The Magician
Page 2
If Maugham could not recall where he found the occult material—though written fifty years after he wrote The Magician, his comment is surely disingenuous—one person certainly knew its origins: Aleister Crowley. In his autobiography, which he cheekily called an “autohagiography,” Crowley described casually picking up Maugham’s novel one day in 1908:
The title attracted me strongly, The Magician. The author, bless my soul! No other than my old and valued friend, William Somerset Maugham, my nice young doctor whom I remembered so well from the dear old days of the Chat Blanc. So he had really written a book—who would have believed it…! The Magician, Oliver Haddo, was Aleister Crowley; his house “Skene” was Boleskine [Crowley’s own house at Loch Ness]. The hero’s witty remarks were, many of them, my own. He had, like Arnold Bennett, not spared his shirt cuff. But I had jumped too hastily to conclusions when I said, “Maugham had written a book.” I found phrase after phrase, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, bewilderingly familiar; and then I remembered that in my early days of the G.[olden] D.[awn] I had introduced Gerald Kelly to the Order and reflected that Maugham had become a great friend of Kelly’s, and stayed with him at Camberwell Vicarage. Maugham had taken some of the most private and personal incidents of my life, my marriage, my explorations, my adventures with big game, my magical opinions, ambitions and exploits and so on. He had added a number of the many absurd legends of which I was the central figure. He had patched all these together by innumerable strips of paper clipped from the books which I had told Gerald to buy. I had never supposed that plagiarism could have been so varied, extensive, and shameless.
Crowley decided to strike back, and he exposed the variety and extensiveness of Maugham’s plagiarism in an article entitled “How to Write a Novel! After W. S. Maugham,” published in the December 30, 1908, issue of Vanity Fair. According to Crowley, the journal’s editor, Frank Harris, would not believe that any author would have the nerve to plagiarize so blatantly, and when Crowley brought “a little library” to his office and offered his proof, he “sat and stared, and gasped like a fish at each fresh outrage.” Harris cut the article down to two and a half pages, but even then, claimed Crowley, it was “the most damning exposure of a literary crime that had ever been known.”
Crowley was always fond of hyperbole, particularly when speaking of himself, but his exposure of Maugham’s plagiarism in The Magician was indeed thorough and damning. Excerpts printed side by side proved that Maugham had paraphrased—and often borrowed word-for-word—lengthy passages from a number of well-known books dealing with the occult: MacGregor Mathers’s Kabbalah Unveiled (1897), Franz Hartmann’s The Life of Paracelsus and the Substance of His Thoughts (1896), A. E. Waite’s translation of Eliphaz Levi’s Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Mabel Collins’s The Blossom and the Fruit (I888), Alexandre Dumas’s Memoirs of a Physician (1846–48), and H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).
Two brief excerpts from Crowley’s proofs are sufficient to demonstrate the extent of Maugham’s borrowing:
Introduction to Mathers’s Kabbalah Unveiled
Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt, was first initiated into the Qabalah in the land of his birth, but became most proficient in it during his wanderings in the wilderness, when he not only devoted to it the leisure hours of the whole forty years, but received lessons in it from one of the angels.
Franz Hartmann’s The Life of Paracelsus
We find some interesting accounts in regard to a number of “spirits” generated by a Joh. Ferd. Count of Kueffstein, in Tyrol, in the year 1775. The sources from which these accounts are taken consist in masonic manuscripts and prints, but more especially in a diary kept by a certain Jas. Kammerer, who acted in the capacity of butler and famulus to the said Count. There were ten homunculi—or as he calls them, “prophesying spirits”—preserved in strong bottles, such as are used to preserve fruit, and which were filled with water.
The Magician
Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt, was first initiated into the Kabbalah in the land of his birth, but became most proficient in it during his wanderings in the wilderness. Here he not only devoted the leisure hours of forty years to this mysterious science, but received lessons in it from an obliging angel.
The Magician
It contained the most extraordinary accounts I have ever read of certain spirits generated by a Johann-Ferdinand, Count von Kuffstein, in the Tyrol, in 1775. The sources from which these accounts are taken consist of masonic manucripts, but more especially of a diary kept by a certain James Kammerer, who acted in the capacity of butler and famulus to the count…. There were ten homunculi—James Kammerer calls them prophesying spirits—kept in strong bottles, such as are used to preserve fruit, and these were filled with water.
In “A Fragment of Autobiography,” Maugham claims never to have read Crowley’s article, but Crowley wrote in his “autohagiography” that the author of The Magician “took my riposte in good part. We met by chance a few weeks later, and he merely remarked that there were many thefts besides those which I had pointed out. I pointed out that Harris had cut down my article by two-thirds for lack of space. ‘I almost wish,’ I said, ‘that you were an important writer.’”
According to Crowley, “no author of even mediocre repute had ever risked his reputation by such flagrant stupra [piracy].” Perhaps because Maugham did not have much of a reputation to lose in 1908, his career suffered no damage from the exposure of his plagiarism, and Crowley pursued the matter no further. In a more litigious age, when copyright laws are more firmly defined, Maugham might have been sued by one of the authors cited in the article, but no such suit was brought against him. And, despite Crowley’s professions of outrage, he was pleased to have been the subject of an occult novel. “The Magician,” he said, “was, in fact, an appreciation of my genius such as I had never dreamed of inspiring. It showed how sublime were my ambitions and reassured me on a point which sometimes worried me—whether my work was worthwhile in a wordly sense.” The characteristics of Haddo which Maugham considered abominable, added Crowley, were ones that he considered admirable—so admirable, in fact, that in later years Crowley would occasionally use “Oliver Haddo” as a pseudonym.
While Crowley’s evidence of Maugham’s plagiarism is indisputable, his allegation—made first in his Vanity Fair article and later in his memoir—that Oliver Haddo’s hypnotic enslavement of Margaret Dauncey was based on his marriage to Rose Kelly is less persuasive. Margaret is a beautiful young woman—she is nineteen when the novel begins—who, after leading a sheltered life under the guardianship of Arthur Burdon, is dabbling in art in Paris. Betrothed to Arthur at the age of seventeen, the virginal Margaret has been experiencing the cosmopolitan life of Bohemian Montparnasse for the first time. Rose Kelly, on the other hand, was nearly thirty and a widow when she met Crowley, and she was both frivolous and incurably flirtatious. She was hardly inexperienced or naive about the world.
It may be that Crowley’s remarkably sudden captivation of Rose, of which Maugham would have learned from the aggrieved Gerald, gave him the idea of having his magician prey on a woman, but his models were more literary. One was undoubtedly George du Maurier’s Trilby, a novel which became enormously successful when it was published in 1894 and added the word “Svengali”—meaning someone who, with discreditable intentions, is able to persuade or force another person to do his or her bidding—to the English language. It tells of three British artists who, studying and painting in Paris, come to know Trilby O’Ferrall, a beautiful young woman who works as a fine milliner and an artists’ model. Outwardly, she is hardly innocent—she even smokes—but at heart she is generous, good, and affectionate; if she has a fault, it is that she sings execrably. All the men fall in love with her, especially the innocent Little Billee, but, recognizing that she is unsuitable to be the wife of a man of his class, she turns down his proposal of marriage. Five years later, when Little Billee has become a success
ful painter, he is reunited with his companions in Paris, and to their astonishment they discover that Trilby has become the most famous singer in Europe. Now called “La Svengali,” she sings like “a woman archangel…or some enchanted princess out of a fairy tale.”
Trilby is indeed enchanted, having been hypnotized by a strange, frightening musician, a German Jew—like Dickens’s portrait of Fagin, the characterization is blatantly anti-Semitic—called “Svengali.” Under his influence, Trilby has become an artificially created split personality: on one hand, the proud, generous, and loving woman known to her friends, and on the other, the hypnotist’s obedient tool, “a singing machine—an organ to play upon—an instrument of music—a Stradivarius—a flexible flageolet of flesh and blood.” Such is Svengali’s hold over Trilby that even his death of heart attack cannot entirely free her—she becomes “La Svengali” again merely at the sight of his portrait—and the strain on her leads to her death.
Trilby became a sensation in 1894 because it described two worlds about which readers knew little but found fascinating, and when Maugham came to write The Magician a dozen years later he realized that he then had his own raw material to do the same. Following in the tradition of Henri Murger’s 1846 novel Scènes de la Vie de Bohème, made famous by Puccini’s operatic adaptation, La Bohème, du Maurier depicts a carefree, picturesque life in the Parisian art colony. It is a highly romantic evocation and, as Elaine Showalter has pointed out, very much an invention of an imaginative author. Fresh from his own experience with the real artistic life in Montparnasse, Maugham provided a different picture in The Magician: much briefer than du Maurier’s and more solidly based on the actual world. In his next novel, Of Human Bondage, he would expand his depiction and use it to expose the artificiality of Murger’s novel and the danger to those who succumb to its romantic allure.
Similarly, when Maugham saw the fascination of the reading public with du Maurier’s menacing hypnotist, Svengali, he must have recognized that a fictional version of Aleister Crowley could touch the same vein of horror. Writing in 1895, the English critic Arthur Quiller-Couch called Trilby “the most successful tale that has ever dealt with hypnotism,” and his summary of the plot of the hypnotism novel of the time is virtually the story of The Magician. The hypnotizer, he said, is always the villain and his victim is a good and admirable woman who falls completely under his malevolent power. The nightmare at the heart of the tale is that of innocence, honesty, and love falling entirely under the control and at the disposal of defiling evil.
Like Trilby, Maugham’s Margaret Dauncey is corrupted and destroyed by a mesmerizing and insidious manipulator, but Maugham’s substantial addition of occult material makes his Oliver Haddo far more evil than du Maurier’s villain. Svengali is a musician who takes pride in converting a musically untalented woman into a magnificent singer, one who becomes the surrogate voice for his own music. Haddo is a black magician who captivates a woman because he needs her blood in order to create homunculi (artificial living creatures).
The demonic elements in The Magician are, as Maugham acknowledged, a reflection of his respect for Huysmans’s La-bàs, but there were very likely other models. In his Vanity Fair article Crowley himself suggests that the plot of The Magician imitates Alexandre Dumas’s novel Joseph Balsamo (Memoirs of a Physician), where the central figure is based on the notorious fourteenth-century charlatan and magician Alessandro, Conte di Cagliostro. In Dumas’s story, Cagliostro, who is involved with freemasonry and conducts experiments in alchemy and hypnotism, marries a young girl but does not consummate the marriage; he instead uses her blood in occult ceremonies designed to create homunculi. Like Margaret, the girl dies in the process, and the novel ends, as does The Magician, with the burning of the sorcerer’s laboratory and its horrors.
While Maugham may have been familiar with Joseph Balsamo, published serially from 1846 to 1848, he was also likely to have read Arthur Machen’s much more contemporary The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light (1894). The Great God Pan is the story of a doctor who, employing “energies I did not understand,” operates on the brain of a young woman, giving her the ability to see Pan, the mythical pre-Christian god of paganism, and she is driven mad by the sight. The story concludes with the observation that “when the house of life is thus thrown open, there may enter in that for which we have no name.” Similarly, in The Inmost Light, an evil doctor experiments on his wife, allowing her to be satanically possessed, and she dies.
In making Haddo a kind of mad scientist intent on creating artificial life, Maugham was following another literary genre well established by the time he came to write The Magician. Mary Shelley had begun it in 1919 with Frankenstein, her cautionary tale of the havoc wreaked on the world by an overly ambitious scientist’s creation of a human-like being out of various body parts collected from cadavers. H. G. Wells offered an equally sensational variation of the idea in The Island of Dr. Moreau, published in 1896. In this novel the demented scientist, Moreau, has created a zoological laboratory on a Pacific island, and there, seemingly to deify himself, he has transformed humans into grotesque half-human, half-animal creatures. The revulsion of the protagonist, Prendick, by Moreau’s beast people is echoed by that of Arthur, Susie, and Dr. Porhoët for Haddo’s grotesque homunculi. And, as Crowley points out, the end of The Magician mimics The Island of Dr. Moreau: like Haddo, Moreau is eventually killed and, by the early light of a new day, his abominable laboratory is consumed by cleansing flames. “The limb of the sun,” writes Wells, “rose eastward beyond the projection of the bay, splashing its radiance across the sky, and turning the dark sea into a weltering tumult of dazzling light.” “In the east,” reads the last line of The Magician, “a long ray of light climbed up the sky, and the sun, yellow and round, appeared upon the face of the earth.”
Composed of liberal borrowing from Trilby, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Great God Pan and the Inmost Light, Joseph Balsamo, and the numerous occult books identified by Crowley, The Magician is itself a kind of literary Frankenstein creation. But, where Victor Frankenstein’s creature, having a soul and a kind of nobility, is more than a sum of its parts, Maugham’s novel lacks much of a thematic core. Whether intended or not, Shelley’s tale is a parable about man using science to become God, destroying himself and those he loves in the process, and it still fascinates both scholars and the general public. Similarly, The Island of Dr. Moreau, though now best known for the explicit horror of the beast people, is at heart an allegory of human nature and Darwinian evolution. The other memorable nineteenth-century stories of the supernatural—notably Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray—are essentially fables worthy of continued examination and reconsideration. The former dramatizes schizophrenia, the contesting forces of good and evil in the human personality, and the Victorian hypocrisy in compartmentalizing good and evil behavior. The latter is, among other things, an evocation of the homosexual consciousness at the end of the nineteenth century.
If The Magician is empty at the core, lacking the allegorical or thematic substance of the best of occult or science fiction literature, it nonetheless contains several motifs which recur throughout Maugham’s writing. Most notably, it presents a variation on the fundamental concern in his life and his work: the freedom of the individual and the many forms of bondage threatening that freedom, what he called “the strange and ruthless forces that are beyond our control.”
Late in his life, Maugham told an interviewer that “the main thing I’ve always asked from life is freedom. Outer and inner freedom, both in my way of living and my way of writing.” Indeed Maugham’s ninety-one-year life can be seen as a lengthy pursuit of freedom, from the orphaned boy longing to escape the guardianship of an insensitive uncle to the old man retreating from the world in his villa at Cap Ferrat. In between, he ardently pursued wealth because it could buy him the freedom to live his life as he wanted and ultimately to write as he wished—as he once said, it gave him the power to tell publishers and theate
r managers to go to hell. He became one of the most traveled authors of the twentieth century in part because in travel he could leave behind the burdens and restraints—professional duties and personal obligations—of his life in London. Perhaps permanently psychologically damaged by a relatively loveless childhood, he always sought emotional detachment, even if this meant severing important relationships with relatives and friends or observing the world from a carefully guarded facade.
Maugham’s lifelong concern with emotional and physical independence indelibly colored his writing and, as many of the titles—The Merry-Go-Round, Of Human Bondage, The Circle, The Painted Veil, The Narrow Corner, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor’s Edge—suggest, he repeatedly explored the narrowness and restraint that circumscribe human life. Though he might be a literary chameleon who could adapt his writing to the fashions and genres that were popular at any given period, though the plots, settings, and characters would vary, the essential theme remained freedom and bondage. Thus the emphasis in his novel of the slums, Liza of Lambeth, is on the way in which the narrow, claustrophobic social life of the ghetto inevitably traps and destroys a high-spirited, independent young woman. Mrs Craddock, on the other hand, shows how a strong-willed, somewhat unconventional middle-class woman is stifled by life among the late Victorian landed gentry. Of Human Bondage, as the title makes clear, is a bildungsroman in which the fundamental search of the young protagonist is for a way of living that will allow him a kind of existential freedom. When he came to write his kunstlerroman , The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham portrayed his artist as a man trapped by the artistic temperament, possessed by a demon that can be exorcized only by painting. In Cakes and Ale, he created his most delightful female character in Rosie Driffield, who defies puritanical convention and remains elusive and independent to the end of her life. And in his last memorable novel, The Razor’s Edge, Maugham presents a young man of a newer generation who is seeking freedom from an American life dictated by materialism, and he finds it in the spirituality of Indian mysticism.