Yellowing Pages #1

As someone who slaved away many years in corporate America while yearning to write for a living, W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence stood out for me as a symbolic work, representing the life I wanted and knew I would eventually lead; in a more practical way, I held it up as a primer on how to achieve the writer’s life. This is despite the fact that I hadn’t, at that point, even read the book.

But who hadn’t heard basis of Maugham’s book: the life of the painter Paul Gauguin, who abandoned his job to live a life dedicated to art, going so far as to move to Tahiti to get away from a European culture he thought artificial and conventional. Who is there amongst us that came to appreciate our artistic inclinations later in life that hasn’t thought of Gauguin with a feeling of hope and inspiration, a clarion call for life’s second act?

Well I did, and it was with great anticipation that I finally read The Moon and Sixpence after being laid off and thrown headfirst into the writing life that I told myself I wanted so badly. I needed to read The Moon and Sixpence to teach me to swim. And after finally reading it, I can say that this novel has taught me a few strokes, just not the ones I imagined.

The Gauguin of The Moon and Sixpence is Charles Strickland, a fortyish investment banker who leaves his comfortable job, cruelly abandoning his wife and two children in London to be a painter. He moves to Paris where he believes a more authentic existence is possible, living in squalor but still behaving callously, only now to another painter, Dirk Stroeve. Dirk is Strickland’s opposite in every way: he is kind and considerate and a terrible painter. But Dirk is also the only person who spots Strickland’s talent, and, because of this keen eye, ceaselessly assists Strickland’s career by giving him money and singing his praises throughout the painting community. Despite this, Strickland looks on Stroeve with hatred, lashing him with verbal barbs whenever he can. He takes Stroeve’s money with anger, has no intention of paying it back, and, if that is not enough, eventually steals Stroeve’s wife, Blanche; dropping her once he’s finished with her, precipitating her suicide. Strickland eventually ends up in Tahiti through Marseilles, and, finding the paternalistic social construct of the island to his liking, settles down with another wife and child. He eventually dies of leprosy after painting his magnum opus on the walls of his hut, which is duly burnt down on his dying instructions by his wife. It is only after his death that Strickland’s work is appreciated.

Such is the life inspired by Gauguin as outlined by Maugham. Was this the character I wanted to serve as my role model?

Maugham isn’t concerned here with telling Gauguin’s life, of which he only knew a rough outline anyway (and whether or not Gauguin’s real life was an inspirational thing itself is a very subjective enterprise anyway when you look at the details) as he is in exploring the nature of someone who could be driven to leave the comfort of society by an obsession to create art. This is not an inspirational story, but a character study.

Strickland is a sociopath. He cares for no one or nothing other than painting, including, it seems, his own physical well-being. He lives with hunger and illness to achieve this end, which is painting what he sees around him. He despises anyone who tries to help him out of kindness, thinking them part of the false life he left behind. (He accepts a meal from the narrator only after the narrator makes clear he doesn’t care about Strickland one bit, and is only inviting him for his own entertainment.) All of these conventions that humans live with - charity, earning money to live, responsibility for anyone other than themselves - he sees as impediments to his goal of creating ‘true’ art.

But this theory that humans can truly live alone, outside social constructs, reveals its flaws in Strickland's relationship with Blanche and the resulting suicide. Strickland is directly responsible for the woman's collapse, though he feels no responsibility for it. He tells the narrator: "I told her that when I'd had enough of her she'd have to go, and she said she'd risk that." Maugham has created something akin to a monster to show us the detachment required to live the artistic life. This is not a study in inspiration, but madness.

The inspiration here is in the writing.

The Moon and Sixpence has no proper plot, but is a gripping psychological work. Maugham uses a writer/narrator (with a bio suspiciously similar to Maugham’s, something he is known for in most of his work and readily admitted to) who tells us he’s writing a posthumous character study of the now famous artist. The narrator had originally met Strickland through Strickland’s wife, who, unaware of the creative spark lying latent in her husband, sought the friendship of artists. When Strickland flees to Paris, it is this narrator that Strickland’s wife sent to Paris to convince him to return. The narrator failed, but comes across Strickland again five years later when he moves to Paris himself. Thus the narrator is an interested party, someone who can give us a firsthand account in the dissection of a genius.

And Maugham’s use of this narrator is precisely that: genius. It adds a deep contrast underlying all the other conflicts and tensions in the work. Like us, the narrator is at times conflicted about Strickland. He is disgusted by the man but can’t pull himself away, just as we can’t stop reading, because of his interest in the creation of art. He’s intrigued as we are in the mind of a true artist living outside the bounds of society, something the narrator knows he himself doesn’t have the courage for. The narrator mentions more than once that Strickland is an artist who creates his own path while we know the narrator is one who follows the path of others in his own artistic endeavor. Maugham nicely underscores this in a bit in which the narrator tells us how he would write a novel of Strickland’s life. In his conventional and sterile take, we see his failure to be the genius Strickland is and we know the narrator craves to be.

As one considers this novel, it becomes clear it’s not Gauguin’s biography that is most instructive in understanding the work, but Maugham’s. Though one of the most famous writers in the first half of the twentieth century with a still-growing fan base, Maugham’s critical recognition pales in comparison to other writers of the era such as Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf. This is because, while his contemporaries were experimenting and creating their own paths, Maugham was all business, writing meticulously and prodigiously but without any frills. Edmund Wilson called Maugham’s simple prose style “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." Maugham wrote great stories in a plain style. This brought him popularity among the masses, but also put him closer in artistic realm to the novel’s narrator than Strickland.

Yet, to the question the novel asks us - do we shoot for the artistic moon and ignore (or, as Strickland does, stomp upon) the sixpence of relationships and life’s little pleasures at our feet?- Maugham seems to be leaning towards the moon.

First, he favorably contrasts Strickland as an artist - the London banker who leaves the social compact so far as to become almost a wild beast, but creates transcendent art - against the narrator - a popular but common writer well-connected in society following the trails of others rather than blazing them himself. He also portrays London’s social scene as stuffy and creatively dead. Its inability to understand Strickland’s art (his wife goes so far as to call his paintings ‘decorative art’ even after his genius has been acknowledged) is a humorous and not too subtle dig at the society of his time. In his own life at the time he wrote the book, we see Maugham eschewing many of the bonds that tie. Even a cursory look at his work suggests he thought the presence of a woman a burden in a man’s life. And he also traveled constantly. (His homosexuality probably played a role in his portrayal of women. And he probably traveled constantly to avoid his wife.) He seems afraid to settle down, afraid to turn out like the London Strickland. Yet when he quite consciously wrote plainly, he seemed to know he was following a path already laid for him.

So, The Moon and Sixpence is inspirational, just not in the way I imagined. It doesn’t tell me how to push a conventional life aside to create art. (In fact, it makes me NOT want to push life aside; it makes me appreciate the sixpence) But it does show me how to write a great and enduring novel. Write a good story well. Have intriguing characters. And ask questions with no easy answers.

Whichever side you come out on with this particular question, The Moon and Sixpence is worth reading more than once just to make sure. And if you’re in a profession you don’t love but feel the fire to create, read it before you quit your job, leave your family and move to Paris.