The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham
London: William Heinemann Pp. 263. 7s. net
The character of a man insensible to ordinary human relations, who lives the life of pure selfishness which is sometimes supposed to produce great art, has always had its fascination for novelists inspired only by the unusual. Accordingly there have been novels in plenty depicting the conflict of (by ordinary standards) brutal genius with 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. Mr. Maugham's story is that of a respectable stockbroker who deserts his wife after seventeen years of marriage and goes alone to Paris to follow a new ideal - the ideal of great and for a time unrecognisable art. The break is succeeded by privation and industry, by long periods of work and outbursts of savage sexual conquest; and the artist at length dies, blind and leprous, in Tahiti.
The book revolves throughout around the character of Strickland and the quality of his art. Does Mr. Maugham so convince us that his Strickland is a real man and a real artist that we can absorb his traits as parts of the essential human creature who lives eternally by his work? It seems to us that he does not. Where every detail should be pungently real, one is constantly checked in belief by the sense of calculated and heightened effect, and by the passion of Mr. Maugham for what is odd and "strong." Such a passion has always defeated its object. Here once more one is repelled, not by Strickland's monosyllabic callousness, but by the knowledge that this callousness is seen and represented without subtlety. The callousness of the artist is something more complex than it is here shown to be. The callousness of Strickland is merely the conventional brutality employed by other novelists of an older generation, the generation which first found in the behaviour of artists a theme to be exploited in fiction. That Mr. Maugham uses the elaborations of a modern technique does not create the illusion of reality that he is pursuing. It simply emphasises the cleverness, the clever unconvincingness, of his portrait - not at all the vigour and personality of one who will starve and suffer for the sake of his artistic ideal.
All the minor drawings in the book are extremely effective, and the simplicity of the narrative is notable. Technically the whole thing has great interest. But as an illumination of the nature of bizarre and uncompromising genius, ready to sacrifice every person and every association that stands in the way of its fulfilment, "The Moon and Sixpence" fails through its literary accomplishment and its lack of true creative inspiration.