W. S. Maugham’s first literary success was his first novel, Lisa of Lambeth (1897); his greatest work is Of Human Bondage (1915); by then he had 10 novels published and 10 plays produced, and at one time had 4 plays running simultaneously on London’s West End; 40 films have been made of his writings – Of Human Bondage has been filmed three times, The Razor’s Edge twice, and The Painted Veil twice, the latter, a very faithful adaptation, in 2006 starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts and Diana Rigg.
He had an affair and a child with Syrie Wellcome, an interior decorator, whom he later married in 1917. Their daughter, Elizabeth, eventually married a Baron. However, he had other female and male lovers until he met, an American, Gerald Haxton in the Red Cross at the outbreak of WWI. They were mostly together until Haxton’s death in 1944. His later partner was Alan Searle until Maugham’s death in 1965.
I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer—whereas really it was the other way around. – WSM
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The Merry-Go-Round (1904) is his fifth novel.
The axis of a merry-go-round is usually covered in mirrors; all the better for us going round and round to see ourselves going round and round. In Maugham’s The Merry-Go-Round the axis is Miss Ley and doing what every freshly polished mirror does.
Miss Ley accidentally witnesses a romantic assignation by a married friend:
“None was more indifferent to convention than herself, and the marriage tie especially excited her ridicule, but she despised entirely those who disregarded the by-laws of society, yet lacked courage to suffer the results of their boldness: to seek the good opinion of the world, and yet secretly to act counter to its idea of decorum, was a very contemptible hypocrisy.”
The themes of The Merry-Go-Round are those that obsessed Maugham throughout his writing career: social and marriage hypocrisy, the class divide, conscience vs sense, love vs reason, and the tyranny of money.
The wealthy spinster, Miss Ley, a bastion of realistic good sense, observes those around her as they confuse themselves with what they want to do and what they feel they must do; they hurt themselves and each other and rarely do good; they go up and down and round and round. Dominating her social landscape are three couples: Basil Kent, law clerk, righteous and duty-bound, and the beautiful but lowly barmaid, Jenny Bush; Grace Castillyon, bored wife, and Reggie Bassett, young, lazy, handsome, but frivolous; and Bella Langton, sympathetic, plain, but devoted, and Herbert Field, young, poetic, sensitive, but consumptive.
As you can see from the above quote, the language is dense with every word used to its maximum effect. As with Hardy, James, and Dickens I read the first few chapters, stop, go back and start again: I need to rehearse the understanding, get ‘into’ the language, before the full meaning of the text is revealed. But when you do the rewards are powerful; even the melodrama, by our contemporary standards, is rendered real and moving.
We live in a very different world to those who lived 120 years ago. The rules of our social behaviour are also different and far less rigid. Maugham’s language not only relates the story but creates the world within which his story can effectively be told.
You can download the ebook for free here. Project Gutenberg allows free ebook downloads from works out of copyright. Most of Maugham’s works are available for free on this site.
The paper version is available here.
And here is a BBC interview with Maugham at his villa on the French Riviera in 1965.
Michael K Freundt 