The Moon and Sixpence is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, first published on 15 April 1919. It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator providing 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. The story is, in part, based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin.
The book 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, because 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 the 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 that point, when he is asked by Mrs Strickland to go to Paris and talk with her husband. He lives a destitute but defiantly contented life there as 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, 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, because all he really wanted from Blanche was for her to be a model to paint, not a serious companion. It is hinted in the novel that he indicated that to her, but she took the risk anyway. Blanche then dies by suicide. She is 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 with a native woman, had two children by her (one of whom died), and started painting prolifically. We learn that Strickland had settled for a short while in the French port of Marseille 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 by his wife after his death, as per his dying orders.
Inspiration
The Moon and Sixpence is not, of course, a life of Paul Gauguin in the form of fiction. It is founded on what I had heard about him, but I used only the main facts of his story and for the rest trusted to such gifts of invention as I was fortunate enough to possess.[1]
The life of the French artist Paul Gauguin is the inspiration for the story, but the character of Strickland as a solitary, sociopathic, and destructive genius is more related to a mythological version of Gauguin's life, which the artist himself developed and promoted, than the actual course of his life. The real Gauguin was a participant in the artistic developments in France in the 1880s, exhibiting his work regularly with the Impressionists, and being a friend and collaborator with many artists. Gauguin did work as a stockbroker, did leave his wife and family to devote his life to art, and did leave Europe for Tahiti to pursue his career. However, none of that happened in the brutal way of the novel's character. Maugham took inspiration from the published writings about Gauguin available at the time, as well as personal experience living among the artistic community in Paris in 1904, and a visit to Tahiti in 1914.[1]
Strickland is created as an extreme version of the "modern artist as 'genius'", who is indifferent and frequently hostile to the people around him.[citation needed]
Writing in 1953, Maugham described the idea for the book as arising during a year that he spent living in Paris in 1904:
"...I met men who had known him and worked with him at Pont-Aven. I heard much about him. It occurred to me that there was in what I was told the subject of a novel."[1]
The idea remained in his mind for ten years, until a visit to Tahiti in 1914, where Maugham was able to meet people who had known Gauguin, inspired him to start writing.[1] The critic Amy Dickson examines the relationship between Gauguin and Strickland. She contrasts the novel's description of Strickland, "his faults are accepted as the necessary complement of his merits... but one thing can never be doubtful, and that is that he had genius", with Gauguin's description of himself:
"I am an artist and you are right, you're not mad, I am a great artist and I know it. It's because I know it that I have endured such sufferings. To have done otherwise I would consider myself a brigand—which is what many people think I am."
Dickson sums up the novel as follows:
"Maugham was fascinated by the impact of the arrival of modernism from Europe on an insular British consciousness and the emergence of the cult of the modernist artist-genius—The Moon and Sixpence is at once a satire of Edwardian mores and a Gauguin biography."[2]
About the title
According to some sources, the title, the meaning of which is not explicitly revealed in the book, was taken from a review in The Times Literary Supplement of Maugham's novel OfHuman Bondage, in which the novel's protagonist, Philip Carey, is described as being "so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet."[3] According to a 1956 letter from Maugham, "If you look on the ground in search of a sixpence, you don't look up, and so miss the moon." Maugham's title echoes the description of Gauguin by his contemporary biographer, Meier-Graefe (1908): "He [Gauguin] may be charged with having always wanted something else."[2]
The novel served as the basis for a 1957 opera, also titled The Moon and Sixpence, by John Gardner to a libretto by Patrick Terry which premiered at Sadlers Wells.[4]
Ray Noble's dance band hit "We've Got the Moon and Sixpence" (1932), sung by Al Bowlly, takes its name from the book.[citation needed]
The Moon and Sixpence is central to the protagonist's solving the mystery in the Howard Pease novel The Ship Without a Crew (1934).[citation needed]
The book was mentioned in Agatha Christie's mystery (Hercule Poirot series) novel Five Little Pigs (1942), when Poirot asks one of the suspects (Angela Warren) if she read the book at the time the crime was committed. The victim in the case is a married artist infatuated with a younger woman he yearns to paint, and for whom he may or may not be about to abandon his wife.[citation needed]
It was mentioned in the James Jones novel From Here to Eternity (1951), in a conversation between Sergeant Warden and Corporal Mazzioli.[citation needed]
In the opening scene of François Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451 (1966), an adaptation of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel of the same name, several firemen are preparing books for burning. In the crowd of onlookers is a little boy who picks up one of the books and thumbs through it before his father takes it from him and throws it on the pile with the rest. That book is The Moon and Sixpence.[citation needed]
William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, known for his plays, novels and short stories. Born in Paris, where he spent his first ten years, Maugham was schooled in England and went to a German university. He became a medical student in London and qualified as a physician in 1897. He never practised medicine, and became a full-time writer. His first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), a study of life in the slums, attracted attention, but it was as a playwright that he first achieved national celebrity. By 1908 he had four plays running at once in the West End of London. He wrote his 32nd and last play in 1933, after which he abandoned the theatre and concentrated on novels and short stories.
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramist, and writer, whose work has been primarily associated with the Post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements. He was also an influential practitioner of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms. While only moderately successful during his lifetime, Gauguin has since been recognized for his experimental use of color and Synthetist style that were distinct from Impressionism.
The Razor's Edge is a 1944 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. It tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in World War I, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life. The story begins through the eyes of Larry's friends and acquaintances as they witness his personality change after the war. His rejection of conventional life and search for meaningful experience allows him to thrive while the more materialistic characters suffer reversals of fortune.
Pierre Bonnard was a French painter, illustrator and printmaker, known especially for the stylized decorative qualities of his paintings and his bold use of color. A founding member of the Post-Impressionist group of avant-garde painters Les Nabis, his early work was strongly influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, as well as the prints of Hokusai and other Japanese artists. Bonnard was a leading figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. He painted landscapes, urban scenes, portraits and intimate domestic scenes, where the backgrounds, colors and painting style usually took precedence over the subject.
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? is a 1897–98 painting by French artist Paul Gauguin. The painting was created in Tahiti, and is in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. Viewed as a masterpiece by Gauguin, the painting is considered "a philosophical work comparable to the themes of the Gospels".
Of Human Bondage is a 1915 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The novel is generally agreed to be Maugham's masterpiece and to be strongly autobiographical in nature, although he stated, "This is a novel, not an autobiography; though much in it is autobiographical, more is pure invention." Maugham, who had originally planned to call his novel Beauty from Ashes, finally settled on a title taken from a section of Spinoza's Ethics. The Modern Library ranked Of Human Bondage No. 66 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
Five Little Pigs is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in May 1942 under the title Murder in Retrospect and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943. The UK first edition carries a copyright date of 1942 and retailed at eight shillings while the US edition was priced at $2.00.
Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1930) is a novel by the British author W. Somerset Maugham. Maugham exposes the misguided social snobbery levelled at the character Rosie Driffield, whose frankness, honesty, and sexual freedom make her a target of conservative opprobrium. Her character is treated favourably by the book's narrator, Ashenden, who understands that she was a muse to the many artists who surrounded her, and who himself enjoyed her sexual favours.
Roderic O'Conor was an Irish painter who spent much of his later career in Paris and as part of the Pont-Aven movement. O'Conor's work demonstrates Impressionist and Post-Impressionist influence.
Events from the year 1919 in art.
The Way to Paradise is a novel published by Mario Vargas Llosa in 2003.
Oviri is an 1894 ceramic sculpture by the French artist Paul Gauguin. In Tahitian mythology, Oviri was the goddess of mourning and is shown with long pale hair and wild eyes, smothering a wolf with her feet while clutching a cub in her arms. Art historians have presented multiple interpretations—usually that Gauguin intended it as an epithet to reinforce his self-image as a "civilised savage". Tahitian goddesses of her era had passed from folk memory by 1894, yet Gauguin romanticises the island's past as he reaches towards more ancient sources, including an Assyrian relief of a "master of animals" type, and Majapahit mummies. Other possible influences include preserved skulls from the Marquesas Islands, figures found at Borobudur, and a 9th-century Mahayana Buddhist temple in central Java.
The Moon and Sixpence is a 1942 film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's 1919 novel of the same name, which was in part based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. Dimitri Tiomkin was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. Two versions were filmed. In one, Devi Wani, a Javanese actress, played Ata; in the other, Ms. Verdugo played her, to accommodate audiences for whom marriage between a Polynesian and an Englishman was considered unacceptable.
Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao tupapau) is an 1892 oil on burlap canvas painting by Paul Gauguin, depicting a nude Tahitian girl lying on her stomach. An old woman is seated behind her. Gauguin said the title may refer to either the girl imagining the ghost, or the ghost imagining her.
Fatata te Miti is an 1892 oil painting by French artist Paul Gauguin, located in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC.
Merahi metua no Tehamana is an 1893 painting by the French artist Paul Gauguin, currently in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The painting is a portrait of Paul Gauguin's wife Teha'amana during his first visit to Tahiti in 1891–1893. This marriage has always provoked controversy because it was arranged and completed in the course of a single afternoon and Gauguin claimed Teha'amana was just thirteen years old at the time.
The Narrow Corner is a novel by the British writer W. Somerset Maugham, published by William Heinemann in 1932.
Arii Matamoe or The Royal End is a painting on coarse cloth by the French artist Paul Gauguin, created in 1892 during the painter's first visit to Tahiti. It depicts a man's severed head on a pillow, displayed before mourners, and although it did not depict a common or contemporary Tahitian mourning ritual, may have been inspired by the death of Pōmare V in 1891 shortly after Gauguin's arrival. A curator for the J. Paul Getty Museum suggested Gauguin likely painted the canvas "to shock Parisians" upon his expected return to the city.
The Moon and Sixpence was an American television movie broadcast on NBC on October 30, 1959. The production, starring Laurence Olivier, was adapted by S. Lee Pogostin from the novel by Somerset Maugham. The production won multiple Emmy and Sylvania Awards, including awards for Olivier's acting, Pogostin's adaptation, and Robert Mulligan's direction.
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