W. Somerset Maugham, Henry James, and the Modernist Aesthetic of The Moon and Sixpence

Abstract:Ultimately, Wilson condemns Maugham as "a half-trashy novelist, who writes badly, but is patronized by half-serious readers, who do not care much about writing" (731). Most of Wilson's objections concern Maugham's remarks in the introductory essays to his anthology Great Modern Reading (1943), in which Maugham mixes praise with criticism of James and others; however, the ambivalence about modernism that Wilson detects in Maugham's anthology runs throughout the novelist's critical writings. Moreover, this conflict that Maugham's critical work exhibits—essentially an aesthetic of anxiety about modernism and literary impressionism in particular—manifests itself particularly in the novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919). As this essay will demonstrate, the novel's plot displays the author's anxiety about style, and the novel as a whole represents the author's attempt to resolve this internal conflict and embrace a technique, both in theory and in practice, that supersedes the realism he naturally prefers.