On the cusp of modernity, a search for meaning

Novelist W. Somerset Maugham is the missing link of English literature, a bridge between the Victorian and Modern eras. Born in 1874, he published his first novel, “Liza of Lambeth,” in the last years of the 19th century, and his most iconic writings, like the 1915 novel “Of Human Bondage,” have more in common with, say, Thomas Hardy than with such contemporaries as D.H. Lawrence or James Joyce.

At the same time, Maugham couldn’t help but flirt with the anxieties of modernity -- particularly those straddling the divide between bohemianism and the middle class. In “The Moon and Sixpence,” he appropriates the story of Paul Gauguin, writing about a British stockbroker who deserts his family and becomes an Impressionist painter in the South Seas, whereas “Cakes and Ale” offers a biting sendup of London literary life. These are very much 20th century novels, marked by themes of individual fulfillment and the quest for meaning. Yet there’s also something formal about them as if they’d been written by someone from another age.

Of all Maugham’s 15 novels, perhaps none embodies these contradictions as profoundly as “The Razor’s Edge.” Originally published in 1944, and newly reissued in paperback, it is a book that moves with a fluid grace from the most downtrodden fringes of bohemia to the heights of continental society.

The story of Larry Darrell, a young American war veteran who, in the 1920s and early 1930s, travels through Europe and India looking for the key to spiritual enlightenment, “The Razor’s Edge” takes on an array of situations and personalities, deftly balancing the complexities of its characters’ lives. There’s Elliott, the American socialite consumed with the European upper classes, who even on his deathbed cannot see the frippery of his existence. There’s Isabel, Elliott’s niece and Larry’s onetime fiancee, who marries for comfort only to end up mired in understated regret. There’s Gray Maturin, Isabel’s husband, a Chicago trader ruined in the 1929 crash, the essence of the hail fellow well met.

And then, of course, there is Maugham himself, who appears in this novel under his own name, a device that allows him to break the fictional fourth wall as it suits him, weaving commentary into the narrative without it ever seeming unnatural or false. When, for instance, Maugham and Larry spend a long evening in a Paris bistro discussing the vagaries of Eastern theosophy, the author’s occasional asides and interpretations keep the scene from devolving into theory or rehash. “I must interrupt myself,” Maugham writes, “to make it plain that I am not attempting here to give anything in the nature of a description of the philosophical system known as Vedanta. I have not the knowledge to do so, but even if I had this would not be the proper place for it. Our conversation was a long one and Larry told me a great deal more than I have felt it possible to set down in what after all purports to be a novel. My concern is with Larry.”

The authorial presence here is compelling on a couple of levels -- as a stylistic arrangement and because of what it suggests about Maugham. Certainly, it highlights the split in the author’s literary personality, exposing both his modernist sensibilities and his more traditional aesthetic heritage. “This book,” he explains, “consists of my recollections of a man with whom I was thrown into close contact only at long intervals, and I have little knowledge of what happened to him in between. I suppose that by the exercise of invention I could fill the gaps plausibly enough and so make my narrative more coherent; but I have no wish to do that. I only want to set down what I know of my own knowledge.”

Such distance makes for an air of reflection, of time recollected, in the way of a story repeated around a dinner table, or in one of the drawing rooms where many of Maugham’s scenes unfold. At the same time, it gives the book a conditional aspect, as if Maugham were not sure, exactly, the form his narrative should take. “I have never begun a novel with more misgiving,” he declares from the outset. “If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it. I have little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage.” Yet if, in recent years, such conditionality has become a common postmodern tactic, here it is less self-conscious, infusing “The Razor’s Edge” with an understated, offhand quality that disarms us even as it draws us in.

All this works because of the book’s central theme, which is enlightenment or, more accurately, the tension between spiritual and material pursuits. It’s a tension, notes Jeffrey Meyers in “Somerset Maugham: A Life,” that to a large extent defined the author’s history as well. Maugham, Meyers suggests, was a divided soul, “a lifelong exile and wanderer,” ashamed of his propensity to stutter and profoundly conflicted over his attraction to men. He kept his distance from all but a few intimates and had a reputation for being icy and aloof. According to Meyers, this interior division began to emerge as early as the age of 10, when, following the deaths of his parents, Maugham -- who had until then lived in France -- was brought to his uncle’s vicarage in England. His dislocation only deepened as he trained in medicine even while composing his early novels, an experience that left him suspended between the conventional world and bohemia, like many of the characters he would later evoke.

“Somerset Maugham” is largely a litany of facts set down in uninflected prose. Still, in his dogged way, Meyers reveals the impact of Maugham’s sensibility on “The Razor’s Edge.” “Many modern writers ... had plunged into the mists of the supernatural, the paranormal and the crankish, and by doing so had damaged their reputations,” he writes. “Maugham, by contrast, had concluded that ‘life has no meaning’ and treated Ignatius Loyola’s mysticism with detached amusement. He’d criticized Huxley and Isherwood’s infatuation with Vedanta and mocked ‘the swamis swarming in America.’ He called Indian mysticism ‘an impressive fantasy’ and couldn’t give a credible account of his hero’s conversion.” Of course, though Meyer means this as a critique of the novel, more apropos than this is Cyril Connolly’s assessment that Maugham is “the worldliest of our novelists, and yet fascinated by those who renounce the world.”

What Meyers misses is how, in stepping back from his material, Maugham expands his focus, portraying Larry and the enlightenment he seeks as equally elusive. That’s a strategy J.D. Salinger would later use in his Glass family saga, the idea that one evokes a seer only by indirection, by keeping him at the periphery. Like Seymour Glass, Larry is most important for the sway he has over his fellow characters. In fact, as the book develops, it becomes less a story of one man’s spiritual passage than a passion play in which Larry’s self-examination is balanced by the desires of Gray, Isabel and Elliott.

It is here that “The Razor’s Edge” is at its most traditional, its least distanced, that the author’s filter is at its thinnest. But it is here, too, that Maugham stares down the quintessential stress lines of modernity, its breakdown between obligation and desire. Yes, Maugham plays with form in these pages; he even, by including himself, plays with the line between fiction and fact. But ultimately he means to tell us that tradition and innovation both have their uses when it comes to art. Or, as he reflects late in the novel, while recalling a Racine play: “I had admired the way in which the actors had contrived to be human, passionate, and true within the limitations that confined them. Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.” *