Ebook The Moon And Sixpence Azw3 Tác Giả W. Somerset Maugham

Introduction of the ebook: The Moon and Sixpence

Đánh giá : 4.14 /5 (sao)

Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham’s ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham’s ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art. As Strickland pursues his artistic vision, he leaves London for Paris and Tahiti, and in his quest makes sacrifices that leave the lives of those closest to him in tatters. Through Maugham’s sympathetic eye, Strickland’s tortured and cruel soul becomes a symbol of the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and the cost in humans’ lives it sometimes demands. …more

Review ebook The Moon and Sixpence

Life isn’t long enough for love and art.

Years ago I read and thoroughly enjoyed W. Somerset Maugham’s Theatre, so when I found a copy of The Moon and Sixpence in the bookcase, it looked the perfect breezy weekend diversion I was looking for before I would embark on the finale of Thomas Mann’ s Doctor Faustus. Imagine my surprise having by chance run into a novel which also turned out to be a Künstlerroman , both novels sketching the development of two men who come to live only for their art, the (fictitious) composer Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s novel, and Charles Strickland, a painter modelled on Paul Gauguin, in The moon and Sixpence – finding quite a few parallels between both novels.

Apart from narrators cultivating a peculiar friendship with the respective artists and who plead for compassion and understanding for the ordeal of the artists they admired, both novels in some sense have a common view on the Artist, the key – Romantic- belief that one cannot have it both ways, the Artist has to choose between love and art (Maugham makes this belief explicit from the very beginning, his narrator declares that the artist’s personality is the most fascinating aspect of his art, however repulsive his character or numerous his flaws ). The outcome of that choice doesn’t have to come as a surprise, as Life isn’t long enough for love and art.While Adrian Leverkühn sorely forsakes love in his pact with the devil in exchange for granting him creative genius, Strickland is portrayed as indifferent to love, abandoning his wife and children for his artistic obsessions, which also have a demonic touch. In both cases their choice will have fatal consequences, at least for others. Both are portrayed as monsters in the sense that they are dedicated artists, whose life is totally devoted to their art and so they display monstrous features, even if only in the eyes of those around them. They both consciously choose a hermit’s existence, rejecting commonplace life and participation in society, claiming the freedom to live in an ivory tower for themselves – whether on a farm in Germany or a mansard in Paris (and Tahiti later on). Unlike Charles Strickland, however, Leverkühn is vexed by the monstrous nature of his artistry – Charles Strickland couldn’t bother less.

There are many brilliant reviews and analyses of The Moon and Sixpence to find around here which do great justice to this novel as an outstanding work of literature. Nevertheless I am more on the side of these perspicacious reviews (here and here) which point out its inner contradictions and word astutely some of the impressions the novel left me with, encapsulating what becomes visible once the colours of Maugham’s glowing prose have stopped to bedazzle.

As much as the psychological portrayal of the selfish and obsessed painter is well done – from the little I recall from reading about the life of Gauguin the credibility is supreme (whereas assuaging some of the facts, for instance on his health condition, substituting syphilis by leprosy – it wasn’t the uncouthness, egoism and brutality of artist protagonist Charles Strickland that put me off– after all, haven’t those personality features turned into something one has almost come to expect in the Romantic view on the artist (the contrasts and tension between the ugliness and brutality of the personality versus the beauty he – as the genius is of course a man – pursuits to create)?

It were mostly the rather nauseating generalisations on the nature of women, by Strickland and by almost every character featuring in the novel including the narrator, a writer in who one can recognise Maugham himself which simply baffled me (and made me imagine the narrator/Maugham as an even less likeable person than Strickland/Gauguin, which is quite a feat). At times this misogyny turns so pathetic it becomes rather fascinating – even raking up the discussion if women actually have a soul (which was apparently a non-discussion). So this novel left me puzzled and with plenty of questions buzzing in my mind. What was the status quaestionis with regard to misogyny in 1919? Was Maugham representative for his times, or was it mostly the bitterness because of his personal situation (trapped in loveless marriage while being homosexual) that made him spit out his loathing so viscerally that it came to overcast whatever points he makes on conventionalism and creativity? I hope to find some answers in A Brief History of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, even if it seems too brief to have the space to mention Maugham.

When reading Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography I almost suspected myself of having turned into a sweet water feminist, as her recurrent blaming of patriarchy didn’t much resonate with me. If one however would feel the need to fuel feminist energy, The Moon and Sixpence would make good material to give to one’s children or simple anyone who thinks feminism has become evident or superfluous nowadays, if only to see where we have come from. It must have been from the moment a co-worker started to sing Girls from the Beastie boys in the nineties (‘girls do the dishes’) I was confronted with something as blatantly misogynist/sexist as this book (admittedly, apart from this forum dedicated to books and some newspapers I read little on the internet and so am only vaguely aware of trolling of women who twitter as happened to Mary Beard).

Just a few examples of statements to savour:

When a woman loves you she’s not satisfied until she possesses your soul. Because she’s weak, she has a rage for domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.

It requires a female temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.
Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed.

I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.

Women are strange little beasts… You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you. He shrugged his shoulders. Of course, it is one of the most absurd illusions of Christianity that they have souls…. In the end they get you, and you are helpless in their hands. White or brown, they are all the same.

Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. They want to persuade us that it’s the whole of life. It’s an insignificant part. I know lust. That’s normal and healthy. Love is a disease. Women are the instruments of my pleasure.

What I had taken for love was no more than the feminine response to caresses and comfort which in the minds of most women passes for it. It is a passive feeling capable of being roused for any object, as the vine can grow on any tree; and the wisdom of the world recognizes its strength when it urges a girl to marry the man who wants her with the assurance that love will follow.

On the plus side, the novel made me look more closely at some of the paintings of Paul Gauguin, which I now appreciate more, particularly the vitality of the colours in his still lives (Gauguin’s painting never particularly spoke to me, I find it particularly hard not to look at his paintings through the lens of an exoticism that reeks of a mythologizing of the noble savage; I admit my not so favourable view on him was also negatively affected by reading this loosely biographical graphic novel some years ago, Gauguin: Off the Beaten Track by Maximilien Le Roy).

Maugham’s novel offers lots of food for thought and could serve as an excellent exercise when one tries to consider a work of art independently from the personality of the creator – whether painter or writer. It made me aware I need more exercise on these issues and so I will definitely read more by Maugham. …more