Tuesday 5 March 2019
The Moon and Sixpence
It is told in episodic form by a
first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the
central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who
abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an
artist.
Based on the life of Paul Gauguin, The
Moon and Sixpence is W.
Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius.
The novel is written
largely from the point of view of the narrator, a young, aspiring writer and
playwright in London. Certain chapters entirely comprise accounts of events by
other characters, which the narrator recalls from memory (selectively editing
or elaborating on certain aspects of dialogue, particularly Strickland's, as
Strickland is said by the narrator to have a very poor ability to express
himself in words). The narrator first develops an acquaintance with
Strickland's wife at literary parties, and later meets Strickland himself, who
appears to be an unremarkable businessman with no interest in his wife's
literary or artistic tastes.
Strickland is a
well-off, middle-class stockbroker in London sometime in late 19th or early
20th century. Early in the novel, he leaves his wife and children and goes to
Paris. (The narrator enters directly
into the story at this point, when he is asked by Mrs Strickland to go to Paris
and talk with her husband.)
He lives a destitute
but defiantly content life there as an artist (specifically a painter), lodging
in run-down hotels and falling prey to both illness and hunger. Strickland, in
his drive to express through his art what appears to continually possess and
compel him on the inside, cares nothing for physical discomfort and is
indifferent to his surroundings.
He is helped and supported by a commercially
successful but hackneyed Dutch painter, Dirk Stroeve (coincidentally, also an
old friend of the narrator's), who recognises Strickland's genius as a painter.
After helping Strickland recover from a life-threatening illness, Stroeve is
repaid by having his wife, Blanche, abandon him for Strickland. Strickland
later discards the wife; all he really sought from Blanche was a model to
paint, not serious companionship, and it is hinted in the novel's dialogue that
he indicated this to her and she took the risk anyway. Blanche then commits
suicide – yet another human casualty in Strickland's single-minded pursuit of
art and beauty; the first casualties being his own established life and those
of his wife and children.
After the Paris
episode, the story continues in Tahiti. Strickland has
already died, and the narrator attempts to piece together his life there from
recollections of others. He finds that Strickland had taken up a native woman,
had two children by her, one of whom dies, and started painting profusely. We
learn that Strickland had settled for a short while in the French port of Marseilles before traveling to
Tahiti, where he lived for a few years before dying of leprosy. Strickland left
behind numerous paintings, but his magnum opus, which he painted on
the walls of his hut before losing his sight to leprosy, was burnt after his
death by his wife per his dying orders.
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The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham first published in 1919. It is told in episodic form by a first-person...