Somerset Maugham - Of Human Bondage, & The Moon and Sixpence

by W. Somerset Maugham

Two full novels collected in one edition formatted for the Kindle. WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM [1874-1965] was a British writer of novels, plays, and short stories. He was a medical student at King's College London. While a student learning midwifery in the London slum of Lambeth, He wrote Liza of Lambeth (1897). The novel was a hit, selling out its first edition in a few weeks. This success convinced Maugham to write full time. By 1914, he produced ten novels and ten plays. In World War I, he was one of the "Literary Ambulance Drivers" including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings. While serving near Dunkirk, he proof-read Of Human Bondage (1915). Theodore Dreiser considered Of Human Bondage "a work of genius." In 1916, in the Pacific, he researched Paul Gauguin's life for his novel The Moon And Sixpence (1919). In 1928, he moved to the French Riviera, where he resided for the rest of his life. In 1947, he established the Somerset Maugham Award for British writers. V. S. Naipaul, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and Thom Gunn are some notable recipients of the award.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Novels, Literature, Romance, Literary Fiction

846 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 8, 2008

About the author

William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.

His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. But writing was his true vocation. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays.

Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.

During World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service . He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

At the time of Maugham's birth, French law was such that all foreign boys born in France became liable for conscription. Thus, Maugham was born within the Embassy, legally recognized as UK territory.

Reviews

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one ever died of a broken heart, Maugham proposes, but they do die from a lack of money. I love, love, LOVE this classic! The movie version with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis is a good companion film version and brutal truth peals itself back layer after layer, revealing the consequences of our own weak tendencies and obsessions, whims and misplaced dreams. Like Dickens, though, Maugham doesn't leave us to rot in our own squalor, no matter how justly we may have earned it. He takes us rationally to a safe and appealing harbor, lets us live there with Philip and contemplate our good fortune for awhile before turning the last page. This is one of those books I quote from regularly and it's on my must re-read list!

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A challenging story about loss of parents, physical disability, and the search for self and identity. Why do some people receive ill treatment for acts of generosity and how does love blind? Does struggle really make one better? Phillip, the main protagonist of this novel struggles with the human experience and comes out strong.

[Joel Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first exposure to Somerset Maugham, unless I've read a short story that I've forgotten. Now I'm sure I'll read more. Reviews say Of Human Bondage is his masterpiece. Since I have nothing with which to compare, I can just say that I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. In some ways, Maugham's writing in this novel is almost (but not quite) comparable to Dostoevsky. The detail is certainly there (but not the psychology).
Maugham focuses on one life, Philip Cary, from the death of his mother at nine-years-old until his twenty- ninth year.
Reviews and sources say that the novel is semi-autobiographical. The protagonist develops an interest in art, which Maugham did, and eventually becomes a doctor, which Maugham was.
The novel is long but well worth the read. Recommended.

[James F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this in high school wanted to re-read again. I can see why it was on the must reads in high school this young man Philip is born with a club foot which makes him a social outcast. He doesn't know where his path in life His observations at a young age how he feels about women who use makeup to attract men the book is dated but was worth the effort.

[Franz · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Maugham; one of my favorite authors. He sees right into his characters and allows you to also. Always poignant, a little tragic, and acutely aware of the complexity of life. I love how his characters grow and mature.

[Jane Stanley · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a book! They don't write them like this any more! A moving bildungsroman more than loosely based on William Somerset Maugham's own childhood, youth and young adulthood. So much is covered here as the protagonist grows up at a country parsonage after being orphaned, moves to a boarding school, studies abroad in Germany and France, returns to England and experiences poverty and homelessness. Maugham deals with Christianity, hypocrisy, agnosticism; the extensive poverty of the late Victorian and Edwardian period and the blind eye turned to it by the middle classes; the difficulties of relationships, and of being 'different' - in the book 'Philip' has a club foot while Maugham had a stammer, and Philip becomes obsessed with a young woman working in a cafe while Maugham was, as he put it, three quarters homosexual and one quarter heterosexual but tried to live as if this was reversed, terrified by the fate of Oscar Wilde.
All life is here, and Maugham is a fine writer. I listened for free with Audible, but it was only available for a limited time and was over 25 hours long! I was totally gripped and used Bluetooth headphones to do gardening, cleaning, cooking, a colouring book, you name it, just to get it finished in time. I think the intensity of this improved the experience as I was completely involved with the protagonist's thoughts, feelings, plans, disappointments etc and
it's a testament to Maugham's skills that I was totally convinced and engaged the whole time.

[Patti · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite all-time books. My aunt leant it to me when I was 18. I read it straight through. Story of a med student and eventually a doctor who has to struggle with a club foot in a world that had no cure at the time. He falls madly in love with a waitress who leads him on and becomes a prostitute when he kicks her out. She develops Syphilis and eventually dies. I've read this a couple times and saw the movie several times (the one with Kim Novak). I consider this a must read. This review is for Of Human Bondage, not Moon and Sixpence.

[Paul Silberstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Were I allowed to read only one genre, it would be coming-of-age stories, and Of Human Bondage is the best I have read. Of Human Bondage questions the issue of free will. The constraints of early life be it economic, physical, pressures to conform, family life, even the era of one's birth can have complex implications into the future. Philip, the protagonist, "had an unfortunate gift of seeing things as they were, and the reality which was offered him differed too terribly from the ideal of his dream. He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are watched, for they are full of truthless ideals which have been instilled in them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded...The strange thing is that each one of us who has gone through that bitter disillusionment adds to it in his turn, unsconsciously, by the power within him which is stronger than himself." After his time as a art student in Paris he observes, "in true painters, writers, musicians, there was a power which drove them to such complete absorption in the work as to make it inevitable for them to subordinate life to art. Succumbing to an influence they never realized, they were merely dupes of the instinct that possessed them, and life slipped through their fingers unlived. But he had a feeling that life was to be lived rather than portrayed, and he wanted to search out the various experiences of it and writ from each moment all the emotions that if offered." Philip becomes absorbed in a toxic relationship with Mildred where his reason is overwhelmed by his passion and he does not see her realistically. Humans are emotional creatures and it is this which is our "Human Bondage." He follows the worse, although he sees the better before him simply because it answers some deep seated emotional need. Though initially raised in religious school so as to become a Parson, Philip ultimately concludes that life is inherently meaningless. In the parable of the Persias Carpet, "as the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need to do this as there was use. Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, he might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had the power of selection, though it might be no more than a fatalistic legerdemain, in which appearances were interwoven with moonbeams, it did not matter. In the vast warp of life with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern."

Maugham has a gift for description. The context is of his early arrival in Paris to become an art student. "Philip went out and wondered what he should do with himself till dinner. He was eager to do something characteristic. Absinthe! Of course it was indicated, and so, sauntering towards the station, he seated himself outside a cafe and ordered it. He drank with nausea and satisfaction. He found the taste disgusting, but the moral effect magnificent; he felt every inch an art-student; and since he drank on an empty stomach his spirits presently grew very high. He watched the crowds, and felt all men were his brothers. He was happy."

That reminds me of enjoying a glass of Ouzo in Athens as a young man wanting nothing more than to be worldly. I about vomited and could not have been happier. I understood Philip and I feel wiser and oddly comforted for having read this book.

[Patricia Hilliard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book, Of Human Bondage, is a long narration of the main character’s thoughts. Very little dialogue, especially in the beginning where the young man has few friends and cannot speak his mind to his guardians or teachers. He also has a club foot which makes him a social reject. A few times the author has to intervene to let you know the historical time (the Boer Wars in So Africa).

Many deep and thoughtful insights and conclusions are written that could make great quotes. He admits to some horrible attitudes about women, but they are not unusual for a man of that time. On one hand he expects them to have an inheritance and jobs just like he has (until he loses all in a stock market crash). On the other hand, he is repulsed by the things women do to attract men. He hates they eye-makeup and rouge on their cheeks and wonders why they paint themselves.

UNIQUE ABOUT THE NOVEL: He observes his own emotions and how “bonded” by them he is. This is part of the inescapable BONDAGE that calls up the title. But the bondage also includes one’s feelings of obligation to guardians/parents, to other male friends, to his new philosophy of living, to his intense on-again / off-again relationship with a woman named Mildred. In the end, he realizes that, once he has chosen the right person or people for his life, the “bonded” life is a stable safe life. This conclusion is probably what got the novel published in that it reinforces what society expects from each of us.

[Hermione Laake · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves to be read again. Clearly we still have work to do in liberating the 'Mildreds' and 'Fanny Prices' of the present day from lives as inferior beings because they are either artists or Mothers, and therefore, do not deserve to earn a reliable income, or live in a respectable dwelling where they will not be turned out at a moment's notice because they are 'women'.

[Andreas Kyprianou · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this book. In all honesty, I did want to strangle the protagonist and give him a shake at times but Maugham does such a wonderful job of creating the reality in this story I couldn't put it down.

[Randy D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of Human Bondage is the classic “coming of age” story where a young man, who is drifting through life, finally understands its true meaning; it is simply the pursuit of happiness.

Phillip Carey's lifelong deformity, in his words “had warped his character” and therefore his life; he was insecure and at times deceitful ... he was an obnoxious individual. His insecurity led him to “follow the ideals that other people had instilled into him and never the desires of his own heart....” His life had been swayed by other people who knew what was “best for him” ... in other words, Philip Carey wasn't his “own man.” He was unhappy; eventually he concluded that his unhappiness was what made him “happy.” But, his life was one of human bondage ... he let his acquaintances influence his thoughts to the point that he was miserable, and thus unhappy. He was happy to be unhappy because he deserved nothing better.

But, he began to realize that his new career in the medical profession, plus the realization that his deformity had instilled a desire in him for the beauty of art and literature were part of his personality ... a part of his personality that he kept buried within himself. It was part of his inner self which fueled this constant conflict of which he suffered.

His life changed after he met a friendly patient at the hospital. He became a frequent visitor to the man's “happy home” and Philip saw that he could indeed find happiness in the simplicity of life itself ... but he still clung to his previous way of thinking ... he longed to travel the world to find what would make him happy.

Eventually, the formally disillusioned young man realized he had found his “life's calling and his future would be nothing like he had planned ... but he concluded he wasn't defeated ... he was victorious ... he wholeheartedly embraced his new life. The author summed up his protagonist's thoughts quite well ... “the sun was shining and Philip Carey was happy.”

He looked forward to his new life of domesticity because he had finally found the happiness of which he was seeking. *****

[Phil Eames · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long story of psychological ups and downs, told in clear prose with excellent snatches of vernacular dialogue, with a picture of late Victorian society, its rigid class system and widespread poverty; my only difficulty being the seemingly excessively abrupt swings from loving to hating on the part of the protagonist.

[Martha McSweeney Brower · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first 150 pages were tedious, but as the story unfolded, I couldn't stop. There's a deep message. It seems that we all are bound by something. The main character's life was ruled by longing. But when he least expects it, what he wants has been in his subconscious all along and takes him by surprise.

[Bina Rai · Rating 4 out of 5]

A long book but worth the read

[Bob Pound · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disorganized difficult to follow, stopped reading after 193 pages.

[Barry Mitchell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this long ago and liked it. I tried l Listening to it and hated it. Main character snivels and complains and the whiny other characters are awful.

[Pam Strachan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book grew on me over its 700 pages. Felt the last 200 pages were the best. Reminiscent of Dickens, but more prosaic.

[Raquel Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read all of Somerset Maugham's books when I was in high school, so I decided to re-read them to see if they were as good as I remembered. I did enjoy him again, but his books are a bit dated.

[Vijay Manwani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do not remember the book at all but remember loving it