The Razor's Edge
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 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 |
| Released | 1944 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 314 pp (Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 1-4000-3420-5 |
The Razor's Edge is a 1944 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. 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 after being traumatized by his experiences as a fighter pilot in World War I goes to Europe and then India looking for the meaning of life. But instead of the book climaxing with Larry's enlightenment, the novel's literary innovation is to follow how others react to his subsequent changes and how he thrives while the more directionless and materialistic characters suffer reversals of fortune. The book was twice adapted into film, first in 1946 starring Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney. A less successful, yet arguably more faithful, 1984 version starred Bill Murray in the lead, with Tibet replacing India as the place of Darrell's enlightenment.
[edit] Plot
Maugham uses a unique approach to suspend disbelief by inserting himself as a minor character who drifts in and out of the lives of the major players. "I have invented nothing," he declares, even though it is a novel. Larry's life is contrasted throughout the book with that of his fiancée's uncle, Elliott Templeton, an American expatriate living in Paris and an unrepentant snob.
After Larry is wounded and disillusioned by the First World War, he returns to Chicago and his fiancée, Isabel, only to announce that he plans to "loaf" and wants to delay his marriage. Nor will he take up a promised job as a stockbroker like his friend, the amiable but dull Gray Maturin. Meanwhile their mutual friend, Sophie, is also settling into a compromise marriage, but she loses her husband and baby in a car accident.
While Larry lives in Paris and immerses himself in learning and the bohemian life, Isabel tires of waiting for him and settles for marrying Gray, who will keep her in the style in which she's grown accustomed. Larry finds his answers in India and comes back to the City of Light. What he actually found there and what he finally concluded are held back from the reader for a considerable time, and 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 forced to be guests in Uncle Elliott's grand Parisian house. Gray is bed-ridden with agonizing migraines, but Larry is able to help him using an Indian form of hypnosis. Sophie has also drifted to the French capital, and she's now reduced to an alcoholic and opium addict who has empty liaisons to try to bury her pain. Larry first sets out to save her and then decides to marry her, something that won't be tolerated by Isabel, who is still in love with him after all these years.
Isabel invites Sophie out on the pretext of the two shopping for a wedding dress, but she quickly arranges to leave Sophie alone with a drinks cart. It doesn't take long before Sophie falls off the wagon and then abandons Larry. At this point, Maugham the narrator comes back on the scene to tell what happens and to play amateur detective. He runs into Sophie in Toulon, where he finds her on the arm of a sailor, one who is "dumb but beautiful." Sophie is past redemption and admits to Maugham that she's not worthy of Larry. "When it came to the point, I couldn't see myself being Mary Magdalen to his Jesus Christ." Maugham learns later that Sophie has had her throat cut, presumably by the rough sailor.
Meanwhile in Antibes, Elliott Templeton, who constantly dropped names throughout his life, is on his deathbed with none of his titled friends coming to see him. Unlike Larry, he has learned nothing. "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 will inherit his fortune, but genuinely grieves for her uncle. Maugham confronts her over the matter of Sophie, having figured out what happened, but Isabel's only punishment will be that she will never get Larry, who has decided to return to America and live as a cab driver. He will never touch the rich and glamorous world that Isabel will have again with her inheritance. 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 in 1944 for anticipating an embrace of Eastern culture by Americans and Europeans almost a decade before the Beats were to popularize it. This is all the more remarkable when it is possible that he may have come up with the idea for it even earlier, having visited an ashram in India in 1938. Maugham's literary trick in suggesting that he "invented nothing" was also a source of annoyance for Christopher Isherwood, who helped him translate a verse from the Upanishads for the novel's epigraph. 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. Isherwood went so far as to write Time magazine claiming he was not.
Maugham's depiction of women is particularly unsentimental in this book. Isabel is ultimately shallow and treacherous but having genuine love for Elliott and Larry and solid affection for her husband. Sophie is weak-willed and self-destructive. In one brief scene, Maugham even shows a brutally realistic depiction of domestic violence when a woman is slapped in a café and then resists being helped. "If he slapped my face it's because I deserved it," she says to those who intervene. It can be argued, however, that Maugham gave women more three-dimensional portrayals than was commonly fashionable in books and films of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
Though Americans might claim Larry as a proto-Beat, the book speaks more to the romanticism attached to expatriate and bohemian living in European capitals. Larry does odd jobs just to get by as he scribbles away on a scholarly tome, telling the narrator it doesn't matter if few people read his finished work. Rather than wandering for "kicks" like Kerouac, Larry is driven by his quest for knowledge. When Isabel visits him in Paris and rejects his destitute lifestyle, Larry chooses café life and pursuit of wisdom over middle-class security. As his buddhist mentor tells him, there are three paths to enlightenment - knowledge, service and prayer. Larry chooses the path of knowledge to find enlightenment, and ultimately does find it within himself.
As with so many other works by Maugham, the book has been popular with readers, but less so with critics. Gore Vidal complained in an essay for The New York Review of Books in 1990 that Maugham's narrator is "heavy, garrulous and awkward." Edmund Wilson excoriated Maugham's prose in general, and V. S. Naipaul parodied Maugham's novel in his own Half a Life.
