Harriet Devine's Blog

The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham

As I've said before, I completely missed the advance announcement of Simon and Kaggsy's 1944 Club. I caught up with it eventually and decided to read this 1944 novel by Somerset Maugham, but the copy I ordered didn't arrive in time (one of the disadvantages of living in France) so this is the review I should have written a week or more ago. I've read and enjoyed a handful of Maugham's novels, though I don't think I've written about them on here, so I was very much looking forward to this one, and it didn't disappoint. 

It's a fascinating and most unusual novel. The action actually begins in the 1920s, as the Vintage cover shows. Here's how the first chapter starts:

I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. If I call it a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it. I have a little story to tell and I end neither with a death or a marriage....But I leave my reader in the air.

As this opening indicates, Maugham (or maybe that should be 'Maugham') appears as a narrator/character in the book, telling the story of a circle of people with whom he becomes involved in Chicago and later in Europe. He's introduced to them by his long term friend Elliott Templeton, an expat American art dealer who is visiting from Paris. Elliott is a terrible snob but has a good heart. The people he wants Maugham to meet are his sister, recently widowed, and his niece Isabel. Maugham goes to the meeting and takes a particular interest in Isabel, a tall, slightly plump but undeniably attractive girl: 'Her radiant health, her playful gaiety, her enjoyment of life, the happiness you felt in her were exhilarating'. She has brought Larry Darrell, a pleasant looking young man who says very little but gives a feeling none the less of being completely at ease. The two are engaged, but can only marry if Larry gets a job, something he is very disinclined to do. He says he just wants to 'loaf', but can generally be seen in the library completely absorbed in reading for hours at a stretch.

Time passes and Maugham meets the three main protagonists in Paris. Larry has been living in a cheap flat and spending his time reading - Elliott has dropped him in disgust. Isabel and Larry are still engaged, but he is still committed to 'loafing' and asks her to go with him to Greece - they can live comfortably on his income of $3000. She refuses - she wants a conventional life with plenty of money, and breaks the engagement. Their conflict highlights what is really the main issue of the novel. Isabel's arguments are all about what she sees as the American way:

A man. must work, Larry. It's a matter of self respect. This is a young country and it's a man's duty to take part in its activities.....by 1930 we shall be the richest and greatest country in the world. Don't you think that's terribly exciting?

But Larry has other views. Deeply affected by the death of a close friend in the war, he is determined to find a real meaning in life, and working to become rich does not seem to him to be relevant in any way.

Isabel marries her long-time admirer, a young millionaire businessman, and Larry sets off for a life of wandering. Initially he is in Europe, but a man he meets in Poland persuades him that what he is really seeking is a more spiritual life. As a result Larry goes to India, where he has very significant experiences, though Maugham doesn't reveal exactly what happens to him there until almost the end of the novel. It's clear that it was some kind of profound spiritual development as Larry now carries with him a strikingly deep sense of calm, and has the ability to heal people - or rather, as he says, to show them how to heal themselves.

The Razor's Edge is quite a long novel and many developments happen in the plot, which spans more than twenty years. Isobel's rich husband loses everything in the crash of 1929 and the family becomes dependent on Elloitt, whose investments were wisely protected. Sophie, a childhood friend of Larry and Isabel, suffers a terrible tragedy and goes to the bad, eventually meeting a tragic end. Elliott grows old and dies, deserted by the celebrity friends he has cultivated all his life. And Larry eventually returns to America to live a simple hardworking life far from the elevated social circle he began in. 

Almost at the end of the novel, Maugham reveals what took place in his long conversation with Larry about his experiences in India. He had met a famous guru (referred to here as Sri Ganesh, but based on Ramana Maharishi) who teaches him to meditate. Larry has a powerful experience on a solitary mountain retreat and gains the desired state of enlightement, after which his teacher tells him to go back to the West and make use of his newly acquired knowledge.

This seems to me a most remarkable development for a novel written in 1944. I don't know anything about Maugham's own life and beliefs but presumably he had read about or otherwise heard about such things, as he is able to write about them in lengthy and quite accurate detail, and without a shred of doubt or cynicism. Indeed the whole novel seems at its heart to be contrasting the transitory pains and pleasures, ups and downs of a life without any foundation in self-knowledge with the peace and contentment that Larry quietly carries with him.

So hooray, rather belatedly, for the 1944 Club, without which I might never have encountered this remarkable novel.

 

 

Woman Reading

This is The Beach at Normandy by the Canadian artist Paul Peel (1860-1892). He lived in France for most of his short life and had a French wife.

I live in Normandy but don't go to the beach as often as I might. She's come particularly well equipped with her chair, cushions and umbrella - though I would think she'd be terribly hot in all those clothes. I don't think the Victorians stripped off at all, even on really hot days. 

Transcription review on Shiny

I do love a good spy story, and this is a very good spy story. Kate Atkinson's last two novels. Life After Life and A God in Ruins were both set during and after WW2 and this one is too. The protagonist here is Juliet Armstrong, aged 18, who has been recruited to transcribe secret conversations between MI5 operative Godfrey Toby, who is posing as a Gestapo agent, and a small group of Fifth Columnists who believe he will pass on whatever secret information they can gather to the Nazis. Soon however she's chosen for a new and more challenging job: she will be assuming a fake identity to infiltrate the social circle of a wealthy widow, Mrs Scaithe, who hosts tea parties for the purpose of discussing with her friends their mutual hatred of the Jews. 

There's a huge amount to enjoy here - the period detail is superb and Juliet is a fascinating character. You can read my full review on Shiny here.

The Lady and the Unicorn by Rumer Godden

I'm a great admirer of Rumer Godden, but I've read only a handful of what wikipedia tells me are her 60 books. Only about 25 of this are novels, some of them are non-fiction and a large proportion were written for children. This was only her second novel, published in 1937, and it contains an element that I haven't encountered in any of the others I've read - a sort of breath of the supernatural.

Godden was born in England but raised in India where her father worked for a shipping company, and she continued to live there for many years as an adult. Unsurprisingly a number of her novels are set there, including this one. The Lady and the Unicorn  takes place in Calcutta, where the Lemarchant family live in one wing of a an ancient crumbling mansion. They are what was known at the time as Eurasians - today I think we'd say Anglo-Indians. Descended from unions between Indians and white settlers, they are looked down on as half-castes by both the pure bred Indians and by the whites. The family consists of Father, who seems to spend most of his time lying on the sofa, and Auntie, who holds the family together, shopping, cooking, washing, and generally trying to control the children. There are three of them, all girls. The oldest is Belle, aged about eighteen. Glamorous and confident, Belle is determined to have a better life, and in pursuit of that is prepared to become the mistress of a much older man who treats her badly. However her determination is undimmed, and the last we see of her she has found a new protector who has promised to take her to America and get her into the movies. We're led to believe that it's not impossible that this may succeed, as indeed it is - think Merle Oberon or indeed Cliff Richard, both Anglo Indians by birth.

The second daughter, a year younger, is Rosa, whose story this really is. She's not as flashy as her older sister but has a quiet beauty - pale skin, black hair and dark eyes. She's shy and retiring, has an innocent but close relationship with Robert DeSouza, a handsome boy whose family live in the same building. Then there's the youngest girl, Blanche, who is thirteen and the only family member to have dark skin, of which some family members are ashamed.  Rosa herself is ashamed of Belle's flaunting of her sexuality and anxious about her ambitions and the way she seems to let nothing stand in the way of her achieving them. Belle thinks Rosa could do better for herself and persuades her to borrow a dress and go to a party. Here she meets Stephen Bright, a young Englishman newly arrived in Calcutta. It's been described to him as a 'B party'

What's a B Party?

A and B. B girls.

Oh I see. What happens?

Usual thing. They behave well and we behave very badly, and then they behave worse.

Stephen falls head over heels for Rosa - he's fascinated by her beauty and also by the ancient house where she lives - together they explore the garden and find a crumbling old sundial, obviously imported from England, and learn something about the family who once owned the house, seemingly Rosa's ancestors. Rosa actually sometimes seems to glimpse these long gone people - a weeping girl, a little dog, a grand carriage of party goers, though Stephen can't see them. He raises with her the question of her identity:

You insist on being inferior Britons.

That's not fair....We're as much British subjects as you are.

It's all so false. You're no more like a British girl than a poinsettia is like a daisy. You talk of going home to England, when the only home you have is here in India. It's such a sham. Why can't you be more content, more dignified?

This really highlights what Godden was aiming at in this story - to show the great unfairness she perceived in the treatment of these families, living in between two civilisations but shut out of both. Although Stephen adores Rosa and starts by promising her marriage, in the end their cultural differences get in the way and she is left devastated. Whatever Bella's future may be, it's clear that Rosa is going to live out her life in the same kind of environment as she was brought up in. 

This is quite a dark novel, apparently suggested to Godden by an Anglo Indian family who lived nearby when she was growing up - the Godden children were forbidden to play with them for fear of contracting their 'chi-chi' accents. It's tremendously evocative of India in general -

Through the door in the front gate the people could be seen passing by on the pavement; a man carrying bassinets on a pole, and two Sikh women who hold their veils across their noses, and one of them had a birdcage with a cover of magenta gauze with tassels; a chinaman in grey cotton selling embroidered linen, a widow in dirty white on her way to the street tap, and three coolies carrying baskets of marigold garlands on their heads.

and Calcutta in particular - I was there about ten years ago and was fascinated by the many crumbling mansions and by the Park Street Cemetery, which Rosa and Stephen visit, marvelling at the 19th century tombs of long dead, mostly painfully young English colonists. My Virago edition has an interesting introduction to Godden and to the novel. Well worth reading.

Woman with Book

This one's by one of my favourite artists, Henri Matisse (1859-1954), who needs no introduction, I hope.

1944 Club: The Shrimp and the Anemone

I somehow managed to miss the announcement of Simon and Kaggsy's 1944 Club - I've actually ordered a book but I suspect it won't arrive in time for a review this week. However I found something in the archives - a book I'd enjoyed tremendously - so here's my review, first published eight years ago.

I'm guessing that L P Hartley is not exactly a name to conjure with these days. If you've been around long enough you might have seen the 1970 film of his most famous novel, The Go-Between ("The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there"), or indeed read the novel itself. Beautiful, romantic, and ultimately tragic, that novel is celebrated for its portrayal of childhood innocence betrayed by a pair of socially ill-matched lovers.

Here we have another take on early 20th-century childhood, though written in the early 1940s.The protagonist, from whose perspective the story is told, is Eustace, aged just nine when the novel begins. Gentle, sensitive, imaginative, Eustace lives much of his life in a dream world, from which he often has to be dragged unwillingly by his older sister Hilda. Their mother having died a few years earlier, Hilda has taken it upon herself to bring Eustace up according to her own strict and puritanical standards. Generally speaking Eustace is willing to comply -- his occasional inner rebellion against her educational policies is usually tempered by his own sense of guilt and unworthiness. In fact the only time he does really rebel, going off on a long cross-country run with lively, pretty Nancy Steptoe, ends in disaster as he has a weak heart and becomes seriously ill as a result. In retribution he has to obey Hilda's demand that he go and have tea with an old lady, Miss Fothergill, of whom he is terrified on account of her appearance and her inability to walk. Once he does overcome his fear, though, he takes great pleasure in his visits to her house, and after her death he gets a legacy which changes his entire future.

This is a beautifully written novel, fascinating in its depiction of these two children. We see Hilda only through the eyes of Eustace, who adores and fears her, but her motives are clearer to the reader. This is particularly true of her unwillingness to accept the frequent invitations she gets from wealthy, privileged Dick Staveley, who has noticed her beauty and tries to persuade her to go to tea or to go riding with him. Eustace thinks Hilda dislikes Dick and hates horses, but in fact the opposite seems to be true, and her refusal is probably owing to her puritanism and to an instinctive feeling that any relationship with Dick will turn out badly for her.

But it is Eustace whose inner life is most clearly seen and this is most wonderfully and perceptively done. I was a little bit reminded at times of William Maxwell's great novel, They Came Like Swallows, another book about a sensitive small boy. Hartley went on to write two more novels about these two, ending up with a trilogy which now often appears as one book under the title Eustace and Hilda. 

Woman with Book

Princess Mafalda of Savoy by Leonard Campbell Taylor (1874 – 1969) a British painter, mainly of portraits and interiors in a traditional style.

Princess Mafalda of Savoy was married to Queen Victoria’s great grandson and was the daughter of the Italian King Victor Emmanuel III. During WW II, Hitler believed she was working against the war effort; he called her the “blackest carrion in the Italian royal house.” She was imprisoned and died at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Woman who has been Reading

The newspaper is on the floor, the breakfast is on the table. This is A Helensburgh Breakfast by Annie Rose Laing (British painter) 1869 - 1946

Annie Rose Low was born in Glasgow where she spent most of her life and where she exhibited her first picture in 1894, A Garden, Largo. She travelled to Algeria in 1895 and exhibited a number of the scenes painted there at the Glasgow Institute exhibition in the following year. Upon her return to Glasgow, she began to paint the sophisticated portraits and interiors for which she gained her reputation as an artist and she continued to exhibit in the city for the following three decades. In 1898 she married the Aberdeen painter James Garden Laing.

Time's Convert - Shiny review

If you'd told me ten years ago that I'd become a fan of stories featuring vampires and witches, I probably wouldn't have believed it. But here I am four books in to Deborah Harkness's fat and juicy volumes still enjoying myself tremendously. Here's a link to my review on Shiny of this latest delightful and sometimes rather informative romp. I can't believe many people reading this will be unaware of the adventures of gorgeous, centuries-old, vampire Matthew Clermont and his delightful witch wife Diana Bishop, but if you are, take it from me, there's a lot of fun to be had here, and some apparently solid historical research too.

Of course if you've got Sky you may already have been watching A Discovery of Witches, the dramatisation of the first volume of the All Souls Trilogy (this new one is a sort of offshoot, though the same characters appear). I haven't got Sky otherwise I'd be watching it. 

Briefly, Time's Convert centres on a young (well, actually 2oo year old) vampire named Marcus, who has fallen in love with a 'warmblood', beautiful Phoebe, who has undertaken to be transformed into a vampire. A long period of separation is necessary, and to keep Marcus from going crazy his stepmother Diana encourages him to tell her the story of his life, which spans two revolutions, American and French, and takes in lots of exciting adventures on the way. Just the thing for those long autumn evenings, with Halloween on the horizon.