Cap-Ferrat

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How do we recognize artistic merit today? What relation does it have with popularity? How important is fame in measuring the artist? Why is merit often unmatched by success, whereas the latter and mediocrity are almost one and the same? All one has to do is look at Hollywood and its products of nonstop horror films, but I’m not going there, the place is a burned-out case, pun intended.

The vexing question implicit in my quest is how do we recognize artistic merit? Everyone knew that Mozart was a miracle and that Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, and countless others were geniuses. Their merit stuck out; just think of poor old very talented Salieri. Among poets Keats is the greatest, but you couldn’t get Byron to agree. He badmouthed the dirt-poor and dying Keats because deep down inside he must have known his Byronic verses to be inferior. (Not many will agree with me, but unlike the Brits who adore the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know philhellene, I’m a romantic, and Keats is number one.) Music, painting—the greatest of all is Edward Hopper, the worst the late Picasso—and poetry aside, writing is the art that most intrigues me, an art that can easily be faked, or so it seems at times when I read modern fiction. (Which I admit I never do past a page or two at most.)

Regular readers of yours truly know all about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and how they are the two writers I can never get enough of. The third one is an Englishman, almost unknown today, but he was the richest and most famous of his time, Somerset Maugham. The Bloomsbury literary elite put him down, as they would, their experimental crap being unreadable, they being mostly homosexual, frustrated, and pretty ugly to look at. But Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, “Rain,” The Letter, The Razor’s Edge, and countless other stories are superb, psychologically deep, imaginative, technically superior, and precise.

Maugham called himself three-quarters homosexual, but he had fathered a daughter, Lisa—whose beautiful daughter is a friend of mine and is now Countess Chandon—with Syrie Maugham, who by all accounts was a ballbuster. Somerset had at one time four plays running simultaneously in London, and his books were all bestsellers. He was rich and famous and generous, but the English and the critics never went overboard, and I think I know why. Envy is the English disease, and Maugham chose to live in the grand style and visit places most Brits had never heard of.

Is genius originality? I’m not so sure because there are too many con men and con women out there faking the original. Maugham created the perfect human being in Larry Darrell, which is quite a feat for a novelist. Max Kelada, hero of “Mister Know-All,” is annoying, a braggart, a drunk, and a womanizer, but as it turns out more of a gentleman than anyone else on board. Once you’ve read Maugham the mostly feminine auto-fiction of today becomes unreadable. Critics of the time had reservations about him, most likely due to envy and the fact the writer examined pure artistic desire unmotivated by outside influences. Maugham was always extremely humble about his talent, always putting his writing down, but it was not a pose. Like all great writers his passion had chosen him, not the other way round. His books became bestsellers from day one, yet another reason for the envious critics to find fault.

Writing about people of his class didn’t make him many friends. But Maugham’s novels and short stories were wonderful and so interesting because they had little to do with everyday life. His novels and short stories were redolent with moral questions and touched upon inequality of talent rather than the banality of economic inequality. Elites in any field are more interesting than the common man, and his stories were about places and people off the beaten path. He adored meeting and writing about murderers on Devil’s Island, where he was allowed to roam free and mix because of his fame. Reproducing the atmosphere of our everyday life was not for him, thank God. Yet his technical skills that were always praised by critics were equal to his psychological depth. Larry Darrell’s search for meaning in The Razor’s Edge was most likely also the author’s, Larry being a messianic figure entirely self-sufficient.

I had an opportunity to meet the author a couple of years before his death in 1965. A friend of Maugham’s, a flamboyant homosexual, had asked me to lunch at Maugham’s magnificent Villa Mauresque in Cap-Ferrat, on the Riviera, but I chickened out. I’ve always regretted it, but it was the author who had first warned us about the Riviera: “A sunny place for shady people.” Maugham sure got that right, among many other things.