FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Often I find myself thinking of the justification of autobiographical
writing in fiction. The modern Italian writer is devoted to it.
D'Annunzio set the example a generation ago and carried it to such a
point that he outraged all sense of decency. So long as he confined
himself to revelation of his own alleged amatory potency and mastery of
the arts of love, even though he trampled upon sacred ideals, the public
tolerated it. When he strained the sensualities of well-known and
beloved notabilities through the percolators of his perverse imagination
they sickened of him and denounced him. It is an exquisite form of
self-appreciation--the belief that the commonplace events, deliberate
thoughts, and vagrant fancies of an individual who has in no way
distinguished himself will divert and instruct others, and that they are
worthy of record. The fact that such writings are bought is the
justification they allege. But the public is like the editor of a
magazine. He has to read reams of trash to find one worthy and
acceptable contribution. The purpose of fiction may be manifold, but it
is read chiefly for distraction and diversion. The critic and
interpreter read it to get the temper of the public mind and the trend
of its projection, but the purchaser of it reads it to get surcease of
the woes of life, whether they be the ruts worn by operating the daily
treadmill or the despondencies thrust upon him by circumstances more
inexorable than the tigers of Hyrcania. It is not likely that the
occurrences in the life of another commonplace individual even though
they are pieced with fiction will suffice to provide this. Therefore
those who turn to the narration of the lives of others in which there
have been stirring events, picturesque phases, and romantic incidents
are likely to have greater success. Whether it is a legitimate procedure
is another question. It is a matter of taste. It was as justifiable for
Mr. Somerset Maugham to portray Paul Gauguin in "The Moon and Sixpence"
as it was for Mr. Morley Roberts to describe George Gissing in "The
Private Life of Henry Maitland," and even more so, for the latter had
revealed himself adequately in his books. Nothing was to be gained by
raking up a past that led through prison any more than the prison days
of O. Henry is an asset of immortality. Sometimes such writings have a
meritoriousness apart from their literary qualities. The "Green
Carnation" did much to inform Britishers how prevalent and pernicious
was the vice which its prototype was afterward locked in Reading Gaol
for practising and apotheosizing. To take a man whose fame has mounted
steadily since his death and make a monster of him is a hazardous and,
many will think, an iniquitous thing to do, even though the individual
during his lifetime was unmoral and immoral. This is what Mr. Somerset
Maugham has done for Paul Gauguin, master of the Pont Aven school of
painting; dislocater of impressionism and neo-impressionism; liberator
of art from stereotyped, slavish copyists of nature; apostle of
intellectualism and emotionalism versus æstheticism, and from it he has
created Charles Strickland, victim of a strange disease resulting in
dissociation of personality. The critics tell us "The Moon and Sixpence"
is a "great" book. From the standpoint of literary construction it may
be entitled to such designation. From the standpoint of one who desires
in fiction some verisimilitude of life as it is, or as it should be if
it were ideal, it is disgusting and nauseous, atavistic in implication,
primitive in delineation, bestial in its suggestion, and it tends to
undermine faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. It is
radicalism in realism carried to the _n_th degree.
A middle-class Englishman of unknown antecedents, of commonplace somatic
and intellectual possessions, of emotional barrenness and shut-in
personality, marries, procreates, and serves--on the London Stock
Exchange, after the manner of his kind, until he is forty. If artistic
impulses had peeped from his unconscious mind to his conscious he had
not betrayed them. Then, when constructive incubal activity had passed
its height, he becomes big with the idea that his unsightly hulk harbors
the soul of an artist. He forsakes his family without warning and
without making the smallest provision for their maintenance or welfare,
goes to Paris to study art, to scorn convention and decency, and to
treat mankind with contumely. He knows no French, and gradually his
English vocabulary shrinks to "You are a damn fool" when a man makes
proffer of service or supper, and "Tell her to go to hell" if the offer
of self or succor comes from a woman. When he writes, however, his
mental elaborations encompass the degree that permits him to pen this
chaste message: "God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she
was in hell."
Like all victims of dementia præcox, when the disorder conditions
bizarre conduct for the first time in mid-maturity, he becomes
profoundly egocentric, neglectful of his appearance and of his person,
and callously insensitive to the feelings and rights of others. As the
components of personality dissociate the god disappears, the beast
remains, puissant and uncontrollable when under the dominion of primeval
appetites or instincts. He has no pride to swallow when he feeds from
the hand that still stings from slapping him, no more than does the lion
who devours the meat thrust into his cage on the prong that a moment
before prodded and wounded him.
"Haven't you been in love since you came to Paris?" is Mr. Maugham's
euphemistic question, in his effort to find out for Mrs. Strickland if
her husband has been faithful to his marriage vows. After noting
Strickland's "slow smile starting and sometimes ending in the eyes,
which was very sensual, neither cruel nor kindly, but suggested rather
the inhuman glee of the Satyr," he got this answer: "I haven't got time
for that sort of nonsense. Life isn't long enough for love and art."
This is not what Michaelangelo said to Vittoria Colonna. It is what Tom
Cat says when not in the throes of concupiscency. Then Mr. Maugham gives
a new verbal dress to the devil, who was sure when ill he would like to
be a monk, but who in good health didn't fancy monastic life. "You know
that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want
to roll yourself in it, and you find some woman, coarse and low and
vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of sex is blatant,
and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you're blind
with rage."
Poor Strickland, in the throes of mental dissolution, obsessed, enmeshed
in stereotypy, is still capable of sufficient mental reaction to realize
that "You are a damn fool" or "Go to hell" was not an appropriate
rejoinder or comment to such a speech, so "He stared at me without the
slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very closely."
"When it's over you feel so extraordinarily pure; you feel like a
disembodied spirit, immaterial, and you seem to be able to touch beauty
as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion
with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the
iridescence of the river. You feel like God." The antivivisectionists
should get after Doctor Maugham. It is cruelty to humans to hold
unfortunate Strickland with hypnotic eye, and then thrust a record of
experience so obviously personal upon him--or was it only a recollection
of some published experiences of George Sand and Alfred de
Musset--garnered from those days when he "idled on the quays, fingering
a second-hand book that I never meant to buy," after he settled down in
Paris and began to write a play?
Every Johnson has his Boswell, though he may be mute, unrecording, and
sterile, and every sadist has his masochist. The young Dutchman, Vincent
Van Gogh, a constitutional psychopath, whose mental aberrations took him
into spiritual exhortation, social reformation, and finally "art," often
tried to kill Gauguin. When the latter showed himself versed in mayhem
Van Gogh made his bed, lit his pipe, wrapped himself in serenity and
shot himself in the abdomen, as lunatics often do. Not so Dick Stroeve,
Strickland's fidus Achates. He worshipped Strickland, who reviled him,
kicked him, spat upon him; Stroeve, who naïvely asks, "Have I ever been
mistaken?" in his estimate of artists, knew that Strickland was a great
artist, greater than Manet or Corot, more puissant than El Greco or
Cézanne, and that he had been sent to complete the cycle which Delacroix
and Turner ushered in. Stroeve, a passive, asexual creature, had married
a temperamental English governess in Rome, where he had earned the
soubriquet of "le Maître de la Boîte à Chocolats" after she had had a
disastrous experience with the son of an Italian prince whose children
she had been hired to instruct.
When Strickland falls desperately ill from the combined effects of
insufficient food, touting for prurient Anglicans, and translating the
advertisements of French patent medicines that "restore" Doctor
Maugham's countrymen to such a degree that they may go to Paris with
pleasurable anticipation, Stroeve takes him to his house, despite the
strenuous opposition and pathetic protests of Mrs. Stroeve, whose
previous fleeting contacts with Strickland echoed the call of the wild
in her and presaged disaster. From the moment he arrived the fat was in
the fire. No affinities are so difficult to keep from blending as sex
affinities, facetiously called soul affinities by the newspapers.
Strickland's spark was fanned lovingly into glow by Stroeve, and when it
flamed he threw Stroeve out of his house, possessed complaisant Mrs.
Stroeve violently, and then put her on canvas, nude, "one arm beneath
her head and the other along her body, one knee raised, the other leg
stretched out." After nature's cataclysm had spent itself, Mrs. Stroeve
committed suicide in approved feminine fashion by taking a corroding
acid, without condoning her husband's offense--that of being virtuous.
When she died Stroeve, a true masochist, looked up Strickland, forgave
him, invited him to go with him to Holland, because "we both loved
Blanche. There would have been room for him in my mother's house. The
company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good."
But Strickland, becoming for the moment verbally more expansive,
replied: "I have other fish to fry." When Mr. Maugham spoke to him about
Stroeve's visit he said: "I thought it damned silly and sentimental."
The author doesn't attempt a synopsis of the mental process that took
Strickland to Tahiti, via Marseilles, though he depicts experiences that
parallel those of Gauguin. Instead he animadverts on love and the sexual
appetite to such purpose as to reveal that he is not expert in biology,
psychology, or art. "For men love is an episode which takes its place
among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid upon it in
novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life." But what about
the emphasis laid upon it by countless thousands who find in it a
quality of that ennobling spiritual peace called faith, and which will
be their reward when they repose in Abraham's bosom and live forever
with God in paradise? "As lovers the difference between men and women is
that women can love all day long, but men only at times." And the
difference between male and female animals is that the female of the
species permits contact at certain definite times, while the males are
all Barkises. "Art is a manifestation of the sexual impulse. It is the
same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a
lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the
'Entombment' of Titian." After the author delivered himself of a
statement so pregnant of platitude he must have experienced a sense of
lightening, and a conviction that he would not have to consult the Drei
Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie at least until he wrote his next book.
That art has a definite purpose to perpetuate the creative will and that
God endowed his image with a genesic instinct that he might create and
thus reproduce his kind every one knows, but to contend that one is a
manifestation of the other is puerile, unenlightened, and harks back to
barbarism. One might think that there is no such thing as the psychology
of art or the science of æsthetics. Art has an intellectual significance
as well as, or more than, an emotional significance, and the
unfortunate, unhappy, disequilibrated man who is parodied in this book
contributed his substantial mite in the twentieth century to make us see
it.
Any one who reads the "Lettres de Paul Gauguin," which are prefaced by a
brief survey of his life by Victor Segalen, or his life by Jean de
Rotonchamps, which was published at Weimar at the expense of Count von
Kessler, will see how closely Maugham described Gauguin's life in the
Polynesian cannibal islands. Strickland marries the native girl Ata, who
had a "beguin" for him, but Gauguin had Tioka in his maison de joie
without benefit of clergy. Doctor Coutras, who gives Mr. Maugham so much
valuable information (via Rotonchamps and Segalen) is M. Paul Vernié,
who attended Gauguin and wrote an account of his last days.
Despite the fact that in July, 1914, the London _Times_ lifted the veil
of secrecy from the face of the most prevalent disease in the world, and
thus announced that the name of the disease which Fracastorius, the
poet-physician of Verona, borrowed from the shepherd Syphlus should be
no longer taboo by "nice people," the prevalence of the disease and the
efforts to combat it have been widely discussed, though they are not
topics of conversation at dinner-parties or at "welfare meetings" in
churches, as tuberculosis is. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the
author prefers to kill his "hero" with leprosy. But Doctor Maugham has
been devoting so much of his time in latter years to novels and dramas
that he finds the differentiation between them difficult, and, too,
Gauguin's disease has been diagnosticated leprosy, elephantiasis,
syphilis. "La dernière de ces avaries est exacte, mais ne doit pas être
imputées au pays: c'était une pure vérole parisienne."
"The Moon and Sixpence" is interesting. There is scarcely any diversion
more engrossing than reading about others' infirmities unless it be
relating one's own. Hence the continued popularity of Pepys, Amiel,
Rousseau, Marie Bashkirsteff, and other garrulous sufferers. But it is a
book that no one can be the better or happier for reading, and it does
Gauguin's memory an injury because it parodies it. His life as it has
been revealed to us was bizarre and irregular enough. We could wish that
he had been less like Rimbaud and more like Rodin, but, distressing as
his behavior was, seen in conventional light, we should like not to have
seen it featured in fiction.
Mr. Maugham wrote a novel, "Out of Human Bondage," which is a far more
meritorious piece of work than "The Moon and Sixpence," in which some of
his professional colleagues--he is a physician--recognized portraitures.
Perhaps it was his success with them that encouraged him to try a larger
canvas.
The author's admitted cleverness was never more evident than in the
depiction of Mrs. Strickland's character and characteristics--a smug
Philistine, who runs the gamut of preciosity, jealousy, martyrdom,
autorighteousness, and autosanctification. She is pleased and proud as
she views the veneer of sanctimoniousness which her son, in holy orders,
gives the dearly beloved husband of Mrs. Charles Strickland, who wrote
his father's biography "to remove certain misconceptions which had
gained currency," viz., that Doctor Maugham is masquerading as a
psychiatrist and publishing his experiences with the insane, meanwhile
throwing off "punk" about art and traducing normal, though admittedly
"immoral," man.
"There is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my
flesh each week to a severe mortification. I have never failed to read
the literary supplement of the _Times_." So says Mr. Somerset Maugham.
The first part of the statement is difficult to believe after reading
"The Moon and Sixpence." The latter part may be true, but it can't be
truer than the statement that any one, possessed of ordinary decency and
sensibility, and belief that love, sentiment, kindliness, generosity,
altruism, forgiveness, and faith are the seven lamps that illumine our
path on our way to immortality, will subject his flesh to severe
mortification, while being interested and sometimes even amused by
reading Mr. Maugham's new book.