Somerset Maugham: Lucidity Versus Cunning

30. SOMERSET MAUGHAM: LUCIDITY VERSUS CUNNING By Richard A. Cordell (Purdue University) It is not surprising that little serious critical work has been done on the writings of Somerset Maugham. The "New Critics" display little interest in, and occasional impatience with, conventional fiction and drama; as Theodore Spencer points out, many of them are far more impressed by experiment than by accomplishment. Maugham's frequent assertion that he has never pretended to be anything but a story writer, that the purpose of a story is to amuse an intelligent reader, that a polite regard for the reader precludes obscurity of any kind, his wry confession in 1956: "I am well aware that I have lost any talent I may have had. There was only one thing for me to do—to turn critic"—none of these views endear him to the New Critics and editors of grave, monitorial quarterlies. The "Old Critics," likewise, paid scant attention to him. In 1921 the excellent study by Chevalley, LE ROMAN ANGUIS DE NOTRE TEMPS, mentions LIZA OF LAMBETH, nothing more. Virginia Woolf's vigorous essays on fiction in the 1920's at least attacked Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy, but ignored Maugham, as did critical studies by Legouis and Cazamian, and A.C. Ward. They anticipated their successors in preferring the delving-in, the elaborate study of mental processes in Joyce and Woolf to Maugham's simpler method of showing character in action. Frank Swinnerton now asserts, however, that the metaphysical school of Eliot and the tortuous psychoanalytical school survive the destructive world war only as cults, and that intelligent, fatalistic moderns turn with relief to Maugham's lucidity, logic, and detachment. "At the age of eighty Mr. Maugham for the first time enjoys a popular admiration so great that critical admiration can not resist it." His hedonism, his distaste for life in the garret, his shrewd business sense, and his popularity have lowered him in the estimation of many—one might as well say most—serious critics to the bourgeois level of Bulwer-Lytton and Kathleen Norris. They are certain that no genuine artist can write for a popular audience, that he sold his birthright for a mess of Riviera and Daimler, that his idea of heaven would be Sidney Smith's—eating caviar to the sound of trumpets. Perhaps they forget that Pope, Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Shaw were shrewd and realistic in the matter of pounds and pence. Never in the long history of literary criticism has lucidity been so ignored, if not belittled, as a quality of good writing. Many critics seem to regard clarity and intelligibility as lack of subtlety and cunning. Maugham, who has never considered himself a genius, may have run across Anthony Hope's suggestion that unless one is a genius, it is best to aim at being intelligible. Whether subtle or not, Maugham is always conscious of the complexity of human behavior and of its unpredictability; and in his fiction and drama he does not oversimplify . But except for awareness of the vagaries of human conduct, his writings afford no puzzles, uncertainties, ambiguities; one looks in vain for allegory, myth, time-themes, labyrinthine motifs, dialectics, myriad perspectives, world of images, metaphor in the plot, and so on. He does not interest the "New Critic." Such a sound and respectable critic as Edmund Wilson dismisses him as a trashy novelist, a bad writer who appeals to frivolous readers; Morton Zabel 31. and Gerald Sykes dismiss him as utterly inconsequential. Most, but not all, scholarly critics, however, ignore him entirely, or content themselves with an occasional patronizing reference. A common attitude of a small group of intelligent , sharp critics toward Maugham is that of H.J. Müller, who all but cuts off the heads of Bennett, Galsworthy, and Maugham with a golden axe by lumping them together as "Realists of the Center." Although Müller maintains that most of Maugham's work is addressed to a fashionably smart audience (if so, there are more smart people in this dowdy world than one had suspected), "OF HUMAN BONDAGE is a wholly earnest and important novel...in some ways superior to THE WAY OF ALL FLESH." Readers and critics...