49. D.H. Lawrence, WOMEN IN LOVE

Farewell, emo daffodils! This is without question the novel I enjoyed the least since I started this project. Granted, it wasn't racist like TOBACCO ROAD, but at least that was shorter. Okay, well it's a draw, and an uncomfortable draw.

Regular readers will have seen this coming with updates like five passages that made me roll my eyes and the Emo Daffodil Alert. Here is my struggle with regard to Mr. Lawrence: He's influenced so many writers I like in his obsession with the interiority, in his single-minded focus on the struggle inside the mind. His fingerprints are all over other books I've read and loved. And there are some passages in WOMEN IN LOVE that are truly moving... when taken out of context. Those passages, however, serve to buttress a tedious and uninteresting narrative, the story of two sisters struggling to overcome their bourgeois upbringings through Free Love with two men who, while not even close to the most homoerotic pair in literature, are by and large closer to each other than to the women with whom they are in love.

When I read SONS AND LOVERS, my first exposure to Lawrence, I struggled but with the sense that my intellectual and emotional problems with the book were somehow purposeful -- that upon further reflection I would recognize Lawrence's genius. Rereading it for a class on the modernist novel in college reinforced that feeling. Maybe it's because in the intervening years I have drifted away from academic reading (as a result of not having to do it) but I feel that I lack some essential patience with it now. I have gone over to where I can say "Yeah, but so many authors have done it better since then -- what's the use?"

In efforts to convey emotional truth among his characters, Lawrence elevates every single moment among them to eleven, forcing the narrator to play teenager's diary with their internal conflicts. I posted and laughed at this passage about Rupert and Gerald's relationship before I realized that would be one of the more restrained moments. Everyone in this book sounds like a person Philip Carey drinks with in Paris in OF HUMAN BONDAGE -- only he eventually leaves Paris. (To bring up another ML book, for a second I thought longingly about how Arnold Bennett wrote an entire novel about women without ever talking about their feelings. And I didn't even like that portrayal either.) This novel was published after the Maugham, but still feels like a step backward.

This book did, however, furnish fodder for my never-forthcoming monograph on how Lawrence killed Sylvia Plath, at which point this blog will become a dry promotional machine directed at forcing you to buy it. Given that she hadn't even been born when he died, this seems impossible, but it's not, and my Work of Brilliance will convince you that in fact he is a murderer. I'll be a freakonomist, but for literature!

Ellen VS. ML: 52 read, 48 unread.

Next up: I've started #85 LORD JIM on Dailylit, because otherwise I'll never finish the Conrad section of this venture -- that's the third of his four slots, which seems excessive. But I'd like to open it up to suggestions. Is there a non-crossed out book on this list that you loved and you can't believe I haven't read yet? I need to pick up steam if I'm going to finish this before I am 100.

66. W. Somerset Maugham, OF HUMAN BONDAGE

This one's been a while in the making, not only because I started it in installments back in July but because this is the 50th book off the Modern Library list I've read. It only took four years (and a lot of other books in between). Of course, that's a false measurement since I had already read 30 books when I started, so I'm not really halfway through--but to the novel!

Somerset Maugham's best known book begins with the orphaning of Philip Carey, age 9, and follows him through boarding school, adventures abroad, and ultimately into professional life. Along the way, he falls in love, contemplates a life in art and experiences several strata of London life. If you think I'm being vague for a book that's almost 100 years old, you are correct: but that's because you should go out and read it, preferably right away.

I have to pay this novel a high compliment: I didn't always enjoy the company of Philip Carey but his life and the things that happen to him forced me to think. This book depicts, in a way I wouldn't have expected for its age, the way a personality and a belief system can change over time, gaining and shedding layers of itself based on experiences and friendships and hardships. Even reading it in bits and pieces as I did, I found myself returning to earlier passages, wondering who was Philip now? And who now? But it was all a continuum; even the moments where he acknowledged for himself that a change was taking place joined that endless curve rather than throwing up the stop sign of epiphany.

For me OF HUMAN BONDAGE represents the bridge between the "classic" novel pummeling the reader with Lessons and the modern novel for which the presence of a moral is either an insult or evidence of poor writing. Okay, I'm coming down a bit hard on both ends, but to the extent that instructional fiction has gone out of vogue, it is out of vogue now (which is not to say moral fiction isn't being written). I think Somerset Maugham would have had a lot to say to Zoë Heller's conviction about the point of fiction, but he still employs a moral avatar, doesn't he? In a way his predecessors never would have dared, but there it is.

And nothing exemplifies this better than my reactions to the ending, which I will not spoil nor use as a sort of emotional Rorschach test, though it is tempting. (Personally I cycled through vague disappointment and suspicion to recognition of the decisions Philip Carey makes throughout the book, into which the last fits like a puzzle piece -- recognition, but not full acceptance.)

In terms of the Modern Library project, this is one of those books (like THE GOOD SOLDIER) I'm sure I would have gotten around to eventually, but I'm so glad to have read now. Guess I'll have to re-read it in 10 years (in my hovercraft, I assume) to see how it strikes me then. Frankly, it reminded me of when I started looking at this list lo these many months ago, which, now that I'm numerically halfway done, is just the mind I want to have.

LN vs. ML progress: 50 read, 50 unread.

Next up: #22, John O'Hara's APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA in paper, and from Dailylit, #49, D.H. Lawrence's WOMEN IN LOVE.

Dubs Sunday: On re-reading.

Robo-posted; at the Brooklyn Book Festival; carry on.

"I don't see the use of reading the same thing over and over again," said Philip. "That's only a laborious form of idleness."

"But are you under the impression that you have so great a mind that you can understand the most profound writer at a first reading?"

"I don't want to understand him, I'm not a critic. I'm not interested in him for his sake but for mine."

"Why d'you read then?"

"Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read as if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for ME, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times. You see, it seems to me, one's like a closed bud, and most of what one reads and does has no effect at all; but there are certain things that have a peculiar significance for one, and they open a petal; and the petals open one by one; and at last the flower is there."

Philip was not satisfied with his metaphor, but he did not know how else to explain a thing which he felt and yet was not clear about.
...

Hayward could still talk delightfully about books; his taste was exquisite and his discrimination elegant; and he had a constant interest in ideas, which made him an entertaining companion. They meant nothing to him really, since they never had any effect on him; but he treated them as he might have pieces of china in an auction-room, handling them with pleasure in their shape and their glaze, pricing them in his mind; and then, putting them back into their case, thought of them no more.

--OF HUMAN BONDAGE. This week I learned the term Künstlerroman, which is a bildungsroman specifically dealing with an artist's coming of age. But if OF HUMAN BONDAGE is a Künstlerroman, what of the sections of the book where Philip is not engaged in art at all? How much of your fictional artist's story has to be devoted to art before it becomes more than just a coming-of-age tale? Joyce's A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST... is definitely a Künstlerroman, but early in the novel it may as well have been called A PORTRAIT OF THE YOUNG MAN WHO THOUGHT ABOUT BECOMING A PRIEST, and despite being one-eighth German, I do not know the term for that. Anyway, I assume all will be revealed on the Maugham when I finish it.

Dubs Sunday: On commercial fiction.

[Norah] was separated from her husband and earned her living and her child's by writing penny novelettes. There were one or two publishers who made a specialty of that sort of thing, and she had as much work as she could do. It was ill-paid, she received fifteen pounds for a story of thirty thousand words; but she was satisfied.

"After all, it only costs the reader twopence," she said, "and they like the same thing over and over again. I just change the names and that's all. When I'm bored I think of the washing and the rent and clothes for baby, and I go on again."

--OF HUMAN BONDAGE. This isn't the first time these novelettes have come up in the book; Philip's tearoom love Mildred was also a big fan of what Maugham describes as "a regular supply of inexpensive fiction written to order by poor hacks for the consumption of the illiterate," and he later describes her as "having read too many novelettes" not to do something.

This week in Maugham being everywhere, Bookslut linked to a Daily Mail article questioning whether he was "the most debauched man of the 20th century." (Reached into the Acme Box of Big Claims for that one, they did.) The evidence includes teenage boys in Capri, an affair with a married woman while spying for the Crown and a penchant for towel-whipping -- oops, that last one was James Bond creator Ian Fleming, heh. I'm not convinced, nor do I think it's an important question, but it's funny to see him get the TMZ treatment.

"You have a hierarchy of values; pleasure is at the bottom of the ladder, and you speak with a little thrill of self-satisfaction, of duty, charity, and truthfulness. You think pleasure is only of the senses; the wretched slaves who manufactured your morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues.

"Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in giving alms he is charitable; if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration."

"But have you never known people do things they didn't want to instead of things they did?"

"No. You put your question foolishly. What you mean is that people accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure. The objection is as foolish as your manner of putting it. It is clear that men accept an immediate pain rather than an immediate pleasure, but only because they expect a greater pleasure in the future. Often the pleasure is illusory, but their error in calculation is no refutation of the rule. You are puzzled because you cannot get over the idea that pleasures are only of the senses; but, child, a man who dies for his country dies because he likes it as surely as a man eats pickled cabbage because he likes it. It is a law of creation. If it were possible for men to prefer pain to pleasure the human race would have long since become extinct."

--OF HUMAN BONDAGE. Since Dailylit makes it far too easy to quote at length, every Sunday is going to be Dubs Sunday until further notice. (And I just upgraded myself to Maugham's friend, a measure of which I'm sure he would strongly disapprove.)

To be fair, this oh so contemplative passage from the Paris art school section ends thusly:

"You are cryptic," said Philip.
"I am drunk," answered Cronshaw.

He was taken aback by the change in her. She told him in a voice thrilling with emotion immediately after breakfast that she loved him; and when a little later they went into the drawing-room for his singing lesson and she sat down on the music-stool she put up her face in the middle of a scale and said:

"Embrasse-moi."

When he bent down she flung her arms round his neck. It was slightly uncomfortable, for she held him in such a position that he felt rather choked.

"Ah, je t'aime. Je t'aime. Je t'aime," she cried, with her extravagantly French accent.

Philip wished she would speak English.

"I say, I don't know if it's struck you that the gardener's quite likely to pass the window any minute."

"Ah, je m'en fiche du jardinier. Je m'en refiche, et je m'en contrefiche."

Philip thought it was very like a French novel, and he did not know why it slightly irritated him.

-- W. Somerset Maugham, OF HUMAN BONDAGE

"When the shopping was done they often went down a side street of little houses, mostly of wood, in which fishermen dwelt (and here and there a fisherman sat on his doorstep mending his nets, and nets hung to dry upon the doors), till they came to a small beach, shut in on each side by warehouses, but with a view of the sea. Mrs. Carey stood for a few minutes and looked at it, it was turbid and yellow, [and who knows what thoughts passed through her mind?] while Philip searched for flat stones to play ducks and drakes."

--W. Somerset Maugham, OF HUMAN BONDAGE

It's good to know that if he were still alive Mr. Maugham could be my buddy in Aside Rehab.