Wow. Just wow. If there is a novel ever written about simping, this would win all the gold medals for sure. But it is an unfair statement, because even though simping is a big part of the book, it is more of the young life of Phillip Carey, from the time that he was a young child to his thirties. The bondage in the title is not his bondage to the woman that he loves, but to societal norms, concepts of beauty, mediocrity and bondage of the self by the self. Although Maugham has published a few novels before this one with some success, in hindsight this was the novel that propelled his literary career.
Phillip Carey was born with a club foot and was left orphaned from a young age to live with his clergyman uncle and aunt who lived in the small community of Blackstable. Life started to hit him hard when he found that his deformity made him a target in school, which made him self-conscious all his life. He had very few friends and those he befriended tend to not stick around. He hit a rebellious streak towards his graduation, refusing to finish his school and instead to live in Germany to learn German before pivoting over to Paris to strive for a bohemian life as an artist, as he believed he had always been good at drawing.
After a couple of years, a word from one of the masters revealed his mediocrity, which made him return to England to study medicine because why not? His father was a physician and if you are going to be mediocre, then why not be able to help others while making a career out of it? But money runs out quickly trickling through Phillips’s hands and his new obsession with a waitress, Mildred, quickly derails his life. It is this relationship with Mildred that became the core of the book and the main source of drama.
But as I mentioned, to isolate the book to Phillip’s relationship with Mildred is not doing the book any justice. The title of the book is kinky as it is profound. Phillip’s slavery into the world that he is born forces him to rebel at times — not finishing school, rejecting his career path in the clergy, becoming an atheist. However, he needs society more than society has use for him - he still needs money to learn medicine and sustain himself; he needs education to have a career to make his living. The root has a lot to do with the reliance of money.
But there is also the self-imposed bondage that is perhaps worse than the bondage society imposes on Phillip. His club foot is an eternal fetter to him which constantly puts him on the defence with people, especially with new relations. This also defines his relationship with Mildred, where he was convinced of his love for Mildred, but every time she is gone, he managed to do just fine. He still thinks about her every now and then, but all in all he manages and he turns out happier when she isn’t present in his life. Phillip’s bondage to Mildred is in the most extreme for the lengths that he went for her, even at the cost of his dignity, money and mental health. Whether we argue that he was able to escape from this mind-forged manacle is a whole different question. I think for this, we will need to reflect on our own experience. Ever been a conductor of your own train and watching it eventually crash without being able to do anything about it?
It is the exploration of love — at least the kind of love which Phillip had and would be familiar to many people. Love may not be a happy thing. For Phillip, it is the exact opposite:
“But this was not happiness; it was hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was bitter anguish… When she left him it was wretchedness, and when she came to him again it was despair.” (pg. 319)
And perhaps for Phillip, looking after Mildred despite her extortion of him is an act of necessity — a “heroic” act:
“When she made engagements and broke them, he met her next day with a smiling face; when she excused herself, he said it did not matter. He never let her see that she pained him. He understood that his passionate grief had wearied her, and he took care to hide every sentiment which could be in the least degree troublesome. He was heroic.”(pg. 349)
This has tinges of Joyce’s Ulysses when Harold Bloom lets slide his wife’s infidelities, that the brave Ulysses in fact, is not a heroic at all but only a hero to his own sets of principles. Yes, by this time Phillip had known that the principles which he lived by served him no purpose, and it contradicted his beliefs. Phillip is a fool of a simp — that is all.
It is not only Phillip that falls into this bondage, but other characters around him. In the case of Mildred, she had to rely on Phillip for her own sustenance, taking advantage of him mercilessly. She could not also escape from her nature, and is unable to love Phillip the way that he wanted him to. The only time that she made advances to him was for a desperate attempt for security. And likewise, she cannot escape her promiscuous nature. Mildred Rogers is one of the most vile creatures that has been penned by anybody, and yet she is scary as fuck because she is very, very credible.
In the preface Maugham apologised for the length of the book but stated there was no other way that this book can be written. His latter novels are more concise, but I don’t mind the length because I haven’t found a Maugham book I haven’t loved and I am always in the hunt for them. Maugham’s stories are devastating, populated by broken characters who hit too close to home. His writing is subtle and objective, yet more impactful because he reveals so much from the actions and dialogues. And he writes beautifully.
I can remember the brutality of Adam Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence, leaving behind his family to become an artist, or the effects of the Great Depression in 1929 which humbled some of the characters in The Razor’s Edge. In the case of Of Human Bondage, the devastation comes from Phillip’s obsessive relationship with Mildred, who we can’t help to think to ourselves “Why are you doing this to yourself, man?” But at the same time, we can’t help but to sympathise with him knowing his vulnerability and the fact that at some point, before we have loved someone before perhaps to some similar vein of simpiness as Phillip had.
Of Human Bondage has been adapted into screen three times thus far, and what is known to be the best adaptation, which is the earliest and starred Leslie Howard and Bette Davis, is incomparable to the book (you can watch the full movie in YouTube). Bette Davis played a bitch well, but I thought she overacted and her performance left a cringey feeling in my spine. I do hope at some point in time they will readapt this story again to the big screen because it is a story that deserves to be revisited. But whatever is adapted is going to be a much, much paler comparison to the scope of the book.
The book touches everything that has to do with life — religion, family, nature versus nurture, society, sex, art. Each of these are discussed thoroughly and weaved into the book into the pattern that the book creates. And here is the existential crux of the book — that life really has little meaning, but the pattern that the one who lives create for himself — like a beautiful Persian rug. Phillip’s pattern is full of misery and heartbreak, and it is a pattern that is ever-present in the segment of his life. It is also part of his bondage, if we want to call it that as he strives to reach the pattern that he has in mind:
“As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the pleasure f his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his own pleasure.”(pg. 604)
