Introduction to The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels

by Perry Meisel

The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. By Henry James. New York: Signet Classics, 1995.

Henry James's short novels provide a representative account of James's career as a whole, and serve as an excellent introduction to the peculiar unity of his singular imagination. Although the difference between James's early and later fiction is alone striking – simply compare the opening paragraphs of The American (1877) and The Ambassadors (1903) to see the movement from Victorian realism to the modern psychological realism of which James is the acknowledged master – it is probably more accurate to say that James's career is one of continuity and refinement rather than one of abrupt changes. Whether in his long novels or his shorter ones – nouvelles, as he liked to call the latter, six of which are collected in the pages that follow – James's fiction is always concerned with the play of impressions upon the mind and heart. While a gradual shift in perspective over the years heightens point of view and diminishes the description of faces, objects, and scenes at which the early James grudgingly excels, James's focus remains the extraordinarily specific circumstances that structure the self, and the ways in which the structure of experience and the structure of narrative are very often the same.

In the autumn of 1897, the year before The Turn of the Screw was first published, James had moved into Lamb House, Rye, after more than twenty years of residence in London. James had settled in England in 1876 (he became a British subject in 1915, the year before his death), and soon achieved critical triumph within the same English tradition that had once burdened him as a young American writer. The influence of James's own writing upon twentieth-century fiction is, of course, inestimable. James's psychological realism remains so influential even today that it is, to use James's own description of the success of the fictional poet Jeffrey Aspern in The Aspern Papers (1888), "part of the light by which we walk." Almost every modern writer of fiction in English carries the scars of James's influence, and almost every major English and American novelist in the generation following James's own – E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, even Hemingway and Fitzgerald – can be measured by their respective turns from a strength at once enabling and potentially fatal in the decisiveness with which it reinvents the writing of fiction.

Why is James so influential? What is the nature of his power? The short novels collected here allow us to see what it is in efficient and delicious miniature. The Turn of the Screw (1898) is James's most famous and widely read short novel. Despite its unique extravagance, it contains the principal elements of James's customary world both early and late: interpretative uncertainty and an uncannily vivid sense of solitary and reflective human sadness. The Turn of the Screw shows us a writer fully at home with his powers, and one consciously concerned with central questions about the imagination and its determinations. Bly, the tale's country house, is a haunted house, and the tale a haunted tale. But haunted by what? Are the former governess and the former valet who loom as apparitions fantastic projections of the new governess's imagination? Or are they genuine ghosts, spirits of a past day? Ghosts represent both the past and a past way of thinking in as decisively secular a world as James's is. Surely the ironic brother of the philosopher William James, notorious freethinker and pragmatist, little fancied ghosts as such. Why, then, are we afraid? By means of what power does the tale promote the shudders that it does? We are afraid not only because James has the powers of illusion to do with us whatever he likes, but also because he has the power to do so while suspending all judgment as to what these witnesses of his power may mean. Testimony to James's audacity as a writer, the tale is poised between a series of interpretative alternatives that raise more questions than James thinks it right to answer. The Turn of the Screw is the turn, as it were, that reveals the archaeology or the unconscious of James's own sense of himself as a writer.

As a literary allegory, the tale is also poised between two very real alternatives as it mediates upon questions of imaginative priority. Is James's writing merely a ghost of past writing, or is it testimony to the splendid originality of his own imagination? As a writer of fiction who began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, James had to control Romanticism itself. Like his unnamed governess-narrator (what, by the way, is the status of gender in James?), James is tormented by Romanticism's representatives. Who are Peter Quint and Miss Jessel? They are strangely familiar figures; he is the Romantic male in the visionary tower and she the house-haunting madwoman, whose only place of repose seems to be the attic. Leon Edel, James's biographer, notes the indirect allusions to Jane Eyre in The Turn of the Screw, and the narrator herself wonders out loud whether "an insane, an unmentionable relative" is being "kept in unsuspected confinement." As the governess's fear and malaise attest, however, James himself is interested in neither figure; these Romantic counterparts represent ghostly and offensive burdens that his own fiction will circumvent in favor of a new kind of literary character based upon figures like the depressive governess-narrator here or the scholar-narrator of The Aspern Papers ten years earlier, milder figures for whom vision and madness alike are unacceptable, even unavailable alternatives. Life is after all too sedentary an affair for prose realism to give the glamor of either stance any credibility.

What is left, then, for the novelist to do? Uncertainty and its causes and effects are the major and unifying concerns of James's career, and his use of them as materials allows him to link style and subject, form and theme in dauntingly clear ways. What James's other short novels share with The Turn of the Screw is the pressure of situations and the overriding question within them of what the truth in each case may be. Of course, what the truth is in James's world is a legal or juridical question – a question of evidence, argument, and negotiation among alternatives – not a metaphysical one.

In The Aspern Papers (1888), the question of what the truth may be is the narrative's overt theme. Are the poet Aspern's papers hidden in the Missess Bordereau's house in Venice or not? What is the effect of each move planned by the now shrewd, now bumbling narrator as he tries to extract the truth from the situation? Toward the possession of what objects, as he himself wonders, are these feints directed? The very components of the story sound like the techniques involved in writing one. What frustrates the narrator thickens the illusion for the reader. It is the wonder that the story itself creates – the secret that it puts in place by not disclosing – that is both its motive force and its very subject. Concealing a secret is proof that there must be one. The sense of a fugitive truth gives the narrative and the lives of the characters within it goals that structure and organize both alike whether or not either receives a proper resolution. Tita Bordereau's admission at tale's end that she burned the papers after her aunt's death is part of the mystery, not an answer to it.

If James's career is one of continuity and refinement, then even the early Daisy Miller (1878) – the book that made James famous – must, like Daisy herself, be far less plain and innocent than it seems to be. Here the early James is already exploring the interior as he paints a world presumably external to private states of mind, a world to which characters seem only to react. But the legendary split between an omniscient early James and an entirely subjective later James is partly a myth. Like all of James's work, Daisy Miller is a moral tale. Its lesson is that form does indeed matter; its nonobservance can lead, quite literally, to death. Daisy's flouting of the customs of Rome results in her dying from malaria. But this experiential moral is of a piece with the epistemological lesson that the story also presents, the kind of lesson we tend to associate only with the James of the late phase. With the "ruin" and "inscriptions" of Rome's archaeology serving as the story's site, James shows that "the common forms," as he calls them in The Aspern Papers, are essential to everyone's interior life, the shared assumptions or "pretexts," as he calls them in Daisy Miller, that are one's unconscious connection to the external world. There is some irony in the fact that even solitude and loneliness are made up of social materials (how do I measure myself, for example, except in relation to others?), but it is also this kind of irony that makes James so inconsolable and his world often so torpid.

An International Episode (1878), as early a work as Daisy Miller, is by contrast a tale of ambiguity and questioning despite its fierce realism. What happens between the lovers at tale's end? It is hard to tell; many explanations are implied, but none confirmed. Ten years before The Aspern Papers, James is already writing a kind of interactive fiction, asking the reader to get involved in construing the story itself even though the reader may feel that he or she is simply observing it. However politically incorrect, one reacts, says James, according to one's "preconceptions." Thus "reference," he says, speaking technically of his use of language in the tale, is "reference to a fund of associations," "associations" or "preconceptions" that implicate the reader in the same network of assumption (the figure of the web or mesh is among James's favorite metaphors in his criticism) as the text and its characters.

While The Altar of the Dead (1895) is likely James's most moribund tale of human loneliness and uncertainty, it is also among his frankest, since it provides an undisguised model for what narrative and subjectivity actually share. In the process, James's fiction also comes to discover the nature of its own technique, and dramatizes it with even greater clarity than usual. Its key is temporality, and it is the structure of temporality that identifies experience and narrative so exactly. When George Stransom, James's dubious hero, realizes that his female friend has been grieving for the old mutual friend who did him an unspecified wrong many years before, the shock of belated recognition changes his perspective, requiring him to drop her. "It had been all right so long as she didn't know," reflects Stransom, "and it was only now that she knew too much." The slightest difference can make an enormous one. Belated knowledge that alters one's view of the past is the crucial link between the structure of experience and the structure of narrative. Let Stansom explain:

There were subtle and complex relations, a scheme of cross reference. . . . In this way, he arrived at a conception of the total, the ideal.

Whether it is the self, a story, or an idea, if the parts shift their relation to one another, the whole shifts, although one sees it all only "afterward," as James describes it. So efficient is James that story and technique coincide with remarkable ease. The structure of Jamesian subjectivity is identical with the structure of Jamesian narration, and with the structure of the Jamesian sentence in particular. Like the relations among the elements in a character's life or among those in a porous Jamesian story, the components of a Jamesian sentence don't make entire sense or show surpassing beauty until the reader completes them. James's style and the effect of impressions upon the mind are structured the same way. This is James's reflexive realism, a realism whose representation of the self is at one with the active logic of the writing that describes it.

If an early tale like Daisy Miller is epistemological as well as moral, a late one like The Beast in the Jungle (1903) is moral as well as epistemological. Indeed, The Beast in the Jungle joins the two, showing how the later James really is the refinement of the identity between narrative and experience, between the reflexive and the realistic, the formal and the thematic. The belatedness of John Marcher's shock of recognition is its primary characteristic, and the source of both the story's sadness and Marcher's own. What is the beast, the secret that Marcher fruitlessly awaits his whole life long? That there is no secret, that all is as blank as the face of a grave? Or is there also another, plainer meaning? Like Stransom (François Truffaut combines The Beast in the Jungle and The Altar of the Dead in his film The Green Room), Marcher has also grown old with a friend and companion without having the brains or the nerve to see that there is a durable love between them. "She," says James, "was what he had missed." Marcher is "fit indeed," says James in his postscripted preface to The Altar of the Dead in the complete edition of his works, "to mate with Stransom." The story shows us that Marcher is, in his own words, "an ass." Like the luster of the Jamesian sentence, the shock of Jamesian recognition comes only after the fact, securing some shard of memory and desire, but leaving behind forever, as the price of knowing it, the possibility of ever having actually held it. Even the most painful cases offer the sole and ironic compensation of belated appreciation for the losses involved. "Belated," writes James, "the pain . . . at least . . . had something of the taste of life."

Introduction to It Can't Happen Here

by Perry Meisel

It Can't Happen Here. By Sinclair Lewis. New York: Signet Classics, 1993.

It Can't Happen Here is unique among Sinclair Lewis's major novels, and very likely among his best. Although the book's appearance in 1935 was a topical response to the advent of fascism in Europe (Mussolini had come to power in Italy in 1922, Hitler in Germany in 1933), its depiction of a fascist future for the United States has a force that grows stronger with each passing year. Rather than criticize America for its provincialism as he did in the novels that had made him the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 - Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929) - Lewis now celebrated America by writing a cautionary tale rather than a satiric one.

The urbane Europe of Dodsworth was no longer urbane when Lewis began work on It Can't Happen Here in 1934. His wife, Dorothy Thompson, was a journalist, and had published a book called I Saw Hitler in 1933; Lewis obviously knew what was afoot. His predilection for moral disgust was doubtless kindled by tales of Hitler. He had little patience with presumptive authority, and now found that what he hated about American provincialism - its gullibility - was mirrored by the success of the Nazis. It gave him an entirely fresh aesthetic perspective. Despite received critical opinion (Mark Schorer, Lewis's biographer, has said that after 1930 Lewis was "finished" as a "serious writer"), It Can't Happen Here marks a singular advance in Lewis's art as a novelist that transforms the assumptions of his earlier work into the problems of the new, and that leads to a startling self-reassessment that crowns his career.

Although It Can't Happen Here is as a rule compared to George Orwell's 1984 (1949) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) in its representation of a totalitarian future, its best analogue is Nathanael West's A Cool Million, published just a year before Lewis's novel in 1934. West narrates the rise of an American fascism by showing the grotesque violence that brings to power Shagpoke Whipple, a dishonest banker and former president modeled upon Ronald Reagan's preferred precursor, Calvin Coolidge. Whipple puts America - and West's hero, poor Lemuel Pitkin - under the boot of his Storm Troops to secure the triumph of his National Revolutionary Party.

Lewis's plot is not dissimilar, but it has a wonderfully logical ease compared to West's Kafkaesque fantasy (there is some irony in the fact, too, that Jack London, to whom the young Lewis had sold plots in 1910-11, had in 1907 published the first of what Erich Fromm later called the "negative utopias," The Iron Heel). Unlike Orwell and Huxley, Lewis portrays not an achieved state of totalitarianism whose protocols the novel's characters take for granted, but a slow, altogether believable process whereby the America we all of us know crosses a line that we didn't realize was there. While Orwell and Huxley largely override the specificities peculiar to British culture as part of the nature of the fascist nightmare, Lewis takes advantage of specificity by employing American customs and conventions that we know by heart to stoke the loud realism that makes his story so extraordinarily vivid. The novel charts the rise to power of Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a right-wing demagogue modeled on Huey P. Long of Louisiana, and whose partisans, who call themselves the "Corpos," have persuasive heirs in today's New Right.

Lewis focuses on the American electoral process in an outlandish and uncannily prophetic way, presaging the media campaigns that we now expect in American politics, and mixing, like Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe, fact and fiction when, for example, Windrip beats Franklin D. Roosevelt out of the presidential nomination at the 1936 Democratic national convention. The campaign, too, is utterly convincing to American readers of any generation, especially those who saw Ronald Reagan's presidency, although the climactic Democratic rally at Madison Square Garden in New York the night before the election adds to the clatter of familiar American sounds and images the ominous centrality of the Minute Men, Windrip's storm troopers who, like West's Storm Troops in A Cool Million (they dress in Davy Crockett uniforms), use the virtues of a pioneer image in order to refashion it.

The story is told from the point of view of Doremus Jessup, a sixty-year-old newspaper editor in the small town of Fort Beulah, Vermont. Happiest when he is alone in his attic study amid "an endearing mess," as Lewis puts it, of books - novels, the complete works of Jefferson, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon - Doremus is, unlike Babbitt, say, or the more heroic Martin Arrowsmith, a fair surrogate for the novelist himself. What Doremus learns over the course of the novel is that the "cackle" of the world, as Lewis describes the clutter of contending voices and opinions that makes up America, is not at all unlike the "endearing mess" of books in his study. Society, too, is a motley of speech, a "mess" of variegated languages of thought and feeling that its members expound. The novel and the world are continuous rather than different in kind. America is a particularly manifest example of social life as a tissue of dialects in its own right. It is not a question of who is Right and who is Left, who is right and who is wrong. Each side needs the other for a sense of identity. America is like the "patchwork quilt" under which the fugitive Doremus sleeps in the house of strangers who at the novel's close give him refuge.

It Can't Happen Here is an aesthetic breakthrough for Lewis because his novel shows us the real relation between politics and literature. They are overlapping worlds, not separate ones. Both are signifying pageants, dazzling patchworks of language. This is precisely what the novel as a form uniquely enjoys among other discourses. It is also what the novel as a form shares with democracy as a form. It is Lewis's achievement in It Can't Happen Here to have grasped, after a long and successful career as a satirist, this critical identity, and to realize the thickening of illusion that it can technically effect. No longer a sarcastic onlooker, Lewis has risen from the satirist's chair of the 1920s to a more farcical realist stance in which all the attitudes are equally credible and equally preposterous. He delights in a play of multiple idioms unknown to him before despite a history of critical reception that praises him for tuning single American dialects to perfection.

The polarities that satire structurally requires (if something is stupid and evil, then I who show it to you must be smart and virtuous) are among the kinds of conflict or opposition that Lewis's shock of recognition leads him to override in favor of a more telescopic realism bent on discovery rather than judgment. Lewis now sees that his earlier satiric mode pivoted on the kinds of distinctions that he is no longer willing to make. In Arrowsmith in particular (Lewis had turned down the Pulitzer Prize for the novel in 1926 because, as Schorer describes it, he didn't believe in the legislation of taste such prizes represented), Lewis crystallized the implicit assumptions of Main Street and Babbitt by opposing, plainly and absolutely, the will to truth and the will to dominion.

The simplicity of the opposition - indeed, the opposition itself - is no longer an assumption in It Can't Happen Here. Through Doremus, Lewis realizes that the languages that people speak - the satirist's included - are actually languages of belief rather than of any sort of established truth, each vying for a purely documentary priority, whether Karl Pascal's Marxism or Shad Ledue's resentment. In It Can't Happen Here, Communists and Corporatists, Left and Right, are alike "theocratic," as Lewis puts it, thereby dismantling the presumable opposition between the two, and finding instead a common bond between them in the wish to believe in something. As Orwell argues in his famous essay, "Politics and the English Language" (1946), no language is, despite our "belief" in it, a "natural growth." West's Shagpoke Whipple is blunter still: "This is not a matter of opinion, it is one of faith." Any "loyalty," Doremus concludes, is "religious." He, too, finds himself wanting "a church," as he calls it, to redeem America from fascism. Indeed, winning the Resistance is couched in overtly religious terms - as a redemption from tyranny in an inescapable typology based in a tradition of faith (the Communists refuse to join the Resistance in order to vouchsafe their own purity of belief). The world is dangerous not because people don't mean what they say, but because they do. Belief is somehow inevitable; theocratic piety even attends the use of language as such, since grammar presupposes a stability of relation between subject and object that the world itself may not possess, but in whose name it gets transfigured nonetheless.

Thus the political dangers that the novel shows us are also literary dangers. Lewis's focus on Lee Sarason, Windrip's secretary of state and chief adviser, is decisive in establishing the link between American life and American fiction that is the book's chief invention. Although Sarason is eventually unwise enough to seize power from Windrip as the book steams toward its end (he, too, gets toppled in turn), he is Windrip's speechwriter, press agent, and the real author of Zero Hour, Windrip's version of Mein Kampf, "the Bible," as Lewis calls it, of Windrip's "followers." Sarason's "smoking typewriter" is what is ultimately responsible for the fascism that Lewis describes. "It all made dazzling reading," thinks Doremus of the whole political situation late in the novel. "There had never been a more elegant and romantic fiction."

Windrip is not, however, without his own skills, too. Like Sarason's bewitching typewriter, Windrip's oral ability to entrance his audience has its counterpart in the novelist's ability to absorb and fascinate his or hers. A politician with the rhetorical talents of Windrip is, like Sarason, a kind of novelist in his own right, although a very different one from the surrogate novelist presented by the figure of Doremus. This is the second model of authorship or governance that the novel offers, and it is clear which of the two it prefers despite the irony of having to choose. The danger, in literature as in life, lies in taking any illusionism, any language at all, for "gospel," as Lewis puts it - in believing in it rather than simply appreciating it and weighing its role in a balance of values.

Hence It Can't Happen Here is a particularly relevant text for any assessment of American culture at the present time. After all, Lewis portrays what we can very reasonably call a multicultural America in the book as a whole, and in its concluding image of the patchwork quilt. The principal question he raises is, how do you read a world, or a novel, full of contending tongues without succumbing to the fascism or theocracy of either Left or Right, or to the kind of "message" literature that Zero Hour, for example, recommends to control the polyphony? One guards against the fixities of belief to which Left and Right, and sociological literature, alike aspire by insisting, as Lewis does, on America as a poetic fiction - a poem by Whitman, if you will - and on its endless self-invention rather than on anything self-evident in its constitution. America's precise and paradoxical virtue is that it is decidedly artificial, imagined rather than found.

Lewis conjoins politics and the novel by showing that both are dialogues, unlimited conversations between readerly assumption and writerly surprise, conducted in order to make up what world there is. This is Lewis's reflexive realism - his ability to show the similarities between reading the world and reading a text. This is also a vision of politics itself as ultimately aesthetic, like his account of the campaign, a proleptic Warholesque view of life as television well before the fact. Lewis had been an aesthete in college, writing imitations of Swinburne as a Yale freshman before growing more topically inclined as a writer of prose. This repressed aestheticism returns in It Can't Happen Here, a presumably political novel from a sociological writer, but one in which the certainties of satire wane in favor of a renewed aesthetic irony poised enough to let the sensation of every position, every language, every belief have its effect.

Like its insistence on endless dialogue in both life and literature, the novel's own superb plot does not conclude with the melodrama of either a successful overthrow of fascism or its absolute dominion. Rather, it simply stops with the start of a struggle between the Corpos and New Underground, leaving the story's destiny open. The play of dominion and defiance in America's yielding to Windrip is reflected in the novel's own technique of engaging the reader in a dialogue or, if you prefer, a Socratic dialectic between belief and resistance, expectation and amazement. Debate is the only freedom and dialogue the only art. This is decidedly American writing. The grand image of the patchwork quilt not only links America; it also links Lewis with other American writers of his time such as Willa Cather, for whom the image of the quilt is like testimony to a shared vision of a multicultural America. Indeed, the patchwork quilt has become a popular image for such a vision during the last quarter of this century. If It Can't Happen Here is still real to readers more than half a century after it was written, it is because Sinclair Lewis has identified the precise tensions that structure both democracy and the art of fiction.

Introduction to The Moon and Sixpence

by Perry Meisel

The Moon and Sixpence. By W. Somerset Maugham. New York: Signet Classics, 1993.

Although W. Somerset Maugham's three principal novels - Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), and Cakes and Ale (1930) - have all garnered the praise they deserve, Maugham's remarkable popular success over an extraordinarily long and prolific career has also made generations of critics nervous about just how good a writer he is. Modern novelists, like modern poets, are supposed to be difficult, as T.S. Eliot once observed; if they are too readable, something must be wrong. Ever since the publication of Maugham's first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897, a crisp realist account of a young woman's tragic fate in the slums of London's East End, Maugham has been eminently readable. The book's success convinced him to throw over the career in medicine for which he was to qualify only a few months later, and to take up writing full time. By 1907, he had become a hit London playwright as well as a respected young novelist. By 1908, he was famous on both sides of the Atlantic for his plays, underscoring the dramatic efficiency so central to the power and attractiveness of his fiction.

This virtue has dogged Maugham's reputation as though it were a vice, and has put Maugham's achievement as a master of the modern English novel under a shadow despite his enduring popularity and the readerly satisfaction that both his novels and his short stories continue to afford. Maugham's presumable shortcoming is his apparent failure, by contrast with James Joyce, say, or Virginia Woolf, to innovate formally or stylistically. Our understanding of twentieth-century fiction has, in the years since World War II, valued literary modernism for its antagonism toward the Victorian past and for its departures from Victorian literary conventions, chief among them the unembarrassed compulsion to tell absorbing stories. Maugham's presumable failure to innovate lies in his seeming unwillingness to check, or at least to question, this compulsion.

The Moon and Sixpence, however, shows Maugham to be not only an enormously fluent and compelling writer; it also shows the notion that Maugham is simply a plain and straightforward writer of absorbing tales to be a mistaken one. Like Joseph Conrad, a major influence and still a securely canonical modernist, Maugham is actually a complex and ironic writer of fiction who combines a storytelling ease with profound self-consciousness. The result is an artist whose work both conforms to the protocols of modernist orthodoxy and outstrips them.

Based on the life and legend of Paul Gauguin (1848 - 1903), the Postimpressionist French painter who crucially influenced modern art with his shocking primitivism and daunting use of color, The Moon and Sixpence helped to inaugurate the Gauguin mythology that is the story of a willful man who scorned material comfort in life, and who fled to the South Seas in pursuit of a natural warmth and directness of feeling that found expression in his painting. The tropics, whether African, American, or Asian, had long symbolized a freedom of imaginative expressiveness in the history of Romantic aesthetics, and Gauguin came to represent this symbolism perhaps more clearly than any other single modern artist. Like Conrad, Maugham had a lifelong fascination with the South Seas, although as a writer he, like Conrad, distances himself from this mythology even as he represents it.

Maugham's novel transforms Gauguin into the fictional Charles Strickland, an English stockbroker who, one day, abandons his wife, children, and career because, as he puts it, succinctly enough, "I want to paint." Despite a history of loyalty to his family, Strickland turns out to be rude, callous, and indifferent, the very reverse of both his record of domestic devotion and the depth of feeling presumably reflected in the warm colors and natural expressiveness of his art. After a journey through the garrets of Paris and the underworld of Marseilles, Strickland eventually makes his way to Tahiti, where, poor but happy, he lives, works, and dies. The actual facts of Gauguin's life are a bit more complicated than the rather simpler ones that Maugham uses to structure Strickland's fictional biography (some of them make their way into the Parisian sequences in Of Human Bondage), although the basic outlines of the story are the same.

Like Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence reads with uncommon smoothness, even though it is structured by flashback and discontinuity. The temporal complexities of Maugham's story, together with the foregrounded, first-person narrator who gathers information about his subject belatedly, after the fact of his death, are devices Maugham surely owes to Conrad, particularly the Conrad of Heart of Darkness (1899), whose narrator, Charlie Marlow, pursues the visionary enigma of Kurtz deep into the Congo with questionable interpretative success. The Moon and Sixpence's elliptical, Conradian structure mirrors its theme.

Strickland's decisive quality as an artist is, in Maugham's own word, "simplification," although the irony is that this "simplification" is anything but simple. It is extraordinarily hard to understand. It is almost as though Maugham is poking fun at his own presumable simplicity as well as at the myth of the modern artist whose rejection of all that is conventional turns out to be obfuscating rather than clarifying. Modern art, whether Gauguin's or Maugham's own, is indeed difficult, although one need not be hit over the head with it for its subtleties to emerge. The directness that Gauguin represents mythologically is, in Maugham's rendering, actually the reverse of what it seems to be – inscrutable, oblique, without the manifest meaning it appears to offer. Rather than find and disclose a fugitive secret that will explain Strickland and his art, Maugham's narrator is faced instead with an interpretative impasse. The more he learns about Strickland, the less he knows. To the question, "What is the secret of modern artistic creation?" there is no available reply. "It is a riddle," says Maugham at the book's start, "which shares with the universe the merit of having no answer." Contrary to the very mythology he narrates, Maugham finds Strickland's, or Gauguin's, vaunted directness of purpose and expression to be utterly mysterious, altogether unobliging to analysis despite the endless temptation to engage in it. Strickland and his work are not as simple as they look.

The innovative complexities of The Moon and Sixpence are not, however, limited to temporal experimentation or the refusal to allegorize. If the novel resembles Conrad in narrative structure and tropical site, it also departs from Conrad in its suspension of sympathy for the visionary. Maugham's first-person narrator does not construe his relation to Strickland along the familiar lines of the secret sharer or double (the narrator who recognizes his own dark or repressed side by identifying with his perplexing subject), the combined technical and psychological device that Maugham borrows from Conrad and turns on its head. Unlike Conrad's Marlow, Maugham's narrator is drawn to the visionary not by sympathy but by mere curiosity, circumstantially created by the entreaties of Strickland's abandoned wife, whom he meets in London at the book's start, and, later on, by the circumstances of World War I, when he finds himself in Tahiti after Strickland has died. Even though Maugham's narrator is himself an artist (a professional writer), he does not glorify the artist's pain and suffering, as Thomas Mann does with the composer Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1912), or as Joyce does, with considerably more sarcasm, with Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). "I have nothing but horror," says Maugham in a 1917 entry in A Writer's Notebook, "for the literary cultivation of suffering which has been so fashionable of late." Despite the narrator's fascination with Strickland, there is no kinship, nor is there antagonism. There is instead a preposterously cool neutrality, made convincing by the charming avuncularity of tone that is Maugham's stylistic signature.

This charm is what makes the Maugham narrator the central force in The Moon and Sixpence, and a special voice in English fiction as a whole. Nameless in The Moon and Sixpence, this persona came to be used more and more by Maugham over the years, acquiring the name of Ashenden in many of Maugham's stories (including his famous spy stories, based on his work as a British agent during World War I) and Cakes and Ale; he even survives his incarnation as Ashenden with the publication of The Razor's Edge (1944), when he takes on Maugham's own name. Endearingly paradoxical, the Maugham narrator is sophisticated and cynical, but also affable and companionable; dry and indirect, but also vivid and straightforward. While it may appear that his exact descriptive powers in The Moon and Sixpence contrast with the lack of an explanation to the puzzle of Strickland, his unwillingness to offer allegorical answers to aesthetic, existential, or metaphysical quandaries is of a piece with his trenchant exactitude. If something cannot be described, what is its status? Maugham had little use for the ineffable, not because his sympathy for Romantic vision was nil, but because the realist in him bridled at the excessive poeticity to which the description of inward states of mind might lead. He mocks the dangers of such rhetorical self-indulgence in the opening chapters of The Moon and Sixpence, finally throwing up his hands in the face of the bad writing that results from it in order to get on with his story.

These playful tensions suggest that Maugham's unique narrative voice owes its strength to the strategic resolution of the two major and contradictory influences that determine his writing. One is the social realism of the late Victorian novelist George Gissing, which has its initial expression in Liza and Lambeth, and which, historically, is a literalization of Dickensian melodrama. The other is the late Romantic aestheticism, or "impressionism," of Walter Pater and his disciple Oscar Wilde, whose wide appeal Maugham describes at length in the autobiographical Of Human Bondage, and which has its initial expression in the novel's unpublished first version, "The Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey." Pater's aestheticism stressed the sensuality of visionary apprehension, identifying the privileged moment with a state of grace. Maugham went to the same school as Pater, the King's School in Canterbury, and also studied at Heidelberg, where Pater's two sisters, one of whom later tutored the young Virginia Woolf, had completed their educations. Historically, aestheticism is an appropriation of Romantic poetic diction to prose, and, as a literary stance, bespeaks the stylistic profligacy of which Maugham was most afraid as a writer. Wilde learned to distance himself from his master Pater by scrubbing down Pater's lush rhetoric to an almost parodic concision, turning to the theater, like Maugham after him, as a means of protection from descriptive excess. Blanche Stroeve's suicide in The Moon and Sixpence even recalls Sybil Vane's suicide in Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Both deaths symbolize the protest of realist heroines, and of realism as a literary mode, against the dominion of aesthetic antiheroes, and of aestheticism as a rival and threatening literary practice. The title The Moon and Sixpence is also an expression of these antithetical strains in Maugham's imaginative temper. Its terms come from the assessment of the hero in Of Human Bondage in a review in the Times Literary Supplement ("so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet"), with "the moon" representing the visionary or aesthetic impulse and "sixpence" the commonplace wisdom that is its opposite.

The superb psychological realism of Of Human Bondage is the first genuine resolution of these contradictory influences in Maugham's career as a novelist. A masterpiece from either point of view, it allows the strengths of each of these rival modes of apprehension to supplement rather than impede one another. Paterian inwardness finds its place in the psychology of the book's autobiographical protagonist, while the external world of social realism finds its place in the environmental factors that shape his psyche. The Moon and Sixpence, like Cakes and Ale, carries this achievement to a new level as the voice of Maugham's narrator knowingly balances these contradictory approaches to life and letters alike with an ease that comes from the overt and self-conscious resolution of this conflict. Using the plain speech of the social realist, he denudes the visionary extravagance of aestheticism; using the rhetorical richness of aestheticism, he simultaneously heightens the drabness of social realism. Unlike Pater's modernist heirs Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence, all of whom seek meaning, however ironically, in visionary figures, Maugham suspects the visionary gleam even when it beckons, as it does in the riddle of the exemplary but maddening Strickland.

The result is not a rejection of aestheticism but a hollowing out of aestheticism's belief in the privilege of beauty. What remains is a graceful but severe aesthetic stance with little to enjoy but a pipe before bed and a shake of the head. It is instructive that chief among Ashenden's literary heirs are the had-boiled detectives and spies of Raymond Chandler, Ian Fleming, and John Le Carré, all of whom have testified to Maugham's influence, and whose heroes summarize, albeit in reduced form, the admixture of swagger and sweat that makes up Maugham's characteristic and durable narrative voice (Chandler even goes so far as to suggest Ashenden's source in Conrad's Marlow by naming his own dogged hero Philip Marlowe).

The antagonistic visions of the aesthete and the realist combine rather than compete in The Moon and Sixpence, granting the novel an astonishingly double estimate of life. The suspension of judgment that is its moral implication is likewise astonishing. Life is enormously rich, colorful, full of beauty and emotion, while, at the same time, altogether without meaning. This double vision gives Maugham his continuity with Victorian realism while also placing him among his modernist contemporaries. It also reverses our normative understanding of literary history by rendering modernism a source of affirmation and Victorian realism a source of doubt and emptiness. This formidable balance and revisionary power make Maugham distinct among English novelists, and will allow his fiction to endure.