I never knew I had a soul till I found it here." He doesn't come home.
I want to make more out of my life than that. What is the use of all this hustle and this constant striving?. "Gradually all the life that had seemed so important to me began to seem rather trivial and vulgar. First there was the glorious Tahitian setting, rendered with irresistible laconic ease then the story itself: Edward Barnard falls in with a reprobate uncle of his bride, the family's black sheep, who has fled from his murky past to Tahiti, and instead of becoming a mercantilist, he finds his soul, as well as a beautiful local girl, and decides that a money-free life in a pareo beside a warm lagoon is much better than wealth in dismal, grey Chicago. A long story about a well-to-do young Chicagoan who goes out to the South Pacific in order to rise within a trading company, then come home - laden with dollars and prospects - to marry his preppy bride-to-be, it stunned me. It was "The Fall of Edward Barnard" that first hooked me. (A first edition of Of Human Bondage recently sold in New York for $51,000.) I began rereading him while there. While in Britain his critical reputation (never high) sank ever lower, American letters seemed to have quietly accommodated him as a 20th-century great, a master-chronicler of the late days of empire. It was while teaching in the one-cow desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico, nearly two decades later that I rediscovered Maugham. All in all, that early taste might easily have put me off for life. He also seemed full of an arrogant sense of knowing how things ought to be he was stuffy, and pertained to an old order that had had its day. Maugham's prose had an old-fashioned ring to it, and lacked the clean, contemporary sound of Orwell, my god at the time. Hugh Walpole (who he now?) was cut down to size, while Hardy was seen to grow like some natural phenomenon.Īs with many of my set texts over the months to come, I read only enough to cobble together a take on it. It still baffles me even now that someone thought a bunch of 13-year-olds might enjoy Somerset Maugham's dissection of the making of literary reputations.
When I was 13 and had just arrived at a new school, our first set text was Cakes and Ale.
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