The Moon and Sixpence - Softcover

Maugham, W. Somerset

4.13

24,231 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1544030223 ISBN 13: 9781544030227

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017

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The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham. Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes sacrifices that leaves the lives of those closest to him in tatters. Through Maugham's sympathetic eye Strickland's tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in humans lives it sometimes demands. 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.

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Review:

"[A] witty, compelling roman a clef...that mock[s] the way the world makes saints of the sinners who are often its best artists."- The Boston Globe
"It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham.... He was always so entirely there."-Gore Vidal"

About the Author:

William Somerset Maugham CH ; 25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was a British playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was among the most popular writers of his era and reputedly the highest paid author during the 1930s. After losing both his parents by the age of 10, Maugham was raised by a paternal uncle who was emotionally cold. Not wanting to become a lawyer like other men in his family, Maugham eventually trained and qualified as a doctor. The first run of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), sold out so rapidly that Maugham gave up medicine to write full time. During the First World War, he served with the Red Cross and in the ambulance corps, before being recruited in 1916 into the British Secret Intelligence Service, for which he worked in Switzerland and Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During and after the war, he traveled in India and Southeast Asia; all of these experiences were reflected in later short stories and novels.

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