The Magician Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE MAGICIAN

  WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten years old. He was educated at The King’s School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He later walked the wards of St. Thomas’s Hospital with a view to practicing medicine, but when he had qualified, the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), won him over to letters. Some of his hospital experience is reflected in the story, as well as in his later masterpiece Of Human Bondage (1915). With The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and Cakes and Ale (1930), his reputation as a novelist was further enhanced.

  A celebrity by the age of thirty-three when he became one of most successful playwrights on the London stage, Maugham’s Edwardian comedy Lady Frederick, his first hit (1907), was followed by a string of successes just before and then after the First World War. At one point Maugham had four plays running at the same time in London’s West End. His theater career ended with Sheppey (1933).

  His fame as a short story writer began in 1921 with The Trembling of a Leaf, subtitled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, which contained “Rain.” After initial magazine publication of each story he wrote, there were ten more collections. Somerset Maugham’s general nonfiction books also reflect his love of travel; they include On a Chinese Screen (1922) and Don Fernando (1935), essays, criticism, and the self-revealing The Summing Up (1938), and A Writer’s Notebook (1949).

  He traveled widely in the Far East and throughout Europe. His permanent home since before the Second World War was on the French Riviera, which he vacated temporarily in 1940. He became Companion of Honor in 1954 and he died in 1965.

  ROBERT CALDER is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. He is the author of W. Somerset Maugham and the Quest for Freedom and Willie: The Life of W. Somerset Maugham, which won the 1989 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Most recently he has written Beware the British Serpent: The Role of Writers in British Propaganda in the United States, 1939–1945 and A Richer Dust: Family, Memory and the Second World War.

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  The Magician

  Introduction and Notes by ROBERT CALDER

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  First published in Great Britian by William Heinemann Ltd 1908

  First published in the United States of America by Duffield & Company 1909

  Published in Penguin Books (UK) 1967

  Published in Penguin Books (USA) 1978

  This edition with an introduction and notes by Robert Calder published 2007

  Introduction and notes copyright © Robert Calder, 2007

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS

  Maugham, W. Somerset (William Somerset), 1874–1965.

  The magician / W. Somerset Maugham; introduction and notes by Robert Calder.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 1-4295-3534-2

  I. Calder, Robert, 1941—II. Title.

  PR6025.A86M25 2007

  823’.912—dc22 2006047294

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  Contents

  Introduction by ROBERT CALDER

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  THE MAGICIAN

  Explanatory Notes

  Introduction

  When Somerset Maugham delivered the typescript of The Magician to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, on October 1, 1906, he attached a note: “I have come to the conclusion that it is very dull and stupid; and I wish I was an outside broker, or Hall Caine [a highly successful writer of popular fiction], or something equally despicable.” William Heinemann nonetheless published the novel in 1908 and brought out a second edition six years later. When Maugham put together the Collected Edition of his works in 1934, however, he omitted The Magician, explaining that when he wrote it the novel “was all moonshine. I did not believe a word of it. It was a game I was playing. A book written under these conditions can have no life in it.” It was not until 1956 that he agreed to a new edition, but by then he found the circumstances of the novel’s creation interesting enough that he provided an introduction called “A Fragment of Autobiography.”

  The conditions under which The Magician was written were financial necessity, and the game its author was playing was the writing of potboilers. Maugham had begun his literary career auspiciously in 1897 with Liza of Lambeth, a novel of slum life which was praised by serious critics and bought by enough readers to warrant a quick second printing. Naively convinced that his career as an author was firmly established, he abandoned any thought of practicing medicine, the profession for which he had studied for five years and for which he qualified within weeks of the appearance of Liza of Lambeth. Maugham soon learned, however, that the success of his first novel was based as much on his naturalistic picture of Lambeth’s poor—material he had fortuitously gained as a young medical student—as it was on his literary creativity and style. Over the next decade he wrote seven novels and a collection of short stories entitled Orientations, none of which caught the public’s imagination. Maugham also had ambitions to be a dramatist, and had been writing plays even before the publication of Liza of Lambeth, but in the ten years following he managed to have only one full-length play, A Man of Honour, mounted for a total of thirty performances. Five other playscripts sat buried and ignored in theater managers’ offices in London and New York.

  By 1905 Maugham’s financial situation had begun to trouble him: the £150 annuity inherited from his father was running out and, though his annual income of about £100 from his writing meant that he was not impoverished, he could not afford the life he wished to lead in London. Accordingly, he began to rewrite his plays as novels: The Man of Honour was expanded to become The Merry-Go-Round in 1904, and two unproduced plays, The Explorer and The Bishop’s Apron, were fictionalized in 1907 and 1906. As well, he looked around to see what form of popular fiction might catch the public eye.

  Always an ardent reader, Maugham had a shrewd sense of literary fashions and public tastes; and, as a thoroughly professional writer, he frequently adopted the themes and styles of the moment. Though Liza of Lambeth was based on firsthand experience, he was well aware that writers such as Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, Rudyard Kipling and others had created a vogue in Great Britain
for realistic novels of slum life. His great autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, emulated Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, and countless other novels of adolescence so popular in the early twentieth century. He wrote his own portrait of the artist, The Moon and Sixpence (1919), at a time when the kunstlerroman, or artist-hero novel, was so prevalent that critic Van Wyck Brooks was led to observe that “the artist, one might almost say, is the typical hero in contemporary fiction.” Even at the end of his career Maugham discerned the growing interest in Eastern mysticism as a possible escape from Western materialism and his novel The Razor’s Edge became a best seller in 1944.

  Back in 1906, as Maugham looked around him for a genre of fiction in which he might have some commercial success, he was already familiar with one: literature of the occult. As he said in a later preface to Liza of Lambeth, The Magician would not have been written “except for the great regard I had for Joris-Karl Huysmans who was then at the height of his vogue.” In particular, Huysmans’s Là-bas (Down There, 1891), a novel about nineteenth-century satanists interested in the notorious medieval occult figure Gilles de Rais, aroused great controversy. To Maugham, it “seemed suggestive and mysterious. It had a palpitating horror that many found strangely fascinating.”

  Maugham would have read Là-bas in French, but he was also aware of a wide variety of fiction in English dealing with the occult, horror, or science fiction that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan and The Inmost Light (1894), H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), E. F. Benson’s The Image in the Sand (1905), and many others. So common was such literature that in 1909 The Nation could comment on “the curious wave of occultism which has so lately overrun ‘smart’ English society” and note Maugham’s “quickness to seize the theme of the moment and facility in turning it to account.”

  Maugham might also have been drawn to the idea of writing an occult novel by already having had personal experience of an excellent real-life model on which to base his central character. In early 1905 he had tired of London and moved to Paris, taken a flat in Montparnasse, and begun to mingle with the artists and writers drawn there by its Bohemian life. He already knew Gerald Kelly, who would go on to become one of his closest friends, a respected portrait painter in Britain and President of the Royal Academy; and at one particular restaurant, Le Chat Blanc, he encountered many more remarkable men who in later years would be known for their art. Among them were American artist Alexander Harrison, Canadian painter James Wilson Morrice, American sculptor Paul Bartlett, American illustrator Penrhyn Stanlaws, English author Arnold Bennett, and Irish painter Roderic O’Conor. They were colorful, idiosyncratic figures, and they provided Maugham with a rich gallery of characters for the Paris art scenes in Of Human Bondage, where Le Chat Blanc became “Le Chien Noir.” Through them, too, he learned of the all-consuming nature of the artistic temperament and of Paul Gauguin, who was said to have abandoned his family in middle age in order to paint; this became the basis of The Moon and Sixpence.

  More immediately, the Bohemian Montparnasse life gave him the setting for The Magician and Le Chat Blanc—called, as in Of Human Bondage, “Le Chien Noir”—provided some of the characters. The first of these whom Maugham introduces is Warren, a small, bald man with a pointed beard and protruding brilliant eyes. “The further he gets from sobriety,” the reader is told, “the more charming he is…. He has the most fascinating sense of colour in the world, and the more intoxicated he is, the more delicate and beautiful his painting…. He’s the most delightful interpreter of Paris I know, and when you’ve seen his sketches—he’s done hundreds, of unimaginable grace and feeling and distinction—you can never see Paris in the same way again.” To any of the habitués of Le Chien Noir, this was an unmistakable portrait of James Wilson Morrice, who later achieved a reputation for his fine landscapes in his native Canada. Maugham was not done with him, however, and in Of Human Bondage some of his qualities appear in Cronshaw, the drunken but sympathetic and wise café philosopher who teaches Philip Carey about freedom, society, and the individual.

  Clayson, whose “twinkling eyes, red cheeks, and fair, pointed beard” make him look exactly like a Frans Hals painting, is based on Paul Bartlett, and O’Brien, “a tall, dark fellow with strongly-marked features, untidy hair, and a ragged black moustache” is modeled after Roderic O’Conor. If Maugham’s description of Warren is affectionate, his portrayal of O’Brien is caustic: “He’s a failure, and he knows it, and the bitterness has warped his soul. If you listen to him, you’ll hear every painter of eminence come under his lash. He can forgive nobody who’s successful, and he never acknowledges merit in anyone till he’s safely dead and buried.”

  When he wrote Of Human Bondage, Maugham softened his depiction of O’Conor, presenting him there as Clutton, a painter who has a profound effect on the direction of Philip’s life. Even so, he is a sardonic character who is most animated when he can find a victim for his sarcasm, and here the author is writing out of his own experience. Considered the most formidable man in the Latin Quarter, O’Conor was forty years old, highly intelligent, and experienced and knowledgeable about art. Also sullen, sharp-tongued, and iconoclastic, he took an immediate dislike to Maugham, whose presence at the table seemed enough to irritate him, and the shy young writer had only to venture a remark to have O’Conor attack it. Maugham struck the Irishman as “a bed-bug, on which a sensitive man refuses to stamp because of the smell and the squashiness,” if we are to believe the recollections of Aleister Crowley, O’Conor’s friend and the most bizarre and interesting visitor to Le Chat Blanc.

  Born in 1875, Edward Alexander (“Aleister”) Crowley had already become an eccentric poet and satanist when Maugham met him. Having inherited £40,000, he quickly exhausted it on travel, mountain-climbing, dabbling in occult rituals—he was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn—and financing the publication of luxurious editions of his own poetry. As an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1898, he met Gerald Kelly and, through him, was introduced in 1903 to Kelly’s sister, Rose, on whom he had such a powerful and hypnotic effect that she married him within two weeks of their first meeting. Her family was aghast and her brother was furious. “Gerald Kelly,” Crowley later wrote, “burst into the room, his pale face drawn with insane passion…. On learning that we were already married, he aimed a blow at me. It missed me by about a yard. I am ashamed to say that I could not repress a quiet smile. If he had not been out of his mind, his action would have been truly courageous, for compared to me he was a shrimp.” Not surprisingly, the marriage was ill-fated: Rose became alcoholic and mentally unbalanced, the Crowleys were divorced in 1909, and Kelly’s hatred of Crowley lasted for the rest of his life.

  Crowley himself lived on until 1947 and his eccentric dress, drug-taking, frankly erotic poetry, and conducting of black magic rituals (he took to calling himself “the Beast 666”) led the British press to call him “the wickedest man in the world.” Much of his behavior was pure charlatanism, and a number of his friends have written about his wit and amiability, but there was something in his character that did frighten many people. The man of letters Edward Marsh, for example, recalled a dinner in Soho when Crowley arrived as a kind of apparition in a conjuror’s outfit, with a large diamond in the middle of his shirtfront. In the company of such attractive figures as Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Gibson, Crowley seemed like a monstrous bird of prey. While the others cowered nervously, said Marsh, “he talked wittily, cruelly, diabolically, and we quaked and cowered like Tweedledum and Tweedledee under the shadow of the Monstrous Crow; and for once in my life I felt I had been in the presence of Evil with a capital E.”

  For some of the regulars at Le Cha
t Blanc in 1905, Crowley must have aroused the same anxiety and unease; and Maugham took an immediate dislike to him, in part no doubt because Crowley baited him mercilessly. Crowley nonetheless amused and intrigued him:

  He was a great talker and he talked uncommonly well. In early youth, I was told, he was extremely handsome, but when I knew him he had put on weight, and his hair was thinning. He had fine eyes and a way, whether natural or acquired I do not know, of focussing them that, when he looked at you, he seemed to look behind you. He was a fake but not entirely a fake…. He was a liarand unbecomingly boastful, but the odd thing was that he had actually done some of the things he boasted of…. Crowley was a voluminous writer of verse, which he published sumptuously at his own expense. He had a gift for rhyming, and his verse is not entirely without merit.

  Most fascinating for Maugham, however, was Crowley’s interest in the supernatural. “At the time I knew him,” he later wrote, “he was dabbling in Satanism, magic and the occult. There was just then something of a vogue in Paris for that sort of thing, occasioned, I surmise, by the interest that was still taken in…Huysmans’s Là-bas. Crowley told fantastic stories of his experiences, but it was hard to say whether he was telling the truth or merely pulling your leg.”

  Charlatan or not, there was enough of the unnerving about Crowley to give Maugham his model for Oliver Haddo in The Magician, although, as he said later, “I made my character more striking in appearance, more sinister and more ruthless than Crowley ever was. I gave him magical powers that Crowley, though he claimed them, certainly never possessed.” Haddo’s striking appearance, said Maugham, came from his recollection of Diego Velásquez’s portrait of Alessandro del Borro (a comparison that Maugham includes in The Magician), which he had seen in the Museum in Berlin. As for all the occult trappings associated with Haddo—indeed, if the novel has a defect, it is the glut of tedious references to obscure medieval alchemists and mystics with which Maugham attempted to give his novel authenticity—he professed not to remember where he found them: “I wondered how on earth I could have come by all the material concerning the black arts which I wrote of. I must have spent days and days reading in the library of the British Museum.”