It is not surprising, then, that Maugham’s portrayal of hypnotism and the occult should focus on the ways in which these elements rob the individual of his or her independence. And to convey the strength of Haddo’s enslavement of Margaret, Maugham employs an array of figurative language and imagery similar to that which can be found throughout Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and so many of his other stories of loss of freedom. Margaret is described as being bound to the magician “almost by hidden chains,” of having the “attitude of a prisoner protesting his innocence,” and having her heart “pressed in an iron vice.” She feels “as if a rank weed were planted in her heart and slid long poisonous tentacles down every artery, so that each part of her body were enmeshed.” She is “an automaton,” “a chip of steel” that is irresistibly drawn to a magnet, and “a rat in a trap.” Most often, she is compared to a captive bird: “her heart beat like a prisoned bird, with helpless flutterings”; she struggles like “a bird in the fowler’s net with useless beating of the wings”; and, “like a bird at its last gasp beating frantically against the bars of a cage,” she makes “a desperate attempt to regain her freedom.” In a metaphor that recalls du Maurier’s drawing of Svengali as a malevolent spider glaring at Trilby from his web, Maugham writes that “the web in which Oliver Haddo enmeshed her was woven with skillful intimacy.”
Like Trilby, Margaret becomes a split personality under the spell of the hypnotist; she is not transformed into someone entirely unlike the essential woman known to her friends. Thus, her resistance to Haddo’s incantation is truly a fight “to regain her self-control”: the self has remained constant but she is losing control of it—“her will had been taken from her”—to a powerful mesmerizing manipulator. She tells Arthur later, when he attempts to win her away from her thraldom, “there seem to be two persons in me and my real self, the old one that you knew and loved, is growing weaker day by day, and soon will be dead entirely.”
Maugham was fascinated by the way in which people can often be impelled—by emotion, passion, obsession, and other forms of irrationality—to act in a self-destructive manner even though they know that there is a wiser course to follow. He had read Spinoza’s Ethics and was struck by the philosopher’s comment that “the impotence of man to govern or restrain the effects [i.e. emotions] I call bondage, for a man who is under their control is not his own master, but is mastered by fortune, in whose power he is, so that he is often forced to follow the worse, although he sees the better before him.” So struck, in fact, was Maugham by this idea that he adapted the title of the fourth chapter of Ethics—“Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions”—for his next novel, written five years after the publication of The Magician.
Of Human Bondage is a lengthy examination of the difficult and complex process by which a young man achieves mastery over himself, over his own internal demons: self-loathing, insecurity, pride, masochism, exhibitionism, and obsessive infatuation. A fine example of a realistic novel, it provides a meticulously detailed picture of the external forces against which the protagonist’s development takes place. Philip Carey’s battle, however, is always ultimately with himself, with the emotional and psychological aberrations engendered in him by those forces: being born with a club foot, being orphaned, and growing up in a loveless home. It is this careful examination of a young man’s triumph over his own internal vulnerabilities that made Of Human Bondage one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century.
The Magician, however, is not a serious character study; it is melodrama, and the threat to Margaret’s freedom comes not from within her own character but outside herself. The melodramatic villain, Haddo, captures her will through a hypnotic trance in which he summons before her sensational images of corruption, sensuality, and decadence—of figures such as Salomé, Jezebel, and Circe. Nothing that we know of Margaret’s character suggests that she should be susceptible to the allure of such imagery, but she is nonetheless enthralled. And when Haddo fabricates a vision of the perfumed and mysterious East (in imitation, one suspects, of Benson’s The Image in the Sand), we are not prepared for her response: “a life of freedom, a life of supernatural knowledge. It seemed to her that a comparison was drawn for her attention between the narrow round which awaited her as Arthur’s wife and this fair, full existence.” Unless one sees Margaret’s desire to study art in Paris for two years, which she is prepared to forgo when Arthur proposes marriage to her, as a sign of latent restlessness, the allure of Haddo’s vision does not touch something already in Margaret’s psyche. Where many of the threats to Philip’s independence come from within himself, Margaret thus becomes the prisoner of a wholly external force.
The eroticism in Margaret’s trance is unusually frank for the period in which the novel was written, and it seems to have dissuaded one publisher from including The Magician in its lists. In late 1906 the British firm of Methuen agreed to publish it, and Maugham was given an advance of £75 for three novels. The Magician was typeset and ready to be printed when one of the partners in the company read it in proof and was shocked (Maugham later observed that this showed that “publishers should never learn to read; it is enough if they can sign their names”). It may have been that the partner was appalled by the descriptions of Haddo’s experimentation with homunculi, but it is more likely that he was offended by the vision of lewdness and sexuality which Margaret is offered. If so, it would not be the first time that Maugham had pushed the limits of what could be published—William Heinemann agreed to publish his novel Mrs. Craddock in 1902 only if he agreed to remove a number of passages describing his female protagonist’s sexual desires. And his contract for Of Human Bondage in 1915 contained an unusual clause stipulating that he must return some of his royalties if the novel—which told of the promiscuity of a teashop waitress—were banned by the lending libraries and thus lost money.
For whatever reason, Methuen was concerned enough about The Magician to return it to Maugham, and he repaid the royalty and forgot about the matter. When he had established his reputation as an author a few years later, however, Methuen tried to enforce its contract with him for three books. Threatening to take the matter to the courts, Maugham pointed out that Methuen’s rejection of The Magician canceled the agreement and that he had since published another novel, The Explorer, in which the firm showed no interest. Nothing more was heard from Methuen. In the meantime, Heinemann published The Magician and became Maugham’s publisher for the rest of his very long and profitable career.
Given the sensationalism and melodrama of Margaret’s enslavement by Haddo, it is easy for readers to overlook another of The Magician’s motifs that is common to Maugham’s writing. This is the situation of a young man having to extricate himself from an infatuation with a young woman in order to find a more tranquil—perhaps less passionate but more enduring—relationship with another. His play A Man of Honour (1903), reworked as part of The Merry-Go-Round, tells of a young solicitor and aspiring author who is in love with a beautiful widow but feels compelled to marry a cockney barmaid whom he has impregnated, and when the marriage becomes intolerable for the mismatched couple, the woman commits suicide. Similarly, the protagonist in Of Human Bondage abandons a fulfilling relationship with a loving and supportive older woman to pursue an infatuation with a vulgar teashop waitress, and it is only after a long, painful period of self-discovery that he is able to find happiness with a down-to-earth and maternal young woman.
Margaret, as she is described in the opening pages of The Magician, is hardly an inappropriate prospective wife for Arthur, but she is superficial and their marriage is foreseen as a conventional domestic arrangement. When she falls under Haddo’s spell, however, she becomes the unattainable object, though at the same time more fascinating to Arthur as she takes on some of the alluring characteristics of the lascivious women of the hypnotist’s vision. She thus becomes the kind of woman almost always portrayed negatively in Maugham’s writing, the hetaera, or courtesan figure, who cap
tivates a man with her sexuality. And Arthur is imprisoned by a kiss: “She had never kissed him in that way before, and the rapture was intolerable. Her lips were like living fire. He could not take his own away. He forgot everything. All his strength, all his self-control, deserted him. It crossed his mind that at this moment he would willingly die.” From this point on, Arthur’s devotion to Margaret, previously that of a guardian and fiancé, becomes a painful obsession.
Arthur’s agony as Margaret becomes lost to him is supposed to be more than usually intense because, the reader has already been told, he has “a singular capacity for suffering…. Those quick dark eyes were able to express an anguish that was hardly tolerable, and the mobile mouth had a nervous intensity which suggested that he might easily suffer the fiery agonies of woe.” After only one meeting with Arthur, Margaret’s companion, Susie Boyd, warns her: “I’ve never seen anyone with such a capacity for wretchedness as that man has. I don’t think you can conceive how desperately he might suffer. Be careful, Margaret, and be very good to him, for you have the power to make him more unhappy than any human being should be.”
These remarks, coming as they do very early in the novel when there is nothing to indicate that Arthur’s life is anything but satisfying and successful, seem out of place; gratuitous comments coming from the narrative voice rather than arising credibly from the character’s circumstance. There is a touch of self-indulgence in the comment, and one might be forgiven for suggesting that there are autobiographical elements in the portrayal. Considering that there are definite elements of Maugham in both A Man of Honour/The Merry-Go-Round’s Basil Kent and Of Human Bondage’s Philip Carey, it would not be surprising if Arthur Burdon is in some ways self-referential. Indeed, both the early portraits of Maugham by Gerald Kelly and literary depictions of him by friends emphasize the same dark eyes capable, if not of great anguish, of deep feeling. Writing of Maugham in 1909, Louis Wilkinson commented that his “dark brown eyes…suggested the eyes of some painted portrait,” and the actress Billie Burke, meeting Maugham for the first time in 1910, was struck by his “great smouldering brown eyes.” A year later Ada Leverson put him into her novel The Limit as “Gilbert Hereford Vaughan” and wrote that “whatever or whoever he looked at, his dark opaque eyes were so full of vivid expressions.”
Whether or not Arthur is as much a self-portrait as Basil Kent or Philip Carey, his story resembles theirs in one important way: after much suffering, he ends up with a woman who has patiently waited while he pursued his infatuation. Margaret’s friend Susie considers herself old at thirty, a startling observation for modern readers but not unusual for her time, a period when a woman of her age was considered to have missed the marriage boat. She is also aware that she is not physically lovely, that she is what the French call belle laide, or beautifully ugly. At the same time, she has an engaging vitality, intelligence, common sense, taste, and tact. Kind, generous, and loyal, she has a substance to her character beyond anything we see in Margaret. And though she has never been loved, she is capable of loving. “There was in her,” we are told, “a wealth of passionate affection that none had sought to find. None had ever whispered in her ears the charming nonsense that she read in books. She recognised that she had no beauty to help her, but once she had at least the charm of vivacious youth. That was gone now,…yet her instinct told her that she was made to be a decent man’s wife and the mother of children.”
Susie does fall in love with a decent man, but unfortunately it is Arthur, and she has to suffer in silence as he first is enchanted by the prospect of marrying Margaret and then distraught when she leaves him for Haddo. Though Arthur barely notices it, Susie remains loyal to Margaret and devoted to him in his futile attempt to win her back from her enslavement and ultimate death at the hands of Haddo. Blinded by his search for a woman who in the end is truly lost to him, he seems oblivious to the worth of the one who is at his side throughout the ordeal. Even the hint at the novel’s close that Arthur and Susie will develop a romantic relationship comes from her: “Susie was ready to forget the terrible past and give herself over to the happiness that seemed at last in store for her.” Arthur is merely “singularly relieved” that the struggle with Haddo is over.
Both Arthur’s preoccupation with Margaret and Susie’s long unrequited love for him are the forms of bondage recognizable to many readers of The Magician, but it is of course the occult power of Haddo and his hideous experiments with homunculi that monopolizes their attention. Maugham wrote his novel with that purpose so that he might attract a wide readership, but he was only modestly successful in this; Heinemann issued one printing of 3,000 copies in November 1908, and a seven-penny edition in 1914, and Duffield published it in the United States early in 1909. It did not earn large royalties.
Ironically, by the time that The Magician was published it no longer mattered to Maugham whether it made much money. In November 1907 the manager of London’s Court Theater, needing something to replace an unexpectedly early closing of a play, put on Maugham’s much-rejected Lady Frederick and it became an enormous success. Within months other theater managers retrieved his scripts from their dusty shelves, and by the summer of 1908 he had four plays running in the West End. Nobody, not even Shakespeare, had ever done that, and Maugham’s income was guaranteed for the rest of his life.
Maugham’s reaction to his triumph in the theater was to conclude that he was finished with writing fiction, and he later recalled looking up at the clouds drifting above the Comedy Theater and realizing with relief that he would never again have to render them in prose. “Thank God,” he thought, “I can look at a sunset now without having to think how to describe it. I meant then never to write another book, but to devote myself for the rest of my life to the drama.” Maugham, however, had not counted on what in old age he called “the burden of one’s memories,” and ironically his newfound financial security gave him the freedom to explore his memories of a painful childhood and adolescence. Finally free to write only what he really wanted to, he returned to fiction five years later and produced his most personal and greatest work, Of Human Bondage. It became his most extensive and persuasive exploration of the question of individual freedom that lies beneath the melodramatic surface of The Magician.
ROBERT CALDER
Suggestions for Further Reading
Calder, Robert. Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham. London: Heinemann, 1989.
Cavaliero, Glen. The Supernatural and English Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Crowley, Aleister. The Spirit of Solitude: An Autohagiography, Vol. II. London: Mandrake Press, 1929.
Curtis, Anthony. The Pattern of Maugham. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1974.
du Maurier, George. Trilby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hudson, Derek. For Love of Painting. London: Peter Davies 1975.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Somerset Maugham: A Life. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Wells, H. G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. New York: Bantam Classics, 1994.
Whitehead, John. Maugham: A Reappraisal. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1978.
The Magician
A Fragment of Autobiography
In 1897, after spending five years at St Thomas’s Hospital, I passed the examinations which enabled me to practise medicine. While still a medical student I had published a novel called Liza of Lambeth which caused a mild sensation, and on the strength of that I rashly decided to abandon doctoring and earn my living as a writer; so, as soon as I was ‘qualified’, I set out for Spain and spent the best part of a year in Seville. I amused myself hugely and wrote a bad novel. Then I returned to London and, with a friend of my own age, took and furnished a small flat near Victoria Station. A maid of all work cooked for us and kept the flat neat and tidy. My friend was at the Bar, and so I had the day (and the flat) to myself and my work. During the next six years I wrote several novels and a number of plays. Only one of these novels had any success, but even that failed to make the stir that my first
one had made. I could get no manager to take my plays. At last, in desperation, I sent one, which I called A Man of Honour, to the Stage Society, which gave two performances, one on Sunday night, another on Monday afternoon, of plays which, unsuitable for the commercial theatre, were considered of sufficient merit to please an intellectual audience. As every one knows, it was the Stage Society that produced the early plays of Bernard Shaw. The committee accepted A Man of Honour, and W. L. Courtney, who was a member of it, thought well enough of my crude play to publish it in The Fortnightly Review, of which he was then editor. It was a feather in my cap.
Though these efforts of mine brought me very little money, they attracted not a little attention, and I made friends. I was looked upon as a promising young writer and, I think I may say it without vanity, was accepted as a member of the intelligentsia, an honourable condition which, some years later, when I became a popular writer of light comedies, I lost; and have never since regained. I was invited to literary parties and to parties given by women of rank and fashion who thought it behoved them to patronise the arts. An unattached and fairly presentable young man is always in demand. I lunched out and dined out. Since I could not afford to take cabs, when I dined out, in tails and a white tie, as was then the custom, I went and came back by bus. I was asked to spend week-ends in the country. They were something of a trial on account of the tips you had to give to the butler and to the footman who brought you your morning tea. He unpacked your gladstone bag, and you were uneasily aware that your well-worn pyjamas and modest toilet articles had made an unfavourable impression upon him. For all that, I found life pleasant and I enjoyed myself. There seemed no reason why I should not go on indefinitely in the same way, bringing out a novel once a year (which seldom earned more than the small advance the publisher had given me but which was on the whole respectably reviewed), going to more and more parties, making more and more friends. It was all very nice, but I couldn’t see that it was leading me anywhere. I was thirty. I was in a rut. I felt I must get out of it. It did not take me long to make up my mind. I told the friend with whom I shared the flat that I wanted to be rid of it and go abroad. He could not keep it by himself, but we luckily found a middle-aged gentleman who wished to install his mistress in it, and was prepared to take it off our hands. We sold the furniture for what it could fetch, and within a month I was on my way to Paris. I took a room in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank.
The Magician Page 3