Chapter VIII: Fictional Biography and Autobiography

Often I find myself thinking of the justification of autobiographical writing in fiction. The modern Italian writer is devoted to it. D'Annunzio set the example a generation ago and carried it to such a point that he outraged all sense of decency. So long as he confined himself to revelation of his own alleged amatory potency and mastery of the arts of love, even though he trampled upon sacred ideals, the public tolerated it. When he strained the sensualities of well-known and beloved notabilities through the percolators of his perverse imagination they sickened of him and denounced him. It is an exquisite form of self-appreciation--the belief that the commonplace events, deliberate thoughts, and vagrant fancies of an individual who has in no way distinguished himself will divert and instruct others, and that they are worthy of record. The fact that such writings are bought is the justification they allege. But the public is like the editor of a magazine. He has to read reams of trash to find one worthy and acceptable contribution. The purpose of fiction may be manifold, but it is read chiefly for distraction and diversion. The critic and interpreter read it to get the temper of the public mind and the trend of its projection, but the purchaser of it reads it to get surcease of the woes of life, whether they be the ruts worn by operating the daily treadmill or the despondencies thrust upon him by circumstances more inexorable than the tigers of Hyrcania. It is not likely that the occurrences in the life of another commonplace individual even though they are pieced with fiction will suffice to provide this. Therefore those who turn to the narration of the lives of others in which there have been stirring events, picturesque phases, and romantic incidents are likely to have greater success. Whether it is a legitimate procedure is another question. It is a matter of taste. It was as justifiable for Mr. Somerset Maugham to portray Paul Gauguin in "The Moon and Sixpence" as it was for Mr. Morley Roberts to describe George Gissing in "The Private Life of Henry Maitland," and even more so, for the latter had revealed himself adequately in his books. Nothing was to be gained by raking up a past that led through prison any more than the prison days of O. Henry is an asset of immortality. Sometimes such writings have a meritoriousness apart from their literary qualities. The "Green Carnation" did much to inform Britishers how prevalent and pernicious was the vice which its prototype was afterward locked in Reading Gaol for practising and apotheosizing. To take a man whose fame has mounted steadily since his death and make a monster of him is a hazardous and, many will think, an iniquitous thing to do, even though the individual during his lifetime was unmoral and immoral. This is what Mr. Somerset Maugham has done for Paul Gauguin, master of the Pont Aven school of painting; dislocater of impressionism and neo-impressionism; liberator of art from stereotyped, slavish copyists of nature; apostle of intellectualism and emotionalism versus æstheticism, and from it he has created Charles Strickland, victim of a strange disease resulting in dissociation of personality. The critics tell us "The Moon and Sixpence" is a "great" book. From the standpoint of literary construction it may be entitled to such designation. From the standpoint of one who desires in fiction some verisimilitude of life as it is, or as it should be if it were ideal, it is disgusting and nauseous, atavistic in implication, primitive in delineation, bestial in its suggestion, and it tends to undermine faith in the fundamental goodness of human nature. It is radicalism in realism carried to the _n_th degree.

A middle-class Englishman of unknown antecedents, of commonplace somatic and intellectual possessions, of emotional barrenness and shut-in personality, marries, procreates, and serves--on the London Stock Exchange, after the manner of his kind, until he is forty. If artistic impulses had peeped from his unconscious mind to his conscious he had not betrayed them. Then, when constructive incubal activity had passed its height, he becomes big with the idea that his unsightly hulk harbors the soul of an artist. He forsakes his family without warning and without making the smallest provision for their maintenance or welfare, goes to Paris to study art, to scorn convention and decency, and to treat mankind with contumely. He knows no French, and gradually his English vocabulary shrinks to "You are a damn fool" when a man makes proffer of service or supper, and "Tell her to go to hell" if the offer of self or succor comes from a woman. When he writes, however, his mental elaborations encompass the degree that permits him to pen this chaste message: "God damn my wife. She is an excellent woman. I wish she was in hell."

Like all victims of dementia præcox, when the disorder conditions bizarre conduct for the first time in mid-maturity, he becomes profoundly egocentric, neglectful of his appearance and of his person, and callously insensitive to the feelings and rights of others. As the components of personality dissociate the god disappears, the beast remains, puissant and uncontrollable when under the dominion of primeval appetites or instincts. He has no pride to swallow when he feeds from the hand that still stings from slapping him, no more than does the lion who devours the meat thrust into his cage on the prong that a moment before prodded and wounded him.

"Haven't you been in love since you came to Paris?" is Mr. Maugham's euphemistic question, in his effort to find out for Mrs. Strickland if her husband has been faithful to his marriage vows. After noting Strickland's "slow smile starting and sometimes ending in the eyes, which was very sensual, neither cruel nor kindly, but suggested rather the inhuman glee of the Satyr," he got this answer: "I haven't got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn't long enough for love and art." This is not what Michaelangelo said to Vittoria Colonna. It is what Tom Cat says when not in the throes of concupiscency. Then Mr. Maugham gives a new verbal dress to the devil, who was sure when ill he would like to be a monk, but who in good health didn't fancy monastic life. "You know that all the time your feet have been walking in the mud. And you want to roll yourself in it, and you find some woman, coarse and low and vulgar, some beastly creature in whom all the horror of sex is blatant, and you fall upon her like a wild animal. You drink till you're blind with rage."

Poor Strickland, in the throes of mental dissolution, obsessed, enmeshed in stereotypy, is still capable of sufficient mental reaction to realize that "You are a damn fool" or "Go to hell" was not an appropriate rejoinder or comment to such a speech, so "He stared at me without the slightest movement. I held his eyes with mine. I spoke very closely." "When it's over you feel so extraordinarily pure; you feel like a disembodied spirit, immaterial, and you seem to be able to touch beauty as though it were a palpable thing; and you feel an intimate communion with the breeze, and with the trees breaking into leaf, and with the iridescence of the river. You feel like God." The antivivisectionists should get after Doctor Maugham. It is cruelty to humans to hold unfortunate Strickland with hypnotic eye, and then thrust a record of experience so obviously personal upon him--or was it only a recollection of some published experiences of George Sand and Alfred de Musset--garnered from those days when he "idled on the quays, fingering a second-hand book that I never meant to buy," after he settled down in Paris and began to write a play?

Every Johnson has his Boswell, though he may be mute, unrecording, and sterile, and every sadist has his masochist. The young Dutchman, Vincent Van Gogh, a constitutional psychopath, whose mental aberrations took him into spiritual exhortation, social reformation, and finally "art," often tried to kill Gauguin. When the latter showed himself versed in mayhem Van Gogh made his bed, lit his pipe, wrapped himself in serenity and shot himself in the abdomen, as lunatics often do. Not so Dick Stroeve, Strickland's fidus Achates. He worshipped Strickland, who reviled him, kicked him, spat upon him; Stroeve, who naïvely asks, "Have I ever been mistaken?" in his estimate of artists, knew that Strickland was a great artist, greater than Manet or Corot, more puissant than El Greco or Cézanne, and that he had been sent to complete the cycle which Delacroix and Turner ushered in. Stroeve, a passive, asexual creature, had married a temperamental English governess in Rome, where he had earned the soubriquet of "le Maître de la Boîte à Chocolats" after she had had a disastrous experience with the son of an Italian prince whose children she had been hired to instruct.

When Strickland falls desperately ill from the combined effects of insufficient food, touting for prurient Anglicans, and translating the advertisements of French patent medicines that "restore" Doctor Maugham's countrymen to such a degree that they may go to Paris with pleasurable anticipation, Stroeve takes him to his house, despite the strenuous opposition and pathetic protests of Mrs. Stroeve, whose previous fleeting contacts with Strickland echoed the call of the wild in her and presaged disaster. From the moment he arrived the fat was in the fire. No affinities are so difficult to keep from blending as sex affinities, facetiously called soul affinities by the newspapers. Strickland's spark was fanned lovingly into glow by Stroeve, and when it flamed he threw Stroeve out of his house, possessed complaisant Mrs. Stroeve violently, and then put her on canvas, nude, "one arm beneath her head and the other along her body, one knee raised, the other leg stretched out." After nature's cataclysm had spent itself, Mrs. Stroeve committed suicide in approved feminine fashion by taking a corroding acid, without condoning her husband's offense--that of being virtuous. When she died Stroeve, a true masochist, looked up Strickland, forgave him, invited him to go with him to Holland, because "we both loved Blanche. There would have been room for him in my mother's house. The company of poor, simple people would have done his soul a great good." But Strickland, becoming for the moment verbally more expansive, replied: "I have other fish to fry." When Mr. Maugham spoke to him about Stroeve's visit he said: "I thought it damned silly and sentimental."

The author doesn't attempt a synopsis of the mental process that took Strickland to Tahiti, via Marseilles, though he depicts experiences that parallel those of Gauguin. Instead he animadverts on love and the sexual appetite to such purpose as to reveal that he is not expert in biology, psychology, or art. "For men love is an episode which takes its place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid upon it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life." But what about the emphasis laid upon it by countless thousands who find in it a quality of that ennobling spiritual peace called faith, and which will be their reward when they repose in Abraham's bosom and live forever with God in paradise? "As lovers the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times." And the difference between male and female animals is that the female of the species permits contact at certain definite times, while the males are all Barkises. "Art is a manifestation of the sexual impulse. It is the same emotion which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the 'Entombment' of Titian." After the author delivered himself of a statement so pregnant of platitude he must have experienced a sense of lightening, and a conviction that he would not have to consult the Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie at least until he wrote his next book.

That art has a definite purpose to perpetuate the creative will and that God endowed his image with a genesic instinct that he might create and thus reproduce his kind every one knows, but to contend that one is a manifestation of the other is puerile, unenlightened, and harks back to barbarism. One might think that there is no such thing as the psychology of art or the science of æsthetics. Art has an intellectual significance as well as, or more than, an emotional significance, and the unfortunate, unhappy, disequilibrated man who is parodied in this book contributed his substantial mite in the twentieth century to make us see it.

Any one who reads the "Lettres de Paul Gauguin," which are prefaced by a brief survey of his life by Victor Segalen, or his life by Jean de Rotonchamps, which was published at Weimar at the expense of Count von Kessler, will see how closely Maugham described Gauguin's life in the Polynesian cannibal islands. Strickland marries the native girl Ata, who had a "beguin" for him, but Gauguin had Tioka in his maison de joie without benefit of clergy. Doctor Coutras, who gives Mr. Maugham so much valuable information (via Rotonchamps and Segalen) is M. Paul Vernié, who attended Gauguin and wrote an account of his last days.

Despite the fact that in July, 1914, the London _Times_ lifted the veil of secrecy from the face of the most prevalent disease in the world, and thus announced that the name of the disease which Fracastorius, the poet-physician of Verona, borrowed from the shepherd Syphlus should be no longer taboo by "nice people," the prevalence of the disease and the efforts to combat it have been widely discussed, though they are not topics of conversation at dinner-parties or at "welfare meetings" in churches, as tuberculosis is. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the author prefers to kill his "hero" with leprosy. But Doctor Maugham has been devoting so much of his time in latter years to novels and dramas that he finds the differentiation between them difficult, and, too, Gauguin's disease has been diagnosticated leprosy, elephantiasis, syphilis. "La dernière de ces avaries est exacte, mais ne doit pas être imputées au pays: c'était une pure vérole parisienne."

"The Moon and Sixpence" is interesting. There is scarcely any diversion more engrossing than reading about others' infirmities unless it be relating one's own. Hence the continued popularity of Pepys, Amiel, Rousseau, Marie Bashkirsteff, and other garrulous sufferers. But it is a book that no one can be the better or happier for reading, and it does Gauguin's memory an injury because it parodies it. His life as it has been revealed to us was bizarre and irregular enough. We could wish that he had been less like Rimbaud and more like Rodin, but, distressing as his behavior was, seen in conventional light, we should like not to have seen it featured in fiction.

Mr. Maugham wrote a novel, "Out of Human Bondage," which is a far more meritorious piece of work than "The Moon and Sixpence," in which some of his professional colleagues--he is a physician--recognized portraitures. Perhaps it was his success with them that encouraged him to try a larger canvas.

The author's admitted cleverness was never more evident than in the depiction of Mrs. Strickland's character and characteristics--a smug Philistine, who runs the gamut of preciosity, jealousy, martyrdom, autorighteousness, and autosanctification. She is pleased and proud as she views the veneer of sanctimoniousness which her son, in holy orders, gives the dearly beloved husband of Mrs. Charles Strickland, who wrote his father's biography "to remove certain misconceptions which had gained currency," viz., that Doctor Maugham is masquerading as a psychiatrist and publishing his experiences with the insane, meanwhile throwing off "punk" about art and traducing normal, though admittedly "immoral," man.

"There is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a severe mortification. I have never failed to read the literary supplement of the _Times_." So says Mr. Somerset Maugham. The first part of the statement is difficult to believe after reading "The Moon and Sixpence." The latter part may be true, but it can't be truer than the statement that any one, possessed of ordinary decency and sensibility, and belief that love, sentiment, kindliness, generosity, altruism, forgiveness, and faith are the seven lamps that illumine our path on our way to immortality, will subject his flesh to severe mortification, while being interested and sometimes even amused by reading Mr. Maugham's new book.