Somerset Maugham: wanting, but not quite able, to believe

In September of 2007 I flew to Phnom Penh to gather material for a new novel.  Two of the books I brought with me were by Maugham: a first edition (a gift from Susana Serna) of The Gentleman in the Parlour, a Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong (1930), which is as its title suggests a travel book, and a Penguin paperback edition of The Summing Up (1938), a collection of valedictory essays.

In both books Maugham devotes a section to the question of evil; that is, how to satisfactorily explain the existence of evil in this world.  He goes through the standard Christian and other philosophical arguments and finds them wanting.  Then he discusses Buddhism.  I find his essays so interesting that I have included the last few paragraphs of both below.  Regarding his style, Maugham himself wrote that, given his natural limitations as a writer, he decided that he should aim at lucidity, simplicity and euphony.  I find his style powerful, but not as simple as it appeared in 1938.

From The Gentleman in the Parlour

While reading Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Maugham is repelled at the author’s explanation of evil:

‘But when I came upon his treatment of the problem of evil I found myself scandalized.  The Absolute, I read, is perfect, and evil, being but an appearance, cannot but subserve to the perfection of the whole.  Error contributes to greater energy of life.  Evil plays a part in a higher end and in this sense unknowingly is good.  The absolute is the richer for every discord.

And my memory brought back to me, I know not why, a scene at the beginning of the war.  It was in October and our sensibilities were not yet blunted.  A cold raw night.  There had been what those who took part in it thought a battle, but which was so insignificant a skirmish that the papers did not so much as refer to it, and about a thousand men had been killed and wounded.  They lay on straw on the floor of a country church, and the only light came from the candles on the altar.  The Germans were advancing and it was necessary to evacuate them as quickly as possible.  All through the night the ambulance cars, without lights, drove back and forth, and the wounded cried out to be taken, and some died as they were being lifted on to the stretchers and were thrown on the heap of dead outside the door, and they were dirty and gory, and the church stank of blood and the rankness of humanity.

And there was one boy who was so shattered that it was not worth while to move him and as he lay there, seeing men on either side of him being taken out, he screamed at the top of his voice: je ne veux pas mourir.  Je suis trop jeune.  Je ne veux pas mourir.  And he went on screaming that he did not want to die till he died.

Of course this is no argument.  It was but an inconsiderable incident the only significance of which was that I saw it with my own eyes and in my ears for days afterwards rang that despairing cry, but a greater than I, a philosopher and a mathematician into the bargain if your please, said that the heart had its reasons which the head did not know, and (in the grip of compound things, to use the Buddhist phrase, as I am) this scene is to me a sufficient refutation of the metaphysician’s fine-spun theories.  But my heart can accept the evils that befall me if they are the consequence of actions that I (the I that is not my soul, which perishes, but the result of my deeds in another state of existence) did in past time, and I am resigned to the evils that I see about me, the death of the young, (the most bitter of all) the grief of the mothers that bore them in anguish, poverty and sickness and frustrated hopes, if these evils are but the consequence of the sins which those that suffer them once committed.

Here is an explanation that outrages neither the heart nor the head; there is only one fault that I can find in it: it is incredible.’

From The Summing Up

Again at the end of a later essay on the existence of evil, Maugham is appalled at how devoid of reasonable explanation are the philosophers and theologians:

‘Evils are there, omnipresent; pain and disease, the death of those we love, poverty, crime, sin, frustrated hope: the list is interminable.  What explanations have the philosophers to offer?  Some say the evil is logically necessary so that we may know good; some say that by the nature of the world there is an opposition between good and evil and that each is metaphysically necessary to the other.  What explanations do the theologians have to offer?  Some say that God has placed evils here for our training; some say that he has sent them upon men to punish them for their sins.

But I have seen a child die of meningitis.  I have only found one explanation that appealed equally to my sensibility and to my imagination.  This is the doctrine of the transmigration of souls.  As everyone knows, it assumes that life does not begin at birth or end at death, but is a link in an indefinite series of lives each one of which is determined by the acts done in previous existences.  Good deeds may exalt a man to the heights of heaven and evil deeds degrade him to the depths of hell.  All lives come to an end, even the life of of the gods, and happiness is to be sought in release from the round of births and repose in the changeless state called Nirvana.  It would be less difficult to bear the evils of one’s own life if one could think that they were but the necessary outcome of one’s errors in a previous existence, and the effort to do better would be less difficult too when there was the hope that in another existence a greater happiness would reward one.

But if one feels one’s own woes in a more forcible way than those of others (I cannot feel your toothache, as the philosophers say) it is the woes of others that arouse one’s indignation.  It is possible to achieve resignation in regard to one’s own, but only philosophers obsessed with the perfection of the Absolute can look upon those of others, which seem so often unmerited, with an equal mind.

If Karma were true one could look upon them with pity, but with fortitude.  Revulsion would be out of place and life would be robbed of the meaningless of pain which is pessimism’s unanswer
-ed argument.   I can only regret that I find the doctrine impossible to believe.’

Bach and The End of the Monsoon

Can music and spirituality have a place in a political thriller?  I think they can, if they’re sub-themes illuminating character.  In The End of the Monsoon, Mrs Ambler, an idealistic lawyer, is also an amateur musician and practicing Buddhist.  Her guilt over her illicit affair strengthens her desire for at least a breath of transcendence.

In 1983 I thought I had such a breath in the wee small hours of the morning, while playing the clavichord in my third world luxury apartment in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

In my novel I transferred this experience to the character of Dr White, a no-nonsense, middle-aged expatriate English doctor in Phnom Penh.  In the penultimate chapter he recounts it to the story’s skeptical main character, the American diplomat, Mike Smith:

      ‘There’s a kind of music—Bach composed several examples—which I’m sure Mrs Ambler was aware of, called canon.  I no longer play, but many years ago I did, and one evening, while playing a Bach canon from memory, I felt, briefly, as if I were outside myself; I felt that I’d entered a musical stream, like the flow of a river, or the rushing of the wind, and that this flow—which was the music of the canon—was continuous: it came from I knew not where and continued I knew not whither.  While I played, I was, for a short time, a part of that musical flow.  This vision or waking dream ended the moment I finished the piece.’

Dr. White’s point is that although medical science may determine the chemical reactions associated with such an experience and the location of the brain where it takes place, that doesn’t explain the real cause, or the essence, or the meaning–if any–of such an experience.

In the novel, there are three instances of ‘spiritual experience’: an unusually successful meditation, just before dawn in the jungles of northern Cambodia; the expected and observed death of a main character; and Dr White’s out-of-body moment years before, while playing the Bach canon.  Mr Smith, fighting against having to swallow any of it, challenges the doctor with an angry: ‘What do you believe?’  The doctor replies,

      ‘Me?  I believe in nothing, Mr Smith.  Nothing.  However, I do believe in trying to keep my mind open—just a crack.’

Music Samples

I played and recorded these two pieces on a copy of a 1765 Friederici clavichord which I built in 2006 and 2007.  The original is in the Grassi Museum in Leipzig.  The clavichord is the quietest of all keyboard instruments–these two music samples are not loud.  Playing the clavichord teaches you in a striking way just how different a quiet night in Leipzig must have been in 1765.  No modern background noise at all.  Playing it today, at one in the morning, perhaps with a snow storm outside and all traffic over (as quiet as it’s going to be) struggling to bring out every note, one’s attention focusses in, and after a few minutes a forte–which in aural reality is a piano–sounds to the ear or the mind of the player like an actual forte.

A Dutchwoman of my acquaintance put it well.  “Playing the clavichord,” she said, “is like a meditation.”

Variation 15 from Bach’s Goldberg Variations: a canon in inversion at the 5th.

Download audio file (Goldberg_Variation_153.mp3)

Variation 25 from the Goldberg.  This variation was marked ‘adagio’ in Bach’s own hand, in his copy of the printed score.

Download audio file (Goldberg_Variation_251.mp3)

I loved them when I was thirteen

Want a story to grab you by the neck–but tired of getting it in the neck?

How about a sexy, adult, political thriller?  No virginity.  No teenage angst.  Plenty of adult angst.  Setting?  No, not Utah.  The tropics.  The End of the Monsoon.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, today.  Hot, humid nights at the Foreign Correspondents Club overlooking the Mekong.  Businessmen and tourists, both a little on-the-make.  A cosmopolitan in your hand and frangipani on the air–with a whiff of sewage from an outfall by the National Theater down the quay.

A contemporary story.  The lovers: a British professional woman of Sudanese ancestry, and an American, formerly on Wall Street, now a diplomat. Their affair is illicit, as is his latest assignment: do what it takes to ensure an American oil company is granted a concession to drill in Cambodian waters.

Adult characters with real jobs and real conflicts:

The American diplomat, burned on Wall Street, happy in a new career of blameless duty with a pension at the end–now asked to take on a job that makes the deals he analyzed at Lehman Brothers look clean.

The British lawyer, a Buddhist in a sexless marriage, finding love outside it–but looking for a way to transcend the moral conflict.

The senior American diplomat, a woman who’s climbed the ladder without a break, now asked to follow an order of ambivalent legality–and tempted to pass the chalice.

The young, conscientious Agency case officer–looking for the courage to come out of her sexual closet.

Consciously and unconsciously, in ways they see and ways hidden, their lives intertwine.  It’s the end of the monsoon, the country’s under water, and elections draw near.  The Prime Minister’s party needs money for votes and the American oil company’s willing to pay for the concession.  The US embassy pushes the deal but the Englishwoman, pushing transparency, unwittingly works against it.

The ruling party’s not interested in transparency.  They’ve never hesitated to assassinate their own people (when they couldn’t be bought off).  How far will they go with foreigners?

No, not a vampire story.  Published this August.  Read the first chapter here.

Music and civilization

I’ve just reread, from cover-to-cover, for the first time in years, Lang’s Music in Western Civilization–first published in 1941. My edition dates from 1969. I’m more impressed than ever.

His authority runs through all 1,030 pages. Here are the first lines of the Introduction:

“Every civilization is a synthesis of man’s conquest of life. Art is the ultimate symbol of this conquest, the utmost unity man can achieve. Yet the spirit of an epoch is reflected not in the arts alone, but in every field of human endeavor, from theology to engineering.”

Notice two things: the vigor of the writing–every sentence is in the active voice, with only one adjective per sentence–and how the plan of the whole book is revealed by the end of the third sentence. He is to present a cultural history, in the widest sense, of music in western civilization.

Lang was a Hungarian who studied, in his youth, at the Budapest Music Academy, the University of Heidelberg, and the Sorbonne. He taught at Columbia University from 1933 until his retirement in 1970. He died in 1991 at his home in Lakewood, Connecticut. Oddly enough, the small town of Lakewood was also the home of the Polish harpsichordist, Wanda Landowska.

His book covers western music from the ancient Greeks to America in 1941. The two last musicians mentioned, I believe, are Richard Strauss and Scriabin. Lang regarded symphonic music of the classic period, ending in Beethoven and Schubert, as the high point of musical western culture. However, he does not reach the classic era until page 618–past the halfway mark. How better to indicate his depth of erudition? But a dry scholar he was not. In addition to erudition, he held strong opinions, and expressed them with a romantic warmth. Here is a paragraph, one of many, on Wagner’s Tristan:

“Tristan carried the sensuous expressiveness of music to its ultimate limits, and the terrific erotic power of this music poisoned the minds of the composers of the succeeding generations. No one could escape its devastating influence, yet no one could even remotely match, let alone continue it, for after the Dionysiac ‘love death’ nothing is possible but undisguised sexual lust.”

Lang, himself a musician as well as a teacher, critic and writer, was not afraid of expressiveness. He wrote about music, which in its higher manifestations is synonymous with spirituality, with a sense of poetry and drama, as in his two paragraphs devoted to Alexander Scriabin near the end of the book:

“Lack of spiritual ideals, submission to materialism and technicalism, and a resultant hunger for sensation and bluff, created an atmosphere in which philosophical and aesthetic judgments were vacillating and a normal and purposeful development of artistic individuality was made exceedingly difficult. This decadence of culture ended in the World War of 1914. New life could be infused into the music of this rapidly disintegrating world only by an even more nervous, sophisticated, and surcharged emphasis on the already overtaxed elements of effect and technique. Experiment then became the final aim, as is so tragically demonstrated in the works of Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), whose whole art, nay, whole life, was a mere experiment, a supernatural dream, and whose mind, possessed by demonic forces, penetrated deeper and deeper into the mire of mystical speculations, hallucinations, and dementia. The mystic of the early Christian centuries received from Scripture and from the Church an unshakable structure, the secure walls of which could withstand the flow of the most ardent lava of ecstasis. The modern mystic does not receive anything from any source; he has to find not only his forms but he has to create everything, God and Satan, the world and the beyond, the Redeemer and the Antichrist, the saints and the damned; he must himself write the Bible. There was no halt for Scriabin, the modern mystic, for there was nothing that would bind him; such an artist is not interested in national or social aims, in the music of the people, not even purely technical or formal problems, for he already knows everything and wants everything, and like Icarus soars toward the sun.

Scriabin’s new harmonic system proved one thing only: that tone alone no longer suffices, and that the refurbishing of the tonal system cannot furnish the solution. Nor was the already immensely rich color scheme of the modern orchestra sufficient; Scriabin and his followers wanted actual light and actual color. In his last works Scriabin freed himself entirely from the shackles of tonality, proclaiming that he had found the answer to the riddle of cosmic music. The great unity of sensations, visions, and hallucinations emanates from the orchestra of Le Poème du Feu (1913), its ‘color piano’ inundating the unruly maze of tones with its ‘color fire.’ And then he took the final step toward the universal music of Nirvana, the union of sound, color, drama, song, religion; the universal mystery play which would be the crowning of human art. But by this time that meteor of Scriabin’s spirit has passed beyond the atmosphere of the planets, continuing its path in the eternal darkness of the unknown spaces.”

For his title, Lang could have chosen the phrases ‘Western World’, or ‘Western Culture’. Instead he chose ‘Western Civilization’. I think he chose it because he believed that art music–his term–was one of the most important indicators, creators and supports of the courage, compassion and spirit which form the foundation of what we call civilization.

I have also just reread Leonard Woolf’s (Virginia’s Woolf’s husband) five volume autobiography, and anyone who has read that work, or Victoria Glendinning’s recent biography of him, must come to the conclusion that he was an acutely and consciously civilized man. Lang was a Hungarian, Woolf an English Jew; Lang a musicologist, critic and writer; Woolf a publisher, writer, and advocate of political liberalism. It is interesting to compare Lang’s and Woolf’s references to one of Beethoven’s great last works: his last piano sonata, op. 101. Here is Lang’s:

“The last of the piano sonatas is strangely reminiscent of the Pathétique Sonata; it is in the same key of C minor and opens with the same broad pathos, but what follows is different. The concentration of emotions and energies is such that all conventions had to be thrown overboard, and the majestic first movement was followed by a relaxation in remote spiritual regions. Nothing more could be said after these celestial utterances, least of all a witty scherzo or a robust finale.”

And here is Woolf’s mention of the same sonata, in some of his last published thoughts on civilization, towards the end of his final volume of autobiography, The Journey not the Arrival Matters:

“I feel passionately for what I call civilized life; I hate passionately what I call barbarism. When as a small child I heard my father say one day at lunch that, as regards rules of life, a man need only follow that advice of the prophet Micah: ‘What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God’, I am sure that I did not really understand what he was talking about, yet in some curious way, I think, the words entered into and had a profound effect upon my mind and upon my soul, if I can be said to have a soul. . . .

. . . I have never been much concerned with God or with walking humbly with him, but I believe profoundly in the other two rules. Justice and mercy–they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy toleration. This is, of course, the Semitic vision, but, when later I found that the Greeks had added to it the vision of liberty and beauty–καλσυ και αγαθου–I saw, when I added the words of Micah to the speech of Pericles in Thucydides, what has remained until today my vision of civilization. And my feelings with regard to communal justice and mercy and toleration and liberty are both ethical and aesthetic, and it is this combination which gives to my feeling about what I call civilization both its intensity and also a kind of austerity. The visions of civilization and the partial, hesitating, fluctuating activation of these visions in the barbarous history of man, and the classical instances in which individuals have risked everything in a fight for justice, mercy, toleration, and liberty against the entrenched forces of kings and emperors, states and establishments, principalities and powers, all these have always given me not only an intense feeling about what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, but also the kind of emotion which I get still more powerfully from a play of Sophocles or Shakespeare, the Parthenon or the Acropolis, a picture of Piero della Francesca, a cello suite of Bach or the last movement of the last piano sonata of Beethoven.”

Get an agent

That at least is my advice for novelists looking for a publisher. My first book was non-fiction and I sold it directly to a major publisher’s acquisitions editor. That was eleven years ago, and I’m not sure it could be done today, because I don’t know what the submissions policies are for major non-fiction publishers. I do know the policies for major publishers regarding fiction. They don’t want to look at unsolicited manuscripts. A novelist needs an agent. How do you get one?

Based on my experience, my advice is to use a highly targeted approach. Look for an agent who represents writers you read.

There are several ways to do this. Occasionally writers mention their agent on their book’s acknowledgments page. You can do searches on Publishers Weekly. Or you can just Google the author’s name, and the tag ‘literary agent’.

How to submit

Send a short query by e-mail. It should be both punchy and content-rich. Imagine, in fact, you are writing the first couple of paragraphs of your novel: it should be that much of a selling tactic. For exact contents, look up the agent’s website and see what they want. If their advice is too general, or entirely lacking, then I suggest you include four elements:

A single, short, active sentence telling the agent what you’ve written. This is to avoid wasting the agent’s time.

A single, short, active sentence telling the agent your qualifications.

The first paragraph of the novel, preferably short.

A brief thanks, expressing your readiness to send further material upon request, and your contact e-mail address.

For further advice on query letters, which are after all your first (and only) line of assault, I suggest you trawl the archives of the Miss Snark, the Literary Agent blog. During its heyday a few years ago this was incredibly popular, and is still hilarious. The real Miss Snark (I believe) is a successful New York literary agent named Janet Reid. Her current blog is also hilarious and hilariously informative for authors.

How to get e-mail addresses

This is 2010. E-mail your query letter. If you’re having trouble finding your agent’s e-mail address here is an eccentric but invaluable website.