"Of Human Bondage"

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

After finishing this book I feel the way a marathon runner must feel when he crosses the finish line. It took every ounce of perseverance I could dredge up to stick with it to the end.

The first thirty or so chapters were rather dull. For a long time, a very long time, none of the characters seemed to grow or learn anything or change in any way. They lived by their feelings, consequences never considered, thinking only of their own instant gratification.  For a while I thought I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray again. Then, happily, the setting changed to France and that piqued my interest for a while longer.

At this point, Philip Carey, the main character, begins a series of strange relationships and makes so many bad decisions he should have won a prize for the sheer volume of them. He falls passionately in love with the most unsuitable woman on earth and allows that passion to rule him for years. The woman, Mildred, uses him viciously and breaks his heart over and over again. She is one of the most selfish characters I have met in literature. 

Maugham doesn't have much good to say about women. At one point a friend of Philip's says:"I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas."

Later he makes this statement about women in hospitals (attributed to Philip, but it sounded more like the author's own voice): "Like everyone connected with hospitals he found that male patients were more easy to get on with than female. The women were often querulous and ill-tempered. They complained bitterly of the hard-worked nurses, who did not show them the attention they thought their right and they were troublesome, ungrateful and rude."  Well, ok then.

I got frustrated waiting for Philip to grow up. He kept shooting himself in the foot then wringing his hands in despair over his own bad judgment. By then I was wringing my own hands in despair and questioning how much longer I wanted to read disappointment, discouragement and misery.

Then....ta da!....Philip began to look within himself, waxing philosophical and gleaning some wisdom from life. I also found some great lines which helped considerably. About three quarters of the way through these seven hundred and sixty pages, Philip began to grow on me. He had hit rock bottom, often the place where humans begin to grow up, and the book took on a more positive tone. Once it became more fun to read, it ended.

Just as your children only leave home after they get through the roller-coaster teen years and become pleasant, functioning adults you like having around, so this book ended with Philip's life changing for the good as he matured. The reader is given every sad detail of his misery, then is left alone with the assurance that things would be better now. So unfair. I wanted there to be another chapter or two about his life now that the future held some promise. I wanted to experience happy Philip. Alas, it was not to be.

I thoroughly enjoyed Maugham's writing. I wondered at times if he was a tad pretentious, or maybe he does just actually have a formidable vocabulary and know how to use it. These gave me pause and sent me running for the dictionary: "With the spring, Hayward grew dithyrambic." and "...he found an unexpected fascination in listening to meta-physical disquisitions."
Really? Dithyrambic?

Some of the great quotes I will take away from this book:

"He formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading; he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life. "


"One mark of a writer's greatness is that different minds can find in him different inspirations."

"But he had a feeling that life was to be lived rather than portrayed, and he wanted to search out the various experiences of it and wring from each moment all the emotion that it offered."

And my favorite:

"Kant thought things not because they were true but because he was Kant."  I love it.

Of Human Bondage is worth reading. It may take some patience as it did for me, or maybe you'll be able to get into it from the very beginning. Either way I think you'll find it worth your time in the end. I'm glad I read it. And I'm glad it's over.