For Lydia has seen tragedy. The Russian Revolution displaced her family, left her homeless, fatherless. And for reasons that elude Charley, Lydia pines for a man half a world away--a dope dealer and murderer whose sins Lydia seeks to absolve through her own self- destruction. Haunting, erotic, deeply effecting, Christmas Holiday explores two souls capsized by compassion--and the confusion that engulfed a generation in the days between the Great Wars.
 First edition | |
| Author | W. Somerset Maugham |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Youngman Carter |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | William Heinemann |
Publication date | 1932 |
| Media type | |
| OCLC | 542670 |
The Narrow Corner is a novel by the British writer W. Somerset Maugham, published by William Heinemann in 1932.[1]
A quote from Meditations, iii 10, by Marcus Aurelius,[2] introduces the work: "Short therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells."
In the story, set "a good many years ago" in the Dutch East Indies, a young Australian, cruising the islands after his involvement in a murder in Sydney, has a passionate affair on an island which causes a further tragedy.
Background
In the preface to a collected edition, Maugham writes about the origin of two characters in the novel.[3]
Dr. Saunders was based on "a medical student I had known when I was myself one and whom I continued to know till he died forty years later ... He had ... a great sense of humour, a pleasant cynicism and not a little unscrupulousness." After originally including Dr. Saunders in the short story "The Stranger" in On a Chinese Screen, Maugham remained interested in the character.
Captain Nichols originally appeared in The Moon and Sixpence (introduced in chapter 46); he was suggested by "a beachcomber I met in the South Seas.... He was a very pretty rascal, but he took my fancy. He had smuggled guns into South America and opium into China." An incident related by Nichols in The Moon and Sixpence was cut out during proof reading, since Maugham realised it could be the basis of a new novel.
Summary
Dr. Saunders, an English doctor, is in Takana, an island in the Dutch East Indies, waiting to return home to Fu-Chou in China after performing an eye operation on a local merchant. While waiting he meets Captain Nichols, skipper of the lugger the Fenton, and Fred Blake, his only passenger. The relation between the cunning-looking Nichols, and the educated-looking, sullen young man Blake, intrigues Saunders; he arranges to have a passage on the Fenton where he can treat Nichols' chronic dyspepsia, and thereby begin his return home.
While they are at sea Nichols and Blake play cribbage for money, Blake usually winning. Nichols tells Saunders how he came to be skipper of the Fenton with Blake: in Sydney, Australia, unemployed and anxious to get away from his wife, Nichols met a man in a bar who arranged that he should cruise for a few months with Fred Blake. Apparently it was vital that Blake should disappear from Australia for a period; the reason for this is not known to Nichols.
The Fenton pauses at Kanda-Meira, twin islands of the Dutch East Indies, where Saunders is to stay for a while. They meet Erik Christesson, a young Dane who works for a Danish company there. Erik shows Saunders and Blake a ruined fort built when the island was part of the Portuguese Empire; Blake and Erik form a strong friendship. They visit a friend of Erik, Frith, a former teacher from Britain who has a nutmeg plantation, is interested in Eastern philosophy and in spare time is translating a Portuguese epic poem The Lusiads. They meet Swan, the Swedish father of Frith's late wife Catherine, and Frith's daughter Louise; she and Blake rapidly form a passionate relationship, unnoticed by the others.
Later, Erik talks to Saunders about Catherine, whom he regarded like a mother, and tells him he is unofficially engaged to Louise, whom he has loved for years.
Erik, in a chair outside Frith's house in the late evening, muses about Catherine and Louise. He sees someone coming outside from Louise's room; attacking him, he finds it is Blake. Erik returns home and shoots himself; his body is discovered by Blake.
After Erik's funeral, Blake tells Saunders what happened in Sydney. His father, important in local politics, knew Pat Hudson, an influential politician; Hudson's wife became obsessed with Fred Blake, and Fred eventually tried to end the affair. Mrs. Hudson, however, contrived a situation in which Pat Hudson interrupted them and Fred, attacked by Hudson, shot him dead. Elections were due to take place; to avoid a scandal, Fred's father arranged his disappearance, and later, as Fred learnt with relief from a cable received on Kanda-Meira, his father contrived to have him officially declared dead.
The Fenton leaves the island, and Saunders later leaves for Bali. Pausing in Singapore a month later he meets Nichols, who says that Blake was lost overboard, and when he looked in Blake's strong box for an address, no money was there; Blake had kept it with him. Saunders wonders if Nichols sent Blake overboard to retrieve the money he lost at cribbage.
Film
A Hollywood film version of The Narrow Corner was produced and released in 1933. Directed by Alfred E. Green, it features Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.as Fred Blake, Patricia Ellis as Louise Frith, and Ralph Bellamy as Eric Whittenson.[4]
The book was also the basis of the 1936 film Isle of Fury, starring Humphrey Bogart. The rather loose adaptation includes a scene where Bogart wrestles a giant octopus.[5]
Radio
A radio play, adapted from the novel by Howard Agg, was broadcast on BBC Home Service on 20 October 1962 and 29 January 1967. It featured Raymond Huntley as Dr Saunders, George Merritt as Captain Nichols and Denys Hawthorne as Fred Blake.[6]
A radio play, adapted from the novel by Jeffrey Segal, was broadcast in BBC Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre on 1 April 1989, with Garard Greenas Dr Saunders and Douglas Blackwell as Captain Nichols.[7]
Theater 1937
In Theatre, W. Somerset Maugham–the author of the classic novels Of Human Bondage and Up at the Villa–introduces us to Julia Lambert, a woman of breathtaking poise and talent whose looks have stood by her forty-six years. She is one of the greatest actresses England–so good, in fact, that perhaps she never stops acting.
It seems that noting can ruffle her satin feathers, until a quiet stranger who challenges Julia's very sense of self. As a result, she will endure rejection for the first time, her capacity as a mother will be affronted, and her ability to put on whatever face she desired for her public will prove limited. In Theatre, Maugham subtly exposes the tensions and triumphs that occur when acting and reality blend together, and–for Julia–ultimately reverse.
Of Human Bondage 1915
 First edition | |
| Author | W. Somerset Maugham |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Bildungsroman |
| Publisher | George H. Doran Company |
Publication date | 1915 |
| Media type | Print, hardback |
| Pages | 648 |
| OCLC | 343641 |
| 823.912 | |
| LC Class | PR6025.A86 O4 1915 |
Of Human Bondage is a 1915 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The novel is generally agreed to be Maugham's masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although he stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography; though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention."[1]Maugham, who had originally planned to call his novel Beauty from Ashes, finally settled on a title taken from a section of Spinoza's Ethics.[2] The Modern Library ranked Of Human Bondage No. 66 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Plot
The book begins with the death of Helen Carey, the beloved mother of nine-year-old Philip Carey. Philip has a club foot and his father had died a few months earlier. Now orphaned, he is sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Louisa and William Carey.
Philip lives at his uncle's vicarage. Aunt Louisa tries to be a mother to Philip, but his uncle is cold towards him. Philip's uncle has a vast collection of books, and Philip enjoys reading to escape his mundane existence. After less than a year, Philip is sent to a boarding school. His uncle and aunt plan for him to attend Oxford. Philip's disability and sensitive nature make it difficult for him to befriend other students. Philip learns that he could earn a scholarship for Oxford, which both his uncle and school headmaster view as wise, but Philip insists on going to Germany.
In Heidelberg, Philip lives at a boarding house with other foreigners and enjoys Germany. Philip's guardians persuade him to move to London for an apprenticeship. His colleagues there resent him, believing he is a "gentleman". He goes on a business trip with one of his managers to Paris and is inspired to study art in France.
In Paris, Philip attends art classes and makes new friends, including Fanny Price, a poor and determined but talentless art student and a loner. Fanny Price falls in love with Philip, but he does not know and has no such feelings for her. She subsequently commits suicide.
Philip realizes that he will never be a professional artist. He returns to his uncle's house in England to study medicine, his late father's field. He struggles at medical school and meets Mildred, who works as a waitress in a tea shop. He falls desperately in love with her, and they date regularly, although she does not show him affection. Mildred tells Philip she will marry another man, leaving him heartbroken; Philip subsequently enters into an affair with Norah Nesbit, a kind and sensitive author of penny romance novels. Later Mildred returns, pregnant, and confesses that the man for whom she had abandoned Philip never married her, as he was already married with three children.
Philip breaks off his relationship with Norah and supports Mildred financially, which he can ill afford. To Philip's dismay, after Mildred has her baby, she falls in love with Philip's good friend Harry Griffiths and runs away with him. About a year later, Philip runs into Mildred and, feeling sympathy, takes her in again. Though he no longer loves her, he becomes attached to her baby. When he rejects her advances she becomes angry, destroys most of his belongings, and leaves forever. In shame, and quickly running out of money, Philip leaves the house for good. He meets Mildred once more, towards the end of the novel, when she summons him for his medical opinion. She is suffering symptoms of syphilis from her work as a prostitute. Philip advises Mildred to give up that life but she declines and exits the plot with her fate unknown.
While working at a hospital, Philip befriends a family man, Thorpe Athelny, who has lived in Toledo, Spain and is enthusiastically translating the works of St. John of the Cross. Philip invests in mines but is left nearly penniless because of events surrounding the Boer War. Unable to pay his rent, he wanders the streets for several days before the Athelnys take him in and find him a department store job, which he hates. His talent for drawing is discovered and he receives a promotion and a raise in salary, but his time at the store is short-lived.
After his uncle William dies, Philip inherits enough money to allow him to finish his medical studies and he finally becomes a licensed doctor. Philip is temporarily placed as locum with Dr. South, a general practitioner in Dorsetshire. Dr. South is an old, cantankerous physician whose wife is dead and whose daughter is estranged. However, Dr. South takes a shine to Philip's humour and personable nature, eventually offering Philip a partnership in his medical practice. Although flattered, Philip refuses because he plans to visit Spain.
He goes on a small summer holiday with the Athelnys, hop-picking in the Kent countryside. There he finds that one of Athelny's daughters, Sally, likes him. In a moment of romantic abandon one evening they have sex, and when she thinks she is pregnant, Philip decides to marry Sally and accept Dr. South's offer, instead of travelling the world as he had planned. They meet in the National Gallery where, though learning that it was a false alarm, Philip becomes engaged to Sally, concluding that "the simplest pattern – that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died – was likewise the most perfect". He stops the pursuit of happiness and decides to be content with his lot.
Title
Maugham's initial title was Beauty from Ashes, borrowed from Isaiah 61:3, "... to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair"; however, it had already been used.[3] He took the new title from Spinoza. Part IV of his Ethics is titled "Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions" (Latin: De servitute humana seu de affectuum viribus). A free person, says Spinoza, is able to think rationally: but when one is dominated by emotion, rational thought is impossible, and one becomes a slave to the (unthinking) passions. He also defines good and bad categories based on the people's general beliefs, connecting it to their “emotions of pleasure or pain”. He defines perfectness/imperfectness starting out from the desire, in its meaning of particular aims and plans. Philip Carey, the main character of Of Human Bondage, was seeking this very useful end, and became satisfied only after realizing what his aim had been, and having found a person to share this aim with.
Autobiographical features
Maugham had a stammer (instead of a club foot), lost his parents early in life, and was sent to live with his aunt and uncle. He studied medicine and his tastes in literature coincide with those of the main character in this book. Although Maugham was never an artist, he was interested in painting. He possessed in his private collection works by four painters mentioned in the book: Pissarro, Sisley, Monet, and Renoir. In The Summing Up, he discloses that he read Ruskin and became acquainted with many pieces of European art. Many of his other works are focused on this topic: The Moon and Sixpence (the main character has some resemblance to Paul Gauguin). Maugham wrote an article for Life magazine titled "Painting I Have Liked". Of Human Bondage is, probably, the most vivid instance of Maugham's inclination towards arts. According to Stanley Archer, more than 30 artists are named in the book, ten famous paintings are mentioned by name and many others are referred to. Over half of the 33 artists named in the novel were painters whose careers developed primarily in the 19th century. Of these, 13 are French, five English, and one, Whistler, is American. Eleven were alive at the time in which the plot of the novel is unfolding and five – Carolus-Duran, Degas, Monet, Raffaëlli, and Renoir – were alive when Of Human Bondage was published in 1915.[4]
The Moon and Sixpence 1919
 Cover of the first UK edition | |
| Author | William Somerset Maugham |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Biographical novel |
| Publisher | William Heinemann |
Publication date | 15 April 1919 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 263 pp |
| OCLC | 22207227 |
| 823.912 | |
| LC Class | PR6025.A86 M6 |
| Preceded by | Of Human Bondage |
| Followed by | The Painted Veil |
| Text | The Moon and Sixpence at Wikisource |
The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, first published on 15 April 1919. It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator providing 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.
Plot summary
The book is written largely from the point of view of the narrator, a young, aspiring writer and playwright in London. Certain chapters entirely comprise accounts of events by other characters, which the narrator recalls from memory, selectively editing or elaborating on certain aspects of dialogue, particularly Strickland's, because Strickland is said by the narrator to have a very poor ability to express himself in words. The narrator first develops an acquaintance with Strickland's wife at literary parties and later meets Strickland himself, who appears to be an unremarkable businessman with no interest in his wife's literary or artistic tastes.
Strickland is a well-off, middle-class stockbroker in London, sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. Early in the novel, he leaves his wife and children and goes to Paris. The narrator enters directly into the story at that point, when he is asked by Mrs Strickland to go to Paris and talk with her husband. He lives a destitute but defiantly content life there as a painter, lodging in run-down hotels and falling prey to both illness and hunger. Strickland, in his drive to express through his art what appears to continually possess and compel him on the inside, cares nothing for physical discomfort and is indifferent to his surroundings. He is helped and supported by a commercially successful but hackneyed Dutch painter, Dirk Stroeve, coincidentally, also an old friend of the narrator, who recognises Strickland's genius as a painter. After helping Strickland recover from a life-threatening illness, Stroeve is repaid by having his wife, Blanche, abandon him for Strickland. Strickland later discards the wife, because all he really wanted from Blanche was to be a model to paint, not serious companionship. It is hinted in the novel that he indicated that to her, but she took the risk anyway. Blanche then dies by suicide. She is another human casualty in Strickland's single-minded pursuit of art and beauty, the first casualties being his own established life, and those of his wife and children.
After the Paris episode, the story continues in Tahiti. Strickland has already died, and the narrator attempts to piece together his life there from recollections of others. He finds that Strickland had taken up with a native woman, had two children by her (one of whom died), and started painting prolifically. We learn that Strickland had settled for a short while in the French port of Marseilles before traveling to Tahiti, where he lived for a few years before dying of leprosy. Strickland left behind numerous paintings, but his magnum opus, which he painted on the walls of his hut before losing his sight to leprosy, was burnt by his wife after his death, as per his dying orders.
Inspiration
The life of the French artist Paul Gauguin is the inspiration for the story, but the character of Strickland as a solitary, sociopathic and destructive genius is more related to a mythological version of Gauguin's life, which the artist himself developed and promoted, than the actual course of his life. The real Gauguin was a participant in the artistic developments in France in the 1880s, exhibiting his work regularly with the Impressionists, and being a friend and collaborator with many artists. Gauguin did work as a stockbroker, did leave his wife and family to devote his life to art, and did leave Europe for Tahiti to pursue his career. However, none of that happened in the brutal way of the novel's character. Maugham took inspiration from the published writings about Gauguin available at the time, as well as personal experience living among the artistic community in Paris in 1904, and a visit to Tahiti in 1914.[1] Strickland is created as an extreme version of the "modern artist as 'genius'", who is indifferent and frequently hostile to the people around him.
Writing in 1953, Maugham described the idea for the book as arising during a year that he spent living in Paris in 1904: "...I met men who had known him and worked with him at Pont-Aven. I heard much about him. It occurred to me that there was in what I was told the subject of a novel". The idea remained in his mind for ten years, until a visit to Tahiti in 1914, where Maugham was able to meet people who had known Gauguin, inspired him to start writing.[1]
The critic Amy Dickson examines the relationship between Gauguin and Strickland. She contrasts the novel's description of Strickland, "his faults are accepted as the necessary complement of his merits... but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius", with Gauguin's description of himself: "I am an artist and you are right, you're not mad, I am a great artist and I know it. It's because I know it that I have endured such sufferings. To have done otherwise I would consider myself a brigand—which is what many people think I am." Dickson sums up the novel as follows: "Maugham was fascinated by the impact of the arrival of modernism from Europe on an insular British consciousness and the emergence of the cult of the modernist artist-genius—The Moon and Sixpence is at once a satire of Edwardian mores and a Gauguin biography."[2]
About the title
According to some sources, the title, the meaning of which is not explicitly revealed in the book, was taken from a review in The Times Literary Supplement 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."[3] 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."[2]
Adaptations
The book was made into a stage play in 1925 at the New Theatre, with Henry Ainley as Strickland and Eileen Sharp as Ata. A film of the same namedirected and written by Albert Lewin, was released in 1942, starring George Sanders as Charles Strickland.
The novel served as the basis for a 1957 opera, also titled The Moon and Sixpence, by John Gardner to a libretto by Patrick Terry which premiered at Sadlers Wells.[4]
S Lee Pogostin adapted it for American TV in 1959. That production, The Moon and Sixpence (1959), starred Laurence Olivier, with Hume Cronynand Jessica Tandy in supporting roles.
In popular culture
 |
Ray Noble's 1932 dance band hit "We've Got the Moon and Sixpence", sung by Al Bowlly, takes its name from the book.
The book was mentioned in Agatha Christie's 1942 mystery (Hercule Poirot series) novel Five Little Pigs, when Poirot asks one of the suspects (Angela Warren) if she read the book at the time the crime was committed. The victim in the case is a married artist infatuated with a younger woman he yearns to paint, and for whom he may or may not be about to abandon his wife.
It was mentioned in James Jones's 1951 novel From Here to Eternity, in a conversation between Sergeant Warden and Corporal Mazzioli.
Jack Kerouac mentions the book in his 1958 novella The Subterraneans.
In the opening scene of François Truffaut's 1966 film Fahrenheit 451, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel of the same name, several firemen are preparing books for burning. In the crowd of onlookers is a little boy who picks up one of the books and thumbs through it before his father takes it from him and throws it on the pile with the rest. That book is The Moon and Sixpence.
It is also mentioned frequently in Stephen King's 1998 novel Bag of Bones, and in passing in his 2015 novel Finders Keepers.
The Moon and Sixpence is central to the protagonist's solving the mystery in Howard Pease's 1934 novel The Ship Without a Crew.
The Hour Before the Dawn 1941-42
William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories. Maugham's novels after Liza of Lambeth include Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), The Painted Veil (1925), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor's Edge (1944). His short stories were published in collections such as The Casuarina Tree (1926) and The Mixture as Before (1940); many of them have been adapted for radio, cinema and television. His great popularity and prodigious sales provoked adverse reactions from highbrow critics, many of whom sought to belittle him as merely competent. More recent assessments generally rank Of Human Bondage − a book with a large autobiographical element − as a masterpiece, and his short stories are widely held in high critical regard. Maugham's plain prose style became known for its lucidity, but his reliance on clichés attracted adverse critical comment. During the First World War Maugham worked for the British Secret Service, later drawing on his experiences for stories published in the 1920s. Although primarily homosexual, he attempted to conform to some extent with the norms of his day. He became a father and husband, marrying Syrie Wellcome in 1917, three years into an affair that produced their daughter, Liza. The marriage lasted for twelve years, but before, during and after it, Maugham's principal partner was a younger man, Gerald Haxton. Together they made extended visits to Asia, the South Seas and other destinations; Maugham gathered material for his fiction wherever they went. They lived together in the French Riviera, where Maugham entertained lavishly. After Haxton's death in 1944, Alan Searle became Maugham's secretary-companion for the rest of the author's life. Maugham gave up writing novels shortly after the Second World War, and his last years were marred by senility.