The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham

First published: 1938

Type of work: Literary autobiography

Time of work: 1890-1938

Critical Evaluation:

Although THE SUMMING UP must be classified as autobiography, in only a very few of the seventy-seven sections into which it is divided is the author concerned with the listing of facts and events or the description of personalities important in his life, a procedure one customarily associates with this literary genre. In Sections VI and VII Mr. Maugham writes brief notes on his grandparents, his eccentric barrister grandfather (on his father’s side his family has been connected with the law for several generations), and his grandmother on his mother’s side, who as the widow of an army officer settled in France, composed music and wrote novels. He gives scarcely more information on his parents, his young and beautiful mother, who died of tuberculosis before he was nine, and his older and “ugly” father whose death two years later left him an orphan to be brought up by his uncle, a clergyman. In Sections XVIII through XXI he touches on his experiences, both happy and unhappy, as a schoolboy in Canterbury and much later as a student at St. Thomas’ Hospital, in London, which provided him with material for his creative work, particularly as a novelist. Elsewhere are passages, often merely a short paragraph or two, seldom more than a few pages, in which Mr. Maugham recounts his adventures as a tourist or temporary resident in a foreign country; for example, as a young man in Spain or as a member of the British Intelligence Service during World War I.

But THE SUMMING UP is not conventional autobiography. As Mr. Maugham himself announces in Section III, his book largely represents an attempt to put in order his thoughts on subjects that had interested him during his life. What had chiefly interested Maugham in the course of his life was prose composition, whether expository or narrative, as a means of communication between writer and reader or, as in the theater, between dramatist and audience.

Probably the best known sections in THE SUMMING UP are those concerned with style, for Maugham’s comments on “lucidity, simplicity, and euphony” are often excerpted and anthologized in college texts used by teachers and students. In Sections X through XV the author discusses and characterizes the style of a number of writers, not an easy task, with great insight and ingenuity. His evaluations are frequently original, often persuasive. He states that the King James Bible has had a deleterious influence, that Sir Thomas Brown, Dr. Johnson, Gibbon, and Carlyle, despite their moments of grandeur, are not for all time. For Mr. Maugham the great stylists are Dryden, Swift, Hazlitt, Newman, and Arnold, and among Continental writers Voltaire (the greatest of all) and Colette. In his descriptions and comparisons he is particularly successful. Nowhere else does he demonstrate more surely his ability to turn the felicitious phrase, to choose the mot juste.

Although as a creative writer Maugham first became known as a novelist with such realistic tales of slum life as LIZA OF LAMBETH, published in 1897, he first became famous and financially independent as a dramatist when he had four plays running simultaneously in west end theaters in 1907. He devotes Sections XXX through XLIII to describing his early efforts and varying degrees of success in this genre, tracing his development as a dramatist from his first play A MAN OF HONOR, first performed in 1903, through his last SHEPPY, produced in 1932. He mentions specifically the construction of such plays as OUR BETTERS, LADY FREDERICK, and THE CONSTANT WIFE, sets down rules and explains techniques which may be summed up in two simple principles: making a point and sticking to it, and cutting wherever possible. (Because Maugham regarded himself as especially talented in conveying the sound of the living voice in dialogue it is interesting to note that in the summer of 1965 the unfavorable critical comment on a revival of THE CIRCLE was largely directed against the stilted dialogue, unnatural even in the period and society with which it is concerned.) In Sections XXX through XLIII he also discusses the nature of comedy, writes of directors and producers, of the great importance of actors, and of the influence and importance of the audience. Among the English playwrights whom he discusses or mentions are Shakespeare, Congreve, Goldsmith, Shaw, and his contemporary, Granville Barker; of the foreign dramatists, he refers most frequently to Molliere, Chekov, and Ibsen.

With the exception of LIZA OF LAMBETH and MRS. CRADDOCK, Maugham regards the fiction he wrote during the first ten years of his professional career as apprentice exercises. It was not until 1915, after he was well established as a dramatist, that he wrote the novel which remains his best known work. In Section LI he describes succinctly, with a directness that is moving, the genesis of this novel, OF HUMAN BONDAGE, of how it developed out of his obsession with his memories of his past that had become such a burden to him that he felt he could only achieve peace by writing it all down in the form of a novel. He reports that the publication of this book, a mingling of fact and fiction, freed him forever from the burden of a painful past.

After the conclusion of World War I, in which he served in the Intelligence Department, Maugham made a series of journeys to the Far East and the South Pacific. In Sections LV and LX he explains the importance of these journeys, stating that the encounters and experiences in strange lands and distant seas provided him with fresh inspirations and material for such novels as THE PAINTED VEIL and THE NARROW CORNER; for such short stories as RAIN, THE OUTSTATION, and dozens of others. After a brief discussion of the short story in which he contrasts the practice of Chekov, who had no talent for writing a story of dramatic compactness, with his own view of the short story as a narrative of a single even from which everything not contributing to dramatic unity has been eliminated. Maugham concludes the most important part of his autobiography, the first sixty-two sections, by disparaging the usefulness of current criticism and lamenting that there is no critic in his own time of the stature of Sainte-Beuve or Matthew Arnold, who despite their faults possessed a profound knowledge of and interest in literature beneficial to writers.

What follows in the final Sections LXIII through LXVII is in the nature of an extended postscript or epilogue in which Maugham meditates on matters of universal concern, the nature of God, the existence of evil, death, the possibilities of immortality, and meaning of life, matters generally regarded as metaphysical by the professional philosopher. The connection between the subject matter of this meditation and that of the main body of this work may seem tenuous, but the tone and method of discourse, the attitude, the frame of reference provide unifying links.

Sounding a more personal note than customary, Maugham describes the experiences, intellectual and emotional, which led to his rejection of the tenets of a conventional Anglican faith for an agnosticism which deprived life of all meaning. He then considers the values by which one must live who cannot believe: Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. He refuses to regard either Truth or Beauty as the greatest values because neither engenders the altruistic view nor produces “right action.” The supreme value is Goodness, whose value alone seems an end in itself.

In these last sections Mr. Maugham dwells on the pattern he has made of his own life. He never makes entirely clear the character of this pattern with beginning, middle, and end, but states that it is not the best, not that of husbandry, marriage, and children. Actually it represents a way of life determined by his nature and circumstances.

This last portion of his autobiography is prolix. The moralizing becomes tedious. Most readers will find it the least satisfactory of Maugham’s meditation.

The best way to read THE SUMMING UP is in small doses, a few sections at a time as though the book were a collection of short familiar essays unified through concern with various aspects of essentially the same subject matter. For a style which is remarkably urbane and mellifluous can become under the accumulative effect of the perfect phrasing, the casual and yet so carefully structured sentence and paragraph, monotonous and self-conscious. In his effort to write in that easy conversational manner recommended long ago by Hazlitt, the sound of the living voice which Maugham achieves so successfully carries with it on occasion suggestions of egotism and smugness, qualities irritating to sensitive and sophisticated readers. However, for those who are interested in the generalizations and specific comments of a successful novelist, short story writer, and dramatist on his craft, in the pronouncements of an informed critic on the work of a large number of writers of different periods and nationalities, and in the observations of a highly cultivated man on some matters of universal importance which he has chosen to scrutinize and ponder, THE SUMMING UP will always be instructive, attractive reading. Many creative writers in discussing their own work, in evaluating the work of others, in explaining method, in expressing private convictions on issues of general interest may well reveal greater range of understanding and depth of feeling, but few can communicate their thoughts with such grace and clarity.