Progymnasmata

Last year an English professor at my college retired; she left most of her books to the faculty. I scooped up several freebies: The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham was one of these. The particular volume that I read was an old, ragged, highlighted, dog-eared cheap paperback. It had been read by several people before me.

And I think the nature of this particular volume perfectly fit the central theme of Maugham's novella: that great art scars the intellect and heals the soul.

The narrative is a first-person account of the fictional painter Charles Strickland, often believed to be based on French painter Paul Gauguin. Strickland is brutish and raw but magnetic to nearly all he encounters. The novel documents his life from England, Paris, and later to the island of Tahiti.

While the Strickland character is supremely interesting, the star of the novel is the Maugham. The prose is stark but elegant and, as such, perfectly echos the paintings of and character Strickland.

I love so many phrases, lines, and paragraphs from this novella that I cannot count or cite them all.

But my favorite is this one:

It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

There is a beautiful brutality at work in this sentence which, again, echos the Strickland character and his art. But more than that, it is in every facet of the novel itself: it's plotting, narration, character development, organization. . .

Aw hell, that's not what I mean to say you. You want to know what The Moon and Sixpence made me feel? It made me feel small and insignificant, like I was standing alone on the flat, treeless North Dakota prairie. It made me feel that art and genius exist but that they are beyond my ability to understand or to love. But like Lot's wife, I could not look away.