After Reading | The Moon and Sixpence

The Moon and Sixpence.

W. Somerset Maugham took this as his title, yet never once so much as mentions either of the two. Instead, he sets about unhurriedly telling us of a friend of "his."

1

Rare in this world is the person who casts reality aside for the sake of an ideal — and Charles Strickland is exactly such a person. Past forty, he gave up his job at the stock brokerage, abandoned the wife who had been at his side for seventeen years and their two lovely children, and left London for Paris with barely a hundred pounds on him, leaving behind a telegram of fewer than a hundred words to inform his wife of his departure. Because he had fallen in love with painting. "I have to paint," he said.

In a dingy Paris apartment he began a life kept company by destitution; after years of hard drifting, he washed up at last in Tahiti. Through all those long years spent with oils and brushes, no one could appreciate his work — and he needed no one's praise or criticism. He never again ate a refined meal; all he asked of food was that it be cheap and fill his stomach. He needed no friends and wanted no companion. He was cold, and between the lines you can constantly feel the arrogance carved into his bones. He cared about nothing. He only wanted to paint, immersed in his own boundless hunger to create. Even if no one appreciated the work, so long as he could feel the thrill that rose in the act of creating, that was the finest reward he could ask. There is more than a little of the old verse in him: "Others laugh that I am mad; I laugh that they cannot see."

Later the world would call him a great painter, and his paintings went from worthless to priceless — so much so that even Mrs. Strickland, who had long hated him to the marrow, hung in her home a few color reproductions, gifts from a printer, of Strickland's finest works.

What the world never knew was this: after he contracted leprosy — a disease whose very name struck terror in those days — at the very end of his life, on the walls of a hut sealed off from the world, he created his crowning masterpiece. And then, on his deathbed instructions, it was burned clean away by Ata's own hands, down to ashes. Strickland perhaps understood that this final work was a great masterpiece; he had already gotten the thing he wished for. "His life was complete. He had made a world and saw that it was good. Then, in pride and contempt, he destroyed it." Seen in this light, "not worth telling to those outside" describes exactly this state of mind — the amused mockery of someone looking down from a great height.

I don't like the protagonist of this story one bit. He is utterly selfish and heedless of what anyone else feels. Whether it was Stroeve, who came warmly to his aid when his life hung by a thread, or Blanche, who later gave herself over to him, from beginning to end he treated them with the most vile, callous indifference. He speaks to everyone in a tone of mockery. Of his former wife in London he says bluntly that he "doesn't love her at all," that "what they say about me is their affair"... The restraints of morality and public opinion are things external to his soul; he does not care about them in the slightest.

And yet this man of "rotten-through" character fascinates me deeply all the same — draws me into the accounts of him told by the "normal people" of the book. Maugham writes in it that our distaste for certain conduct is nowhere near as strong as our curiosity about the reasons behind it — and I could not agree more.

Repelled as I am, I respect people of this kind. To fill his own soul, to win satisfaction of the spirit — what did bodily suffering matter to him? What did the world's judgment have to do with him? Even had he turned out to be no genius at all, I would respect him still.

2

There is also, in this book, a kindly wretch through and through — Stroeve. His own paintings were comparatively clumsy, but his gift for appreciating art was of the highest order.

He was one of the very few able to appreciate Strickland's painting. Back in Paris, already, he was declaring the man a genius; no one believed him, and Strickland himself paid his praise no mind whatsoever. Even under Strickland's insults and abuses, one after another, in the end he always forgave — perhaps he considered such things simply the accessories of genius.

Later, Strickland stole the heart of his beloved wife, Blanche. So that Blanche would not suffer, Stroeve — wrestling down his own heart — left his studio and lodgings to the two of them and went to find rooms elsewhere. In the end, Strickland left Blanche anyway. Poor Stroeve then had a still greater wound to bear: Blanche, for love, took oxalic acid to end her life, and even as she lay dying refused to see, one last time, the husband keeping watch outside her hospital room.

He must truly have hated Strickland, I think. When he returned to his studio and saw the painting Strickland had left there, in his agony he snatched up a palette knife to stab it to ruin. But he stopped. He found he was simply incapable of destroying a work that held, in his eyes, infinite worth. And even carrying all that pain and resentment, he still invited Strickland to come home with him to Holland, to paint together — an invitation that was, of course, refused.

Stroeve is pitiable, yes, and laughable — but that kindness of his, that reverence before what is beautiful, is a rare thing to find these days.

3

The book's treatment of love (though honestly I'm not sure it should be called love) is comparatively light of ink, serving mainly to shape the protagonist. One can see a certain degree of male chauvinism in the author, though I imagine that can hardly be separated from the influence of his era.

In the novel, as Strickland sees it, where his pursuit is concerned, "women are no help at all; they only draw a circle on the ground for a prison, hoping to trap you at their side and stand between you and your ideal." And so, against Mrs. Strickland's desperate pleading, he stayed resolutely in Paris; amid Blanche's attentions and offered devotion, he walked away from her. Only at the end, in Tahiti with Ata, did he pass a comparatively happy stretch of time — presumably because Ata could coexist with his ideal, and never tried to bind it.

From the book's vantage, when the fire of an ideal catches on a man, a woman feels the dread of losing him. When Mrs. Strickland discovered that her husband had left her not for a woman but for painting, all the tolerance and magnanimity she had shown until then went up in smoke, turning to rage and bitter resentment. The original passage puts it more plainly:

"'Do you see what I mean?' she cried. 'I'm not sure. You mean that you could have forgiven him if he'd left you for a woman, but not if he's left you for an ideal? You think you're a match for the one, but against the other you're helpless — is that it?' Mrs. Strickland shot me a fierce glare and said nothing. Perhaps I had struck home."

I can't claim to really understand the people of that era, but I can feel how heavily the women of the time weighed reputation and material comfort — to the point of turning a blind eye to a husband's ideal. Living in the present day, when people's thinking has come a long way since then — when male chauvinism no longer fills every street, and there are so many more women who can understand a man's ideals, or whose own ideals yield nothing to any man's — we are probably the lucky ones.

4

As for "I" — "I" is a writer, who stumbled by sheer chance into Strickland's life and then, as a bystander, came to know the man in fits and starts.

The first half of the novel draws Strickland from what "I" saw at first hand; the second half, from what "I" heard from others; the two halves knead together into the protagonist's life. What interests me is the technique of that second half. This "I have a friend, and my friend has a friend" way of writing a novel strikes me as delightful indeed, and worth savoring. To come to know one and the same person through the mouths of people of different histories and different temperaments — you see all of his boundless contradictions, and perhaps come to know him the more completely for it.

Not having read the original, I don't dare pass judgment on the prose itself. Speaking only from the translation: the language truly has few ornate flourishes, but it flows, the descriptions land precisely, and it is vivid throughout — slipping in, when you least expect it, the narrator's own view of the things he describes, in ways that make your eyes light up. The calm, steady register makes you feel an old friend is sitting with you, talking about another old friend of his.

5

One is the moon, high overhead; the other, a sixpence you wouldn't spare a second glance if it dropped at your feet. Maugham never explained his title. Some read it as the untouchable dream against the reality that keeps you company morning and night; others read it as the soul against the flesh. I think both readings are reasonable enough.

And that's about all, I suppose.