BOOKS OF THE DAY
Mr. Maugham's Workshop
SINCE he was eighteen Mr. Maugham has kept notebooks in which he has recorded emotions, ideas and observations of men and things which might afterwards be useful to him as a writer. Some of this material, already used in his books and plays, has been excluded from this volume ; the rest appears in it. The result is fascinating in its variety, its candour and, sometimes, its self-repression.
The epigrams of callow youth in the early 'nineties, when the author was in fashionable revolt, have not been shut out. As the years pass, they appear less often and become less wilfully decorative, but the young man's eagerness to shock himself and the world continues surprisingly long. As late as i9ot, when his age is twenty- seven, a careful and shrewd assessment of Matthew Arnold's style is followed by this: "I'm glad I don't believe in God When I look at the misery of the world and its bitterness, I think that no belief can be more ignoble."
The next year yields this note:
"Bed. No woman is worth more than a fiver unless you're in love with her Thcn she is worth all she costs you."
This is the so-called "cynicism" of the period, corresponding to the smartness of the chromium-plated or hard-boiled generation two decades later. But Mr. Maugham was not writing only this. Almost at the same time, in a comment on Jeremy Taylor, with whom he was by no means in complete sympathy, he could write: " One cannot turn a page without finding some felicitous expression, some new order of simple words which seems to give them a new value," and simplicity is the quality in Jeremy Taylor which most critics miss. Mr. Maugham saw it unerringly, and, being himself a writer by instinct, was not deterred by any differences of theological opinion from proclaiming it. This is why the book is valuable. It is what it says- it is: a writer's notebook, not an ideology masquerading as criticism or an autobiography pretending to final wisdom.
It is interesting, in the first place, that Mr. Maugham should have kept these notebooks at all. For an imaginative writer, the method is of debatable value, and in his preface he debates it, fully aware of the danger that you may rely overmuch on your notes " and so lose the even and natural flow of your writing which comes from allowing the unconscious that full activity which is somewhat pompously known as inspiration." But there is another danger which he does not speak of—namely,, that the habitual note-taker may lose the even and natural flow, not of his writing only, but of his experience itself ; he may become unable to resist a temptation to reach for a pencil while his lady's smile is still incomplete. And this tendency to see life in terms of art—though it will be despised as "cold blooded " by those only who do not know what imaginative writing is--can be perilous if the process of transmutation is too swift. Experience, if given a chance, performs for an artist a miraculous pre-selection among her riches before submitting them to his conscious selectiveness. His notebook, if it becomes habitual and clamorous, may interfere with the miracle by demanding too much, too soon. Of this a writer of Mr. Maugham's quality is necessarily aware. Nevertheless, he has kept notebooks for nearly sixty years. The reason is the only good one : that for him the advantages were greater than the disadvantages. Vineyards are not uniform, nor are their processes. His grape-juice of experience was best matured in this way. If he had been primarily a poet, if he had been nearer to Turgenev than to Flaubert, the balance might have swung the other way, but he is an analytical observer, and his notebooks were necessary to him as store-houses of material for analysis.
Scenes and people in the Pacific, in Russia, in India, in the United States ; sketches of character, outlines of stories, passages of criticism, reflections on a host of subjects from the Absolute to the destiny of France: all are preserved with an admirable detachment, as if the writer had said to himself as each was put away, "Perhaps not, but one never knows the value of material until one has treated it." Nor is the material " raw." This is no scribbling of notes at random. Preliminary treatment has been applied. Some of the outlines are indeed such masterpieces of brevity that their own perfection may well have forbidden the development which was at first intended. Mr. Maugham's " self-repression " has been spoken of, and the word needs to be explained. There is in his writing a quality which has been miscalled "cynicism." A cynic, by Wilde's definition, is " a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing," but a cynic is bleaker than that—he is one for whom the problem of values is boring or non-existent. For Mr. Maugham it is of per- petual interest ; either directly, or, in his notes on religious subjects, indirectly, he continually reverts to it. "Though the turn of my mind," he says, " is concrete and my intelligence moves inactively among abstractions, I have a passion for metaphysics. . . ." His self-repression consists in a refusal to allow that passion to have effect.
I do not wish to raise any question of agreement or disagreement with his interpretation of Epicureanism, but only to remark that his lucid and discerning mind, whenever it approaches the absttact, has a disconcerting habit of suddenly refusing a fence and swerving into irrelevance. For example, he turns away from the concept of Absolute Beauty by asking, "What sort of absolute is it that is affected by personal idiosyncrasy, training, fashion, habit, sex and novelty ? " The answer is that the absolute is not affected. Though we attain to the concept of it through our various and stumbling perceptions of things we call beautiful, its being is not in those things and is not diminished either by our ceasing to value them or even by their annihilation. The idea of Absolute Beauty, may or may not be delusory ; but it certainly cannot be invalidated by the destruction of Chartres cathedral or by our coming to think that the cathedral is ugly.
Mr. Maugham again refuses a fence in his discussion of the nature of the soul. Character, he has said, is-the-soul's sensible manifesta- tion. Character is affected by the accidents of the body. Therefore, he argues, again confusing the idea with one of the things through ' which it may be apprehended, the soul must be affected by the accidents of the body ; and he adds: " I find it then impossible to believe that the soul thus contingent on the accidents of the body can exist in separation from it. When you see the dead it can hardly fail to occur to you that they do look awfully dead." Some- thing prevents him from seeing that his final sentence, far from clinching his argument, re-opens it. Might it not be that a body looks " awfully dead " precisely because the soul is separated from it ?
The greater a reader's respect for Mr. Maugham, not as a Master- craftsman only but as an artist, the stronger, will his desire be to do more than cover this book with urbane compliments. He will be led, as I have been, to grapple with it in an attempt to discover that special tension which gives character and 'vitality to the author's work. This tension arises, I think, from a conflict between his " passion for metaphysics " and his determination not to give him- self or 'his characters the benefit of the doubt. If he has an affecta- tion or mannerism it is of ruthlessness. This is partly honesty and courage, but partly fear. Fear of what ? Of sentimentality ? Of being duped ? Of self-deception ? Honourable fears, but still fears, and fears are conditions of the imagination which criticism too seldom attempts to understand. They run like a shudder, across these pages. They are among the winds that drive Mr. Maugham's
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