Heading Out With Maugham & Conrad

 I have read Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. The latter long before I ever finished a Conrad novel. I made it through Maugham's Of Human Bondage and The Summing Up before I got out of high school. It was lying around the house on my Mom's bookshelves. I tried reading Conrad's Lord Jim after seeing Peter O'Toole's movie but could not finish it. I did finish his The Heart of Darkness after seeing Apocalypse Now. I need to re-read it. Both writers I found in prison. I agree with the following about their relative merits:

Maugham not only imitated Conrad’s work, but also resembled a Conrad character, who revealed the defects of his own personality.  Like Heyst, Maugham distrusted human emotions and intimate relations, and believed “he who forms a tie is lost.  The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.”  Raymond Mortimer, reviewing Purely for My Pleasure (1962), emphasised Maugham’s radical flaw, his chilling aloofness: “A distrust of life, presumably the sour fruit of a most miserable childhood, seems to have made him reluctant to care deeply for anyone or anything—even for pictures, even for the words that are the material of his art.  I think that no great writer, not even Hume or Gibbon, has been so detached.”  Conrad’s passionate commitment to the deeper implications of his novels made him a much greater writer than the reserved and reticent Maugham.

Under Eastern eyes: Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham 

However, I will maintain that Maugham is a great short-story writer. His better novels are far shorter than Of Human Bondage. They were also written after he took up the short story for his career. If Maugham is detached, then what is Hemingway?

But Conrad is not easy to read because what he is after is not easy to get at - life.

And, Yes, I finished Lord Jim. Sorry, I did not bull my through back in high school.

sch 7/2