I am reading The Moon and Sixpence after pretty recently reading Cakes and Ale and despite having a taste for Maugham’s writing at the moment, I’m starting to get annoyed. Cakes and Ale was fine enough, and the first few chapters pretty funny, but after a while he seems so intent on skewering whomever (Walpole and Hardy?) in a lot of boring specificity that he begins to repeat himself, and then the ending threw all my assumptions about the book into disarray. Rosie turns out to have a tragic secret! Only the heartrending death of a child could explain her naughty behavior! So much for being frank and unconventional. It turns out she’s just a muse. Empty and highly reflective with a “body made for the act of love.” (Hahaha! Oh no, really?)  Also, I assumed the narrator was supposed to be a bitchy pedant, but nothing really happened to confirm it was intentional; and now I find the same narrator in The Moon and Sixpence droning on about women in a fantastically pompous voice that barely hides his squeamishness. Yikes, was that Somerset Maugham? I s’pose it partly is, given the actual Vicar-uncle of Something-stable and his history as a medical student. Poor guy. For your enjoyment, a digested version of The Moon and Sixpence:

I have a recollection of large, unbending women with great noses and rapacious eyes. “Why do nice women marry dull men?” “Because intelligent men won’t marry nice women.” I did not know then how great a part is played in women’s life by the opinion of others. It throws a shadow of insincerity over their most deeply felt emotions. I have always been a little disconcerted by the passion women have for behaving beautifully at the death-bed of those they love. “Who makes fame? Critics, writers, stockbrokers, women.” “You mustn’t take very seriously what women say when they’re in a passion” 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 an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to it spiritual value. Women are constantly trying to commit suicide for love, but generally they take care not to succeed. It’s generally a gesture to arouse pity or terror in their lover. Because women can do nothing except love, they’ve given it a ridiculous importance. “Women are the instruments of my pleasure.” As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times. “Women are strange little beasts,” he said to Dr. Coutras. “You can treat them like dogs, you can beat them till your arm aches, and still they love you.”

Nevertheless, I am actually enjoying it and spending a good amount of time speculating about how much of it was really Gauguin. Could anyone have been so opaque to their own family? That cranky that much of the time? And I guess leprosy is more literary than syphilis. More of a clear judgement from on high with no room for a jolly elbow to the ribs. It’s a good enough book to take the taste of The Magician out of my mouth– bleh, dilute Le Fanu with a lot of scholarly references thrown in for effect. (Though I’d happily take a list of said scholarly references. I was reading in Eucalyptus, which presumptuously does not allow bookmarks. I have a weakness for alchemists, guys. All I want to do is fold down the corner of the page.) The best parts were descriptions of how Susie was dressed: a green silk gown with ancient lace and “a chain which had once adorned that of a madonna in an Andalusian church.” At first I thought we’d have gotten along, but then she fell in selflessly in love… The other night I read Of Human Bondage for the first time since high school. I had a headache that wouldn’t budge. In fact, I have it still. It’s been more than a week and either someone is trying to poison me for my vast fortune (I read a lot of Agatha Christie during my formative years.) or someone else is feeling unwell and getting up six or more times in the night to be comforted. Tangentially, the latter someone has been begging me to swaddle him and walk around with him, which is what we did from six to ten pm every night of the first three or four months of his tortured little life. In those days, he cried the whole time, but despite that, it must have been comforting because the last few nights he’s requested we wrap his arms (tight!) and walk the same stumbling loop around the dark bedroom. Anyhow, the headache—it’s different from the usual. A tight band with painful swollen spots at the base of my skull that are impervious to heat. I thought I couldn’t handle it any more so I took some Excedrin migraine. I don’t normally take pain killers for headaches since they have a rebound effect on me, but I was stupidly desperate. Afterward I was so wired (and still headache-y) I didn’t even feel drowsy until seven am. Instead I intermittently walked the baby and read Of Human Bondage. It was odd to recall my own emotional responses to the story but not the details of the story itself. I think the dreary repetitive realism frightened me a bit at the time. (Too soon after Agatha Christie, perhaps?) Now I’m drunk with exhaustion and still more headache, but fine enough to look up soap bubbles and the Marangoni Effect.