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Bad Horse


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Apr
14th
2014

Review: The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham · 7:21pm Apr 14th, 2014

The Razor’s Edge
W. Somerset Maugham, 1944

The Razor’s Edge is told in first person by Maugham, who claims the entire story is true. All of the characters are Americans, but the story takes place in Paris and London, plus those places Larry describes his travels to. There is nothing flashy about the style, but it is precise. The dialogue is very good; each character’s social class and role is evident in every word that they speak. It contains a few overly-large expository lumps in which someone explains their moral beliefs. The novel’s strong point is perhaps the vivid and unsympathetic description of the European upper class, and the web of ambition, deception, and betrayal within it. If you liked Pride and Prejudice, this novel is something like that, but with less-virtuous and more-believable characters, and better prose, at least to someone accustomed to literary realism, with more showing, less telling, and less-intrusive syntax.

Maugham starts off by saying that the he wrote it to tell people about the remarkable life of a remarkable man, whom they would probably otherwise never hear of. He then spends the next chapters describing a friend, Elliott Templeton, who spends his time throwing and attending upper-class parties. Elliott introduces Maugham to Isabel and Larry, who are engaged. Larry was traumatized during World War I (which just ended). As a result, instead of marrying Isabel and settling down to a company job and an upper middle class lifestyle, he travels around the world seeking spiritual enlightenment. Isabel breaks off their engagement because she can’t bear the thought of living without crystal goblets, mahogany furniture, and a nurse to take care of their children.

The story covers the next 10 or so years of the lives of Elliott, Isabel, and Larry. Elliott is a snob whose only desire is to hobnob with the aristocracy. He provides access to and gossip about the nobility of Europe, and uses this to climb socially in terms of the parties he gets invited to and the people who come to his parties. He despairs over the rise of the middle class in Europe, and is disappointed that America, which had appeared poised to create its own aristocracy to carry on the grand traditions, has instead also developed a large middle class. On his deathbed, all his aristocratic "friends" have discarded him, yet he still expresses his hope and confidence that the class divisions that were so permeable on earth will be better honored in heaven.

Isabel was born to some money, and wants only to enjoy it by attending parties thrown in expensive homes and attended by wealthy people in fashionable dress. She is vain, shallow, selfish, and vicious. Larry is a saint who seeks solitude and spiritual enlightenment. You may see the problem. The main characters are completely incompatible, their romantic entanglement repulsive, and there is no possibility for them to have any interactions beyond misunderstanding each other and throwing each other into contrast for the spiritual edification of the reader.

If we accept the interpretation that I find on web pages about it, it is the proto-hippie novel, the first popularization in the West of going to the East for spiritual enlightenment. Larry pursues enlightenment, while Elliott and Isabel pursue dinner parties, and their lives are shallow and unfulfilling. This interpretation is reinforced by the fact that Maugham visited mystics in India and even translated the Upanishads shortly before writing the novel.

But when Maugham began by saying he was going to describe a remarkable man, and then began describing Elliott, I decided the story must be about Elliott. I questioned this later when the story focused more on Larry, but eventually came back to believing that he must have meant Elliott. Partly this is because the story closes shortly after Elliott’s death, but mainly it’s because Elliott, despite being deplorable in many ways and a man I would expect to hate, is the most interesting and likable character in the book. (Isabel is shallow and a selfish bitch.)

The novel's opening narrative tension is over the puzzle of Larry: Why won't he take a job and marry Isabel? You learn he's realized he has enough money to have a modest lifestyle without working, and he's got things to do that seem more important to him than working 9 to 5 every day just so he can vacation in the fashionable parts of the Riviera. Larry is open to having acquaintances of all social classes. He takes a job in a coal mine rather than in a bank, for the experience. He reads widely in philosophy. He is admirable in every way.

(That is the first and last instance of narrative tension. If you need some exciting doubt about what comes next, you're not going to make it through the novel.)

But Larry isn’t interested in people. He cures a man of migraines using his Indian hypnosis voodoo, but in a casual way, only because he happens to be there. Larry shows no consideration for others--he refuses to tell them how to find him; he will not warn them in advance when he’s going to visit; he does not like to tell them what he has been doing or what he thinks or feels; he leaves suddenly when he's lost interest. He has spent years imagining how his marriage to Isabel could be perfect for him, but not one moment considering what she might want. He tolerates others with bland disinterest. He is completely wrapped up in himself. That’s one kind of religious ideal, but it’s not wisdom.

Larry tries to reform the fallen woman Sophie by selflessly marrying her. Yet Maugham describes, in one of those expository lumps, how this is really selfish of Larry; his true selfish desire is to be a martyr. Sophie’s story is also morally ambiguous: She has fallen into a self-destructive lifestyle of drugs and rough sex with bad men, yet Maugham describes her as being beautiful and full of life when she’s drunk, and dry and pathetic when straight and sober.

Elliott, on the other hand, is always thinking about people, helping people, or entertaining them, often with no expectation of repayment. Maugham wrote, "Who could deny that Elliott, that arch-snob, was also the kindest, most considerate and generous of men?" The author describes Elliott as having selfish reasons for all he did, yet over the course of the novel we see it may be more accurate to say Elliot has a religious devotion to class divisions. Larry has his spiritual quest, true; but Elliott is engaged on his own spiritual quest, and if he has chosen gods to worship who are real enough for us to discover their flaws, I count that as a point against Larry.

Elliot’s “self-interested” social climbing makes him a much better friend than Larry’s selfish spiritual quest. The fact that Larry does not seek material goods or social approval does not clear him of the charge of being supremely selfish. His quest is only to meet his own needs; he shows no interest in teaching or helping others on that path. Larry’s “wisdom” is entirely negative. It consists only in rejecting things (money, friendship, respectability, love, home, religion, emotion), but not in accepting anything else in their place. Maugham says that Larry has found peace and contentment, as if that were a worthy ambition for a life. Yet Larry has no peace; he is driven to quest endlessly around the world, observing much but feeling little, while Isabel, Elliott, and the “fallen woman” Sophie live real lives with highs and lows of emotion.

So I was dismayed to go to Amazon and see the majority of reviews there were people impressed with Larry’s spiritual enlightenment. I don’t know whether Maugham knew what he wanted to say. It would certainly have been a worse book if it had been the straightforward praise of spirituality that it’s usually described as. It might have been a better book if Maugham had had some idea of what spirituality ought to be, rather than only what it ought not to be. As it is, I can only read it as a condemnation of spirituality.

This may be an example of how novels are superior to books of philosophy. If Maugham had written a philosophy book, it would have come to exactly the wrong conclusion Maugham had apparently wanted it to, about the futility of material and social life. But comparing truthfully the lives of a shallow society man and a “spiritual” recluse, the “shallow” man usually comes off as happier and morally superior, despite the author’s intentions.

Or perhaps that was the author’s intention. It may be deliberate that he began by saying he was going to tell us the tale of a remarkable man, and never specified which man he meant.

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Comments ( 13 )
#1 · Apr 14th, 2014 · · ·

I wish I could favorites Blogs.

Larry and Isabel both sound like annoying idiots. Isabel's idiocy may have been more instantly-recognizable from a Western intellectual point of view because she is a shallow materialist; writers like Sinclair Lewis cut their writing-teeth on making fun of people like her in Babbitt and Main Street. Larry's idiocy is more subtle: he claims to be interested in deeper and more spiritual things, but instead what he is doing is being showily mystical, taking advantage of his inheritance of (relative) wealth and education to hob-nob with the theocratic elite of Eastern lands, and doing so at the price of his real responsibilities to -- well, Isabel.

From your description, Larry is the sort of person who affects to love Mankind but has no love or consideration for any particular human beings. He clearly regards Isabel as a sort of accessory whose place it is to be there in the background waiting for him and certainly not to make any claims of loyalty upon him (as one to whom one is betrothed might reasonably do to any man not having a self-proclaimed and conveniently discovered Higher Purpose).

From what you say, he treats all his friends in just this fashion too. He acts in a manner that one might imagine would benefit Sophie, but it's just another form of showy self-sacrifice, and indeed one that if I were Sophie would horrify me, he's saying to her "Wow. You're such a worthless miserable drunken slut that I must be a saint to want to marry you!" Yeah, that's gonna make her feel a lot better about herself and put her right on the road to recovery of her dignity as a moral human being. :trixieshiftright:

He is profoundly irresponsible. And it's interesting that you mention Jane Austen, for if she had ever had a character like Larry she would have enjoyed skewering his pretensions.

Calling him a "proto-hippie" is also interesting, because the signal characteristic of the late 1960's - early 1970's counterculture was that it was mostly composed of shallow rich kids who were playing at revolution and a number of middle class and poor kids who joined them; when the party was over the shallow rich men stepped right back into their lives of ease, their mistakes forgiven by their family wealth -- while the middle class and poor kids they were playing with, having wasted their chance at an education and in many cases inflicted severe illnesses and addictions upon themselves, declined into street derelicts, being the discarded and broken toys of the wealthy.

Elliot? He sounds like an okay fellow, a bit shallowly self-interested but amusing company and harmless in his social-climbing. It's perfectly normal for people to want to raise themselves in life. Indeed, it's useful to society.

Larry, on the other hand, strikes me as a truly poisonous person, the more dangerous for his mask of martyrdom. People like Larry lead civilizations in directions which end in tears and Holocausts.

This sounds like a very interesting read. I'll have to add it to a list of mine.

Given some wealthy people throw Great Gatsby themed parties with no hint of irony, it is hard to say from reader reactions whether or not the author's intent was fulfilled without the author themselves speaking up sometimes.

Of course it could also merely be that the author wasn't trying to make a point of one over the other at all, and that Larry and Elliot, despite their seemingly very different outlooks on life, both found fulfillment in their own ways, and that the point was in the end that it didn't really make any difference, and that people simply say Larry is the protagonist because they're supposed to. All of the review and wiki pages seem to imply that Larry is the protagonist.

To me, the interesting question[1] is whether Larry is self-centered, and merely lives a life of unbridled hedonism, just with a uncommon definition of pleasure, or whether he is another social climber with just an alternate ladder to climb. The former would make the book a condemnation of self-absorption and abandoning people while claiming to love humanity. The latter, would be a case of a book that's a bit more cynical, perhaps, and dismisses 'counterculture[2]' as basically another clique-ridden application of snobbery.

Anyway, brilliant post as usual, BH. :twilightsmile:

[1] Well, one of them, anyway.
[2] Of whatever stripe.

Re: Larry and Amazon. Some people who read about a person who does not really connect to anybody but himself consider him to be an enlightened individual with greater vision into the cosmic all who has discovered his inner peace and now should be admired as a role model.

Others of us realize the individual is a narcissist and should properly be ignored. Does that sound a little like Larry?

Nice job Horse. Now let's see, hm...

Larry tries to reform the fallen woman Sophie by selflessly marrying her.

That is to say, she is so much poorer, dumber and weaker than he is that he finds her to be no threat to his erection. So of course he marries her. Nice guy.

He despairs over the rise of the middle class in Europe, and is disappointed that America, which had appeared poised to create its own aristocracy to carry on the grand traditions, has instead also developed a large middle class.

I don't know how it is in Europe, but here it seems our snobs regard the American bourgeois much as they once regarded the American Indian, a nation to be cherished when--and only when--it had finally been destroyed.

Elliott, on the other hand, is always thinking about people, helping people, or entertaining them, often with no expectation of repayment. Maugham wrote, "Who could deny that Elliott, that arch-snob, was also the kindest, most considerate and generous of men?" The author describes Elliott as having selfish reasons for all he did, yet over the course of the novel we see it may be more accurate to say Elliot has a religious devotion to class divisions.

Yeah, I could go fishin' with the man.

Anyway if you liked this I think you'll love The Court of the Red Tsar, a meticulously-researched social history of Stalin's inner circle. It's like the world's best gossip column about the world's worst people.

2010484

Others of us realize the individual is a narcissist and should properly be ignored.

If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line
as a man of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms,
and plant them ev'rywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases
of your complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter
of a transcendental kind.

And ev'ry one will say,
As you walk your mystic way,
"If this young man expresses himself in terms too deep for me,
Why, what a very singularly deep young man
this deep young man must be!"

...something like that?

2010484 I think Larry genuinely embodies the virtues we most often seek in our saints, and particularly the detachment of the mystic, Buddhist, or Hindu ideal. That's why it's interesting--an actual life lived out that way looks thin and colorless.

This sounds like a book I need to read. I say this not in the "click on the clock icon and add it to the ever-growing list I'll never touch" sense, but in the sense of: based on your analysis, this is a book that I need to read, that I need to read, along with some honest reflection on Larry's path.

… I'll order a copy from Amazon. If I have a physical copy around it'll get done.

2010875
I've always been partial to Asimov's filk of that, about life as a sci-fi writer.

2010858

That is to say, she is so much poorer, dumber and weaker than he is that he finds her to be no threat to his erection. So of course he marries her. Nice guy.

He's a "James Taggart." Though of course this book came over a decade before Atlas Shrugged. Which makes me wonder if Larry was one of Ayn Rand's inspirations for that particular character. Except that James Taggart wound up marrying a woman who was actually better than he thought -- and so he drove her to suicide.

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