Ten novels and their authors.
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He afterwards walked the wards of St. Thomas’s Hospital with a view to practice in medicine, but the success of his first novel,” Liza of Lambeth” (1897), won him over to letters. Something of his hospital experience is reflected, however, in the first of his masterpieces,” Of Human Bondage” (1915), and “The Moon and Sixpence” (1919) his reputation as a novelist was assured.
His position as one of the most successful playwrights on the London stage was being consolidated simultaneously. His first play, “A man of Honour” (1903), was followed by a procession of successes just before and after the First World War. (At one point only Bernard Shaw had more plays running at the same time in London). His theatre career ended with Sheppey (1933).
His fame as a short-story writer began with “The Trembling of a Leaf”, sub-titled “Little Stories of the South sea Islands”, in 1921, since when he published more than ten collections.
Somerset Maugham’s general books are fewer in number. They include travel books, such as “On a Chinese Screen” (1922) and “Don Fernando” (1935), essays, criticism, and the self-revealing “The Summing Up” (1938) and “A Writer’s Notebook” 91949).
Mr. Maugham lived on the Riviera, from which he retired temporarily during the war. During his life he travelled in almost every part of the world. He became a Companion of Honour in 1954, and died in 1966.
Fortunately “Moby Dick” may be read, and read with intense interest, without a thought of what allegorical or symbolic significance it may or may not have. I cannot repeat too often that a novel is not to be read for instruction or edification, but for intelligent enjoyment, and if you find you cannot get this from it you had far better not read it at all. But it must be admitted that Melville seems to have done his best to hinder his readers’ enjoyment. He was writing a strange, original and thrilling story, but a perfectly straightforward one. The romantic beginning is admirable. Your interest is aroused and held. The characters, as they are introduced one by one, are clearly presented, alive and plausible. The tension rises and, with the acceleration of the action, your excitement increases. The climax is intensely dramatic. It is hard to understand why Melville should have deliberately sacrificed the grip he had got on his readers by pausing here and there to write chapters dealing with the natural history of the whale, its size, skeleton, amours and so forth. It is as senseless, on the face of it, as it would be for a man telling a story over the dinner table to stop now and then to tell you the etymological meaning of some word he had used. Montgomery Belgion, in a judicious introduction to an adition of Moby Dick, has supposed that since it is a tale of pursuit, and the end of a pursuit must be perpetually delayed, Melville wrote these chapters merely to do so. I cannot believe that. Had he had any such purpose, during the three years he spent in the Pacific he must surely have witnessed incidents or been told tales, that he could have woven into his narrative more fifty to effect it. I myself think that Melville wrote these chapters for the simple reason that, like many another self-educated man, he attached an exaggerated importance to the knowledge he had so painfully acquired and could not resist the temptation to parade it, just as in his earlier writings he “called up Burton, Shakespeare, Byron, Milton, Coleridge and Chesterfield, as well as Prometheus and Cinderella, Mahomet and Cleopatra, Madonna and Houris, Medici and Mussulman, to strew carelessly across his pages.”
For my part, I can read most of these chapters with interest, but it cannot be denied that they are digressions which sadly impair the tension. Melville lacked what the French call l ‘ esprit de suite, and it would be stupid to assert that the novel is well-constructed. But if he composed it in the way he did , it is because that is how he wanted it. You must take it or leave it. He knew very well that Moby Dick would not please. He was of an obstinate temper, and it may be that the neglect of the public, the savage onslaught of the critics, and the lack of understanding in those nearest to him only confirmed him in his determination to write exactly as he chose. You must put up with his vagaries, his faulty taste, his ponderous playfulness, his errors of construction, for the sake of his excellencies, the frequent splendour of his language, his vivid and thrilling descriptions of action, his delicate sense of beauty and the tragic power of his “mystic” ponderings which, perhaps because he was somewhat muddleheaded, with no striking gift for ratiocination, for just that reason are emotionally impressive. But , of course, it is the sinister and gigantic figure of Captain Ahab that pervades the book and gives it its unique force. You must go to the Greek dramatists for anything like that sense of doom with which everything you are told about him fills you, and to Shakespeare to find beings of such terrible power. It is because Herman Melville created him that, notwithstanding any reservation one may make, Moby Dick is a great book.
I have said, and said again, that in order to get a real insight into a great novel you must know what there is to be known about the man who wrote it. I have an idea that in the case of Melville something like the contrary obtains. When one reads, and rereads, Moby Dick, it seems to me that one gets a more convincing , a more definite, impression of the man than from anything one may learn of his life and circumstances; an impression of a man endowed by nature with a great gift blighted by an evil genius, so that, like the agave, no sooner had it put forth its splendid blooming than it withered; a moody, unhappy man tormented by instincts he shrank from with horror; a man conscious that the virtue had gone of him, and embittered by failure and poverty; a man of heart craving for friendship, only to find that frienship too was vanity. Such, as I see him, was Herman Melville, a man whom one can only regard with deep compassion.
COMMENTARY.
1. Melville, Herman (1819 -91),an American writer who wrote about his experiences as a seaman. His most famous books are Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Moby Dick (1851).
2. Moby Dick - the name of the whale in the story Moby Dick by Herman Melville, the book tells the exiting story of a whaling captain’s search for a great white Whale.
3. Milton, John (1608-74). An English poet, famous for his epic poem Paradise Lost, which was followed by Paradise Regained, written after he had gone blind. He also wrote many articles in support of the Parliamentariaus and of freedom for the individual.
4. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834),an English poet and critic, best known for his poems The Rime of the Unciet Mariner and Kubla Khan. He took drugs, including opium, for many years. He and William Wordsworth were the leaders of the Romantic movement in England.
5. Prometheus.In classical mythology, a giant who stole fire from heaven to give to men. He was kept in chains and punished by Zeus and was finally freed by Hercules. He is the subject of many works of Literature.
6. Madonna. (In the Christian religion) Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ.
7. Medic.The name of an Italian family that owned a bank and that ruled Florence from the 15 th to the 18 th century and spent much of their wealth on the arts.