W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge (#ParisInJuly-just in time!)

"I'm counting the days until I can get back to Paris. It's the only place in the world for a civilized man to live."

It hurts me to report the speaker was in Chicago when he said it.

W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge comes out in 1944, but the events end before the Second World War and start in 1919. 

Elliott Templeton (our Paris booster) is in Chicago to visit his sister. The narrator of the novel (a novelist much like Maugham himself) is passing through Chicago and has lunch with Templeton, an old acquaintance. He also meets most of the other figures of the novel: Louisa Bradley, Templeton's sister; his niece, Isabel Bradley; Larry Darrell, Isabel's fiancé, Gray Maturin, who's in love with Isabel, rich, and whom her mother and uncle discreetly would prefer she marry; and Sophie Macdonald, a friend of the younger generation.

It's Larry Darrell's decisions that drive the action of the novel. He had lied about his age and managed to fight as a pilot for the French during WWI. The horrors he saw there, the fact that his life was saved by a friend who died in the process, have left him wondering about the big questions. He still loves Isabel, he says, but he wants to spend two years at least on a quest to discover the meaning of existence. (That's Bill Murray as Larry in something approaching a Hindu seeker's garment on the cover of my beat-up movie tie-in edition.) Larry wants to marry Isabel, but not to give up his search, and suggests that they live on his small inheritance while he continues. In his search, Larry reads philosophy (William James, Spinoza!), makes a retreat at a Benedictine monastery, and eventually travels to India.

But, after Spinoza, and before the monastery, Isabel says unh-unh to that proposal of impoverished seeking; instead she marries Gray Maturin, who was patiently waiting at her side. They have two children and a life of great social and financial success. Until 1929.

I think the novel is usually viewed as a story of spiritual seeking, and it is, of sorts. The Wikipedia article compares it to Hesse in its early (by Western standards) interest in Eastern spirituality. But Larry is not often on the scene, and the novelist character/narrator only meets Larry occasionally over the fifteen or twenty years of the novel. "I can only guess, you know, and I may be quite wrong. I think he's been seeking for a philosophy, or maybe a religion, and a rule of life that'll satisfy both his head and his heart." 

There's one long discussion about philosophy between Larry and the narrator in an all-night Paris café, which might be a little dull. But:

"I feel it right to warn the reader that he can very well skip this chapter without losing the thread of such story as I have to tell, since for the most part it is nothing more than the account of a conversation I had with Larry. I should add, however, that except for this conversation I should perhaps not have thought it worthwhile to write this book."

Hmm. I might still have felt it worthwhile to read it without that chapter, but it is important that Larry not just be an object of fun, but that his quest be taken seriously. And so it is. Still the diffidence and irony of the narrator means that while he takes Larry's quest seriously enough, it's not taken completely seriously, and there are other possibilities.

And in fact Elliott Templeton is present in much more of the novel. He's quite an amusing character who clearly codes as gay, though he's never explicitly described as such. He made his money as an art dealer, though his trading days are so vanishingly far behind him that he won't acknowledge they ever existed; he spends his time cultivating high-status social acquaintances. He's compared to Proust at one point, and not since Recherche has there been quite so much concentration on breaking into the Boulevard St. Germain. I found him the most entertaining character. His pronouncements are sometimes shocking, and maybe we shouldn't like him:

"I have always moved in the best society in Europe and I have no doubt I shall move in the best society in heaven. Our Lord has said: The House of my Father hath many mansions. It would be highly unsuitable to lodge the hoi polloi in a way to which they're entirely unaccustomed."

But at the same time he, too, is treated with real tenderness by the narrator.

Some bad things do happen, and at one point the narrator ends up in a police office in the matter of a dead girl:

    "'We found a number of detective stories in her room and two or three volumes of poetry. There was a Baudelaire and a Rimbaud and an English volume by someone called Eliot. Is he known?'

    'Widely.'"

Our narrator can be amusingly catty himself:

    "Why d'you suppose they do it?" [get divorced]

    "Don't you know? Because American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."

"A novel which she knew from the beginning (otherwise she wouldn't have read it) would end happily."

Is that the sort of novel we're reading? Well...

"...to my intense surprise it dawned on me that without in the least intending to I had written nothing more or less than a success story. For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted: [Spoilers!] And however superciliously the highbrows carp, we the public in our heart of hearts all like a success story; so perhaps my ending is not so unsatisfactory after all."

Anyway, maybe I'm not one of those highbrows after all, but just another member of the public, and so I thought it was a good read. 😉

One from my Classics Club list.

And squeezing one late-breaking entry in for Paris in July!

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Novels

Titus Groan,  the first of the Gormenghast novels, begins thus, with a description of the castle:

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.

Not very inviting prose, I agree. I made a list of words I was going to need to look up as I read: abactinal, clowder, anile, fuscous, spilth, marcid, scorbutic. Et cetera, et cetera. And I see now as I type my spell-checker thinks only fuscous and scorbutic are even words, but my OED was happy to give me definitions for all of them.

And yet the book shows up regularly on lists of great novels. I don't know any longer which list led me to purchase it, but I suspect it was Anthony Burgess' list of best English-language novels from 1939 to 1984 that appeared in the New York Times. And now that I've read it, I'd have to say he may be right.

There are three novels in my edition, plus a critical apparatus. It's from The Overlook Press and it came out in 1995 with two introductions, one by Burgess and one by Quentin Crisp. It seems to be out of print now. The novels center around Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast. In the first, Titus Groan (1946), Titus is born, and at the age of one year and a bit, he becomes the earl when his father goes mad and dies, well, is eaten by owls. It's that kind of book. In the second, Gormenghast (1950), Titus ages from seven to eighteen or so, and leaves the castle. In the third, Titus Alone (1959), he wanders the world outside Gormenghast. Peake planned at least a fourth, and there are a few pages of it, but he was unable to finish it, dying at the age of 56 from either Parkinson's or dementia.

The main psychological tension is between the traditional ritual that the earl of Gormenghast must perform and the desire for freedom, for life. But at the same time, at least in the first two volumes, there is considerable physical tension, mostly supplied by Steerpike, who starts as a kitchen boy and ends up (with a few murders along the way) as the Master of Ritual, the most important position, outside of the family, in the castle. Titus and his mother's hunting and killing of Steerpike provides the climactic finish of the second volume. You might not guess it from the quote above, but Peake writes very well about scenes of violence and suspense.

He can also be very funny. In the second volume Titus goes to school with an array of comic pedants; after the first headmaster dies a ridiculous death--he dies standing on his head as a result of a school prank gone too far--Bellgrove becomes the headmaster, mostly known for a pain in his teeth and falling asleep in class. The sister of castle's medical doctor Irma Prunesquallor decides to throw a party with the primary intention of finding a husband; she invites the entire teaching staff of the school, all male, as the only available pool of men of neither too high nor too low a class for her to choose from. Irma and Bellgrove both come to the party determined to get married, and by the end of the party, the pact is done. She knows nothing about his teeth, and he knows nothing about the hot water bottles she was using to pad out her cleavage. The marriage is, of course, no particular success.

But especially surprisingly to me, Peake is also capable of tenderness, and this ill-starred union is treated gently.

It's all very good, really, while it's good. Unfortunately Titus Alone is not up to Peake's earlier standard. The dementia that would kill him nine years later was already making itself felt in 1959. But it's also, I think, the case that the tension of the first two novels was wound up by the need to escape the rituals of Gormenghast, and once Titus does escape, the spring was slack. I don't know. But it's certainly the case that I finished the third (shorter) novel, only because the first two were so great.

Anyway, like the fine bottle of wine it is, it's been aging on my shelf for ten years. And I figured not everything I read for my TBR challenge can be 200 pages. It's two-thirds very highly recommended, but give yourself some time to get into it.