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SECOND
THOUGHTS – THE HINDU
Go East, young man In The Razor’s Edge, Maugham foresaw that the West would one day come seeking the East.
The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham has sold millions of copies in many
formats- hardback, paperback, classic, even two movies. But recently I
was gifted again the edition that I have always regarded as the
original, rightly or wrongly, since it lay for years amongst my
father’s books, along with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends
and Influence People and Emile Zola’s Nana. It’s the pocketbook edition with the edges of the pages
stained in ruby red and the cover picture of a clean-cut,
brilliantined American hero holding up the expectant face of a wavy
haired, equally American heroine against an inky blue, star-filled
sky. So once again — after more than three decades decades — I was
away on the same journey, following through the observant and
perceptive eyes of Maugham, the spiritual voyage of an American pilot,
Larry Darrell, as he searches for meaning in a post war world and ends
up finding it in India. Not in a hurry It wasn’t till I was at least 30 pages into the novel
(Maugham: “If I call it a novel it is only because I don’t know
what else to call it.”) until I realized what was happening to me. I
was having to pace down my mind as I read. The book was unlike any
other novel I have read in recent years. It was not a novel in a hurry
tumbling over its own verbal gymnastics and nor was it going to be a
flurry of different voices telling the tale from different viewpoints.
This was going to be a story which the writer would tell in
his own time. There would be asides and walks along byways, there
would be conjecture and speculation. And if the reader was in a hurry,
he would only run into a closed door again and again. So I took several deep breaths, added another pillow and
let myself be taken in hand by the narrator, in this case Maugham
himself, as he weaved in and out of the story of the main characters,
describing their lives and interactions over several years and ending,
as he says, “neither with a death nor a marriage.” There is the fabulously detailed Elliot Templeton, the
society man par excellence till his dying day; the beautiful but
limited Isabel and her steady, unromantic husband; the unfortunate and
doomed Sophie as she turns from poet to drunken libertine and Larry
himself, the restless soul seeking the Knowledge and the meaning of
God and life. There are detailed leisurely descriptions of There is observation and perceptiveness in the narration
that only Maugham is capable of; there is sympathy and kindliness as
well as the inevitable rapier thrust. (“American women expect to
find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to
find in their butlers.”) The heart of the book is tucked towards its end, in a night
long conversations between Larry and Maugham as Larry details his
travels in Reams have been written about who the real Larry was. Did
Maugham base his story on an American engineer named Guy Hague, whom
he could have met at the ashram of Ramana Maharishi when he visited Exquisite novel Naipaul, in his Half a Life has parodied (but surely
that must go to Maugham’s credit?) the westerner’s adventure with
eastern spirituality. Nevertheless it is worth remembering that the book was
prescient in this aspect. It was written in 1944, before the beatniks
started playing around with dharma, or the Beatles found the Maharishi
in Rishikesh or the flower children swayed to Ravi Shankar’s sitar. It was before all that Maugham saw that one day the West,
traumatized, exhausted, over-indulged, may come seeking the East. So
he wrote this exquisite novel and chose for its epigraph a verse from
the Katha Upanishad: The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; Thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard.
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