжигавшей его страстью, утрачивал к ней всякий интерес. Никогда не был он удовлетворен тем, что сделал; вышедшее из-под его кисти всегда казалось ему бледным и незначительным в сравнении с тем, что денно и нощно виделось его духовному взору."
Его не интересовала слава и деньги, его одержимостью был момент творчества. "Я не думаю о прошлом. Значение имеет только вечное сегодня." - говорит Стрикленд. Его картины не понимали, и только Дирк Струве, бездарный художник, но тонкий ценитель искусства, с его безупречным вкусом сразу увидел в нем великого художника. Стрикленд повел по отношению к нему по-скотски, увел у него жену Бланш, она интересовала его исключительно, как модель, а закончив картину, он ее бросил. Бланш отравилась щавелевой кислотой и умерла мучительной смертью, но это нисколько не тронуло, не взволновало Стрикленда. Как человек, он был ужасен, жесток, циничен и эгоистически сконцентрирован лишь на себе, вернее своей работе. При этом, он ценил не сами свои работы (мог расплатиться ими за пустячный долг), а момент творчества, процесс, а не результат.
И все же Моэма интересовал не только художник, и его мотивы, его интересовало обывательское окружение - жена- покровительница искусств, ее круг общения, люди, окружавшие Стрикленда на Таити или в Париже. Роман потому не закончился на его смерти и название также даёт контраст. Моэма интересует меркантильность, склонность все оценивать деньгами, самомнение людей, которые и формируют публику. Его интересует, как люди воспринимали его картины, и в романе даётся несколько описаний картин разными людьми.
Но самое ценное в этой книге не перипетии биографии наполовину выдуманного художника, хоть у героя и был великий прототип, а мысли автора о творчестве, искусстве, пути художника.
О своей книге и о писательстве Моэм рассуждает: "Много ли шансов у отдельной книги пробить себе дорогу в этой сутолоке? А если ей даже сужден успех, то ведь ненадолго. Один Бог знает, какое страдание перенес автор, какой горький опыт остался у него за плечами, какие сердечные боли терзали его, и все лишь для того, чтобы его книга часок-другой поразвлекала случайного читателя или помогла ему разогнать дорожную скуку. А ведь, если судить по рецензиям, многие из этих книг превосходно написаны, авторами вложено в них немало мыслей, а некоторые � плод неустанного труда целой жизни. Из всего этого я делаю вывод, что удовлетворения писатель должен искать только в самой работе и в освобождении от груза своих мыслей, оставаясь равнодушным ко всему привходящему � к хуле и хвале, к успеху и провалу."
О писательнице Розе Уотерфорд, соединявшей в себе "мужской ум" и "женское своенравие", он пишет: "Жизнь представлялась ей оказией для писания романов, а люди � необходимым сырьем." В какой-то мере и сам Моэм использовал Гогена в качестве сырья для своего Стрикленда.
"Красота � это то удивительное и недоступное, что художник в тяжких душевных муках творит из хаоса мироздания. И когда она уже создана, не всякому дано ее узнать. Чтобы постичь красоту, надо вжиться в дерзание художника. Красота � мелодия, которую он поет нам, и для того, чтобы она отозвалась в нашем сердце, нужны знание, восприимчивость и фантазия." - говорит Дирк Струве при обсуждении картин Стрикленда.
"... люди говорят о красоте беззаботно, они употребляют это слово так небрежно, что оно теряет свою силу и предмет, который оно должно осмыслить, деля свое имя с тысячью пошлых понятий, оказывается лишенным своего величия. Словом «прекрасное» люди обозначают платье, собаку, проповедь, а очутившись лицом к лицу с прекрасным, не умеют его распознать. Они стараются фальшивым пафосом прикрыть свои ничтожные мысли, и это притупляет их восприимчивость. Подобно шарлатану, фальсифицирующему тот подъем духа, который он некогда чувствовал в себе, они злоупотребляют своими душевными силами и утрачивают их. Но Струве, этот вечный шут с искренней и честной душой, также искренне и честно любил и понимал искусство. Для него искусство значило то же, что значит Бог для верующего, и, когда он видел его, ему делалось страшно."
Стрикленда поначалу одна из героинь романа характеризует его, как биржевого маклера: "Он человек смирный. И нисколько не интересуется литературой и искусством." Миссис Стрикленд называет его в ту пору "типичнейшим обывателем". А сам рассказчик после знакомства с ним характеризует его: "Это был просто добродушный, скучный, честный, заурядный малый. Некоторые его качества, может быть, и заслуживали похвалы, но стремиться к общению с ним было невозможно. Он был равен нулю. Пусть он добропорядочный член общества, хороший муж и отец, честный маклер, но терять на него время, право же, не стоило!"
Бросив в середине жизни жену и детей, он уезжает в Париж, чтобы стать художником. Он подрабатывал гидом для знакомства англичан с ночной жизнью Парижа, переводил рекламы патентованных лекарств, работал маляром во время забастовки. Деньги на краски у холст у него всегда находились, а большего ему и не надо было. "Он стремился к чему-то, к чему именно, я не знал, да навряд ли знал и он сам, и я опять еще яснее почувствовал, что передо мною одержимый. Право же, он производил впечатление человека не совсем нормального. Мне даже почудилось, что он не хочет показать мне свои картины, потому что они ему самому не интересны. Он жил в мечте, и реальность для него цены не имела. Должно быть, работая во всю свою могучую силу, он забывал обо всем на свете, кроме стремления воссоздать то, что стояло перед его внутренним взором, а затем, покончив даже не с картиной (мне почему-то казалось, что он редко завершал работу), но со сжигавшей его страстью, утрачивал к ней всякий интерес. Никогда не был он удовлетворен тем, что сделал; вышедшее из-под его кисти всегда казалось ему бледным и незначительным в сравнении с тем, что денно и нощно виделось его духовному взору."
Его не интересовала слава и деньги, его одержимостью был момент творчества. "Я не думаю о прошлом. Значение имеет только вечное сегодня." - говорит Стрикленд. Его картины не понимали, и только Дирк Струве, бездарный художник, но тонкий ценитель искусства, с его безупречным вкусом сразу увидел в нем великого художника. Стрикленд повел по отношению к нему по-скотски, увел у него жену Бланш, она интересовала его исключительно, как модель, а закончив картину, он ее бросил. Бланш отравилась щавелевой кислотой и умерла мучительной смертью, но это нисколько не тронуло, не взволновало Стрикленда. Как человек, он был ужасен, жесток, циничен и эгоистически сконцентрирован лишь на себе, вернее своей работе. При этом, он ценил не сами свои работы (мог расплатиться ими за пустячный долг), а момент творчества, процесс, а не результат.
И все же Моэма интересовал не только художник, и его мотивы, его интересовало обывательское окружение - жена- покровительница искусств, ее круг общения, люди, окружавшие Стрикленда на Таити или в Париже. Роман потому не закончился на его смерти и название также даёт контраст. Моэма интересует меркантильность, склонность все оценивать деньгами, самомнение людей, которые и формируют публику. Его интересует, как люди воспринимали его картины, и в романе даётся несколько описаний картин разными людьми.
Но самое ценное в этой книге не перипетии биографии наполовину выдуманного художника, хоть у героя и был великий прототип, а мысли автора о творчестве, искусстве, пути художника.
О своей книге и о писательстве Моэм рассуждает: "Много ли шансов у отдельной книги пробить себе дорогу в этой сутолоке? А если ей даже сужден успех, то ведь ненадолго. Один Бог знает, какое страдание перенес автор, какой горький опыт остался у него за плечами, какие сердечные боли терзали его, и все лишь для того, чтобы его книга часок-другой поразвлекала случайного читателя или помогла ему разогнать дорожную скуку. А ведь, если судить по рецензиям, многие из этих книг превосходно написаны, авторами вложено в них немало мыслей, а некоторые � плод неустанного труда целой жизни. Из всего этого я делаю вывод, что удовлетворения писатель должен искать только в самой работе и в освобождении от груза своих мыслей, оставаясь равнодушным ко всему привходящему � к хуле и хвале, к успеху и провалу."
О писательнице Розе Уотерфорд, соединявшей в себе "мужской ум" и "женское своенравие", он пишет: "Жизнь представлялась ей оказией для писания романов, а люди � необходимым сырьем." В какой-то мере и сам Моэм использовал Гогена в качестве сырья для своего Стрикленда.
"Красота � это то удивительное и недоступное, что художник в тяжких душевных муках творит из хаоса мироздания. И когда она уже создана, не всякому дано ее узнать. Чтобы постичь красоту, надо вжиться в дерзание художника. Красота � мелодия, которую он поет нам, и для того, чтобы она отозвалась в нашем сердце, нужны знание, восприимчивость и фантазия." - говорит Дирк Струве при обсуждении картин Стрикленда.
"... люди говорят о красоте беззаботно, они употребляют это слово так небрежно, что оно теряет свою силу и предмет, который оно должно осмыслить, деля свое имя с тысячью пошлых понятий, оказывается лишенным своего величия. Словом «прекрасное» люди обозначают платье, собаку, проповедь, а очутившись лицом к лицу с прекрасным, не умеют его распознать. Они стараются фальшивым пафосом прикрыть свои ничтожные мысли, и это притупляет их восприимчивость. Подобно шарлатану, фальсифицирующему тот подъем духа, который он некогда чувствовал в себе, они злоупотребляют своими душевными силами и утрачивают их. Но Струве, этот вечный шут с искренней и честной душой, также искренне и честно любил и понимал искусство. Для него искусство значило то же, что значит Бог для верующего, и, когда он видел его, ему делалось страшно."
March 15, 2022
کتاب روایت زندگی خانوادها� به نام استریکلند است. شوهر، همسرش را تنها میگذار� و به پاریس میگریز� بعد از 17 سال زندگی مشترک!
جوانی 23 ساله به دنبال این مرد میرو� تا علت را جویا شود.
چارلز استریکلند ادعا میکن� که حالا نیاز به تغییری در زندگیا� دارد و نباید بعد از 17 سال همچنان جور همسرش را بکشد. او مدعی است که هیچ حسی نسبت به فرزندانش هم ندارد و حتی اینکه مردم دربارها� چه فکر میکنن� برایش مهم نیست.
تنها جواب او این است: میخواه� نقاشی کنم!
در واقع داستان چارلز استریکلند برگرفته از زندگی پل گوگن است.
این دومین کتاب از موام است که میخوان� و بیشتر حس میکن� مضمون کتابهای� سفر درونی است. کسانیک� به دنبال چرایی زندگی میرون�.
جوانی 23 ساله به دنبال این مرد میرو� تا علت را جویا شود.
چارلز استریکلند ادعا میکن� که حالا نیاز به تغییری در زندگیا� دارد و نباید بعد از 17 سال همچنان جور همسرش را بکشد. او مدعی است که هیچ حسی نسبت به فرزندانش هم ندارد و حتی اینکه مردم دربارها� چه فکر میکنن� برایش مهم نیست.
تنها جواب او این است: میخواه� نقاشی کنم!
در واقع داستان چارلز استریکلند برگرفته از زندگی پل گوگن است.
این دومین کتاب از موام است که میخوان� و بیشتر حس میکن� مضمون کتابهای� سفر درونی است. کسانیک� به دنبال چرایی زندگی میرون�.
January 27, 2025
Страхотно увлекателен роман за живота на Пол Гоген.
Силно препоръчвам!
Силно препоръчвам!
May 3, 2023
“Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.�
December 22, 2023
This book is a compelling exploration of the dichotomy between art and the artist. While I hated Charles Strickland's character due to his selfish, brutish, abrasive, misogynistic, and sexist traits, the novel's progression masterfully challenges preconceived notions. It serves as a profound portrait of genius, prompting readers to grapple with the intricate relationship between an artist's personal flaws and their artistic brilliance. What elevates this novel beyond a mere character study is its ability to cast a critical eye on the broader human experience. Each event and character serves as a lens through which we examine the intricacies of human emotions, and morality.
It is a riveting exploration of art, passion, and the enigmatic nature of genius. As the story progresses, the central question emerges: Can we separate art from the flaws of its artist? This overarching theme threads its way through the narrative, forcing readers to confront the uncomfortable reality that great art often emerges from tumultuous souls. This book is, at its core, a powerful exploration of the inherent tension between the artist’s pursuit of truth and the moral compromises that journey may entail.
Maugham’s prose, eloquent and straightforward, becomes a vehicle for introspection, as he invites readers to confront the uncomfortable truths embodied by Strickland.
When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set. It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger.
Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realize that this love will cease; it give what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is not he loves it better than reality. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known.
It is a riveting exploration of art, passion, and the enigmatic nature of genius. As the story progresses, the central question emerges: Can we separate art from the flaws of its artist? This overarching theme threads its way through the narrative, forcing readers to confront the uncomfortable reality that great art often emerges from tumultuous souls. This book is, at its core, a powerful exploration of the inherent tension between the artist’s pursuit of truth and the moral compromises that journey may entail.
Maugham’s prose, eloquent and straightforward, becomes a vehicle for introspection, as he invites readers to confront the uncomfortable truths embodied by Strickland.
When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the utmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set. It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger.
Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realize that this love will cease; it give what he knows is illusion, and, knowing it is not he loves it better than reality. It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that infirmity of any man I have known.
November 10, 2023
This narrative by the author is a brief and unremarkable account of the life of French artist, Paul Gauguin.
The writing is superb as if Maugham himself was an artist painting a beautiful picture of his own with his words. He certainly is expressive and understands the human condition.
The writing is superb as if Maugham himself was an artist painting a beautiful picture of his own with his words. He certainly is expressive and understands the human condition.
November 20, 2017
The Moon and Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham first published in 1919. It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist. The story is in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.
عنوانها: ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)؛ ماه و شش پنی؛ قلب زن؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: بیست و چهارم ماه دسامبر سال 1970 میلادی و در ماه فوریه سال 1991 میلادی
عنوان: ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم: پرویز داریوش؛ تهران، انتشارات پیروز، 1333؛ در 263 ص؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، امیرکبیر، 1344؛ در 263 ص؛ چاپ دیگر: اصفهان، زمان نو، 1362؛ در 334 ص؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، اساطیر، 1370؛ در 355 ص؛ چاپ دوم 1376؛ چاپ سوم 1388؛ شابک: 9789645960108؛
عنوان: ماه و شش پنی؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم: الهه مرعشی؛ تهران، فرهنگ جاوی، 1393؛ در 284 ص؛ شابک: 9786006182216؛
عنوان: قلب زن؛ نویسنده: ویلیام سامرست موآم؛ مترجم: حسین بدلزاده؛ رشت، انتشارات روزنامه سایبان، 1336، در 220 ص؛
ماه و شش پشیز (پنی) را سامرست موام براساس زندگی پل گوگن نقاش نگاشته و نخستین بار با ترجمه زنده یاد پرویز داریوش به زیور نشر آراسته شده بسیار خواندنی ست. ا. شربیانی
The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham first published in 1919. It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist. The story is in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.
عنوانها: ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)؛ ماه و شش پنی؛ قلب زن؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: بیست و چهارم ماه دسامبر سال 1970 میلادی و در ماه فوریه سال 1991 میلادی
عنوان: ماه و شش پشیز (پنی)؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم: پرویز داریوش؛ تهران، انتشارات پیروز، 1333؛ در 263 ص؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، امیرکبیر، 1344؛ در 263 ص؛ چاپ دیگر: اصفهان، زمان نو، 1362؛ در 334 ص؛ چاپ دیگر: تهران، اساطیر، 1370؛ در 355 ص؛ چاپ دوم 1376؛ چاپ سوم 1388؛ شابک: 9789645960108؛
عنوان: ماه و شش پنی؛ نویسنده: سامرست موام؛ مترجم: الهه مرعشی؛ تهران، فرهنگ جاوی، 1393؛ در 284 ص؛ شابک: 9786006182216؛
عنوان: قلب زن؛ نویسنده: ویلیام سامرست موآم؛ مترجم: حسین بدلزاده؛ رشت، انتشارات روزنامه سایبان، 1336، در 220 ص؛
ماه و شش پشیز (پنی) را سامرست موام براساس زندگی پل گوگن نقاش نگاشته و نخستین بار با ترجمه زنده یاد پرویز داریوش به زیور نشر آراسته شده بسیار خواندنی ست. ا. شربیانی
March 25, 2016
It must be said up front that I am a huge fan of Maugham. I like his writing style, which always makes me feel as if I am sitting with a friend and he is telling me about someone he actually knows. With this conversational tone, Maugham leads you into the depths of the human soul and sometimes leaves you to find your own way out.
Based very loosely on the life of Paul Gauguin, this novel is a study in how much a true artist will do for the sake of his art: not only how much he will endure, but how much he will inflict upon others. You cannot like Maugham's character, Strickland, nor, I think, can you truly understand him. Even our narrator never manages to understand the man, and he has been observing him for a lifetime. I can't help wondering how much Maugham felt that he was, himself, a man who had to follow his art at any cost. Of course, for Strickland and anyone who happens to come too close to him, the costs are extreme.
One of the important questions Maugham raises in this novel is what makes up success and who gets to decide if you are successful. Is it truly about how much you acquire outwardly or how much you acquire inwardly?
"I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual."
I think Maugham thought that we too often attach the wrong meaning to life, that we strive too often for what others tell us should be our want instead of the things that our soul cries out for in the night. None of us wishes to be Strickland. Hell, we don't even want to know Strickland, but each of us is faced with his same choice--cut our own path or follow the dictates of society--and too often we make the wrong decision.
Based very loosely on the life of Paul Gauguin, this novel is a study in how much a true artist will do for the sake of his art: not only how much he will endure, but how much he will inflict upon others. You cannot like Maugham's character, Strickland, nor, I think, can you truly understand him. Even our narrator never manages to understand the man, and he has been observing him for a lifetime. I can't help wondering how much Maugham felt that he was, himself, a man who had to follow his art at any cost. Of course, for Strickland and anyone who happens to come too close to him, the costs are extreme.
One of the important questions Maugham raises in this novel is what makes up success and who gets to decide if you are successful. Is it truly about how much you acquire outwardly or how much you acquire inwardly?
"I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is it success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual."
I think Maugham thought that we too often attach the wrong meaning to life, that we strive too often for what others tell us should be our want instead of the things that our soul cries out for in the night. None of us wishes to be Strickland. Hell, we don't even want to know Strickland, but each of us is faced with his same choice--cut our own path or follow the dictates of society--and too often we make the wrong decision.
July 6, 2015
We want the world. We want it all. We want the moon. And still it's not enough.
It's my long term goal to read everything Maguham wrote, a goal that I doubt will be very difficult to reach. He writes with such poignant observation and wit and in The Moon and Sixpence he captures the all encompassing, obsessive and brutal nature that perhaps it takes to be an artist.
Told by an unnamed narrator, we are introduced to Charles Strickland, a beastly yet seemingly ordinary man who one day leaves his wife, his children, his job and his entire life to paint. The drive to create is all there is in him, and leaving a trail of destruction he goes to Paris (don't they all?) and then to Tahiti. He is displaced, disassociated and curiously unappealing. It is a wonderful and extreme portrait of the innate need some have to follow their calling, or better still, the lack of choice they have to do so.
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace,and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that send men far and wide in search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. (p.135)
It's my long term goal to read everything Maguham wrote, a goal that I doubt will be very difficult to reach. He writes with such poignant observation and wit and in The Moon and Sixpence he captures the all encompassing, obsessive and brutal nature that perhaps it takes to be an artist.
Told by an unnamed narrator, we are introduced to Charles Strickland, a beastly yet seemingly ordinary man who one day leaves his wife, his children, his job and his entire life to paint. The drive to create is all there is in him, and leaving a trail of destruction he goes to Paris (don't they all?) and then to Tahiti. He is displaced, disassociated and curiously unappealing. It is a wonderful and extreme portrait of the innate need some have to follow their calling, or better still, the lack of choice they have to do so.
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace,and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that send men far and wide in search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. (p.135)
June 24, 2017
تصور أنك استيقظت اليوم ورأسك تعتريه هذه الأفكار: أنا لا أريد هذه الحياة، لم أعد أطيق هذه الوظيفة، ولا هؤلاء البشر...إنني أكره هذه البلد.... تتقلب ذات اليمين وذات الشمال وهناك هاجس واحد يمسك بتﻻبي� همّتك: أن تستقيل من وظيفتك، تهجر عائلتك، وتبدأ حياة جديدة، في بلد غريبة مهما انتحب من يحبونك، ومهما كان الثمن الذي ستدفعه من فقر وجوع وتشرد.
هذه الرواية مستوحاة من حياة الفنان بول جوجن -وإن كان باسم مختلف ومع الكثير من التصرف- الذي عاش حياة مثيرة للجدل، ولم يعرف العالم أعماله بشكل جيد إلا بعد أن قضى نحبه.
هذا هو لقائي الثاني مع سومرست موم، والإنطباع هو ذاته. موم كاتب كﻻسيك� ممتع، يقدم شخصيات فريدة على فترة زمنية ممتدة، دون الإسراف في المساحة الورقية. مثل روايته الشهيرة: "عن عبودية الإنسان"، وجدت موم مولعاً بالتوغل في النفس البشرية بمبضع دوستويفكسي، لا يتوانى عن كشف ضعفها، وسوادها وكل ما يربض هناك في الجانب المظلم من القمر. ستلتقي بعينات نادرة- ولكنها واقعية- من البشر. فهناك من يهجر أولاده ليمارس هوايته الفنية في أقاصي الارض، هناك من يترك منصباً حكومياً عالياً ليعيش على هامش الحياة في أحد الموانئ الغريبة. هناك من يحب رغم الخيانة، هناك من يحقد على من مد له يد العون...الخ. أي ستجد من تراهم حولك كل يوم إذا تجردوا من قيود المبادئ والمجتمع وأصبح اللعب "على المكشوف".
بالرغم من أن النص يروي جانباً من سيرة فنان ينتمي إلى مدرسة مابعد الإنطباعية -اتحداك إن كنت تعرف ماهية هذه المدرسة- إلا أن النص بعيد كل البعد عن الوصف الفني والغوص في فنيات وتقنيات الرسم. بل إن الرواي قد صرح بأنه لا يتمتع بخلفية كبيرة عن الفنون وكأنه يطمئن القارئ بأنه لن يصدّع رأسه بكل تلك التفاصيل المرهقة. يطيب لي أن أشيد بأسلوب الحكي الوراد على لسان رواة عدّة، ممن التقوا أو عايشوا الفنان بطل الرواية. كما وجدت الانتقال في الأماكن، من لندن إلى باريس ثم هاييتي، سلساً وممتعاً ويضيف إلى عنصر التشويق في الرواية.
تستحق القراءة بواقع ثلاثة نجوم ونصف
هذه الرواية مستوحاة من حياة الفنان بول جوجن -وإن كان باسم مختلف ومع الكثير من التصرف- الذي عاش حياة مثيرة للجدل، ولم يعرف العالم أعماله بشكل جيد إلا بعد أن قضى نحبه.
هذا هو لقائي الثاني مع سومرست موم، والإنطباع هو ذاته. موم كاتب كﻻسيك� ممتع، يقدم شخصيات فريدة على فترة زمنية ممتدة، دون الإسراف في المساحة الورقية. مثل روايته الشهيرة: "عن عبودية الإنسان"، وجدت موم مولعاً بالتوغل في النفس البشرية بمبضع دوستويفكسي، لا يتوانى عن كشف ضعفها، وسوادها وكل ما يربض هناك في الجانب المظلم من القمر. ستلتقي بعينات نادرة- ولكنها واقعية- من البشر. فهناك من يهجر أولاده ليمارس هوايته الفنية في أقاصي الارض، هناك من يترك منصباً حكومياً عالياً ليعيش على هامش الحياة في أحد الموانئ الغريبة. هناك من يحب رغم الخيانة، هناك من يحقد على من مد له يد العون...الخ. أي ستجد من تراهم حولك كل يوم إذا تجردوا من قيود المبادئ والمجتمع وأصبح اللعب "على المكشوف".
بالرغم من أن النص يروي جانباً من سيرة فنان ينتمي إلى مدرسة مابعد الإنطباعية -اتحداك إن كنت تعرف ماهية هذه المدرسة- إلا أن النص بعيد كل البعد عن الوصف الفني والغوص في فنيات وتقنيات الرسم. بل إن الرواي قد صرح بأنه لا يتمتع بخلفية كبيرة عن الفنون وكأنه يطمئن القارئ بأنه لن يصدّع رأسه بكل تلك التفاصيل المرهقة. يطيب لي أن أشيد بأسلوب الحكي الوراد على لسان رواة عدّة، ممن التقوا أو عايشوا الفنان بطل الرواية. كما وجدت الانتقال في الأماكن، من لندن إلى باريس ثم هاييتي، سلساً وممتعاً ويضيف إلى عنصر التشويق في الرواية.
تستحق القراءة بواقع ثلاثة نجوم ونصف
August 30, 2022
It’s a preposterous attempt to live only for yourself and by yourself. Sooner or later you’ll be ill and tired and old, and then you’ll crawl back into the herd. Won’t you be ashamed when you feel in your heart the desire for comfort and sympathy? You’re trying an impossible thing. Sooner or later the human being in you will yearn for the common bonds of humanity.
I want to start with a note on the title (which does not appear in the novel). Apparently, a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement wrote of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage that its protagonist was "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet�. I haven’t read any other Maugham, but this must be a common theme for him (if he reused the phrase as the title of this, his next book) and this quote about yearning “for the common bonds of humanity� seems to hearken back to “of human bondage� (making me think that Maugham wanted the reader to consider these novels together and I had a pleasantly informative time googling about Maugham and his writing and Gaugin and his art.) To the review proper:
Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. Their brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you that the umbrella of the gardener's aunt is in the house.
Loosely based on the life of Paul Gaugin, has a narrator (whose life experiences are broadly those of Maugham himself) who finds himself crossing the path of a misanthropic painter over the course of his hermetic and uncelebrated career. I liked that the narrator only reports known facts � his own conversations with this Charles Strickland or conversations that he had with others about the man � and I liked the irony of him saying that if this were a novel he’d imagine a childhood backstory to explain the ’s prickly personality, or his apologies that he needed to invent dialogue for Strickland because so much of what the artist conveyed was in grunts and gestures. I don’t know if this was a common concept in 1919, but everything about the narrator (even quoting from invented biographies of Strickland) trying to add to the body of knowledge about a genius painter who wasn’t appreciated until after his death felt fresh and modern. As Strickland had left his job as a London stockbroker and abandoned his wife and children, at the age of forty, to pursue his painting, the question at the heart of this novel is: Does genius alone excuse a man for throwing off the bonds of humanity in order to pursue his passions outside the bounds of society? (As Maugham himself left his wife and child to explore the world with his gentleman companion/secretary/lover � travelling from Paris to Tahiti in the footsteps of Gaugin � he seems to be making the case for his own life as much as the painter’s; when Maugham writes about “artists�, he is obviously including himself.)
Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer-by to pick up idly? Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.
As much as the concept felt modern, the attitudes were very much of their time, with offputting racism, classism, and frequent misogyny. (It is not incidental that I wrote the question is about a ’s right to pursue his passions; Maugham [or at any rate, his narrator] does not seem to like the ladies very much.) Some representative passages:
� I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. Sometimes it seems as if they grudge the longevity which postpones their chance of an effective scene.
� Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.
� “Women are strange little beasts,� he said to Dr. Coutras. “You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.� He shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls.�
(Perhaps even in 1919 the idea of Gaugin taking a thirteen year old Tahitian wife, while still married, was creepy; in this novel, Strickland’s bride is seventeen. Better?) From people not understanding Strickland's painting within his lifetime (such that he was always just one step ahead of starvation) to people kicking themselves for not buying up his work cheaply when they were deemed priceless masterpieces after his death, the point can be made that the genius was always present in the work; the pursuit of truth and beauty is its own reward, separate from the opinions of others:
The moral I draw is the artist should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in the release of the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.
Back to the title: Perhaps the true lesson is to support those who would ignore the sixpence at their feet in pursuit of the moon. This was a very compelling read (even if the racist bits were totally offputting) and I am interested in reading more from Maugham.
February 9, 2023
I read my first Maugham novel a few years ago, that being , and I thought it was a well-structured story, and it essentially put Maugham on my radar. What a talented writer!
Maugham introduces us to the life of an artist, which I heard is based loosely on the artist Paul Gauguin, who in order to solely pursue his talent, he abandons everything else close to him in his life, including family, work, responsibilities. It's just him and his brush.
I notice that Maugham makes him out to be some kind of impressive and a somewhat valiant character, dedicating his whole self to art, and, that it was a necessity to do so, in order to achieve that creativity. While I enjoyed the story, I won't agree with that cutting yourself off from humanity and everything else that can bring one pleasure is the way to achieve a talent such as artistry. I mean, what is the point of life if that's all there is?
This was an interesting read about an obsession and a tormented man, and although I'm glad I've read it, I don't think it was Maugham's best work.
Maugham introduces us to the life of an artist, which I heard is based loosely on the artist Paul Gauguin, who in order to solely pursue his talent, he abandons everything else close to him in his life, including family, work, responsibilities. It's just him and his brush.
I notice that Maugham makes him out to be some kind of impressive and a somewhat valiant character, dedicating his whole self to art, and, that it was a necessity to do so, in order to achieve that creativity. While I enjoyed the story, I won't agree with that cutting yourself off from humanity and everything else that can bring one pleasure is the way to achieve a talent such as artistry. I mean, what is the point of life if that's all there is?
This was an interesting read about an obsession and a tormented man, and although I'm glad I've read it, I don't think it was Maugham's best work.
October 18, 2017
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I'm working my way through an omnibus edition of Maugham's work, and man, he can write. I'm torn between the impulse to swim leisurely through his prose or just gleefully cannonball into it. Unlike some writers of this time, Maugham is not particularly flowery, but he has an interesting way of presenting ideas and constructing sentences that makes you want to read over them several times, just to appreciate their ideas and form.
MOON AND SIXPENCE, which could just as easily be called "Portrait of the Artist as a Douche," is based loosely off the life of the artist, I tried to pronounce his name several times, ineffectively, ranging from gewgaw, to Google, to gaijin. As it turns out, the way it's actually pronounced makes him sound like a creature from a Japanese monster movie (it rhymes with "Rodan"), which is only the first way this book surprised me.
Strickland seems like he has the ideal of the moderately successful life: a wife, children, a good job with steady pay. But he is discontent, and one day, coldly decides to leave his wife and job and go to Paris, living in squalor. Why? So he can paint. The confusion of his family, neighbors, and the narrator himself is palpable. To paint? Not because of madness, or because of another woman - but just... for art? For art's sake, and not for fame?
The narrator follows Strickland, as he wrecks yet another marriage, paints more art, and eventually goes to Tahiti, where he finds the climate agreeable and even obtains one of the locals as a "wife." The whole time he is cruel and scornful, dismissive of others' feelings, wants, or desires, and even his own comfort. Everything must be sacrificed for art. Ultimately, I'd say this is a tragedy, because that vision ends up consuming Strickland; he pours his entire being into his art, and like many artists, it isn't until he's dead that his work becomes first a curiosity and then something far more powerful.
A lot of my friends did not enjoy this book and I can certainly see why. Strickland is a jerk, and so is the narrator. There's a casually dismissive attitude towards the things that people generally consider worthy in a human being: compassion, empathy, loyalty, family, kindness, charity, etc. Art here is portrayed as something wholly selfish, and the message here seems to be that it is somehow okay; that an artist is allowed to be an egotist, because self-absorption is necessary for introspection. I don't like that message, so I can see why some people might write off MOON AND SIXPENCE as too dark and grim and irritating. However, I found myself fascinated by these terrible characters.
I enjoyed this book a lot. I've read Maugham before and really liked his work, so this isn't really surprising. His other book was more of a comedy of manners, though; it was nothing like this. I'm really looking forward to working my way through his repertoire and seeing how his stories vary, while enjoying his beautiful writing and compelling, yet flawed characters.
4 stars
March 3, 2019
The Moon and Sixpence (1919) was my first foray into Somerset Maugham, and I don’t think I’ll be hurrying back. The subject is interesting: a seemingly stolid stockbroker who breaks away from his comfortable life in his forties to become an artist, living on the breadline in Paris (and occasionally rather beneath it), before ending his days in Tahiti. I wasn’t put off either by the fact that the protagonist, Charles Strickland, is an unpleasant character, devoid of all human empathy. That can be an interesting challenge, for the reader, as well as the writer.
What I found off-putting in this novel was the style, which was rather leaden and ponderous, and the trite nature of its reflections on life. The unnamed narrator, an acquaintance of Strickland’s, who becomes fascinated by him when he is “discovered� as a great artist after his death in penury, is given to pompous generalizations about art, society, and women—particularly women. There is a whole rancid florilegium of misogynistic maxims to be had in this novel, for anyone who cares for such things. Strickland’s own gender philosophy is classic “mail-order bride:� Western women are castrating harpies and a chap can only get what he needs by looking to the simpler and healthier mores of the “primitive� world. Here is Strickland reflects complacently on his happy bigamous second marriage with a Tahitian teenager: “Women are strange little beasts � You can treat them like beasts, you can beat them until your arm aches, and they still love you.�
The reflections on art and the artist are similarly underwhelming. Near the beginning of the novel, the narrator expresses his own views on the subject, which could not be much farther from my own: “To my mind, the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to forgive a thousand faults. I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one’s admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of the soul like a standing sacrifice.� The whole narrative of The Moon and Sixpence unfolds from this witlessly romantic position, with Strickland’s obnoxiousness redeemed by his fiery genius, etc. etc.
One intriguing aspect of the novel is the way in which Strickland’s life partly maps onto Gaugin’s. That was one of the things that attracted me to it in the first place. Like the thinly characterized narrator figure (who surely just is the author), Maugham did his research, traveling to Tahiti to speak to people who knew Gaugin; yet he was careful to distinguish the final product from a fictionalized biography. “I used only the main facts of his story,� Maugham clarified, “and for the rest trusted to such gifts of invention as I was fortunate enough to possess.� Having seen the results, I might query that “fortunate.� Perhaps he should have stuck with the facts.
What I found off-putting in this novel was the style, which was rather leaden and ponderous, and the trite nature of its reflections on life. The unnamed narrator, an acquaintance of Strickland’s, who becomes fascinated by him when he is “discovered� as a great artist after his death in penury, is given to pompous generalizations about art, society, and women—particularly women. There is a whole rancid florilegium of misogynistic maxims to be had in this novel, for anyone who cares for such things. Strickland’s own gender philosophy is classic “mail-order bride:� Western women are castrating harpies and a chap can only get what he needs by looking to the simpler and healthier mores of the “primitive� world. Here is Strickland reflects complacently on his happy bigamous second marriage with a Tahitian teenager: “Women are strange little beasts � You can treat them like beasts, you can beat them until your arm aches, and they still love you.�
The reflections on art and the artist are similarly underwhelming. Near the beginning of the novel, the narrator expresses his own views on the subject, which could not be much farther from my own: “To my mind, the most interesting thing in art is the personality of the artist; and if that is singular, I am willing to forgive a thousand faults. I suppose Velasquez was a better painter than El Greco, but custom stales one’s admiration for him: the Cretan, sensual and tragic, proffers the mystery of the soul like a standing sacrifice.� The whole narrative of The Moon and Sixpence unfolds from this witlessly romantic position, with Strickland’s obnoxiousness redeemed by his fiery genius, etc. etc.
One intriguing aspect of the novel is the way in which Strickland’s life partly maps onto Gaugin’s. That was one of the things that attracted me to it in the first place. Like the thinly characterized narrator figure (who surely just is the author), Maugham did his research, traveling to Tahiti to speak to people who knew Gaugin; yet he was careful to distinguish the final product from a fictionalized biography. “I used only the main facts of his story,� Maugham clarified, “and for the rest trusted to such gifts of invention as I was fortunate enough to possess.� Having seen the results, I might query that “fortunate.� Perhaps he should have stuck with the facts.
January 23, 2024
Virtual Gauguin...
If Gauguin, the painter, had been an Englishman, his life could very well have been as reconstructed by Maugham in this famous novel. The main characters are few: the author cast as minor English writer, Strickland or the "Gauguin character", his first wife, a Dutch painter in Paris and his English wife. A number of minor characters give intense color to much of the book and are very skillfully drawn. Not just a biographical novel, which could have been interesting in itself, THE MOON AND SIXPENCE attempts to be a psychological study of an unusual person, a genius perhaps. And there is no doubt---it succeeds. Not only is a fascinating novel that will grip you for as long as it takes to read, it is a major work on the relationship of art, psychology and society. The novel is one of the greatest of a very talented writer. Maugham's overarching question is "what kind of person suddenly leaves a very mediocre, average life as a stockbroker---having shown absolutely no inclination for art---throws over his wife, his relatives, and everything he has ever known, to go to Paris to become an artist in the utmost poverty ?" What makes a man do that ? And how strange it is that he succeeds beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Along the road of explanation, Maugham introduces many an interesting argument between humanism and cold rationality, between those who feel for others and those who only act for themselves.
I like seashells, the treasures of the ocean, but I prefer to find them myself, buried in the sand or lying in a mess of seaweed. I clean them off and they're mine. I never buy them, polished and sterile, from a shop shelf. That is, I don't like getting repeated "nuggets of wisdom", polished and presented to me by an author. I prefer to stumble on them myself, pondering as I go. What I do not particularly care for in this novel, which may put off readers (or, sure, may attract them) is the didactic, hectoring tone (leaving aside the rather misogynistic view of women). Maugham insists on hitting the reader over the head, again and again, with his views...
"Suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindicative" (p.64).
"There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even..." (p.114)
"...Man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette." (p.135).
I can provide a lot more examples. Maugham writes a tremendous story, a sensitive psychological portrait of a man who was contrary to what everyone had supposed him to be, a man possessed for years by a secret devil---Art. The author insists that it is impossible to know exactly what a person will do, that it is impossible to fathom human nature. He then fills his novel with endless little lectures, innumerable aphorisms, about human nature, thereby contradicting his own core theme.
It is still a great novel.
If Gauguin, the painter, had been an Englishman, his life could very well have been as reconstructed by Maugham in this famous novel. The main characters are few: the author cast as minor English writer, Strickland or the "Gauguin character", his first wife, a Dutch painter in Paris and his English wife. A number of minor characters give intense color to much of the book and are very skillfully drawn. Not just a biographical novel, which could have been interesting in itself, THE MOON AND SIXPENCE attempts to be a psychological study of an unusual person, a genius perhaps. And there is no doubt---it succeeds. Not only is a fascinating novel that will grip you for as long as it takes to read, it is a major work on the relationship of art, psychology and society. The novel is one of the greatest of a very talented writer. Maugham's overarching question is "what kind of person suddenly leaves a very mediocre, average life as a stockbroker---having shown absolutely no inclination for art---throws over his wife, his relatives, and everything he has ever known, to go to Paris to become an artist in the utmost poverty ?" What makes a man do that ? And how strange it is that he succeeds beyond anyone's wildest dreams. Along the road of explanation, Maugham introduces many an interesting argument between humanism and cold rationality, between those who feel for others and those who only act for themselves.
I like seashells, the treasures of the ocean, but I prefer to find them myself, buried in the sand or lying in a mess of seaweed. I clean them off and they're mine. I never buy them, polished and sterile, from a shop shelf. That is, I don't like getting repeated "nuggets of wisdom", polished and presented to me by an author. I prefer to stumble on them myself, pondering as I go. What I do not particularly care for in this novel, which may put off readers (or, sure, may attract them) is the didactic, hectoring tone (leaving aside the rather misogynistic view of women). Maugham insists on hitting the reader over the head, again and again, with his views...
"Suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindicative" (p.64).
"There is no cruelty greater than a woman's to a man who loves her and whom she does not love; she has no kindness then, no tolerance even..." (p.114)
"...Man in moments of emotion expresses himself naturally in the terms of a novelette." (p.135).
I can provide a lot more examples. Maugham writes a tremendous story, a sensitive psychological portrait of a man who was contrary to what everyone had supposed him to be, a man possessed for years by a secret devil---Art. The author insists that it is impossible to know exactly what a person will do, that it is impossible to fathom human nature. He then fills his novel with endless little lectures, innumerable aphorisms, about human nature, thereby contradicting his own core theme.
It is still a great novel.
January 10, 2025
ماه و شش پنی تصویری بینظی� از جدال همیشگی بین هنر و جامعه، اشتیاق و اخلاق، و زیبایی و وظیفه� است. سامرست موآم با الهام از زندگی پل گوگن، داستان مردی رو روایت میکن� که از قیدوبندهای عرفی، عشق و خانواده رها میشه تا به جستجوی حقیقیتری� شکل هنر بپردازه. این کتاب سفری عمیق به پیچیدگیها� روح انسانه؛ اینکه آیا نابغهه� باید بهایی گزاف برای خلاقیتشو� بپردازن، و آیا جامعه حق داره این بها رو براشون تعیین کنه؟
شخصیت استریکلند با بیاعتنای� مطلقش به احساسات دیگران، نمادی از شور خام و بیرحم� هنریه. اون قضاوت نمیشه� بلکه صرفاً درونمایها� برای تأمل ارائه مید�. زبان ساده و نگاه نیشدار موآم به اخلاقیات و ارزشها� انسانی، از این کتاب اثری میسازه که نه تنها الهامبخشه� بلکه تلنگری برای بازاندیشی در مرزهای بین هنر و زندگیه. ماه و شش پنی روایتیه که با هر صفحه، خواننده رو به بررسی عمیقتر� از مفهوم آزادی و بهای اون دعوت میکن�.
شخصیت استریکلند با بیاعتنای� مطلقش به احساسات دیگران، نمادی از شور خام و بیرحم� هنریه. اون قضاوت نمیشه� بلکه صرفاً درونمایها� برای تأمل ارائه مید�. زبان ساده و نگاه نیشدار موآم به اخلاقیات و ارزشها� انسانی، از این کتاب اثری میسازه که نه تنها الهامبخشه� بلکه تلنگری برای بازاندیشی در مرزهای بین هنر و زندگیه. ماه و شش پنی روایتیه که با هر صفحه، خواننده رو به بررسی عمیقتر� از مفهوم آزادی و بهای اون دعوت میکن�.
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