I share things I’ve enjoyed on Sundays, and I publish an essay, story, or book review (no significant spoilers) on Wednesdays. This is a book review.
I am unsure if any human experience can be perfectly described through language. Certainly this is true for esoteric mystical states—such as those the Buddha attempts to describe through his many negations—but, even in the more mundane cases, words can only get us indeterminately close. Just as we will never know if one man’s purple is exactly another’s, we should be equally skeptical that no gaps separate their pains.
Literature does not attempt to resolve this; instead, it chisels down the universal human sentiment until the reader believes he has found a partner—almost certainly distant, often dead—who felt, or feels, very much if not exactly the same. To accomplish this feat, the writer performs three tricks: first, he makes it possible to imagine his world; second, he describes how characters feel about their various experiences; third, he attempts to trigger similar emotions within the reader.
My favorite works are those with the smallest perceived distance between myself and the writer: even if I cannot state with certainty that my blue is exactly the same shade as his, I can say that it is as close as words are capable of expressing. Through this intimacy a strange friendship is formed, and one finds that many of his closest friends are dead writers whom he has never met. It is better that way, to come in contact with the most authentic version of someone on the page, to be relieved of any of the inevitable personal problems that physical meetings birth. Like Holden Caulfield, I would submit to the temptation of calling these writers if I could, but I am happy that I don’t have the chance.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. I wouldn't mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. And Ring Lardner, except that D.B. told me he's dead. You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham, though. I read it last summer. It's a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn't want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don't know, He just isn't the kind of guy I'd want to call up, that's all.
— from Catcher in the Rye
(Note: the following paragraph outlines the plot without major spoilers.)
Based on my criteria for success, Of Human Bondage is safely settled at the peak of literature. Starting with the death of his mother while still a child, Maugham meticulously illustrates the smallest ridges of his childhood, black as coal, and then continues through to the commencement of his adulthood. The material is fascinating. Carey flees his boarding school to Heidelberg where he comes in contact, for the first time, with romance and the arts. Next, he tries his hand at accounting—a profession that a literary genius could not master—before moving to Paris to pursue painting. There, Maugham mixes the romance of Lost Generation with spots of Henry Miller’s sordidness to render a wonderfully balanced picture comprised of a cast of characters that provide for an exceptionally rich commentary on art, poverty, and Bohemian life. The book reaches its climax when, upon moving to London for medical school, Carey falls for a waitress he meets. At length, Maugham drags us through a masochistic gut-wrenching romance that showcases the turbulent, cruel, obsessive aspect of love. For the rest of the novel, Carey’s adventures occur in London.
It is likely that fate has spared the reader from the outer reaches of Carey’s grim life; yet within each of these dismal events is a poignant feeling that each individual knows. He puts the reader through one harrowing event after another, forces him to react, and then explains, through an assiduous examination of his youthful mind, that he too felt as you now do.
Maugham’s traversal through the range of human emotion is written in terse sentences that create the feeling of a serious psychological study—perhaps the greatest ever written—on the page. Within him, there existed a power of unbiased reserved observation that bordered omniscience, made more powerful through the prosaic delivery he acquired later in his career:
For long after I became a writer by profession I spent much time on learning how to write and subjected myself to a very tiresome training in the endeavour to improve my style. But these efforts I abandoned when my plays began to be produced, and when I started to write again it was with a different aim. I no longer sought a jeweled prose and a rich texture, on unavailing attempts to achieve which I had formerly wasted my labour; I sought on the contrary plainness and simplicity. With so much I wanted to say within reasonable limits I felt that I could not afford to waste words and I set out now with the notion of using only such as were necessary to make my meaning clear. I had no space for ornament.
— Somerset Maugham, preface to Of Human Bondage
Although many of the events in the novel are factual, its fictitious aspect was necessary to provide Maugham the freedom to add elements that enhance the novel’s resonance. Carey’s clubfoot is a stand-in for Maugham’s stutter and, since he was gay, it is likely that Mildred was actually male. But it will forever be a mystery where the line between fact and fiction meanders, even for the author himself:
Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other. It would not interest me to record the facts, even if I could remember them, of which I have already made a better use.
— Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up
The book would have been much poorer if it were a literal account because Maugham was aiming only at the psychological truths that the book is replete with. One failure would have fractured the immersion Maugham patiently builds, but, thankfully, there are none to be found.
Of Human Bondage is immaculate and shows us how close a writer can get to the ineffable. Within the limiting confines of language, one of the greatest artistic minds of a generation takes us through a coming-of-age journey that narrows the distance between the author and the reader to its smallest point. Of Human Bondage is as successful a novel as any could ever be.
Thanks for reading! On September 6th, a short story; on September 13th, a review of Bright Lights, Big City; and, on Sundays, a round-up of things I’ve enjoyed. You can subscribe if that sounds interesting to you:
And if you enjoyed this post and think someone would benefit from reading it—or you just want to do me a massive favor—you can share it: