AN ANTHOLOGY OF THOUGHT & EMOTION... Un'antologia di pensieri & emozioni
הידע של אלוהים לא יכול להיות מושגת על ידי המבקשים אותו, אבל רק אלה המבקשים יכול למצוא אותו

Saturday 30 September 2017

I FOUND...

Bruno Schulz, "Self-portrait", 1920-22, cliché-verre
The Lost
Searching for Bruno Schulz.
(writing on The New Yorker, 2002)

In 1941, when the Germans seized the Polish town of Drohobycz, Felix Landau, the notorious Gestapo officer in charge of the Jewish labor force, took an interest in BrunoSchulz, a local writer and artist who had submitted samples of his work to the Judenrat in the hope of gaining employment. Landau had an eye for design— after the war, he went on to start an interior-decorating firm in Bavaria—and he commissioned a number of works from Schulz, including a set of murals for his young son's bedroom depicting scenes from fairy tales. In return, Landau supplied Schulz with extra food and with protection that temporarily spared the artist's life. Ultimately, though, Landau's favors contributed to Schulz's death. In November, 1942, Landau killed a Jewish dentist favored by a rival Gestapo officer, Karl Günther. Soon after, on a day that has come to be known as Black Thursday, Günther saw his opportunity for revenge. That morning, a "wild action"—a spontaneous Gestapo shooting spree—broke out. Schulz was not at work but in the ghetto, perhaps getting food in preparation for an escape, which he had planned for that night. According to Schulz's friend Izydor Friedman, who witnessed his death, Günther caught up with Schulz at the corner of Czacki and Mickiewicz Streets and shot him twice in the head. "You killed my Jew—I killed yours," he later boasted to Landau. 

After the war, Drohobycz became part of the Soviet Union, and bureaucratic difficulties made searching for the murals nearly impossible. In February, 2001, however, the German documentary filmmaker Benjamin Geissler went with a crew to Drohobycz, now part of Ukraine, to look for them. With the help of several residents of the town, they were able to gain access to Landau's house, which had been converted into apartments. There, in a tiny room being used as a pantry, they discovered the faint outlines of Schulz's paintings, hidden beneath a coat of whitewash. As they rubbed the walls, bright spots of color began to appear: Schulz's kings and queens and gnomes, released after their long period in hiding. 

First edition of "Cinnamon Shops" (which appeared in English as "The Street ofCrocodiles")

It is cause for celebration whenever a work of art thought to have been lost is found, but in the context of Schulz's life the discovery seemed like a miracle. At the time of his death, Schulz had published only two books of short stories, Cinnamon Shops (which appeared in English as The Street of Crocodiles) and "Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass," and some illustrations and other graphic art works. These books have established him as one of the most original voices of European modernism. Schulz has been called a symbolist, an Expressionist, and a Surrealist, and compared to writers as different as Kafka and Proust. His work shares the former's fascination with metamorphosis and the latter's reverence for childhood, while embodying a radical sensuality that is unique. But it is hard to evaluate Schulz's work with confidence, because much of what he wrote, or may have written, has been lost. When he was forced to move to the Drohobycz ghetto, a year before his death, he divided up his papers, which are said to have included at least two unpublished manuscripts and hundreds of drawings, prints, and paintings, and entrusted them to a few non-Jewish friends for safekeeping. They have not been seen since. 

Restoration work on the murals began immediately. The Ukrainian minister of culture announced that they would be put on the country's list of protected national monuments. Shortly afterward, three people representing Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, came to the apartment and removed Schulz's paintings. Fragments "were pried from the walls hurriedly and crudely," leaving behind "mutilated remnants," Jerzy Ficowski (1924 – 2006) writes in his biography of Schulz, Regions of the Great Heresy, which has been newly translated by Theodosia Robertson. All of a sudden, Bruno Schulz became front-page news. "THEY STOLE SCHULZ" a headline in Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland's leading newspaper, announced. Dora Katznelson, a member of the Drohobycz Jewish community, wrote in a letter to the editor, "Not only Jews and Poles but Ukrainians as well, reading daily in the Ukrainian papers about the barbaric theft of Schulz's paintings, cry out in amazement: 'Yad Vashem? It can't be!' " After several days of silence, a Yad Vashem spokesperson claimed that the removal "was conducted with the full coöperation of the Drohobycz municipality," adding that, since Schulz was a Jew and had been killed by the Nazis, the museum could assert a "moral right" to the art work. Ficowski believes that such arguments "offend logic and common sense and invalidate the work of a generation of Polish intellectuals whose goal it has been to force a nation to come to grips with its past." He adds, "Despite local and world protest, a work of art was allowed to disappear."* 

Bruno SchulzThe murals' disappearance, though, was strangely appropriate. Schulz's fiction is preoccupied with the attempt to locate things that have been lost, from an exquisite book, glimpsed in childhood and never seen again, to his own father, whose death is reenacted in many of the stories. Indeed, the idea of loss is a crucial aspect of Schulz's principal endeavor: to reconstruct the world of childhood, a world that the writer can approach only through memory and imagination. It is a phantasmagorical region in which mundane incidents—a nighttime walk, an encounter with a tramp —expand to take on a mystical dimension. "An event may be small and insignificant in its origin, and yet, when drawn close to one's eye, it may open in its center an infinite and radiant perspective because a higher order or being is trying to express itself in it and irradiates it violently," Schulz wrote. "Thus we shall collect these allusions, these earthly approximations, these stations and stages on the paths of our life, like the fragments of a broken mirror." 

Schulz's biography, too, is a collection of fragments. Ficowski calls his book a "biographical portrait," but "sketch" would be more apt, since much about the writer's life is simply not known. Schulz was born on July 12, 1892, in Drohobycz, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (The high school he attended was named after Franz Josef, but by the time he returned there as a teacher, in a newly independent Poland, it had been patriotically rechristened after the medieval Polish king Wladyslaw Jagiello.) Schulz grew up speaking both Polish and German. He started to draw as a very young child, long before his first attempts to write. "Before I could even speak," he told a friend, "I covered any piece of paper and the edges of newspapers with scribbles that caught the attention of those around me." 

After graduating from high school, in 1910, Schulz went to Lwów, the provincial capital, to study architecture. His studies were interrupted by poor health—he suffered heart and lung ailments throughout his life—and with the outbreak of war in 1914 he had to abandon them. His father died the following year, and responsibility for the upkeep of the family, which included his widowed elder sister and her two children, fell in part to Schulz. In the first years after the war, he concentrated on his art, exhibiting his work in galleries in Lwów, Wilno, and Warsaw and assembling a collection of prints under the title The Booke of Idolatry, which he bound and sold. Whether from embarrassment or modesty, he told the students who assisted him that the prints were illustrations of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs. This gives a fair idea of their content—highly erotic, with a recurrent motif of men collapsed in worship at the feet of a longlegged nude woman. (When Schulz's art was displayed in a spa town where he periodically went to take the cure, a senator condemned it as pornography and threatened to have the exhibit shut down.) But he was unable to earn a living through art, and his family responsibilities weighed heavily. In 1924, he began teaching drawing and "handicrafts"—essentially, shop—at the high school in Drohobycz. 


At about this time, Schulz began to write in earnest. While teaching, he would tell stories to get his rowdy students to calm down and pay attention. One former student recalled "those tales in which a pencil, an inconspicuous water jug, or a tile stove had their own histories and lived in a manner close to us and so much like human beings." As Schulz recounted the tales, he illustrated them "with a few strokes of chalk on the blackboard." He seems always to have done his best work before an audience, a tendency that made him an extraordinary correspondent. In a series of letters to the poet Debora Vogel, he composed elaborate postscripts—long, descriptive passages based on episodes from his childhood. Vogel encouraged Schulz to turn his postscripts into a book, which eventually came to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nalkowska, an important figure in the Warsaw literary scene. After reading Schulz's manuscript, she proclaimed him "the most sensational discovery in our literature!" and promised to take his book to the publisher herself. Cinnamon Shops was published in 1934; Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass followed, three years later. 

"The books we read in childhood don't exist anymore; they sailed off with the wind, leaving bare skeletons behind," Schulz wrote in a 1936 letter. "Whoever still has in him the memory and marrow of childhood should rewrite these books as he experienced them." This was the foundation of his creative project, and he realized it most vividly in a story called simply "The Book," which opens his second collection and may originally have been part of a novel, now lost. The story's narrator recalls a volume whose pages, when rubbed, reveal fragments of kaleidoscopic color: 
Sometimes my father would wander off and leave me alone with The Book; the wind would rustle through its pages and the pictures would rise. And as the windswept pages were turned, merging the colors and shapes, a shiver ran through the columns of text, freeing from among the letters flocks of swallows and larks. Page after page floated in the air and gently saturated the landscape with brightness. At other times, The Book lay still and the wind opened it softly like a huge cabbage rose; the petals, one by one, eyelid under eyelid, all blind, velvety, and dreamy, slowly disclosed a blue pupil, a colored peacock's heart, or a chattering nest of hummingbirds.
When, years later, the boy asks his father what happened to The Book, he is told that it is "a myth in which we believe when we are young, but which we cease to take seriously as we get older." One day, he finds some tattered pages that he believes were part of the treasured volume. Alas, all the text has been destroyed; only old advertisements remain. Yet even these rise "over the sphere of daily affairs into the region of pure poetry": an ad for canaries carries the sound of chirping birds, a procession of cripples yields to distant landscapes beyond. No image ever appears twice; the writing "unfolds while being read, its boundaries open to all currents and fluctuations." This book, the boy is certain, is "the Authentic," to which all books aspire. Without it, "they live only a borrowed life, which at the moment of inspiration returns to its ancient source." 

All artists, Schulz believed, spend their lives interpreting images that are stamped in their minds during childhood. He wrote, "They do not discover anything new after that, they only learn how to understand better and better the secret entrusted to them at the outset; their creative effort goes into an unending exegesis, a commentary on that one couplet of poetry assigned to them." For Schulz, this "couplet" was the mythology of his early life—a "spiritual genealogy," he called it. The linked stories that make up his two collections are all narrated from the perspective of a young boy who is an apparent stand-in for the author. His father, the central figure of the stories, combines physical frailty with prodigious psychic power. In an illustration for Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the father is bedridden, but his force manifests itself in an enlarged, bulbous forehead and in his hair, which sticks up in thick ropes. In the story "Tailors' Dummies," a mannequin inspires the father to imagine how man might be re-created in disposable form: "For each action, each word, we shall call to life a different human being." His son labels him a "Heresiarch," though this particular heresy is an attack not on religion but on the banality of life: the linear flow of hours and days, which Schulz's stories, with their magical transformations and moments outside time, seek to overcome. 

"Reality is as thin as paper, and betrays with all its cracks its imitative character," Schulz wrote in one story. His fiction peers through those cracks. Familiar streets unexpectedly become labyrinths of hidden corners and strange courtyards; forgotten passageways become gateways to another, more vibrant world. In "Cinnamon Shops," the boy is sent to run an errand at night and becomes lost: "There open up, deep inside a city, reflected streets, streets which are double, make-believe streets. One's imagination, bewitched and misled, creates illusory maps of the apparently familiar districts, maps in which the streets have their proper places and usual names but are provided with new and fictitious configurations by the inexhaustible inventiveness of the night." In "Tailors' Dummies," the father recalls a surprising discovery he made upon entering a neglected room in an old apartment: "From all the crevices in the floor, from all the mouldings, from every recess, there grew slim shoots filling the grey air with a scintillating filigree lace of leaves: a hot-house jungle, full of whispers and flicking lights—a false and blissful spring." The vision vanishes almost as soon as it appears: "The whole elusive sight was a Fata Morgana, an example of the strange make-believe of matter which had created a semblance of life." 

Like prose poems, the stories work not through conventional structures of plot or character but by building up a welter of images that create their own logic. Their anthropomorphism can be dizzying. "Now the windows, blinded by the glare of the empty square, had fallen asleep," Schulz writes in "August." "The balconies declared their emptiness to heaven; the open doorways smelt of coolness and wine." In "Birds," we are told, "The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year's loaves." Then Schulz prods the simile just a bit further than expected: "One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference." The sensuality that characterizes Schulz's language is rooted in the Polish poetic tradition, but the surreal and grotesque tweaks are his own. 

Although Schulz's stories revel in the metaphysical, his letters reveal that he was preoccupied with mundanities. He found teaching burdensome, and fretted constantly about not being granted the leaves of absence that he requested. "Time to which someone else has laid claim, to which someone made the slightest allusion— is already tainted, ruined, inedible," he wrote in a 1934 letter. "When I have to prepare a lesson for the next day, buy materials at the lumberyard—the entire afternoon and evening are already ruined for me." He was also obsessed with the pettier details of a writer's career: reviews of his books (which were mixed), nominations for prizes (which he seldom received), foreign translations (which did not occur in his lifetime). He longed to escape his family, with whom he lived, and marry Józefina Szelińska, a Catholic schoolteacher to whom he became engaged in 1935, but he worried that his meagre income could not support two households. After two years, they broke off the engagement. 
Portrait of Jozefina Szelińska and Stefania Czarecka at Drohobycz, by Bruno Schulz
In addition to his financial concerns, Schulz was oppressed by fears of personal danger; in one of the biography's few personal details, Ficowski poignantly recounts that, when Schulz was anxious, to calm himself he would sketch the outline of a little house. If he found himself without a pencil, he would trace the shape with his finger. These worries, naturally, interfered with his writing. After he wrote the stories in his two published books, he never enjoyed another period of sustained productivity. For years, he labored over a novel, to be called Messiah, in which the Jewish Messiah appears in Drohobycz. Except for a couple of stories published in Schulz's second book which may originally have been part of the novel, nothing of Messiah ever made its way into print. The romantic allure of this apparently lost masterpiece has inspired endless speculation and at least two novels, Cynthia Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and David Grossman's See Under: Love. But, considering the slow pace of Schulz's progress, it seems fair to wonder how much of Messiah ever got written. "I am waiting for more free time in order to return to work on the novel Messiah," Schulz wrote in a 1935 letter. "My work progresses very slowly" was the next report. "I've not had good periods. Over vacation I couldn't write anything. Now when I could write—school." In 1937, the book was "still in its infancy." 

In September, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Just two weeks later, the Soviets took Drohobycz. Schulz was safer under the Soviets than he would have been under the Germans, but he suffered in the new political climate. He was unable to publish his written work, which clearly did not conform to the dictates of socialist realism, though he did earn money by painting portraits of officials, including Stalin. (When a Stalin portrait he had done for the Drohobycz town hall was destroyed by jackdaws, Schulz is said to have told a friend that the loss of his own work actually brought him satisfaction.) This relative reprieve did not last long. The Germans retook Drohobycz in June, 1941, during Operation Barbarossa, and Schulz was forced to give up his home and move to the ghetto. Ironically, this may have galvanized his art. Ficowski reports that ten days before his death Schulz told an acquaintance that he was collecting material for a work about "the most awful martyrdom in history." Already, he said, he had amassed a hundred pages of notes. 

These notes, like the rest of Schulz's manuscripts, have never been found. The search for the writer's papers has been Ficowski's lifelong occupation, and he has pursued it with a fervor that sometimes looks like mania. "For a half-century I have lived in expectation, believing and not believing by turns that I will see it in the end," he writes of Messiah. Described as Schulz's "chronicler and archeologist," Ficowski has acted as the writer's agent, producing numerous editions of his stories, letters, and drawings and getting them published in Poland and abroad. He has also served as a one-man literary detective agency, placing advertisements in Polish and Ukrainian newspapers imploring the people to whom Schulz entrusted his work to make themselves known, and attempting to track down every living correspondent of Schulz's in the effort to find any remaining letters or other papers, no matter how insignificant. 

At times, Ficowski seems to have come excruciatingly close to the jackpot. In 1987, a man named Alex Schulz, who claimed to be the writer's cousin, contacted him to say that a man from Lwów, possibly a diplomat or a K.G.B. official, had offered to sell him a package of Schulz's manuscripts and drawings weighing two kilograms. Ficowski readily agreed to verify the authenticity of the documents; months passed; and then Alex Schulz died of a brain hemorrhage, leaving Ficowski with no way to contact the mysterious man from Lwów. Several years later, he met the Swedish ambassador to Warsaw, who told him that a "bulging packet" containing Schulz's manuscripts, "with the novel Messiah at the top," was hidden in the K.G.B. archives. The ambassador had learned about this from a "Russian" who had come upon the packet by accident, hidden under the name of an unknown Pole, presumably one of those to whom Schulz had given his papers. He asked Ficowski to accompany him to Ukraine to look for it, but the authorities twice denied the ambassador a visa, and he, too, died before the quest could be completed. 

Amid these spy-novel machinations, one begins to wonder whether Ficowski could have been the object of a terrible joke—the bulging packet with Messiah at the top sounds too good to be true. And the fact that fifty years of searching have turned up only about a hundred letters might well be evidence that nothing else ever existed. Still, the chapters in which Ficowski writes autobiographically about his quest are the most engaging in his book. And the frustration of the ongoing search for Schulz's traces explains the magnitude of the excitement when the Drohobycz wall paintings were found, and the disappointment that ensued when they vanished. For local devotees of Schulz, the removal of the murals was deeply wounding. A national treasure had been lost and, it was claimed, the force required to remove the murals from the walls could have damaged them irrevocably. 

Yet the events in that Drohobycz apartment have a certain chilly logic. For Schulz's stories suggest that, like the childhood episodes he reimagines, works of art, too, have an inherent ephemerality, vanishing almost as soon as they are experienced. The Book, the mysterious landscape of Cinnamon Shops, the Fata Morgana in the empty room—all are momentary creations of the imagination, glimpses through a crack that is already closing. They exist for just one glorious instant, made all the more beautiful by the impossibility of their reconstruction. Schulz, in one story, compared books to meteors. "Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame," he wrote. "For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes." 
_________________

* International controversy ensued. Yad Vashem said that parts of the mural were legally purchased, but the owner of the property said that no such agreement was made, and Yad Vashem did not obtain permission from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture despite legal requirements. The fragments left in place by Yad Vashem have since been restored and, after touring Polish museums, are now part of the collection at the Bruno Schulz Museum in Drohobych. This gesture by Yad Vashem instigated public outrage in Poland and Ukraine, where Schulz is a beloved figure. The issue reached a settlement in 2008 when Israel recognized the works as "the property and cultural wealth" of Ukraine, and Ukraine's Drohobychyna Museum agreed to let Yad Vashem keep them as a long-term loan. In February 2009, Yad Vashem opened its display of the murals to the public. (from Wikipedia)
Bruno Schulz, Self-portrait at the Drawing Board
Much of Bruno’s art is available on the website
The Art of Bruno Schulz

...But here's a sample gallery 






Friday 29 September 2017

A GASH IN THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE

Hans Günther Adler, who wrote under pseudonym H. G. Adler (July 2, 1910, in Prague – August 21, 1988, in London), was a German language poet, novelist, scholar, and Holocaust survivor.
The Long View
A rediscovered master of Holocaust writing.
(writing on The New Yorker in 2011)

In the spring of 1950, the philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno, who was then teaching at the University of Frankfurt, received a letter from H. G. Adler, an unknown scholar living in London. Adler informed Adorno that he had reviewed the professor’s Philosophy in Modern Music for the BBC, and mentioned that he happened to be the author of an academic study of Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Adorno wrote back, and a friendly correspondence sprang up between the two men, despite a fundamental conflict in their viewpoints. A year earlier, Adorno, a core member of the Frankfurt School of Marxist social theorists, had written an essay titled “Cultural Criticism and Society,” setting the terms for the debate over the literary representation of the Holocaust in a single famous dictum: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” By contrast, Adler, a survivor of the camps, had started writing poems about them while he was still a prisoner, and went on to address his experiences during the war both in novels and in scholarly accounts. In Adorno’s ideologically driven view, no kind of sense could be drawn from the victims’ fate; to try to impose an artistic coherence upon such a monstrosity was an inherent falsification, and to write poetry in its shadow epitomized the decadence of bourgeois culture. For Adler, the attempt to assimilate the horror of the camps into art was a necessity—not only an essential aspect of his life’s work but also a means of recapturing his own humanity after the catastrophe.

Like Adorno, Adler, who was born in Prague to a German Jewish family in 1910, was a musicologist by training. In February, 1942, he was deported to Theresienstadt. After two and a half years of imprisonment there, followed by a brief period in Auschwitz and another six months in two smaller labor camps near Buchenwald, he was liberated in April, 1945. Within a year of his emigration to London, in 1947, he had completed the exhaustive Theresienstadt 1941-1945. More than nine hundred pages long, the book is a comprehensive study of the camp from every perspective: sociological, historical, economic, anthropological, psychological. In a letter of recommendation to American publishers, the émigré novelist Hermann Broch wrote that the book would become the standard work on the subject, and that Adler’s “cool and precise method not only grasps all the essential details but manages further to indicate the extent of the horror in an extremely vivid form.” (The book was published in Germany in 1955 and quickly became a touchstone in German Holocaust studies, but it has never been translated into English.) 

The Theresienstadt book was only the beginning for Adler, who produced a quantity and a diversity of writings about the Holocaust that seem to have been equalled by no other survivor. In the decade after the war ended, he wrote at least five novels, two of which Peter Filkins has recently translated into English: The Journey, which appeared in 2008, and now an earlier work, Panorama (2011) . In addition, Adler produced poetry, works of history, collections of documents and testimonies, essays on a vast variety of topics, and another colossal (and still untranslated) sociological tome on the deportation of German Jews, called The Administered Man (1974). In an interview near the end of his life—he died in 1988—Adler recalled thinking, upon his arrival at Theresienstadt, “If I survive, then I will describe it . . . by setting down the facts of my individual experience, as well as to somehow describe it artistically.” 
Children at Auschwitz
In his introduction to Panorama, Filkins writes that Adler’s “dovetailing of fact and fiction in trying to both scientifically and imaginatively encompass his experience” is “unique to almost any writer we know.” Among survivors, Primo Levi also accomplished something like it—combining precise observations of Auschwitz, in such works as If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, with more freewheeling depictions of his experiences in The Truce and The Periodic Table. But Levi’s fiction was ultimately less ambitious than Adler’s. The Journey and Panorama are very different works, each with its own distinctive style, but both are modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil. Yet until recently they have been almost entirely unknown—not only in the English-speaking world but even in Germany, where Adler faced unusual difficulties in getting published. The Journey, written in 1950-51, did not appear until 1962. Panorama, Adler’s first novel, was written in 1948 and first published twenty years later. 

In his introduction to The Journey, Filkins writes that “the times were not ready for Adler,” but even recent critics have tempered their admiration of The Journey with surprise: Harold Bloom commented that he tends to avoid Holocaust fiction, “but this book helps redeem an all-but-impossible genre.” Yet why should the genre be nearly impossible? People have always created art in response to adversity; the Holocaust, whatever its historical uniqueness, cannot be an exception to a universal rule. Still, the idea of a Holocaust writer who fails to confine himself to the facts of his experience has always been difficult to accept. We expect our survivors to be witnesses and chroniclers, not artists. 

A young Adler

Panorama depicts, in broad strokes, the path of Adler’s early life. The book takes the form of ten scenes in the life of its narrator, Josef Kramer (whose name betrays his creator’s debt to Kafka), starting with a prologue in which the little boy is taken by his grandmother to visit a panorama, an exhibit of moving pictures viewed through a screen: “Two peepholes are there so that you see everything just the way it really looks, and everything is enlarged so that it seems completely alive.” The early scenes depict Josef ’s childhood: his bourgeois upbringing in an unnamed city that must be Prague, his torturous years at boarding school, a summer spent camping with a youth group called the Wanderers. (Perhaps to emphasize fiction’s universality, Adler almost never uses identifiable names for places or people: Panorama refers to Hitler as “the Conqueror,” and to concentration-camp inmates as “the lost.”) As a young man, Josef joins a mystical-philosophical circle surrounding a photographer guru, with whom he soon grows disillusioned; he interviews for a job as a tutor for a wealthy family; and he works at an institute identified as the Cultural Center, haphazardly run in Kafkaesque fashion by a group of employees who are overwhelmed by their own bureaucracy. Like the literal panorama in the prologue, the book’s chapters are distinct and self-contained, but, as they scroll by, certain commonalities become apparent. Peepholes, lenses, or scopes of different types appear in nearly every chapter; likewise, the chapters function as openings into a life, presenting partial pictures that are nonetheless complete unto themselves. 
Auschwitz and railway to entrance
By the time Josef is thirty, the war is under way. The chapter “Building the Railroad” shows him doing forced labor. He befriends a violinist, and the two men sustain each other with talk of music and art. But by the next scene we are in “Langenstein Camp,” which, it soon becomes clear, is one of the satellites of Buchenwald to which Adler was sent. The chapter gives a glimpse of the conditions in the camp—“no nails on the walls, no stools, no table, no bench, nothing, nothing at all, no beds, no straw mattresses, nothing but the bodies of the lost, clothed in rags of many colors”—before zooming out to chronicle Josef ’s journey there via Auschwitz. And now Adler imagines what happened to the rest of the prisoners, the ones selected for death: 
Stripped and hardly sheltered from
the elements, the doomed are
loaded into trucks, their tired feet
not having to walk much farther,
the conspirators striking the
doomed from the rolls, order
always maintained, the doomed
trucked once more through the
camp toward one of the temples of
murder made of concrete, the
doomed unloaded between the
flower beds of the front garden,
then pushed or dragged down
some steps into the dressing room
with the reassuring sign
announcing THIS WAY TO THE
SHOWERS. See, here you will wash
up, your soul has grown dirty, you
need a good scrubbing, but now
you will be clean, you will sanctify
yourself in order to meet your
salvation. . . . Look, how this is a
shrine into which you are being
led, you are precious, we want to
keep you secure, you shouldn’t run
away, just go on in, go with the
others, just as thousands and
thousands have gone before you
and will follow you, go, it’s so easy,
just go.
This passage is remarkable for any number of reasons: its gently pulsing lyrical rhythm, its use of religious vocabulary to describe the profanest of events (“temples of murder,” “salvation”), its direct address to the reader as if he or she were among the victims (“it’s so easy, just go”). But it is remarkable also for depicting an aspect of the Jewish tragedy that is considered, both by scholars and by the general public, to be beyond the limits of representation. Even critics who admired Schindler’s List, to give but one example, were repelled by the movie’s shower scene, which, in an interesting coincidence, is filmed through an Adler-style peephole. The gas chamber is a place where the imagination has feared to tread. But Adler demonstrates that even this barrier can be broken with compassion and taste. His novel would be poorer without this essential scene. 

The camp episode is extraordinary also in its position within the novel. Most works of fiction about the Holocaust take the events of the war as their primary focus, adopting the time line of history as the novel’s own: they begin somewhere around the start of the war and end soon after liberation. But “Panorama” takes a synoptic view in which the camps are but a single moment: its peepholes are windows not only into Josef ’s life but also into the twentieth century. At the same time, the camp chapter is linked thematically to earlier scenes. The routine at the boarding school is a sinister foreshadowing of what is to come, with its brutal instructors, mottoes painted on the wall, bread that tastes like straw, and even a roll call in which the pupils are forced to stand outside every morning to have their personal hygiene and clothing inspected. (Adler later referred to the school’s real-life model as his “first concentration camp.”) The repetition of such motifs gives the camp episode a grim familiarity. Auschwitz, in Adler’s telling, is simply another episode in the life of a European Jew. 
Theresienstadt concentration camp archway with the phrase Arbeit macht frei (work makes (you) free), placed over the entrance in a number of Nazi concentration camps
The panorama is not comprehensive: a crucial scene is missing. That scene is Theresienstadt, to which Adler gave fictional representation in The Journey, the third of the five novels written during his postwar decade of frenetic activity. (Two are still unpublished.) But first he wrote Theresienstadt 1941-1945, his academic magnum opus and the book for which he was best known—often to his chagrin—during his lifetime. (In an interview in the last decade of his life, more than twenty-five years after the book’s publication, he complained that he was still known as “Theresienstadt-Adler.”) Adler was deported to the camp in February, 1942, with his first wife, Gertrud, and her parents. He remained there until October, 1944, when Gertrud’s mother was assigned to a transport for Auschwitz, and her daughter and son-in-law decided to accompany her. (Gertrud’s father had died in Theresienstadt.) Upon arrival at Auschwitz, Gertrud’s mother was immediately selected for the gas chamber, and Gertrud chose to join her rather than allow her to die alone. Adler’s imaginative distance in that passage from Panorama describing the gas chamber becomes all the more remarkable with the knowledge that he must have been envisaging his wife and mother-in-law inside. 

Adler’s son, Jeremy, a professor of German at King’s College, London, who has written extensively on his father’s work, remarks on the “almost unbearable objectivity” with which Adler was able to describe his own experiences. This quality greatly impressed Adorno, who wrote, “It lies beyond the bounds of the imagination that a gentle and sensitive person could maintain his self-awareness spiritually and remain capable of objective thought in this organized Hell, the blatant purpose of which, even more than physical destruction, was the destruction of the self.” Adler himself writes, in his introduction to Theresienstadt 1941-1945, that within a few months of his arrival in the camp it became clear to him that he had a responsibility to analyze his situation systematically rather than passively surrender to it. “I said to myself: You must observe life in this society as soberly and objectively as a scientist studying an obscure tribe. . . . Thus I lived in the camp simultaneously as both an outside observer and a typical prisoner.” 

Adler modelled the book on an ethnographic study that he came upon in the camp. In addition to the materials he was able to gather while imprisoned, he had access to a trove of documentation immediately after liberation, when the Prague Jewish Museum hired him to create an archive of the war years. Ultimately, Adler had tens of thousands of documents at his disposal. Transports, housing, food supplies, work details, medical facilities—no element of life in the camp is left out. In the chapter on “Population,” he records the places of origin of the camp’s residents—mainly Bohemia and Moravia, Germany, and western Poland—as well as their physical characteristics and linguistic groups. Under “Economics,” lengthy tables list everything from the types of toiletries available to the jobs assigned to the inmates. In W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, the title character, for whom Adler’s book assumes a nearly cosmic significance, muses that Adler describes life in the camp “down to the last detail in its objective actuality,” and recapitulates some of the book’s more revealing observations, including the fact that the number of dead rose so sharply at one point that the joiner’s workshop could not keep up with the demand for coffins. 
Gas chamber at Auschwitz
Jeremy Adler points out that, in Adler’s major scholarly books, the only indications of his personal connection to his material are the dedications: Theresienstadt 1941- 1945 is dedicated to Gertrud, who “for thirty-two months did all she could for her family, up to the limits of her strength,” while The Administered Man is dedicated to his parents, who were killed at death camps. But the works nonetheless served a highly personal purpose. In the introduction to The Administered Man, which extends the investigation begun in Theresienstadt to conditions under the Nazis more generally, Adler wrote that in order to go on living he needed to put his own camp experience in a broader historical perspective. In an interview with the journalist Alfred Joachim Fischer, he was even more explicit. Fischer asked, “Isn’t the act of writing such a book . . . a form of self-laceration, a continual re-churning up of a horror that most people would prefer to repress?” On the contrary, Adler responded: “I would not be here before you today if I had not written that book. That book constituted my self-liberation.” He later elaborated, “I felt that I couldn’t go on, that the pain of what had happened would leave within me an abyss of despair, a gaping emptiness, if I didn’t try, in this way, to overcome the monstrosity both intellectually and emotionally; and so I had no other option but to begin my research.” 

But the objective history alone was not enough to fill Adler’s emptiness; the creative aspect of his endeavor was equally significant. Although he had begun making notes almost as soon as he arrived in Theresienstadt, his observations found their first expression in poetry. All in all, Adler wrote more than a hundred and thirty camp poems—a hundred in Theresienstadt and the rest after his journeys to and from Auschwitz. One of the poems in a sequence titled “Theresienstadt Pictures,” of which only selections have been published, is called “Totenfeier,” or “Funeral Rites,” a term that Adler also uses in the dedication of the Theresienstadt study to Gertrud. The poem, which depicts an unsentimental burial in the camp, is nearly as documentary in spirit as the monograph. 

“Totenfeier” is classical in style, with regular metre and rhyme. But The Journey, which depicts the transport of the elderly Dr. Leopold Lustig, his wife, and their adult children—is decidedly experimental, in a style that one critic has called “Holocaust modernism.” The book’s initial reception was unwelcoming. Adler wrote the novel in 1950-51, but it did not appear until 1962—possibly because Peter Suhrkamp, then the head of the influential German publishing house bearing his name, vowed, in an astonishing burst of hostility toward Adler, that the book would not be published as long as he was alive. (Suhrkamp died in 1959.) It was eventually published by Biblioteca Christiana, an obscure house in Bonn. As late as 1980, Adler lamented in an interview that the book was “almost entirely unknown.” 

H. G. Adler
Part of the trouble, perhaps, was that Adler was unwilling to categorize The Journey as a novel, preferring the musical term “Ballade.” The novelist Heinrich Böll, an admirer of Adler’s, argued, in an essay printed in 1963, that Adler’s objection to calling the book a novel despite its obvious resemblance to the form had to do with its subject matter: “Adler cannot call the story he tells a novel, because that makes it sound like something imaginary, and the uncanny journey on which Doctor Leopold Lustig and his family are sent was not imagined by Adler.” Nonetheless, Adler was frustrated with critics who tried to read the book as a chronicle of his own experiences. He found it understandable, he wrote in a response to his early readers, that book reviewers chose to focus on the contents of the novel. “But the knowledge of its contents does not suffice for an understanding of this multilayered story as fiction.” Neither a novel, exactly, nor reportage: Adler was asking his readers to accept a discomfiting in-between form. 

The Journey flickers constantly between fantasy and reality, at times telling its story in linear, chronological fashion, then suddenly switching perspective between the characters or skipping back and forth in time: one character’s death and illness are described in reverse order. As in Panorama, places appear in disguise, with Theresienstadt bearing the ironic name Ruhenthal—literally, “valley of rest,” which gives it the double connotation of both a spa town and a place of final repose. The “journey” of the title is the Lustig family’s deportation to the camp, but it is also a metaphor for life. There are few specifics: as in Panorama, the words “Jew,” “Hitler,” and “gas chamber” almost never appear. When the novel addresses Nazism, it is depicted in the guise of a “mental illness” that has spun out of control: “The sickness had crept out of nowhere without a sign. . . . It was the first epidemic of mental illness, but no one recognized it as such, neither the patients nor the doctors. No one told anyone he was sick, for as a result of the epidemic everyone was crazy, and once they finally recognized what was happening it was too late.” 

In his introduction to The Journey, Filkins writes that “neither Germany nor the world was ready for novels about the Holocaust in the 1950s.” Holocaust fiction had already started to appear in the first years following the war, by such writers as Tadeusz Borowski and the author who wrote under the name Ka-Tzetnik 135633 (literally, “concentration camp inmate”). But these bluntly written works were recognized as plainly testimonial. A literary novel was an altogether different animal. As Adler wrote, “It is a question of different categories of reality, and there is nothing to be gained from holding fast to the facts in literature, facts that only a chronicle of experience or an academic work of history or sociology can properly encompass, while in a work of art these experiences are recast, transformed, even incinerated—a process through which literature arises.” This transformation was largely lost on his readers at the time. A few friends in America, including Hermann Broch and Hannah Arendt, tried to help Adler with the publication of his Theresienstadt book, and Arendt cited it in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Yet colleagues took considerably less interest in Adler’s fiction. 

Adorno, too, was happy to engage Adler on the aesthetics of musicology, but shied away from a more sensitive subject of mutual interest: the question of aesthetics after the Holocaust. And naturally so: where could the author of the no-poetry-after-Auschwitz dictum and the poet of Theresienstadt find common ground? The two men nonetheless maintained their friendship for nearly a decade, until Adorno invited Adler twice to deliver lectures in Frankfurt about Theresienstadt. The second of these lectures was not a success. As Jeremy Adler tells it, Adler wanted to speak about a propaganda film that the Nazis had made in the camp and its relation to “human blindness under slavery.” Adorno proposed, instead, the theme of “ideologies under slavery.” Adler apologized for failing to fulfill the expectations of Adorno and his students, but later took revenge in his posthumously published, still untranslated novel The Invisible Wall, in which a “Professor Kratzenstein” spouts a parodic jumble of Marxism and psychoanalysis. The professor, Adler writes, “could not sufficiently emphasize that all suffering, insofar as it was not based in human nature, derived from economic factors. Concentration camps, for example, evolved from a specific form of exploitation, and everything else which made them so disgusting must be explained by sociopsychological means.” 
Theresienstadt concentration camp, documentary photos
Kratzenstein here sounds suspiciously like Adorno in a chapter toward the end of his Negative Dialectics (1966), in which Adorno revisits his original dictum. “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems,” Adorno writes. He continues: “But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared.” It is hard to think of a more grotesque example of the limitations of ideology in understanding the Holocaust. Adorno’s perspective fails utterly to take into consideration the human dimension of the catastrophe, whereas Adler, even in his academic works, never lost sight of the human pain that underlay every aspect of his gigantic subject. 

Adorno went on to address Adler more directly, in a passage that touches the root of their conflict: 
A man whose admirable strength
enabled him to survive Auschwitz
and other camps said in an
outburst against Beckett that if
Beckett had been in Auschwitz he
would be writing differently, more
positively, with the front-line creed
of the escapee. The escapee is right
in a fashion other than he thinks.
Beckett, and whoever else
remained in control of himself,
would have been broken in
Auschwitz and probably forced to
confess that front-line creed which
the escapee clothed in the words
“trying to give men courage”—as if
this were up to any structure of the
mind.
The “escapee” in this passage is Adler, Jeremy Adler and others have written. Adorno, while recognizing the survivor’s strength, is critical of his humanism, which he dismisses as a “front-line creed”—a cheaply gained trench religion, in other words, which serves as the last-ditch hope of a man who glimpses his nearly inevitable death. In contrast to Beckett’s nihilism, Adler’s approach—to investigate, to contextualize, even to transform—is profoundly positive. He strove to write novels that were documentary and academic works that were emotionally gripping, creating a body of work in which both the parts and the whole functioned with a common purpose: to illuminate, in as many ways as possible, the terrors of the Nazi years. Seen this way, the Holocaust is not a gash in the fabric of the universe; it is a historical event, the lessons of which we are obliged to study carefully
Auschwitz, the ovens
Adler once recalled that before the war he had a recurring dream in which he was walking with Hitler through the streets of Prague, trying to disabuse him of his anti-Semitism. The optimism of this dream is of a piece with the optimism of Adler’s scholarly and literary project: the belief that one’s words will be received and understood, and that they might go so far as to alter the path of the world. In Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz laments, “It seems unpardonable to me today that I had blocked off the investigation of my most distant past for so many years . . . and that now it is too late for me to seek out Adler.” Thankfully, for the rest of us it is too late no longer.

Thursday 28 September 2017

THE PATH TO ENLIGHTENMENT IS HARD

My mother had a thing for W. Somerset Maugham, especially for two of his novels, which she introduced to me in my teens... And they changed my life, somehow, making me dream to emulate the adventurous and tormented characters Maugham depicted. I almost succeeded, living on the Razor's Edge while yearning for the Moon and Sixpence.
Katha Upanishad "1-3-14. Arise, awake, and learn by approaching the exalted ones, for that path is sharp as a razor's edge, impassable, and hard to go by, say the wise."
Paul Gauguin, Self-Portrait 'Les Miserables' (1888)
The Great And the Good
Somerset Maugham’s sense of vocation.
By Ruth Franklin

In Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence, there is a scene in which Dirk Stroeve, a painter, visits an art dealer to inquire after the work of another artist, Charles Strickland, whose paintings he has persuaded the dealer to take on. Stroeve is himself a mediocre painter of blatantly commercial landscapes and peasant scenes, unrepentant about his lack of originality. “I don’t pretend to be a great painter,” he says early on, “but I have something. I sell.” Yet he recognizes Strickland’s work as genius. He tells the dealer, “Remember Monet, who could not get anyone to buy his pictures for a hundred francs. What are they worth now?” The dealer questions this logic. “There were a hundred as good painters as Monet who couldn’t sell their pictures at that time, and their pictures are worth nothing still. How can one tell? Is merit enough to bring success?” Stroeve is infuriated. “How, then, will you recognize merit?” he asks. “There is only one way—by success,” the dealer replies. “Think of all the great artists of the past—Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ingres, Delacroix—they were all successful.”

Success came easily to Maugham, whose career embodies the vexing questions implicit in Stroeve’s argument with the art dealer: how do we recognize artistic merit, and what relation, if any, does it have to popularity? It is difficult to think of another writer whose work was once so ubiquitous and is now so thoroughly absent from the contemporary literary canon. As Selina Hastings writes in her new biography, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (2010)—the title is somewhat sensational, given that most of Maugham’s secrets have been open for some time—Maugham was for much of his life “the most famous writer in the world.” He once had four productions running simultaneously in London’s West End, his novels were best-sellers in England and America, and his works have been adapted for film and television more than ninety times. He spent his later years in style, in a villa on the French Riviera, and his death, in 1965, at the age of ninety-one, was front-page news in Europe and America. Yet during the seven years I spent studying English literature at two universities, three decades later, I do not recall anyone, professor or student, ever mentioning his work.

Maugham’s critical acclaim was always more uneven than his commercial success. Theodore Dreiser championed Of Human Bondage, but English critics, particularly the Bloomsbury literary élite, were largely uninterested in Maugham. (He paid them back in his fiction by invariably portraying critics, bitterly and hilariously, as opportunistic philistines.) Joseph Conrad wrote snidely of Maugham’s first novel that the author “just looks on—and that is just what the general reader prefers.” When he was praised, it was for his technical skill rather than for his psychological depth. “I do not know of any living writer who seems to have his work so much under control,” Evelyn Waugh once wrote. In a devastating piece on Maugham for this magazine in 1946, Edmund Wilson said, “I have never been able to convince myself that he was anything but second-rate.” Such criticism seems to have carried a particular sting for Maugham, perhaps because it coincided precisely with his own self-deprecating assessments. In his autobiography, The Summing Up, published in 1938, when he was sixtyfour, he explained, “I discovered my limitations and it seemed to me that the only sensible thing was to aim at what excellence I could within them.” These limitations, as he saw them, included “small power of imagination,” “no lyrical quality,” and “little gift of metaphor”: “I knew that I should never write as well as I could wish, but I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed.”

Somerset Maugham by Ronald Searle
There is more than a hint of the English gentleman’s requisite modesty in these words—a gesture of self-criticism made from the comfortable vantage of success—and what appears to be soul-searching reflection may just be an advance parry against the critics’ blows. But Maugham was right that his gift lay not in a striking style or in sweeping ambition but in the raw powers of observation and the glittering precision that he brought to his moral dramas. “It seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people missed,” he once wrote, with his characteristic understatement. The devastating conditions of the poor in London slums, the eccentric characters populating remote colonial outposts of the South Pacific, the treacherously hypocritical upper class: always looking on, Maugham set their stories down—sometimes virtually unaltered—in his singularly unemotional style. Must a true artist be a visionary in the manner of Charles Strickland, an originator constantly in the process of “making it new”? Or is “making it real,” however unfashionable, sometimes just as worthwhile? Fittingly, Maugham’s obsession with the greatness of which he believed himself incapable occasionally spurred him to achieve it.

"One of the first things one learned about Somerset Maugham in London was that no one liked him very much,” the journalist Drew Middleton wrote just after Maugham’s death. The difficult ground of his life has been covered many times. Hastings’s approach, though never hagiographic, is refreshingly sympathetic. Maugham was born in 1874 in France, to English parents, and grew up speaking French more fluently than English. Orphaned at the age of ten, he was shipped off to southeast England to live with his uncle, a vicar, and his wife. When he was at boarding school in Canterbury, the other boys abused him for his small size and his difficulties with English pronunciation, which developed into a full-fledged stammer that was to plague him all his life. Hastings identifies as autobiographical the episode in Of Human Bondage in which Philip Carey, the author’s fictional alter ego, prays that God will cure him of his clubfoot. His disappointment is the first step in his loss of religious faith.

Most readers have assumed that Philip’s clubfoot stands in for his creator’s speech impediment, but Francis King, an English writer and a friend of Maugham’s, argued that it was “a metaphor for a graver disability”—his sexual orientation. Maugham famously once said that as a young man he had thought that he was “three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer—whereas really it was the other way around.” He did have relationships with women and, in 1917, married Syrie Wellcome, who had become pregnant with his child while still married to her first husband; Maugham was named in the divorce proceedings. Homosexuality was more than a hindrance in turn-of-the-century England. It could send a man to jail: Oscar Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency” took place in 1895, when Maugham was twenty-one. By that point, he had already spent some time studying in Heidelberg, where he absorbed influences as diverse as Pater, Ibsen, and Schopenhauer. After his return to London, he took up medical studies. Training among the poor in London’s slums, he found himself fascinated by the people and their stories, which inspired his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, about the life and death of an eighteen-year-old factory worker. “I caught the colloquial note by instinct,” he wrote later.

Maugham photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1934
From the start, Maugham approached writing as a profession, earning a living being his first priority. He had no illusions about his early work: a letter to his agent accompanying three short stories called one of them “bad enough to suit anything.” He turned to playwriting, because it was lucrative, and because, as he later claimed, he found it easier “to set down on paper the things people said than to construct a narrative.” Maugham is again selling his talent short: it was not every writer who could sit down and dash off a top-rate comedy within a month. “His acute intelligence enabled him to gauge what his audiences wanted,” Hastings writes, and “his expert craftsmanship delivered it.” And what the audiences wanted was the kind of witty, urbane society drama for which he became famous. But after a remarkable run of eight hit plays—he eventually wrote more than two dozen—the novel pulled him back. Maugham began writing Of Human Bondage in 1911; it was published in 1915. The ease with which he had found success as a playwright perhaps instilled in him the mistrust of pure facility that became a recurrent preoccupation in his novels.

In a foreword to the novel, Maugham notes that it had a first life as a shorter book, called The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey, which he had written at the age of twenty-three. He is relieved now that it was not published, he says, because he would then have “lost a subject which I was too young to make proper use of.” Of Human Bondage is autobiographical, he says, but not autobiography: “Fact and fiction are inextricably mingled; the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents are related as they happened.” Despite this caution, critics and biographers have mostly read at least the first part of the novel as drawn directly from Maugham’s life—the early death of the mother, the icy vicar, the torturous school experience, and then the escape to Heidelberg, where Philip is first exposed to aesthetic experience. The parallels break down as Philip reaches adulthood, which is also where the novel begins to take shape as a masterpiece.

Somerset Maugham by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1942After failing as an accountant, Philip flees to Paris, where he spends two years studying to be a painter and living la vie bohème. Maugham depicts the world of the art students with the fondly satirical eye of an older man who can no longer take his younger self quite seriously. Philip grows his hair, learns to drink absinthe, and spends evenings in seedy cafés debating the purpose of art, but—like most of his circle—he turns out not to have much talent. “What does it matter if your picture is good or bad?” his friend Clutton, the only gifted painter among them, asks him. “The only reason that one paints is that one can’t help it.” But Philip, like his creator, knows that he lacks this kind of passion; his talent, he worries, lies in nothing more than “a superficial cleverness of the hand.” When he abandons art to enter medical school, it is with a sense of relief.

The true originality of the novel, and the reason many critics were taken aback by it, lies in the miserable, mildly sadomasochistic love affair between Philip and a waitress, Mildred, which begins soon after he returns to London. An odd and unattractive love object, she has a “chlorotic color” brought on by anemia, thin pale lips, “narrow hips and the chest of a boy.” (It has been universally assumed that this episode is based on an unhappy relationship the young Maugham had with a man.) She affects pretentious manners to disguise her lower-class background, and her conversation is superficial. At her warmest, she is merely indifferent to Philip, but when she’s in a bad mood her contempt for him manifests itself in cruelty:
He was not happy with her, but he was unhappy away from her. He wanted to sit by her side and look at her, he wanted to touch her, he wanted . . . the thought came to him and he did not finish it, suddenly he grew wide awake . . . he wanted to kiss the thin, pale mouth with its narrow lips. The truth came to him at last. He was in love with her. It was incredible.
. . . When she left him it was wretchedness, and when she came to him again it was despair.
The novel does not try to explain the source of Mildred’s hold over Philip—the inexplicability of his passion is precisely the point. She soon runs off with a businessman, freeing Philip to become involved with another woman, who is smart, kind, and loving. He is well aware of the difference between their characters, and yet when Mildred reappears, pregnant and desperate, he cannot resist her. “When all was said the important thing was to love rather than be loved. . . . He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her.” But when Mildred betrays him again the spell is broken, and it’s a relief to be told, after their painful final encounter, that Philip will not see her again.

But Philip has traded one form of bondage for another. After running through most of his savings supporting Mildred, he loses the rest on the stock exchange and has to give up his medical studies. Too proud to ask his friends for money, he pawns his clothes and is reduced to sleeping outdoors. “He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it,” he muses later. Once he has hit bottom, he has the revelation he has been longing for ever since he stopped believing in God: that life has no meaning other than what one makes of it. And now, at last, he feels free: “Happiness mattered as little as pain. They came in, both of them, as all the other details of his life came in, to the elaboration of the design.”

The novel’s fundamental drama is Philip’s rejection of the romantic temperament as unsuitable for real life. In the end, neither love nor art can live up to his youthful expectations; it is only by learning to overcome their temptations that he can achieve peace. “The impotence of man to govern or restrain the emotions I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master,” Spinoza wrote in the section of his Ethics from which Maugham drew the novel’s title. Instead, a man like this is “mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him.” Philip is finally able to choose “the better,” with his engagement to Sally, the wholesome daughter of a friend. But he continues to distinguish between the “affection” he feels for her and his “love” for Mildred. And the book’s ending is deliberately unromantic. “I’m so happy,” he tells Sally after she accepts his proposal. “I want my lunch,” she replies.

El Greco - Presumed self-portrait


El Greco—“the Greek who had devised a new technique to express the yearnings of the soul,” as one Maugham character describes him—appears in each of Maugham’s major novels. Part of the fascination may be related to speculations about El Greco’s homosexuality, as Maugham once acknowledged. But surely it was also because the painter embodied precisely the artistic quality that Maugham felt lacking in himself. Of Human Bondage is a deeply imagined and powerfully moving novel, but it has far more in common, formally speaking, with a work of the previous generation like Jude the Obscure than it does with the experimentalism of Virginia Woolf ’s The Voyage Out or Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, both published the same year. (Ford was almost exactly the same age as Maugham, Woolf a decade younger.) This is not necessarily a flaw: new is not always better, as Maugham’s characters are fond of repeating, and a broad audience was ready for his themes, even as a new literary élite was moving beyond his forms.

Furthermore, Maugham was both self-aware and canny enough to exploit the artistic conundrum of his reliance on the old technique. This question is central in The Moon and Sixpence, the novel that immediately followed Of Human Bondage. (Maugham drew the title from a reviewer’s complaint that Philip Carey “was so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet.”) The nameless narrator is a writer who accepts his own style as behind the times. He compares himself to the once famous poet George Crabbe, who, following Alexander Pope, wrote “moral stories in rhymed couplets.” Time went on, and “the poets sang new songs,” but Crabbe continued in the same style. Now, the narrator says, a generation of new writers has arisen, and “I am on the shelf. I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.”
Somerset Maugham
If genius is originality, then the narrator knows that he lacks it; his art is something that he chooses to do, rather than a passion that has chosen him. “I wonder if I could write on a desert island, with the certainty that no eyes but mine would ever see what I had written,” he asks. In dire contrast is the figure of Charles Strickland (modelled loosely on Gauguin), a stockbroker who suddenly deserts his family. Everyone assumes that he has run off with a woman, but when the narrator discovers him in Paris he is living in a cheap hotel, alone: he has decided to become a painter. The narrator is astounded. “Supposing you’re never anything more than third-rate, do you think it will have been worth while to give up everything?” he asks. Strickland has no use for the question. “You blasted fool,” he answers. “I tell you I’ve got to paint. I can’t help myself.”

Like Clutton in Of Human Bondage, Strickland represents pure artistic desire, unmotivated by outside influences. It is a feeling to which the narrator cannot relate. A third way to live the artist’s life comes in the form of Dirk Stroeve, the painter who grasps the greatness of Strickland’s work, and persuades the art dealer to carry it, while accepting his own mediocrity. In one particularly poignant scene, which takes place after Strickland has stolen and then abandoned Stroeve’s wife, Stroeve discovers a nude portrait of her by Strickland. Furious, he grabs a paint scraper to destroy it, but cannot continue. “It was a work of art . . . a great, a wonderful picture,” he tells the narrator. “I was seized with awe. I had nearly committed a dreadful crime.”

Critics have always had reservations about this book, but it was an immediate best-seller, and remains among Maugham’s most popular. The character of Strickland is perhaps too broadly drawn, and in the end, despite the narrator’s insistence that “man is incalculable,” it is a bit too implausible that a buttoned-up stockbroker could turn into this roughtalking, utterly amoral brute. But the subtlety of the narrator’s character has often gone unappreciated. At the start of the novel, he declares himself inadequate to the story: true greatness is something he can’t pretend to understand, and he is bewildered by Strickland’s art. He is not so much an unreliable narrator as an insufficient one. But by the end he, too, gazing upon one of Strickland’s late paintings, is transformed. He still cannot say what moves him about the picture, but he knows that it is great; its greatness is what changes him.
The Day of the God (1894) - Paul Gauguin
By this time, Maugham had begun the habit of globe-trotting that he was to continue into old age, and the final chapters of The Moon and Sixpence draw heavily on his voyage to Tahiti, where he actually discovered a painting by Gauguin in a remote hut (and brought it home with him). Hastings notes, “As a writer of fiction, Maugham was a realist: his imagination needed actual people and events to work on, and these his travels amply furnished.” Of course, this is not exactly the method of most “realists,” who are usually more concerned with reproducing the atmosphere of everyday life than with telling other people’s stories. Maugham’s use of the real was extreme: he sometimes failed to change even the names of his characters and got into trouble for his dependence on found stories. When his novel Cakes and Ale appeared, in 1930, all of literary London recognized the fawning, sycophantic hack novelist Alroy Kear—“I could think of no one among my contemporaries who had achieved so considerable a position on so little talent,” the novel’s narrator says—as a stand-in for Hugh Walpole, an acquaintance of Maugham’s. Hastings agrees, characterizing as “deeply disingenuous” a letter of apology that Maugham sent to Walpole. Alroy Kear “is made up of a dozen people and the greater part of him is myself,” Maugham wrote. “There is more of me in him than of any writer I know.”

But, even if Maugham’s intentions were insincere, his statement contains an element of truth. For there is something of Maugham in the prolific, industrious Kear, with his excellent manners and his friends in high places. The narrator tells us that Kear “saw the white light of revelation when first he read that Charles Dickens in an after-dinner speech had stated that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains”—the same word that Maugham applied to himself in The Summing Up (“I thought with pains I could arrive at writing as well as my natural defects allowed”). And Kear defends himself by saying, “I know I’m not a great novelist. . . . I think I can tell a good story and I can create characters that ring true. And after all the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” He goes on to cite his high sales. We hear an echo of Dirk Stroeve’s “I sell,” but also of Maugham’s justifiable pride in his own popularity.

Maugham travelled frequently to gather material, but also to escape his unhappy living situation. His marriage was predictably miserable, with Maugham preferring the company of Gerald Haxton, a young American whom he had met during the First World War, when they were both volunteering with the Red Cross. According to a memoir by Maugham’s nephew, when Maugham asked Haxton what he wanted out of life Haxton said that he was interested in “fun and games . . . someone to look after me and give me clothes and parties.” This might seem to suggest a less than promising match, but the men remained together until Haxton’s death, from alcoholism and tuberculosis, in 1944, with Maugham apparently content to stay at home while Haxton roamed the Riviera, gambling and picking up boys. (With his matchless gift for aphorism, Maugham called the Riviera “that sunny place for shady people.”)

Cap Ferrat, France, 1954, English author Somerset Maugham (right) is pictured with his secretary-companion as they eat dinner at the Villa Mauresque

All of Maugham’s friends seem to have had strong feelings about this relationship, either pro or con, and Hastings lets many of them have their say. But she sheds little light on the peculiar fact that Haxton was Maugham’s employee as well as his life partner, drawing a salary for services that included companionship (though, it seems, not necessarily sex) and typing manuscripts. After Haxton died, his role was filled by an even younger man, named Alan Searle, for whom the financial arrangement seems to have been of primary importance. When Maugham, in his old age, was suffering from senility, Searle succeeded in turning him against his daughter and largely disinheriting her for his own gain, a sad story that Hastings explores in grim detail.

Maugham’s late novel The Razor’s Edge offers a depiction of an incompatible couple with tantalizing similarities to himself and Haxton. Here he uses the same form that he polished to perfection in The Moon and Sixpence and Cakes and Ale—the narrator observes his characters and reflects disinterestedly on tensions between conventionality and the risky search for self-fulfillment. This time, however, he raises the verisimilitude to a high pitch, using his real name and styling the opening as a kind of memoir. “I have never begun a novel with more misgiving,” he writes, and continues, “If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know what else to call it. . . . I have invented nothing.” The narrator meets Isabel and Larry, a happily engaged young couple, on a visit to Chicago. But soon he learns of a hitch in their plans: Larry, recently returned from serving as a pilot in the First World War, has decided to turn down a promising job so that he can devote himself to reading and thinking. Isabel generously encourages him to take some time for himself, but she is as alarmed to come upon a Greek dictionary in his room as she might have been to find another woman’s bathrobe. “What is that going to lead to?” she asks him in frustration. “The acquisition of knowledge,” he replies.

It turns out that Larry has embarked upon a spiritual quest. “I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not,” he tells Isabel. “I want to find out why evil exists. I want to know whether I have an immortal soul or whether when I die it’s the end.” He asks Isabel to join him, but—in words strikingly similar to the ones Haxton is reported to have said to Maugham—she refuses to live frugally on his small inheritance: “I want to have fun. I want to do all the things that people do. I want to go to parties, I want to go to dances. . . . I want to wear nice clothes.” Later, she tells the narrator that she broke off her engagement because she didn’t want to stand in Larry’s way. He scoffs, “You gave him up for a square-cut diamond and a sable coat.”

 उत्तिष्ठ जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत | क्षुरस्य धारा निशिता दुरत्यया दुर्गं पथस्तत्कवयो वदन्ति
uttiṣṭha jāgrata prāpya varān nibodhata | kṣurasya dhārā niśitā duratyayā durga pathas tat kavayo vadanti

Larry spends ten years reading books and travelling the world. He lives in Paris, works in a coal mine, and visits a Benedictine monastery. Finally, he goes to India to stay at an ashram, and here he achieves something like transcendence. The Maugham figure asks Larry what attracted him to the yogi with whom he studied. “Saintliness,” Larry answers. “I was slightly disconcerted by his reply,” the narrator comments. “In that room, with its fine furniture, with those lovely drawings on the wall, the word fell like a plop of water that has seeped through the ceiling from an overflowing bath.” Larry’s sincerity, his utter lack of cynicism, sets him apart from the rest of the novel’s characters, who are disconcerted by the contrast between his manner and their vaunted sophistication. Larry, the narrator says, is “the only person I’ve ever met who’s completely disinterested. . . . We’re not used to persons who do things simply for the love of God whom they don’t believe in.”

Larry, a nearly messianic figure, is Maugham’s most mysterious creation. In contrast to Philip Carey, tortured by his nonsensical love, or even Charles Strickland, driven inexorably by his own creative impulse, he is a truly free man: wedded (literally or figuratively) to no other person, entirely selfsufficient, utterly focussed on his own search for meaning. There is a selfishness in his quest, but even a lover he abandons on his way does not begrudge him his liberty. Perhaps because Maugham himself was not religious, Larry always feels a little out of reach, yet he is all the holier for it. Cyril Connolly, reviewing The Razor’s Edge, wrote that Maugham is “the worldliest of our novelists, and yet is fascinated by those who renounce the world. . . . Here at last is a great writer, on the threshold of old age, determined to tell the truth in a form which releases all the possibilities of his art.” At the end of The Razor’s Edge, the narrator worries that his story is unsatisfactory, but muses that all the characters finally “got what they wanted.” The story of Maugham’s life, too, comes to a somewhat unsatisfying end: after this book, published when he was seventy, he did no work of distinction, capping his career with a few lacklustre historical novels (one of which occasioned Edmund Wilson’s diatribe) and a disastrous memoir called Looking Back, which shocked his acquaintances by unearthing sordid details from his marriage, and hastened the decline of his reputation. And yet he, too, seems to have got what he wanted, for what he wanted most of all, it seems, was not to be a genius like Strickland or a wise man like Larry. He wanted, rather, to be recognized—whether through his endlessly amusing plays, the sumptuous hospitality he lavished on his friends, or the novels that, for all their coolly objective prose, bring to life an entire world. Drew Middleton reported, “Just before his 90th birthday, he remarked that his greatest, indeed his only consolation, was the letters that came to him every day from young people all over the world. They were still reading him, he said with a touch of pride.”
Drawing portrait of Somerset Maugham