Of Human Bondage

W. Somerset Maugham

Art, he continued with a wave of the hand, is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be.

Maugham paints a picture of humanism in Of Human Bondage which repeatedly places the glories of humanity before the reader before spitting upon them and grinding them into the ground with his nicely polished shoe. After each glory which might signify something greater and more grand going on here than the rutting and rooting about of so many animals, he finishes with an exuberantly sunlit picture of humans reveling in the beauty of being alive in an ugly world.

It is strange, almost mindboggling (of course only when you actual slip away from Maugham's insidious grasp) to notice how incredible happy the man is about his morbid discoveries. At one point he comments joyfully that he would have long ago dealt himself a murderer's death if he weren't so "damned flippant." It seems that in Of Human Bondage life in losing it's meaning, gains some other (greater?) thing. Asceticism? The hedonist glory of living because we are not dead?

But beyond the perhaps questionable philosophy in Of Human Bondage, I once again must spend some moments talking about his excellent craftsmanship. I do not know that I have ever before encountered an author who works in English with so much beauty. Maugham's writing, regardless of those pedantic people who imagine it too stylish, like some fop or dandy--garish in their fashion--is perhaps the best put together of any English author's.

For example, one interesting phrase, "Oh life where is thy sting?" might strike some as a childish twist on a much venerated and perhaps overused rhetorical idea. But I have not yet become so like Maugham's characters as to be unable to enjoy a cliche when used rightly. Like a Dairy Queen burger at the right moment, such a style can be as great a pinnacle as any.