Of Human Bondage / by W. Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham was actually born in France in 1874 as the son of an English diplomatic lawyer living in Paris. His father, knowing that any child born on French soil could be conscripted into military service at any point during his or her lifetime, arranged for William to actually be born inside the British Embassy compound. Soon after Maugham was enrolled by his parents in an English boarding school where, like his three elder brothers, he was expected to begin his studies which would see him follow the path of his father into law. His formative years were anything but happy however as the early deaths of both his parents made for difficult, isolated upbringing. Turning to writing after dabbling in a medical career, Maugham penned his most famous novel, Of Human Bondage, a semi-autobiographical fable of a young man's wanderings through life, in 1915. The book brought mixed critical feelings but popular mainstream success at the time and has remained among the classics of early twentieth century literature.

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"Art," he continued, with a wave of the hand, "is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life." (p. 174)
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With the death of his mother and father only a few months apart, 9-year-old Philip Carey is sent to live with relatives in the small village of  Blackstable where his uncle, a the local parson, assumes his guardianship. Though he has inherited a small fortune from his parents, the money is held in custody by his uncle until Philip reaches the age of twenty-one, a situation making the youth's early days at the vicarage a bit difficult. It's not long before he's sent to Tercanbury, a boarding school where things are much worse as his shyness and club foot make fitting in a difficult task. Philip is a good student though and having demonstrated considerable academic prowess during his time at Tercanbury, he earns a scholarship for clerical studies at Oxford which he promptly turns down (to the grievance of his uncle and headmaster) for a chance to study in Germany at the prestigious Heidelberg University. It's here at home amidst the intellectual crowd who open his mind to a more idealized world that Philip gradually turns his back on the stiff, institutionalized values of his upbringing and focuses his time and energy on cultivating a profession and lifestyle of his own choosing.
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Upon returning home to England eager to rebel against convention, Philip meets a middle-aged family friend named Miss Wilkinson whose open flirtatiousness and evident availability startle the younger man initially. He's not attracted to Miss Wilkinson but rather likes the idea of carrying on an affair and is complicit as her lover out of little more than caprice. It's not so much fun once Philip finds out how deep her attachment is to him. In part to offset the undesirable conditions of the affair, Philips goes to London to try his hand as an accounting and later to Paris to study art where he meets and shares a genuine friendship with Fanny Price, yet another woman who has an unrequited affection for him. Realizing that Philip will never love her, the pennyless Fanny commits suicide prompting Philip to return to London to pursue a career in medicine, his late father's field. Things are little better in the city where medical school proves to be a tough order and Philip runs into more women trouble when he falls in love with a cockney waitress named Mildred. The encounter leads to a series perturbing problems for Philip. Over the next few years Mildred and a steady stream of other women seem to have a way of keeping Philip 'bound' to a life of strife and complications, circumstances which slowly force the young man (now growing older) to come to terms with his exotic ambitions and lofty philosophical ideals.
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Every place is the same. This abiding principle, along with other circular themes like man's search for meaning, the quest for fulfillment, and the nature of desire, comprise this masterfully delivered novel, truly one of the treasures of twentieth century fiction. All of the sequences, all of Philip's thoughts and encounters, his convictions and introspections, are carefully articulated in reverberating, yet poignant style by Maugham who no doubt exorcises some of his own demons with the effort. His protagonist Philip is every bit a modern 'everyman', and, in that respect, a proverbial 'everyman' foreseeing a world of opportunity and self-manifestation absent the psychological pitfall of failure. He's not absurdly naieve or an especially self-deluded individual, just someone discontented with not knowing. It's not until he's exhausted his ambitions, his plans and found only futility in wayward relationships that his ideals are inevitably deconstructed and put away in the final pages. "He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers. His Ideals? He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life: had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect? It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories." (p. 564). (FIC MAUGHAM)