Maugham, W. Somerset

A Secret I Am Unworthy to Share? W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

paintedveil

‘Take care the nuns don’t start converting you,’ said Waddington, with his malicious little smile.

‘They’re much too busy. Nor do they care. They’re wonderful and so kind; and yet — I hardly know how to explain it — there is a wall between them and me. I don’t know what it is. It is as though they possessed a secret which made all the difference in their lives and which I was unworthy to share. It is not faith; it is something deeper and more — more significant; they walk in a different world from ours and we shall always be strangers to them.’

Maugham tells us in his Preface to The Painted Veil that the novel’s inspiration was a fragment of Dante’s Purgatorio:

Pia was a gentlewoman of Siena whose husband, suspecting her of adultery and afraid on account of her family to put her to death, took her down to his castle in the Maremma the noxious vapors of which he was confident would do the trick; but she took so long to die that he grew impatient and had her thrown out of the window.

I knew basically where we were going, then, in this story that begins, brilliantly, with the suspenseful trying of the door behind which Kitty Fane and her lover, Charlie Townsend, are anxiously concealed. I didn’t know at first, though, that Kitty is so dreadful — self-centered, shallow, vacuous — that I wouldn’t feel sorry for her as her doom drew nearer.

Maugham’s depiction of the world, and especially the family, Kitty comes from is ruthless and yet occasionally, redemptively, touching. The relentlessly social-climbing Mrs. Garstin is hard to forgive, but her husband — who reproaches his wife only “in his heart” for her machinations — is a sorry figure in his loneliness and disappointment:

He grew perhaps a little more silent, but he had always been silent at home, and no one in his family noticed a change in him. His daughters had never looked upon him as anything but a source of income; it had always seemed perfectly natural that he should lead a dog’s life in order to provide them with borad and lodging, clothes holidays, and money for odds and ends; and now, understanding that through his fault money was less plentiful, the indifference they had felt for him was tinged with an exasperated contempt. It never occurred to them to ask themselves what were the feelings of the subdued little man who went out early in the morning and came home at night only in time to dress for dinner.

Having met Kitty, watched her marry Walter Fane for all the wrong reasons, and seen the poor return she makes him for his devotion (“Now that she had learned something of passion it diverted her to play lightly, like a harpist, running his fingers across the strings of his harp, on his affections. She laughed when she saw how she bewildered and confused him”) I came bck to her affair with no sympathy to spare, and I watched without pity as she was coerced by her husband and abandoned by her unworthy lover. A trip into the heart of cholera seemed no more than she deserved, and if she were to go out a window — well, that would be horrible, of course, but not wholly undeserved!

Things change for Kitty, though, during her stay in Mei-tan-fu. Though it’s a difficult time, I think it’s fair to say that things get better, or, more precisely, that she gets better, especially through the work she begins doing with the nuns at the nearby convent. She is motivated to help them because her perspective on the world is changing, becoming less self-centered, more (if uncertainly) spiritual. She has her first glimpse of death, which “makes everything else seem so horribly trivial.” For the first time she hears “the Chinese spoken of as anything but decadent, dirty, and unspeakable”:

It was as though the corner of a curtain were lifted for a moment, and she caught a glimpse of a world rich with a color and significance she had not dreamt of.

She doesn’t really experience one single epiphanic moment; her change is gradual and only tentatively religious. But her first look at the temple across the river from her new home is certainly an awakening:

 It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand. It towered, the stronghold of a cruel and barbaric race, over the river. But the magician who built worked swiftly and now a fragment of colored wall crowned the bastion; in a moment, out of the mist, looming vastly and touched here and there by a yellow ray of sun, there was seen a cluster of green and yellow roofs. Huge they seemed and you could make out no pattern; the order, if order there was, escaped you; wayward and extravagant, but of an unimaginable richness. This was no fortress, nor a temple, but the magic palace of some emperor of the gods where no man might enter. It was too airy, fantastic, and insubstantial to be the work of human hands; it was the fabric of a dream.

The tears ran down Kitty’s face and she gazed, her hands clasped to her breast and her mouth, for she was breathless, open a little. She had never felt so light of heart and it seemed to her as though her body were a shell that lay at her feet and she pure spirit. Here was Beauty. She took it in as the believer takes in his mouth the wafer which is God.

She envies the nuns both their social purpose and their spiritual insight; she can enter into the first but feels excluded from the second: “She felt shut out not only from that poor little convent, but from some mysterious garden of the spirit after which with all her heart she hankered.” They possess, she reflects with regret, “a secret which made all the difference in their lives and which I was unworthy to share.”

By the end of the novel, Kitty has returned home, and she’s a very different woman than the one Walter stooped to punish for her facile infidelity. (How that worked out for Walter, I will leave unspoiled.) She may not yet have entered that “mysterious garden of the spirit,” but she seems to know the secret she needs to find it:

perhaps her faults and follies, the unhappiness she had suffered, were not entirely vain if she could follow the path that now she dimly discerned before her, not the path that kind funny old Waddington had spoken of that led nowhither, but the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace.

As I said, she gets better. But that was the point at which (for all that I loved Maugham’s writing) things got rather worse for me, as once again I found myself confronting a conversion that (religious or not) was only barely convincing. It’s not that I don’t believe someone like Kitty could transform so completely, though it was a bit like watching Rosamond Vincy rush off to help Dorothea with her plans for healthier cottages — or, even more astonishing, to help Lydgate nurse fever patients at the hospital. The change just seemed undermotivated in the action and unprepared for in her character: we knew nothing about her, up to that moment with the temple, that suggested any capacity for reverence, awe, or duty. If Rosamond had changed in such a way, we would have understood fully how such a thing was possible, just as we understand, thanks to Chapter XV, how Lydgate’s troubles arise from his “spots of commonness.” The before and after with Kitty were not just radically different: to me they seemed almost unconnected, and I found that jarring.

I found myself thinking back, as a result, on the discussion we had about Christopher Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder. I complained there about the lack of explanation regarding Sophie’s religious conversion:

to me the account of Sophie’s religious experience was a reedy echo (at best) of Maggie Tulliver’s struggles with faith in The Mill on the Floss, where her passionate embrace of asceticism after reading Thomas à Kempis emerges from a rich narrative context including overt philosophical reflection on the needs religion meets for those who are suffering inexplicably. By comparison, What Happened to Sophie Wilder is briskly superficial about the social and historical contexts of both Charlie’s and Sophie’s stories. Perhaps that’s because George Eliot thinks religious belief needs explanation, while Beha is emphasizing its spontaneity and inexplicability.

In her reply, Teresa noted that “the inability to describe a religious experience in words also rings true to me–it reminds me of the rich apophatic tradition in which God cannot be described directly because God is beyond language. That could be why I didn’t feel the conversion experience was flat or unconvincing.” And in a post at her blog responding to mine, Nicole said 

 The black box of mysticism forestalls any urge I might have to disagree with or even interrogate Sophie Wilder’s beliefs; they just are. And, being that she converts to Roman Catholicism and takes on the full dogma of that religion, I already know what those beliefs are—and, again, they just are. What she believes may make no sense to me, but her actions do, because they predictably follow from her beliefs—and I never have to walk through any attempts at nonmystical moral logicking with her that might rankle or irritate.

Once again, with The Painted Veil, I find myself wondering if I am the problem: I don’t — I can’t — share the character’s transformative belief, which to me is just a form of magical thinking or superstition, and that so without the kind of explanation Eliot offers (which translates their religious impulses into secular ones I can understand) I’m just not invited to the party — or into the mysterious garden.

But is Kitty’s transformation a religious conversion? There is certainly no need for religion to change Kitty: she sees enough human suffering, and is responsible for enough personal trouble and misery, that humanity alone ought to do the trick. And in fact, Maugham is just vague enough about what exactly Kitty is learning, or yearning after, that I suppose I could choose to see the “path to peace” in those terms. Maugham himself was apparently not a believer, and Kitty’s revelation (“that beside all the terror of death under whose shadow they lay and beside the awe of the beauty which she had caught a glimpse of that day, their own affairs were trivial”) has no necessary connection to the God worshipped by the nuns she so admires. “She hoped with all her heart,” Kitty thinks, “that she had learnt compassion and charity.”

Whatever its specific causes, I was glad that, home again, Kitty offered her father the love and sympathy he’d never known before: “She saw dimly all the suffering that had preyed on his heart for thirty years.” Her resolution to bring her daughter up differently — “to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself” — also casts a somewhat different light back on Kitty’s earlier behavior. “I never had a chance,” she says, but she faces the future with “hope and courage.” It’s not the defenestration I’d initially hoped for, but I admit, it’s a better ending for us all.

W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Cakes and Ale is the latest reading selection for the Slaves of Golconda group. I think I read Of Human Bondage years ago, but I have no recollection of it, so at this point Cakes and Ale represents the sum total of my knowledge of W. Somerset Maugham’s oeuvre. Based on what I know about Of Human Bondage, though, it would be a mistake to attempt any generalizations about Maugham based on Cakes and Ale–so I won’t!

Cakes and Ale struck me as quite an odd book. It has many passages in it that are amusing, interesting, and eminently quotable, such as the set pieces on the role of beauty in art and criticism, or on the place of the first-person singular in the art of fiction. The book is about a writer writing about a writer, narrated by another writer; between this set up and the embedded commentaries on fiction and criticism, the book overall seems as if it must be metafiction of some kind, and yet it doesn’t seem so, and this is one reason I found it odd: I can’t quite see how to connect all this self-referential potential with the story the novel tells about Edward Driffield and his putatively enchanting first wife Rosie, bar-maid turned society beauty turned scandalous absconder. That is, the metafictional commentary doesn’t seem to be saying anything about the kind of book Cakes and Ale actually is. I suppose this means it isn’t metafictional after all but incidental, just the kind of stuff a narrating writer would write about. Here’s a bit from the excursus on first-person narration, for instance:

A little while ago I read in the Evening Standard an article by Mr Evelyn Waugh in the course of which he remarked that to write novels in the first person was a contemptible practice. . . . I was much concerned, and forthwith asked Alroy Kear (who reads everything, even the books he writes prefaces for) to recommend to me some works on the art of fiction. On his advice I read The Craft of Fiction by Mr Percy Lubbock, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Henry James; after that I read Aspects of the Novel by Mr E. M. Forster, from which I learned that the only way to write novels was like Mr E. M. Forster; then I read The Structure of the Novel by Mr Edwin Muir, from which I learned nothing at all.

Amusing, as I said. Ashenden goes on to conclude that the value of first-person narration is that in an increasingly confusing life, it makes sense to focus on our own limited experience, which is, after all, all we can really be sure of and hope to understand. Yet Cakes and Ale is not really about him, is it? Or, is it? If so, it does a good job effacing his part in it: he’s a Nick Carraway type, significant (or so it seems) primarily as a device for delivering Maugham’s gentle literary and social satire and for telling us about other people, especially Driffield and Rosie.

Driffield, too, is a fairly absent main character: in his case he seems to be there to provide the occasion for the literary commentary, as well as for some pretty funny stuff about the rise and fall of literary reputations and the dubious reliability of critical judgments. Ashenden does not admire Driffield much himself:

But of course what the critics wrote about Edward Driffield was eyewash. His outstanding merit was not the realism that gave vigour to his work, nor the beauty that informed it, nor his graphic portraits of seafaring men, nor his poetic descriptions of salty marshes, of storm and calm, and of nestling habits; it was his longevity. . . But why writers should be more esteemed the older they grow, has long perplexed me. . . . After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of an author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grown older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author who wrote them.

Let’s not start naming contemporary authors we think might be unduly revered for just this reason! Again, this is funny, with just enough sting to make it interesting too. But the novel does not give the issue of literary merit any momemtum as a theme (by, say, really focusing on whether Driffield does have any genius besides longevity), and I don’t think it also takes it on as a formal problem by trying to embody in its own narrative any special genius.

The only element of the novel that has much forward momentum is the story of Rosie–but to me, she was too flat a character, and too representative of a kind of male fantasy of undemanding available amoral female sexuality, to captivate me the way she (to me, inexplicably) enchants young Ashenden. So enamoured is he that even after she has run off with the coal merchant of Blackstable and started a new life as Mrs Iggulden in America, he defends her for having “carried on” behind Driffield’s back: “She was a very simple woman. Her instincts were healthy and ingenuous. She loved to make people happy. She loved love.” Challenged on this sappy conclusion (“Do you call that love?”), he responds,

Well, then, the act of love. She was naturally affectionate. When she liked anyone, it was quite natural for her to go to bed with him. She never thought twice about it. It was not vice; it wasn’t lasciviousness; it was her nature. She gave herself as naturally as the sun gives heat or the flowers their perfume. It was a pleasure to her and she liked to give pleasure to others. It had no effect on her character; she remained sincere, unspoiled, and artless.

Well, not so artless she doesn’t welcome the gift of a very expensive fur cloak from one of her lovers, and not so fond of giving pleasure to others that she hesitates before causing them pain. Her acts have little effect on her character because Maugham (or Ashenden) gives her very little character to begin with. The absence of complexity in her personality is not liberating: it’s limiting, if you intend the portrait to be in any way related to reality. But maybe Rosie isn’t intended to be more than an animated, good-natured fantasy figure. Or maybe there’s something dimly progressive about the freedom with which she enjoys her own sexuality, and about Maugham’s (or, again, Ashenden’s) refusal to judge her for it–but I’m not convinced.

And yet–near the end we learn a bit more about Rosie’s history, something that adds darker shades to the radiant glow in which she always seems bathed (her skin is so “dewy” that at one point Ashenden asks if she rubs vaseline on it). More interesting still, that sad past is linked to the one novel of Driffield’s that Ashenden particularly admires, for having a “cold ruthlessness that in all the sentimentality of English fiction strikes an unusual note.” This novel, The Cup of Life, is also the novel that drew censure down on the novelist for being “gratuitously offensive [and] obscene.” The incident in the novel that so outrages the righteous public turns out to be taken almost straight from life. So perhaps there is a metafictional angle after all, and it turns on Rosie: perhaps her story, and her character, with its overt and unapologetic sensuality, is a challenge to Maugham’s (or Ashenden’s?) readers, to see, for instance, if they will appreciate her beauty without decrying her morality, or find beauty in her freedom from social constraints. Is the novel about the relationship between beauty and virtue? Does that help us make sense of the title? But again, I’m not convinced, because I just don’t find Rosie, or the novel as a whole, for that matter, substantive enough to hang a theory on.

The novel is funny, though, if only in strange fits and starts, so to close, another of the many quotable passages, this time about a poet who becomes, for a time, the rage of London literary society:

Now that he is so completely forgotten and the critics who praised him would willingly eat their words if they were not carefully guarded in the files of innumerable newspaper offices, the sensation he made with his first volume of poems is almost unbelievable. The most important papers gave to reviews of it as much space as they would have to the report of a prize-fight, the most influential critics fell over one another in their eagerness to welcome him. They likened him to Milton (for the sonority of his blank verse), to Keats (for the opulence of his sensuous imagery), and to Shelley (for his airy fantasy); and, using him as a stick to beat idols of whom they were weary, they gave in his name many a resounding whack on the emaciated buttocks of Lord Tennyson and a few good husky smacks on the bald pate of Robert Browning. The public fell like the walls of Jericho.

Maybe fun is the key: Maugham had an idea for Rosie, he tells us in his Preface, and wanted a book to put her in, and he also had a lot of experience with the vagaries and vapidities of literary celebrity and the satirical skill to write them up elegantly. Why not put these ingredients together into a little confection of a book?

I’m sure I’ll learn from the discussion. Anyone interested is welcome to join in; usually we cross-post at the Slaves of Golconda blog, and there’s contact information there for those who also want to participate in the forum as well.