The Razor's Edge
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| The Razor's Edge | |
 1946 hardcover edition promoting the first film adaptation |
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| Author | W. Somerset Maugham |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Doubleday |
| Publication date | 1944 |
| Media type | print (hardcover and paperback) |
| Pages | 314 pp (Paperback) |
| ISBN | 1-4000-3420-5 |
The Razor’s Edge is a book by W. Somerset Maugham published in 1944. Its epigraph reads, "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard." —Katha-Upanishad.
The Razor’s Edge tells the story of an American, Larry Darrell, who, traumatized by his experiences as a fighter pilot in World War I, decides to search for some transcendent meaning in his life. The novel is supposed to be based on the life of William R. Lewis.[citation needed]
The story begins through the eyes of Larry’s friends and acquaintances as they witness his personality change after the War. His rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while the more materialistic characters suffer reversals of fortune. The book was twice adapted into film, first in 1946 starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney, and Herbert Marshall as Maugham, and then a 1984 contemporary adaptation starring Bill Murray, with Tibet replacing India as the place of Larry’s enlightenment (the monastery to which Larry travels in the 1984 movie adaptation is in Ladakh, India).[1]
Contents |
[edit] Plot
Maugham includes himself as a minor character, a writer who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players. Larry Darrell’s lifestyle is contrasted throughout the book with that of his fiancée’s uncle, Elliott Templeton, an American expatriate living in Paris and a shallow and unrepentant yet generous snob. For example, while Templeton's Catholicism embraces the hierarchical trappings of the Church, Larry's proclivities tend towards the 13th century Flemish mystic and saint John of Ruysbroeck.
Wounded and traumatized by the death of a comrade in the War, Larry returns to Lake Forest, Illinois and his fiancée, Isabel Bradley, only to announce that he does not plan to work and instead will "loaf" on his small inheritance. He wants to delay their marriage and refuses to take up a job as a stockbroker offered to him by the father of his friend Gray, Henry Maturin. Meanwhile, Larry’s childhood friend, Sophie, settles into a happy marriage, only later tragically losing her husband and baby in a car accident.
Larry moves to Paris and immerses himself in study and bohemian life. After two years of this "loafing," Isabel visits and Larry asks her to join his life of wandering and searching, living in Paris and traveling with little money. She cannot accept his vision of life and breaks their engagement to go back to Chicago. There she marries the millionaire Gray, who provides her a rich family life. Meanwhile, Larry begins a sojourn through Europe, taking a job at a coal mine in Lens, France, where he befriends a former Polish army officer named Kosti. Kosti's influence encourages Larry to look toward things spiritual for his answers rather than in books. Larry and Kosti leave the coal mine and travel together for a time before parting ways. Larry then meets a Benedictine monk named Father Ensheim in Bonn, Germany while Father Ensheim is on leave from his monastery doing academic research. Father Ensheim, having certain insights other than strictly western spiritual influences, suggests Larry widen his spiritual perimeters and go to India in search of answers.
Larry has significant spiritual adventures in India and comes back to Paris. What he actually found in India and what he finally concluded are held back from the reader for a considerable time until, in a scene late in the book, Maugham discusses India and spirituality with Larry in a café long into the evening.
The 1929 stock market crash has ruined Gray, and he and Isabel are invited to live in her uncle Elliott Templeton’s grand Parisian house. Gray is often incapacitated with agonizing migraines due to a general nervous collapse. Larry is able to help him using an Indian form of hypnotic suggestion. Sophie has also drifted to the French capital, where her friends find her reduced to alcohol, opium, and promiscuity — empty and dangerous liaisons that seem to help her to bury her pain. Larry first sets out to save her and then decides to marry her, a plan that displeases Isabel, who is still in love with him.
Isabel tempts Sophie off the wagon with a bottle of Żubrówka, and she disappears from Paris. Maugham deduces this after seeing Sophie in Toulon, where she has returned to smoking opium and promiscuity. He is drawn back into the tale when police interrogate him after Sophie has been found murdered with an inscribed book from him in her room (along with volumes by Baudelaire and Rimbaud).
Meanwhile in Antibes, Elliott Templeton, who has compulsively throughout his life sought out aristocratic society, is on his deathbed. None of his titled friends come to see him but he ignores his loss. "I have always moved in the best society in Europe, and I have no doubt that I shall move in the best society in heaven."
Isabel inherits his fortune, but genuinely grieves for her uncle. Maugham confronts her about Sophie, having figured out Isabel’s role in Sophie’s downfall. Isabel’s only punishment will be that she will never get Larry, who has decided to return to America and live as a common working man. He is uninterested in the rich and glamorous world that Isabel will move in. Maugham ends his narrative by suggesting that all the characters got what they wanted in the end: "Elliott social eminence; Isabel an assured position; ... Sophie death; and Larry happiness."
[edit] Influences and critical reception
Maugham, like Hermann Hesse, was remarkably prescient, anticipating an embrace of Eastern culture by Americans and Europeans almost a decade before the Beats were to popularize it. Maugham himself visited Ramana ashramam where he had a direct interaction with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India in 1938.[2][3] Maugham’s suggestion that he "invented nothing" was a source of annoyance for Christopher Isherwood, who helped him translate a verse from the Upanishads for the novel’s epigraph.[citation needed] Many thought Isherwood, who had built his own literary reputation by then and was studying Indian philosophy, was the basis for the book’s hero.[4] Isherwood went so far as to write Time magazine denying this speculation.[citation needed] But another candidate, Guy Hague, may have more reason to be believed as the basis for Larry Darrell, as Hague, an American mining engineer, did spend some time in Sri Ramana Maharshi's ashram.
As with so many other works by Maugham, the book has been popular with readers but less so with critics. Its popularity at the time may be indicated by an otherwise unexplained reference to the book in the 1947 movie Song of the Thin Man, when Nick Charles and Asta discover a razor blade at a crime scene and Nick mutters thoughtfully, "Oh no, no, it couldn’t be Somerset Maugham." Gore Vidal complained in an essay for The New York Review of Books in 1990 that Maugham’s narrator is "heavy, garrulous and awkward."[5] Edmund Wilson excoriated Maugham’s prose in general,[6] and V. S. Naipaul parodied Maugham’s novel in his own Half a Life.
[edit] References
- ^ [1]
- ^ Talk 550. 15 October, 1938. Talks with Ramana Maharshi. Inner Directions Press. ISBN 978-1878019004
- ^ http://www.davidgodman.org/rteach/smaugham.shtml 'Somerset Maugham and The Razor’s Edge'. The Mountain Path, 1988, pp. 239-45.
- ^ 'Fable of Beasts & Men'. Time Magazine. November 05, 1945.
- ^ Gore Vidal. 'Maugham’s Half & Half'. The New York Review of Books. Volume 37, Number 1 · February 1, 1990.
- ^ Edmund Wilson. 'Somerset Maugham and an Antidote' New Yorker. XXII, 8 June, 96-9
