In August, we will be reading Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham.
Please post your thoughts and comments in this thread.
In August, we will be reading Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham.
Please post your thoughts and comments in this thread.
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"It is not that I am mad; it is only that my head is different from yours.”
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I'm actually most of the way through it alreadyI am enjoying it, it is similar in a way to the quite brilliant 'The Moon and Sixpence' though not quite its equal. Looking forward to some discussion.
I finished The Razor's Edge day before yesterday, it's the first by Maugham I've read. Is this typical of his style?
An article about Maugham I happened across on the NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/bo...ooksupdateema1
I would say so, it's his usual simple style. I do recommend The Moon And Sixpence if you enjoyed this one, it's one of my favourite books. It's also a portrait of an unusual figure (based on Paul Gauguin) who ignores social pressure and does his own thing.
I would like to hear more about Larry in this one but i guess his point is comparing the materialist and ultimately lonely life of Elliot(do you think he is meant to be gay?) and the self chosen life of poverty and spiritual fulfillment of Larry.
I will look into The Moon and Sixpence. I did enjoy TRE, although the last bit about Larry's supposed spiritual fulfillment to be a bit droning. It's possible that if it hadn't been so close to the end, I'd have put the book down at that point. It just didn't ring true to me. But all in all the story pulled me along, although I sometimes wanted to slap Isabel.
Maugham put across the emptiness Larry felt very well, almost too well in a way. I would have appreciated more of Larry's inner life.
As for Elliott being gay or not, I'd assumed he was...what with the book being written in the early 40's Maugham wouldn't have been able to come out in any blatant way about his sexual orientation.
An interesting article on WSM. I have read Salina Hastings biography of Maugham and it is probably definitive in that it leaves no known stones unturned. Much of his life was detailed in a better, to my mind, biography by Ted Morgan ( a man, incidentally, whose life is almost as interesting as Maugham's own ); Hastings merely adds the icing on the cake. For all that the New York Times article tries to write Maugham off, it is interesting to note that the same has been said by many other critics; but here we are, forty eight years after his death, and he is still very much in print. Of course, there will come a time when he is no longer read but that will be the reading public's loss.Originally Posted by plainjane
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
Quite an absorbing tale; I appreciated the unencumbered, straight-forward style of narrative.
Who would you prefer for a traveling companion: Elliott or Larry?
"He lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive himself. Ha-ha!"
- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
You know that is an interesting point. Elliott as a companion was my first automatic choice, however Larry could be interesting as well. Maybe alternating tours?
Definitely Larry for me, i actually found him somewhat inspiring. I wonder if Maugham had read Siddhartha by Hesse when he wrote this... they would be a good double header.
Somerset Maugham and Hesse apparently foresaw that the West would eventually become interested in and even embrace Eastern religions and culture as a whole.
How would you judge Isabel with regards the zubrovka trap that she set up for Sophie?
"He lives most gaily who knows best how to deceive himself. Ha-ha!"
- CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
I doubt if Maugham was influenced by Hesse in relation to Eastern religions. By the time he came to write The Razor's Edge, he had travelled extensively in the Far East and had seen the impact of some Asiatic religions on certain white men he'd met in his travels; mention of which can be seen in some of the short stories and a couple of the novels.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
The two novels to come out of, or perhaps because of,
World War I, are The Sun Also Rises and The Razor's Edge. I have read both any number of times, and I still don't know which I prefer. Perhaps it's a dead heat. I have read a lot of Maugham, including all his short stries in four volumes, but I prefer this novel even more so than The Moon and Sixpence and Of Human Bondage.
If you like the book, be sure to watch the movie. Tyrone Power is Larry, Gene Tierney as Isabelle, and the incomparable Clifton Web as Elliot. Some say that Clifton Web was gay, but others that he was asexual. Clifton Web was very close to his mother, and when she died he was almost inconsolable. This prompted some wit to say, "Poor Clifton, left an orphan at age 65! I think it was Oscar Levant.
As for Maugham's sexuality, I have never read a biography, but he did leave his wife and live in France with another man for a number of years.
Last edited by dfloyd; 08-11-2010 at 10:06 PM.
Yes, that sounds like Oscar Levant.
Like many homosexuals, Maugham was very promiscuous but was able to keep it under wraps throughout his life because it wasn't considered a subject for polite conversation. At that time there appears to have been an international ring of high society homosexuals that included people such as Maugham, Thomas Mann, Noel Coward etc. This is perhaps most sharply delineated in Salina Hastings biography of Maugham already referred to, but his sexual proclivities had already been known for quite some time.
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
I knew Noel Coward was a homosexual, .....
but I didn't know about Thomas Mann, not that it matters much. I think these people kept their sexual proclivities more to temselves rather than parading them for all to see, such as Truman Capote.
I last saw Noel Coward in Graham Greene's "Our Man in Havana", a great spy spoof. John Le Carre tried to equal it in "The Panama Tailor", but it didn't come off as well as Grahame Greene's novel.
In Donald Prater's biography of Mann his homosexuality is only hinted at, but in Selina Hastings biography of Maugham she relates a specific instance of one of Maugham's partners also having a homosexual relationship with Mann.
They were obviously more discreet than would have been the case today because the general public would not have stood for it; let alone the police.
The fact that Noel Coward was homosexual made the scene where he approaches Alec Guinness in the bar in Havana and asks him to accompany him to the toilet all the funnier. Especially when Guinness refuses and Coward says: "Why not? You're an Englishman aren't you?"
"L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.
"Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.
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