Second Mencken Chrestomathy (42 page)

From the
Smart Set
, Nov., 1919, pp. 138–40.
A review of T
HE
M
OON AND
S
IXPENCE
, by W. Somerset Maugham; New York, 1919

“The Moon and Sixpence” is an absurdly vague and vapid title for an extremely sound piece of work. This Maugham, half a
dozen years ago, was well-known as a writer of bad comedies of the slighter, smarter variety, by Oscar Wilde out of the Tom Robertson tradition—the sort of thing that John Drew used to do—labored epigrams strung upon a thread of drawing-room adultery. In the intervals between them he wrote third-rate novels: “The Explorers,” “The Magician” and others, all now forgotten. One day, entirely without warning, he gave London a surprise by publishing a story of a different kind, to wit, “Of Human Bondage,” an interminably long, solemn and inchoate but nevertheless curiously sagacious and fascinating composition—very un-English in its general structure, almost Russian in some of its details. This book came to me for review, but when I observed its count of pages I quietly dropped it behind the piano. Two or three years later a woman of sound taste in fiction advised me to unearth it and read it, and I made a futile search for it. Another year passed and a second woman began talking it up. Having been long convinced that women are much better judges of novels than men—who ever heard of a woman who read detective stories?—I now got hold of the book and read it, an enterprise absorbing the leisure of a whole week. I left it very much impressed. The story was too garrulous; it often threatened to get beyond the author; it was, in more than one place, distressingly young; but all the same there was a fine earnestness in it, and a great deal of careful observation, and some passages of capital writing. The Maugham of the shallow comedies for West End theatres was nowhere visible. This Maugham was a man who was trying very hard to present his characters honestly, and to get beneath their skins, and to put behind them a living and recognizable background, and what is more, he was, in chapter after chapter, coming pleasantly close to success. In brief, a very unusual book—something worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with such things as Walpole’s “The Gods and Mr. Perrin,” George’s “The Making of an Englishman,” Bennett’s “Whom God Hath Joined” and Wells’ “Ann Veronica.”

Now, in “The Moon and Sixpence,” Maugham takes another leap forward. That leap is from the uncertainty of the neophyte to the sureness of the accomplished craftsman, from unsteady experimentation to fluent and easy technic. It is, indeed, an astonishing progress; I know of no other case that quite parallels it. The book,
if it were hollow as a jug otherwise, would still be remarkable as a sheer piece of writing. It has good design; it moves and breathes; it has a fine manner; it is packed with artful and effective phrases. But better than all this, it is a book which tackles head-on one of the hardest problems that the practical novelist ever has to deal with, and which solves it in a way that is both sure-handed and brilliant. This is the problem of putting a man of genius into a story in such fashion that he will seem real—in such fashion that the miracle of him will not blow up the plausibility of him. Scores of novelists have tried to solve it, and failed. Every publishing season sees half a dozen new tales with Nietzsche, or Chopin, or Bonaparte, or Wagner for hero—and half a dozen creaking marionettes, no more real than your aunt’s false teeth. But Maugham, with his painting genius, his Kensington Gauguin, somehow achieves the impossible. One gets the unmistakable feeling that the fellow is extraordinary—not merely odd, but of genuinely superior quality—and yet there is nothing operatic and fabulous about him; he remains an authentic man in the midst of all his gaudiest doings. It is a novelistic feat of a high order, and, as Woodrow says, I should be lacking in perfect frankness if I did not admit that I have been a good deal surprised by Maugham’s performance of it. It is as if John Philip Sousa should suddenly spit on his hands and write a first-rate symphony. It is almost as if a Congressman should suddenly become honest, self-respecting, courageous and intelligent.

Naturally, the thing is done very simply. Maugham’s success, in fact, lies a good deal less in what he positively does than in what he discreetly leaves undone. He gets the colors of life into his Charles Strickland, not by playing a powerful beam of light upon him, but by leaving him a bit out of focus—by constantly insisting, in the midst of every discussion of him, upon his pervasive mystery—in brief, by craftily making him appear, not as a commonplace, simple and completely understandable man, but as the half comprehended enigma that every genuine man of genius seems to all of us when we meet him in real life. The average novelist, grappling with such a hero, always makes the fatal error of trying to account for him wholly—of reducing him to a composite of fictional rubber-stamps. Thus he inevitably takes on commonness,
and in proportion as he is clearly drawn he loses plausibility as a man of genius. Maugham falls into no such blunder. Of Strickland, the unit of human society—the Strickland who eats, sleeps, travels about, reads the newspapers, changes his shirt, has his shoes polished, dodges automobiles and goes to business every morning like the rest of us—we get a portrait that is careful, logical and meticulous—in brief, that is brilliantly life-like. But of the vaster, darker Strickland who is a man of genius—the Strickland who deserts his family to go to Paris to paint, and there plods his way to extraordinary achievement, and then throws away his life in the South Seas—of this Strickland we see only an image made up of sudden and brief points of light, like flashes of Summer lightning below the horizon. He is, in one aspect, made convincingly vivid; he is, in the other, left in the shadow of mystery. That is precisely how we all see a man of genius in real life; he is half plain John Smith and half inscrutable monster. It remained for Maugham to get the thing into a novel. If there were no other merit in his book, it would stand out from the general for that unusually deft and effective character sketch.

As for the machinery of the effect, part of it is borrowed from Joseph Conrad, to wit, the device of presenting the story through the medium of an onlooker, himself fascinated and daunted by the enigma of it. This device, of course, was not invented by Conrad, but it seems to me that he has employed it to better purpose than any other novelist writing in English. Consider, for example, how magnificently it is used in “Typhoon,” in “Lord Jim,” and in “Heart of Darkness.” These stories, straightforwardly told, would still be stories of very high quality, but I believe that a good deal of their present strange flavor would be gone; they would cease to suggest the sinister and inexplicable. There appears to be a theory among novelists that the precisely contrary method is the more convincing—that the way to write a tale that will carry the air of reality is to do it in the autobiographical form. But that is surely not true. When he adopts the autobiographical form the novelist is compelled to account for his protagonist completely; he must attain to realism by pretending to omniscience. That pretension has brought many an otherwise sound novel to disaster. I am almost convinced that it would have brought even “Lord Jim” into difficulties.
What holds our interest in Jim to the last, and leaves us with a memory of him that glows for long days, is the dark wonder of him. We learn enough about him to see him clearly, but we never quite penetrate his soul—we are never quite certain about the interplay of motives that brings him to his romantic catastrophe. Take away the droning Marlow, and he would come too close to the camera. Thus there lies, beyond the crude realism of white light, the finer, softer realism of delicately managed shadows. More than half the charm of Conrad, I daresay, is due to his superb capacity for managing them. At the end of every one of his incomparable tales there is a question-mark. He leaves us to answer as we will, each according to the light within.… I think that Maugham, borrowing that device, has employed it with noteworthy success. He is, God knows, no Conrad, but he has written a very excellent novel, and in it there is plenty of evidence that its quality is no mere accident, but the product of very deliberate and intelligent effort.

From the
Smart Set
, May, 1922, pp. 142–43.
A review of C
ROME
Y
ELLOW
, by Aldous Huxley; New York, 1922

Aldous Huxley’s “Crome Yellow,” if it be called a novel, violates all of the rules and regulations that I have laid down so smugly. But why call it a novel? I can see absolutely no reason for doing so, save that the publisher falls into the error in his slip-cover, press-matter and canned review. As a matter of fact, the book is simply an elaborate piece of spoofing, without form and without direction. It begins, goes on aimlessly, and then suddenly stops. But are only novels fit to read? Nay; try “Crome Yellow.” If it does not make you yell with joy, then I throw off the prophetical robes forever. It is a piece of buffoonery that sweeps the whole range from the most delicate and suggestive tickling to the most violent thumping of the ribs. It has made me laugh as I have not laughed since I read the Inaugural Harangue of Dr. Harding.

This Huxley, in truth, is a fellow of the utmost shrewdness, ingenuity,
sophistication, impudence, waggishness and contumacy—a literary atheist who is forever driving herds of sheep, hogs, camels, calves and jackasses into the most sacred temples of his people. He represents the extreme swing of the reaction against everything that a respectable Englishman holds to be true and holy. The attitude is no pose, as it would be among the fugitives from the cow states in Greenwich Village; it comes to him legitimately from his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, perhaps the roughest and most devastating manhandler of gods ever heard of in human history. Old Thomas Henry was a master of cultural havoc and rapine simply because he never grew indignant. In the midst of his most fearful crimes against divine revelation he maintained the aloof and courtly air of an executioner cutting off the head of a beautiful queen. Did he disembowel the Pentateuch, to the scandal of Christendom? Then it was surely done politely—even with a certain easy geniality. Did he knock poor old Gladstone all over the lot, first standing him on his head and then bouncing him upon his gluteus maximus? Then the business somehow got the graceful character of a
Wienerwalz.
Aldous is obviously less learned than his eminent grandpa. I doubt that he is privy to the morphology of
Astacus fluviatilis
or that he knows anything more about the Pleistocene or the Middle Devonian than is common gossip among Oxford barmaids. But though he thus shows a falling off in positive knowledge, he is far ahead of the
Ur
-Huxley in worldly wisdom, and it is this worldly wisdom which produces the charm of “Crome Yellow.” Here, in brief, is a civilized man’s
reductio ad absurdum
of his age—his contemptuous kicking of its pantaloons. Here, in a short space, delicately, ingratiatingly and irresistibly, whole categories and archipelagoes of contemporary imbecilities are brought to the trial by wit. In some dull review or other I have encountered the news that all the characters of the fable are real people and that the author himself is Denis, the minor poet, who loses his girl by being too cerebral and analytical to grab her. Nonsense! Huxley, if he is there at all, is Scogan, the chorus to the whole drama, with his astounding common sense, his acidulous humor, and his incomparable heresies.

From the
Smart Set
, Feb., 1923, pp. 140–41

The case of Lawrence continues to baffle me. First I read the current encomiums of him as a man of genius, then I pray humbly to God, and then I read his books. They leave me hopelessly convinced, despite all the high testimony to the contrary, that what is in them is extremely hollow and trivial stuff—that they are full of false psychology, preposterous episodes, and stiff and artificial people. Of late I have been giving hard study to what is widely regarded as the author’s masterpiece, to wit, “Women in Love.” In brief, the story of two provincial English-women, sisters, who track down a pair of husbands. This business, it turns out, is not easy. The swains are coy, and one of them, at least, carries about with him a very violent anti-connubial complex. Nevertheless, the girls persist, and in the end they are successful, though both have to employ the desperate device of offering their favors before the parson cries “Go!” The dialogues which forward the benign business are set forth at extreme length, and to me, at all events, they appear magnificently nonsensical. If this is “psychology,” as the Lawrence fanatics would have us believe, then it is unquestionably the psychology of maniacs. One of the swains, Birkin, actually runs amok more than once. I submit his conversation, as Lawrence reports it, to the judgment of a candid world. His most massive ideas are simply psychopathological. As for the girls, they are both fools. In brief, a book full of blowsy tosh.

But why, then, the vast esoteric vogue of Lawrence? He is highly esteemed, I am convinced, simply because he is rather bold in his dealing with sexual transactions. He is not content to stop with the usual eye-rolling and hard breathing; he proceeds to physiological phenomena of a far less seemly character. When Hermione, the fat girl, whacks her beau over the head, the effects upon her own central nervous system are those described in certain chapters of Krafft-Ebing. I do not say that these effects are improbable, and I certainly do not argue that Lawrence sets them forth with anything
properly describable as indecency: the Comstockian attack upon his book, indeed, is characteristically imbecile. But what I do say is that his current celebrity rests very largely upon his obvious preoccupation with such things, and that all his antecedent “psychology,” though it is mainly nonsensical, is taken on trust for the sake of them. Standing by itself, or leading to some less blushful goal, that “psychology” would simply bore his customers. It is, as I have said, extremely bizarre and unconvincing. People do not do things for the motives that he credits to them, nor do they explain their acts in the outlandish terms he uses. To argue, as some of his admirers do, that his work marks an advance in the inner structure and content of the English novel, and that he is teaching all other novelists something about their business that they never knew before he mounted the stump—to argue thus is to depart definitely from all sense and logic. There is nothing in his novels—and I have now read them all, and some of them twice—that properly deserves such astounding encomiums. They are, in spots, competently written, but those spots are few and wide apart. In the main, he is horribly dull.