BOOK #78
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Review
by Edward Tanguay January 6, 1997 |
Before reading this I was a bit afraid that Maugham's fictional Strickland would somehow distort my conception of Paul Gauguin. Whether this is true or not, Gauguins paintings now glow with that vast hollowness of possessed genius with which Maugham instills Stickland in the book.
In a plummeting step-by-step fall you get to know Strickland. Maugham begins with what is a super ordinary man ("He was null. He was probably a worthy member of society, a good husband and father, an honest broker; but there was no reason to waste one's time over him.") Maugham spends a calculated amount of time describing to you the ordinariness of Strickland's life and character, here, of Strickland and his wife:
They would grow old insensibly; they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason, marry in due course--the one a pretty girl, future mother of healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow, obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy, not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would sink into the grave.
This builds you up for the descension into Strickland's empty soul. And one day in a natural Sartrian movement of absolute freedom, Strickland just leaves. Something must have smoothly and silently broken inside of him to make him just move away. He has no more emotion, and Maugham spends the rest of the book expertly showing us this in contact after contact between the narrator and Strickland.
In meeting after meeting, Strickland proves himself to be nothing else but empty of normal response ("Then, what in God's name have you left her for?" / "I want to paint.") He "just wants to paint," which is an extremely mild way of putting that he needs to madly pursue a genius demon inside of him. Strickland simply repeats, "I've got to paint" until finally he is confronted with "You are a most unmitigated cad" to which he replies, "Now that you've got that off your chest, let's go and have dinner."
He is so dry it makes you laugh. But then you realize that Strickland is seriously empty and the emotions waver to sadness and then disgust for him. You are not expecting how removed Strickland is from normal social behavior and you begin guessing what has happened inside of him. Maugham has a way of letting you identify with the narrator ("I could not struggle against his indifference.").
Strickland has "the directness of the fanatic and the ferocity of the apostle." He becomes not so much an intricate character but a fantastically unbelievable character. In fact, describing Strickland the man becomes the goal of the book.
Does Strickland not have the same morals as the pursuer of Lolita? It is an allout pursuit of beauty, and that is the only moral rule.When confronted that if everyone acted like him, "the world couldn't go on," Strickland replies, "That's a damned silly thing to say. Everyone doesn't want to act like me. The great majority are prefectly content to do the ordinary thing." This is not really impressive reasoning, but reasoning is not what Strickland does well.
"You evidently don't believe in the maxim: Act so that every one of your actions is capable of being made into a universal rule."
--"I never heard it before, but it's rotten nonsense."
"Well, it was Kant who said it."
--"I don't care; it's rotten nonsense."
The narrator (does the narrator have a name?) continues to reason with Strickland, but to no avail, there is a no end to his depth of indifference, he simply doesn't feel those feelings that others feel about social commitment and responsibility towards others.
I enjoyed seeing how those back in England responded to the news of him in Paris. They try to understand him ("Charles Strickland had become infatuated with a French dancer"), yet they have no paradigms with which to understand the man. No one seems to.
Dirk Stroeve and his wife come into the story as perfect foils to show us the next set of depths to which Strickland's fate binds him. That Stroeve forgives Strickland in the end for ruining his wife to her death brings out Strickland's character even moreso.
Strickland becomes a paradox ("He was a sensual man, and yet was indifferent to sensual things") yet you begin to get a better picture of him from description to description ("He did not seem quite sane. It seemed to me that he would not show his pictures because he was really not interested in them. I had the idea that he seldom brought anything to completion, but the passion that fired him, he lost all care for it.") The more possessed Strickland appears, the more you understand him.
An important distinction that surprised me was that Strickland was not an elegant speaker:
He used gestures instead of adjectives, and he halted. He never said a clever thing, but he had a vein of brutal sarcasm which was not ineffective, and he always said exactly what he thought."
He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain.
Like a sculptor, Maugham reveales Strickland's character piece by piece:
For choice he sat on a kitchen chair without arms. It often exasperated me to see him. I never knew a man so entirely indifferent to his surroundings.
The emotions common to most of us simply did not exist in him, and it was as absurd to blame him for not feeling them as for blaming th tiger because he is fierce and cruel.
Strickland was indifferent to his surroundings, and he had lived in the other's studio without thinking of altering a thing.
When I imagined that on seeing his pictures I should get a clue to the understanding of his strange character I was mistaken. They merely increased the astonishment with which he filled me.
With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place. It was unimportant. It was irksome. His soul aimed elsewither. He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession. I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery. When he had regained command over himself, he shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed.
Strickland was an odious man, but I still think he was a great one.
When Stroeve's wife stated that she was in love with Strickland we get one level deeper. This episode shows a nice love/hate attraction, which emphasizes Strickland's paradoxal nature.
The shift to the island gave the book a new dimension and kept it fresh. This is a nicely balanced book, you do not get bored in any setting of it, it has a motion all the way through. As strange as the island is, it was a place which Stricklick needed:
Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen bfore, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. here at last he finds rest.
He painted and he read, and in the evening, when it was dark, they sat together on the veranda, smoking and looking at the night.
He was an extraordinary figure, with his red beard and matted hair, and his great hairy chest. his feet were horny and scarred, so that I knew he went always barefoot. He had gone native with a vengeance.(!)
The ending has a Dorian Grey touch, as if Strickland's looks and leperous condition began to show the deterioration of his soul. Then a visitor comes to the house and finds that Strickland, even though blinded from leperously, had painted the inside walls of his cabin as he died. Here you get the last clues into the depths of Strickland's possessed soul:
His eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and now he was seized by an overwhelming sensation as he stared at the painted walls. He knew nothing of pictures, but there was something about these that extraordinarily affected him. From floor to ceiling the walls were covered with a strange and elaborate composition. It was indescribably wonderful and mysterious. It took his breath aaway. It filled him with an emotion which he could not understand or analyze. he felt the awe and the delight which a man might feel who watched the beginning of a world. It was tremendous, sensual, passionate; and yet there was something horrible there too, something which made him afraid. It was the work of a man who had delved into the hidden depths of nature and had discovered secrets which were beautiful and fearful too. It was the work of a man who knew things which it is unholy for men to know. There was something primeval there and terrible. It was not human. It brought to his mind vague recollections of black magic. It was beautiful and obscene.
The moral issue comes up again. Strickland was a bastard of a person, but was his life complete? Was he true?
The characters are sharp in this book. Maugham is a master at this. For instance, you get full, bright concepts of Stroeve's character in descriptions like this:
I suggested that he should get a thermometer, and a few grapes, and some bread. Stroeve, glad to make himself useful, clattered down the stairs.
He looked like an overblown schoolboy, and though I felt so sorry for him, I could hardly help laughing.
Stroeve stopped again and mopped his face.
I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely.
Fine writing. Enjoyed the book.
Edward Tanguay
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