Content area
Full Text
Perhaps the most disparaging criticism of W. Somerset Maugham comes from Edmund Wilson, who, in his essay "The Apotheosis of Somerset Maugham" (1946), argues that Maugham neither writes well nor recognizes the quality of better novelists. In particular, Wilson takes issue with Maugham's treatment of modernist writers: "Though Mr. Maugham's claims for himself are always carefully and correctly modest, he usually manages to sound invidious when he is speaking of his top-drawer contemporaries. … [we] find him patronizing, in what seems to me an insufferable way (and with his customary buzz of clichés), such writers as Henry James, James Joyce, and W. B. Yeats" (728). Citing Maugham's criticism of Proust in which he advises that large passages may be skipped, Wilson judges, "The inability of Mr. Maugham to grasp what there is in Proust helps to explain why he has not been able to make his own work more interesting" (730). In great literature, form and function are in balance, and Maugham, according to Wilson, did not understand the principle.
Ultimately, Wilson condemns Maugham as "a half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronized by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing" (731). Most of Wilson's objections concern Maugham's remarks in the introductory essays to his anthology Great Modern Reading (1943), in which Maugham mixes praise with criticism of James and others; however, the ambivalence about modernism that Wilson detects in Maugham's anthology runs throughout the novelist's critical writings. Moreover, this conflict that Maugham's critical work exhibits—essentially an aesthetic of anxiety1 about modernism and literary impressionism in particular—manifests itself particularly in the novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919). As this essay will demonstrate, the novel's plot displays the author's anxiety about style, and the novel as a whole represents the author's attempt to resolve this internal conflict and embrace a technique, both in theory and in practice, that supersedes the realism he naturally prefers.
Modernism and Maugham
"Modernism" has always been an unstable, contested category that has been embraced by diverse artists and critics at different times and places for different purposes. In its broadest sense, it simply denotes a break from tradition. When narrowed down, the term's meaning often partakes of the theoretical approach of the practitioner who chooses to use...