La Mancha. The oak trees. They stretch for miles along the gently undulating country. They are not very high and magnificence is not theirs, but they look immensely sturdy, and their trunks are gnarled and twisted, so that they give you an impression of violent effort. They have battled with rugged energy against the assaults of time and wind and rain.
Then for miles as far as the eye can reach you have the monotonous lines of the furrows.
Sometimes you pass a peasant ploughing his field with a wooden plough, like the ploughs they used in Roman times, drawn by two mules. Sometimes you pass a peasant on a donkey, or another, with his son riding pillion, on a horse. The wind blows cold and they are huddled in their brown blankets. Sometimes you pass a shepherd, wrapped up, guarding a flock of sheep that nibble the scanty grass, or, more scattered and active, a herd of goats. They are spare old men, the shepherds, clean-shaven, with small, sharp, pale eyes, and their earthy faces are thin and lined and astute; and the bitter cold of winter, the heat of summer, seems to have dried them up. Their movements are slow and you guess that they are sparse of words.
In the villages the houses, built of stones and clay, have the colour of the barren soil, and they look like temporary shelters that soon will crumble away again into the ground on which they have been built.
Alcalá de Henares. It has a large plaza with arcades, and a street with arcades and two-storey houses of modest appearance. It is an empty, dead little town. Down the street wander few people, a cart with a great hood drawn by a mule, a huckster on horseback with his two big baskets on either side. The university, with its handsome patio, has a plateresque façade of no great importance. The other streets are narrow and grey and silent.
Las Meniñas. The first thing that strikes you is its gaiety, and then you realise that this comes from the warm light of common day that miraculously envelops the figures. Velasquez painted no picture in which his cheerful, equable nature is more evident. It has the alegria which is the Andalusian’s most cherished and characteristic grace.
Velasquez’s dwarfs and fools are painted in the Shakespearian spirit, with frank amusement, gaily and without the slightest feeling for the horror of their deformity or the misery of their lot. His sunny temper made him look upon these loathsome, aborted creatures with the good humour of one who knows that the Almighty had created them to be the playthings of princes.
Velasquez suggests in none of his portraits a criticism of his sitters. He takes them at their face value. His charm seems joined to a sort of gay heartlessness. I suppose no one can deny his wonderful skill; the dresses of some of these infantas are amazing, but while one admires one has a slight sense of uneasiness and asks oneself whether this marvellous skill is worth very much. It reminds one of a writer who says things with exquisite sobriety, but says nothing of any great consequence. There is no reason to depreciate breadth in favour of depth, but it is hard to resist the impulse to do so. Velasquez may be superficial, but he is superficial on the grand scale. How beautifully he places his figures on the canvas so that they make a pattern charming to the eye! He was the greatest court painter that ever lived.
London. The barber. He got his job when he was sixteen. He was then a well-grown boy big enough to pass for the eighteen which he said he was, with a mop of curly fair hair the luxuriance of which had encouraged him to enter his trade. He was fond of reading poetry, and on Sundays—in those days a barber worked six days a week—he made pilgrimages to the various places which were connected with the poets he was at the time interested in. He visited Chalfont St. Giles while he was reading Paradise Lost; he had seen the birthplace of Keats and the house in which Coleridge had lived; he went to Stoke Poges and wandered in the churchyard which had suggested Gray’s Elegy. He had a delightful and naïve enthusiasm. All his spare money he spent on books. He had his midday meal at an A.B.C. and while he ate his scone and butter and drank a glass of milk he thumbed a precious volume. It was at an A.B.C. that he first saw the young lady who afterwards became his wife. She worked in a dressmaker’s shop in Dover Street. Then he had a son. While he was courting her his wife had admired him because he was so well-read, but when they were married it made her impatient to see him constantly poring over a book. When he got back from his work and they had eaten their supper she wanted him to take her out for a walk or go to the pictures. They had been married for seven or eight years when the war broke out. He enlisted, and by the influence of one of the men whom he had shaved habitually was sent out to Russia with armoured cars. He was away for the duration of the war. The end of it found him in Rumania. At last he came back and returned to his job. He was a young man still. He was thirty-three. The prospect of cutting hair and shaving chins for the rest of his life dismayed him, but he did not know what else to do. That was all he knew, how to shave chins and cut hair. His wife thought he ought to be thankful to have a good job to come back to. He did not get on so well with her as he had done before he went away. She thought him crotchety and fanciful. He was impatient because she was so well satisfied with the life she led. He saw that he would never escape from the necessity of earning a decent living so that he could support her and the boy. The boy was ten now. He began to loathe his customers. I asked him if he still read. He shook his head. “What’s the good?” he said. “It’ll never get me anywhere.” “It’ll take you out of yourself,” I replied. “Perhaps it will. But I’ve always got to come back.” He had only one thing left, the determination to give his son the freedom that was denied to himself. He was beaten, he had no longer any hope; but savagely, vindictively, he looked forward to his son revenging him vicariously for the loss of his own illusions. When his son grew up he went into the hairdressing business, but for ladies, because it pays better.
The Recipe. The young are earnest. He was a young man with a pugnacious but rather attractive face and a shock of thick brown hair, brushed straight back from his forehead, to which he sought by the lavish application of oil to give the fashionable sleekness. His inclinations were vaguely literary and he asked me how to make an epigram. Since he was in the flying corps it seemed natural enough to answer: “You merely loop the loop on a commonplace and come down between the lines.” His brow puckered as he turned my reply over in his mind. He was paying me the compliment of giving it his serious attention: I only wanted the tribute of a smile.
Once a lady who had a son of a literary bent asked me what training I should advise if he was to become a writer; and I, judging by the inquirer that she would pay little attention to my answer, replied: “Give him a hundred and fifty a year for five years and tell him to go to the devil.” I have thought of it since and it seems to me it was better advice than I imagined. On such an income a young man will not starve, but it is small enough for him to enjoy little comfort; and comfort is the writer’s bitterest foe. On such an income he can travel all over the world under conditions which will enable him to see life in aspects more varied and multi-coloured than a man in more affluent circumstances is ever likely to happen upon. On such an income he will be often penniless and so constrained to many pleasant shifts to earn his board and lodging. He will have to try his hand at a variety of callings. Though very good writers have led narrow lives they have written well in spite of their circumstances rather than on account of them; many old maids who spent much of the year at Bath have written novels, but there is only one Jane Austen. A writer does well to place himself in such conditions that he may experience as many as possible of the vicissitudes which occur to men. He need do nothing very much, but he should do everything a little. I would have him be in turns tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; I would have him love and lose, go hungry and get drunk, play poker with rough-necks in San Francisco, bet with racing touts at Newmarket, philander with duchesses in Paris and argue with philosophers in Bonn, ride with bullfighters in Seville and swim with Kanakas in the South Seas. No man is not worth the writer’s knowing: every occurrence is grist to his mill. Oh, to have the gift, to be twenty-three, to have
five years before one, and a hundred and fifty a year.
They’re both dead now. They were brothers. One was a painter and the other a doctor. The painter was convinced that he had genius. He was arrogant, irascible and vain, and he despised his brother as a philistine and a sentimentalist. But he earned practically nothing and would have starved except for the money his brother gave him. The strange thing was that though bearish and uncouth in manner and appearance he painted pretty-pretty pictures. Now and then he managed to have an exhibition and always sold a couple of canvases. Never more. At last the doctor grew conscious of the fact that his brother wasn’t a genius after all, but only a second-rate painter. It was hard for him after all the sacrifices he’d made. He kept his discovery to himself. Then he died, leaving all he had to his brother. The painter found in the doctor’s house all the pictures he had sold to unknown buyers for twenty-five years. At first he couldn’t understand. After thinking it over he hit upon the explanation: the cunning fellow had wished to make a good investment.
For an English audience the extremity of love is always somewhat ridiculous. To love more than moderately is to find oneself in a farcical situation.
Middle Age. I think I have been more than most men conscious of my age. My youth slipped past me unnoticed and I was always burdened with the sense that I was growing old. Because for my years I had seen much of the world and travelled a good deal, because I was somewhat widely read and my mind was occupied with matters beyond my years, I seemed always older than my contemporaries. But it was not till the outbreak of the war in 1914 that I had an inkling that I was no longer a young man. I found then to my consternation that a man of forty was old. I consoled myself by reflecting that this was only for military purposes, but not so very long afterwards I had an experience which put the matter beyond doubt. I had been lunching with a woman whom I had known a long time and her niece, a girl of seventeen. After luncheon we took a taxi to go somewhere or other. The woman got in and then her niece. But the niece sat down on the strapontin leaving the empty seat at the back beside her aunt for me to sit on. It was the civility of youth (as opposed to the rights of sex) to a gentleman no longer young. I realised that she looked upon me with the respect due to age.
It is not a very pleasant thing to recognise that for the young you are no longer an equal. You belong to a different generation. For them your race is run. They can look up to you; they can admire you; but you are apart from them, and in the long run they will always find the companionship of persons of their own age more grateful than yours.
But middle age has its compensations. Youth is bound hand and foot with the shackles of public opinion. Middle age enjoys freedom. I remember that when I left school I said to myself: “Henceforward I can get up when I like and go to bed when I like.” That of course was an exaggeration, and I soon found that the trammelled life of the civilised man only permits of a modified independence. Whenever you have an aim you must sacrifice something of freedom to achieve it. But by the time you have reached middle age you have discovered how much freedom it is worth while to sacrifice in order to achieve any aim that you have in view. When I was a boy I was tortured by shyness, and middle age has to a great extent brought me a relief from this. I was never of great physical strength and long walks used to tire me, but I went through them because I was ashamed to confess my weakness. I have now no such feeling and I save myself much discomfort. I always hated cold water, but for many years I took cold baths and bathed in cold seas because I wanted to be like everybody else. I used to dive from heights that made me nervous. I was mortified because I played games worse than other people. When I did not know a thing I was ashamed to confess my ignorance. It was not till quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say: “I don’t know.” I find with middle age that no one expects me to walk five and twenty miles, or to play a scratch game of golf, or to dive from a height of thirty feet. This is all to the good and makes life pleasant: but I should no longer care if they did. That is what makes youth unhappy, the vehement anxiety to be like other people, and that is what makes middle age tolerable, the reconciliation with oneself.
By imagination man compensates himself for his failure to get a complete satisfaction from life. Eternal necessity forces him to renounce the gratification of many of his most radical instincts, but renunciation comes hardly to man; and balked of his desire for honour, power, love, he cheats himself by the exercise of fantasy. He turns away from reality to an artificial paradise in which he can satisfy his desires without let or hindrance. Then in his vanity he ascribes to this mental process a singular value. The exercise of the imagination seems to him the sublimest activity of man. And yet to imagine is to fail; for it is the acknowledgement of defeat in the encounter with reality.
The Novelist’s Material. The danger always lies in wait for the novelist that with increasing knowledge of the world which offers him his subject matter, with a more comprehensive grasp of the ideas which enable him to give it coherence, and with a more exact command of the technique of his art, he may outgrow his interest in the varieties of experience which on the whole make up his material. When advancing years, wisdom or satiety prevent him from giving an excessive consideration to affairs which concern the generality of men, he is lost. A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common-sense considers of no great consequence. He must never entirely grow up. He must interest himself to the end in matters which are no longer of his age. It needs a peculiar turn of mind in a man of fifty to treat with great seriousness the passion of Edwin for Angelina. The novelist is dead in the man who has become aware of the triviality of human affairs. You can often discern in writers the dismay with which they have recognised this situation in themselves, and you can see how they have dealt with it: sometimes by looking for significance in different subject matter, sometimes by deserting life for fantasy, and sometimes, when they have been too deeply engaged with their past to disentangle themselves from the snares of reality, by turning upon their old material with a savage irony. So George Eliot and H. G. Wells deserted the seduced maiden and the amorous clerk for sociology; so Thomas Hardy turned from Jude the Obscure to The Dynasts; and Flaubert from the love affairs of a provincial sentimentalist to the cruelties of Bouvard et Pécuchet.
The Work of Art. When I watch the audience at a concert or the crowd in a picture gallery I ask myself sometimes what exactly is their reaction toward the work of art. It is plain that often they feel deeply, but I do not see that their feeling has any effect, and if it has no effect its value is slender. Art to them is only a recreation or a refuge. It rests them from the work which they consider the justification of their existence or consoles them in their disappointment with reality. It is the glass of beer which the labourer drinks when he pauses in his toil or the peg of gin which the harlot takes to snatch a moment’s oblivion from the pain of life. Art for art’s sake means no more than gin for gin’s sake. The dilettante who cherishes the sterile emotions which he receives from the contemplation of works of art has little reason to rate himself higher than the toper. His is the attitude of the pessimist. Life is a struggle or a weariness and in art he seeks repose or forgetfulness. The pessimist refuses reality, but the artist accepts it. The emotion caused by a work of art has value only if it has an effect on character and so results in action. Whoever is so affected is himself an artist. The artist’s response to the work of art is direct and reasonable, for in him the emotion is translated into ideas which are pertinent to his own purposes, and to him ideas are but another form of action. But I do not mean that it is only painters, poets and musicians who can respond profitably to the work of art; the value of art would be much diminished; among artists I include the practitioners of the most subtle, the most neglected and the most significant of all the arts, the art of life.
My first book, published in 1897, was something of a success. Edmund Gosse admired it and praised it. After that I published other books and became a pop
ular dramatist. I wrote Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence. I used to meet Gosse once or twice a year and continued to do so for twenty years, but I never met him without his saying to me in his unctuous way: “Oh, my dear Maugham, I liked your Liza of Lambeth so much. How wise you are never to have written anything else.”
The Dying Poet. He was so ill that the friend who was taking care of him felt he should telegraph for his wife. She was a painter of sorts and had gone to London for a one-man show she was giving in a minor gallery. When he told the sick man that he had sent for her, he was angry. “Why couldn’t you let me die in peace,” he cried. Someone had sent him a basket of peaches. “The first thing she’ll do on getting here is to take the best peach in the basket and while she eats it she’ll talk of herself and the success she’s had in London.”
The friend went to fetch her at the station and brought her to the apartment.
A Writer's Notebook (Vintage International) Page 26
