Of Human Bondage

yes, another one in the series of public-domain (ie free) books I am reading on the iPad, usually while on public transport. (I am more likely to read printed books at home, but that may well change).  Just at the moment my reading seems to be books by gay Englishmen published early in the twentieth century, but that's just coincidence I imagine.  I don't know what a person is supposed to think about this book.  I read it in my late teens and thought it was wonderful, and then forgot it.  This time I read it differently.  Its central character, Philip Carey, is a friendless orphan boy who is socially awkward and has a club foot.  He fails at just about everything he does - being religious, being a painter, being a lover, being an accountant, being a friend, being loved.  The book takes him from the age of nine, when his mother dies and he becomes an orphan, to twenty-nine, when we leave him apparently about to become happy in the arms of a sturdy 19-year-old Kentish girl with big hips.  (This is not a spoiler).  In between, he spends years besotted with a waitress who becomes a working girl on the streets and who despises and tries to destroy him, he loses the little money he has and is homeless and starving on the streets for a while, a poet dies in his bedroom, and a woman who loves him but who is loved by no-one kills herself because she has no money.  He becomes a medical student, diagnoses the woman he loves with probably syphilis, and she goes on working the streets.  In short, not a bundle of laughs.  There is plenty in this book about art, talent and the creative process, and a refrain is "We do this, but we don't know why", which becomes a little tiresome after a while.  Surely if you are a painter or a writer or a musician you don't need to know why you do it, you just need to, er, do it.  There are plenty of wonderfully drawn characters in the creative world, presumably based on people Maugham knew, and the book probably pissed people off for that reason at the time, but none of that matters now.  The book, like almost all English novels, is about money.  We hear on almost every page about how much money Philip currently has, how much it will cost him to do X or Y, how much money he owes, and how much he expects his uncle, who took him in when his mother died, to leave him.  There is nothing here that reflects the experimental writing of the time, such as that of Joyce or Woolf: Maugham tells a straight story.  Some of the best reading in it for me was the conversations between artists, about how to see the world and whether, or if, artists actually change the way we see the world or only reflect it.  But be warned, if this kind of thing is not what you like there is an awful lot of it.  The book is a long one, but for me never dragged or palled at all.  I wanted to know on every page what was going to happen to Philip next.  There is a lot here about people who try to be creative but who have no talent.  This is rare. Artists in books are usually talented and successful, or else we see them early in their career before they have been recognised. Not here.  In this book we see them after years of toil, producing bad work tht nobody wants to buy or thinks worth while.  Some of them we see drinking themselves to death after decades of failure, some becoming fat and bald as their youthful fizz and spark turns to dullness and ashes. Philip himself tries to be a painter, but is ultimately not talented enough and gives it up.  Money is the theme, with failure a sub-theme.   A nurse at one point remarks on the suicides and attempted suicides brought in to the hospital where she works.  People don't kill themselves because of love, she says, that's only in books, they kill themselves because they haven't got any money.     

Recommended.