mTHE POWER OF TRADITION IN A HIGH MODERN STORY

Years ago, when I was seriously reading novels and thinking about their purpose and uses, I would usually tend to treat them as problems of art, especially when I was trying to write fiction of my own and seeking models and methods.  However, the bias of my study of criticism, such as it was, also often inclined me to treat novels as artifacts in a history of literature.  The consequence was that sometimes I would want to go “inside” the structure of the text; at other times I would want to take stock of the “outside” of the narrative, to measure its contribution to an understanding of the state of mind and affairs in Britain, Europe, or America at a given moment.

This teeter-totter approach left me without a single strong conviction about the significance of fiction.   I was moving on to non-literary interests by the time the New Novelists of France, the magic realists, and the postmodernists replaced historically realistic fiction--the fiction we now classify as twentieth-century high modern--that had taken most of my attention as a serious reader.  Nothing in my experience or training equipped me to understand the vast changes in style and substance signaled by such new categories of fiction.  (That is not to say that I omitted the obligatory reading of major figures such as Thomas Pynchon or that I did not have pleasure from such reading beyond the bounds of my familiar terrain.)

Nowadays, I pick up a fictional piece from that now-vanished high modern period with a feeling of coming home, even though my rusty critical apparatus from years ago is still somewhat conflicted: I still want to see into the artfulness of the piece; but also, especially because I have gained perspective with the passing of time, I still want to find in the novel new evidence of the social, political, and psychic dynamics that defined modernity and led to its transformation.  Indeed, over time the “outside” issues have overtaken the “inside” issues of craft in my personal interests, and this permits me with less hesitation or apology to “use” a novel in my continuing exploration of modernity’s maturation and dilemma.

  Story and style

I recently took from the library shelf W. Somerset Maugham’s Up at the Villa—which I could not remember having read before--with just that feeling of permission.  Yet, it was Maugham’s familiar artfulness—the “inside” structure--that at first struck me, rather than the “outside” issues reflected in the book.  It displayed the same technical expertise, the same narrative virtuosity, that had attracted me when I was reading other novels of his many years ago—when he was still alive and displaying his sustained success as a writer of fiction and drama.  (He died in 1965 at age 91.)

Here again, still fresh and familiar, was that rigorously spare manner of expression.  Here again was his characteristic avoidance of the deepest feeling in favor of bemused irony.  And here again, story reigned supreme.  Narrative craft mattered most. 

For Maugham, a story was an exercise in consciously spare style.  Shadowing what he told you were the many narrative possibilities that he omitted.  His sentences were studies in what he did not have to say.  The plot had the economical craftsmanship you would find in a well-wrought piece of cabinetry.  Up at the Villa is a short book, a novella rather than a full-length novel.  Its brevity perfectly suited Maugham’s penchant for omission and concision.  After so many years, it was a pleasure for me to encounter once again his deft handling of a plot and his skill at selecting just enough to reveal who his characters were and why they were behaving as they did.

Nevertheless, my interest in the dynamics of modernity soon overtook the initial esthetic pleasure I took from a fresh encounter with Maugham’s artful manner of story-telling.  My wish to pursue the “outside” significance of this little story arose from its setting—the time and place of its action—and from the norms of behavior that pushed and pulled Maugham’s deftly drawn characters.

I was soon to realize, however, that Maugham’s style of telling his story went hand in hand with the issues of modernity that now commanded my interest.  That is, with the insight conferred on me by the passage of years since Maugham wrote, I could see that the “inside” of  his text—the esthetic of its making—participated in its “outside” meaning as an artifact of Western modernity in the first half of the twentieth century.

I need to stipulate that Maugham’s main interest in his fiction was not to critique the times of which he wrote.  He was not like, say, Thomas Mann, who purposefully sought to expose the problem of the Western mystique of rationality.  When Maugham flourished and when I was reading him for the first time in the 1950s, it would have been amiss to burden his stories with heavy-handed historical analysis.  He thought of himself as a teller of stories first and last; he disclaimed the deeper uses of fiction and drama.  The times were what they were; his was not to question why but to use them for the tales that they enfolded.  High modernity was a given, not a question.  Maugham’s vaunted irony was not a weapon aimed at the make-up of his people and their world; it simply exemplified the way of that world.

But those times have passed.  As the characteristic values and style of high modern people have congealed into a more or less completed historical moment, they appear in a more penetrating light to someone, like me, who has survived that moment and now looks back at it from significantly different circumstances.  A novel from that period, too, whatever its original intentions, can appear in a more penetrating light.

Feeling some such advance in my ability to see an old story by a writer dead for some time, I tried to take from Up at the Villa some fresh understanding both of Maugham’s craft and his (probably unintended) revelations about the way it was when high modern values and style prevailed in British and American life.  This effort was not primarily a renewed attempt to understand Maugham.  It mainly showed my continuing wish to understand the high modern world that had shaped the way I grew up and that, since, had metamorphosed into a postmodernity that I still was trying to understand.

The narrative recipe

In Up at the Villa, Maugham told the story of Mary Panton, a thirty-year-old recent widow who was regaining her emotional balance in a Renaissance villa above Florence, loaned by friends, English compatriots.  In his first chapter of 20 pages, Maugham set up some of the important elements that would operate in the story to come.  Mary’s rakish husband left her in very modest means.  A beauty who had been on the stage, she was attractive to Sir Edgar Swift, a 54-year-old unattached family friend who was about to become the governor of Bengal in India.  Edgar proposed marriage, and she promised to answer in a few days when he returned from a meeting in Cannes about his impending appointment.  The central events took place in that interval. 

In these first pages, Maugham established two of the key dramatic ingredients.  One was the presence in the Florentine countryside of “starving workmen and penniless refugees” (19) who posed a threat to the safety of the English living there in affluence.  The second was the revolver that Edgar pressed upon Mary for her protection while driving alone.  The economy of Maugham fiction compelled a reader to acknowledge that these ingredients would matter significantly as events unfolded.

The reader learned about the remaining ingredients for this narrative recipe in the second and third chapters, just about as brief as the first.  Mary went to a dinner party hosted at a restaurant by the Princess San Ferdinando, an American who had married a Roman prince and had remained in Italy after his death many years ago.  There, the Princess threw her together with Rowley Flint, an affable young Englishman with a “shocking reputation which he thoroughly deserved.” (30)  His “sex appeal” (32) made him irresistible to women, despite their knowledge that “his intentions are always dishonourable.” (36)  Maugham’s narrative attention to Rowley established that he would play an important part in whatever complications were about to descend on Mary.  Maugham’s attention to the substitute violin player at the restaurant established that he too would play a part in Mary’s story.  Mary overtipped the man, who played poorly, because he looked so wretched. (45)

After the party, Rowley pressed Mary to reject Edgar and marry him; when she turned him down, he then suggested an affair to satisfy the sexual instincts he knew she was made to satisfy.  She turned that down too.  However, it provoked a response from her that foreshadowed the critical event of the story, which would come before the night was over.  When he asked her if she ever had the desire to “give of her riches,” she surprised Rowley with her answer:

My poor Rowley, you’re the last man I would ever have had an affair with.  But I’ve sometimes thought that if I ever ran across someone who was poor, alone and unhappy, who’d never had any pleasure in life, who’d never known any of the good things money can buy—and if I could give him a unique experience, an hour of absolute happiness, something that he’d never dreamt of and that would never be repeated, then I’d give him gladly everything I had to give. (64-65)

In Maugham’s tightly constructed fictional universe, the subsequent events of the night, bizarre as they were, surprised the reader only in their specific details.  Alone after dropping Rowley at the hotel, Mary encountered the violin player, invited him up to the villa, and carried out the “crazy idea” that she had revealed to Rowley. (65) 

Karl Richter, the violin player, was Austrian not Italian, a refugee from his homeland after he resisted Hitler’s recent Anschluss.  Mary learned that he was without hope as a displaced person lacking legitimate status in Italy.  After giving him her lovely dancer’s body, she told him that it was a once-and-done affair.  To her dismay, this completed his despair, and he shot himself with the revolver that he found in her purse—the last thing that she expected to flow from her misguided philanthropy.

The logic of the narrative that Maugham established at the dinner party worked out in the remainder of the night.  Mary called on Rowley to help her avoid the embarrassment of Karl’s suicide in her rooms.  He did the dirty work, as an English gentleman would (even one as rakish as Rowley), by dumping the body at a distance from the villa. 

This saved Mary from having to explain the body’s presence to authorities.  It would have saved her chances of marrying Edgar, except that she insisted on telling him what had happened.  She and Edgar, in a climactic exchange after he returned from Cannes, agreed that her misadventure would always threaten to surface and destroy his position in the Indian imperial service.  She declined his marriage offer; he went off, head high, to serve the Empire.

It remained for Maugham to tie up the ends of his narrative.  Mary, after the harrowing disposal of the body, found herself more suited to the devil-may-care style of Rowley than she would acknowledge earlier.  Their decision to marry put a comedic conclusion on a story wholly embedded in modern English society on the eve of World War II.

Tradition in modernity

We take from this economically constructed and delivered tale an impression of the high modern system of values that characterized that society.

In essence, high modernity pitted an individual’s restless desire for novelty—the exercise of freedom, the impulse to self-expression--against the power of tradition to constrain it.   Typically in imaginative works of the high modern period, dramatic tension grew out of the effort of the modern person to resist the traditional boundaries that had yet to yield to the dynamics of change.  (That is why an avant-garde was essential: it was the cutting edge, hacking away at traditional constraints on behalf of the whole bourgeois culture.)

Now that high modernity is over, however, we are better able to understand that tradition—at least of a certain kind—had to persist if high modernity itself was to persist.  Amidst transformational social change, some traditions, by holding fast, regulated the rate of change and lent an impression of stability.  In a study of reflexive modernization, Anthony Giddens believes that even as high modernity upset the status quo, it did not touch “core aspects of social life.” These core aspects mainly were the structure of the family and sexual identity.   (Reflexive Modernization, 56)  In the ritualistic and formulaic power of tradition, Giddens sees moral and emotional bonds that led high modern people to persist in repetitive behavior instead of breaking free with the avant-garde.

In the plot of Up at the Villa, the individualistic expression of Mary and Rowley, manifested in their seeming sexual freedom, could not prevail against the power of tradition inherent in English society of the late 1930s.   Tradition pushed back against their modern inclinations toward self-expression.  “I’m a gentleman by birth,” Rowley said, “not by nature.”   The traditional cultural code of family and sexual identity motivated Mary’s relations with Edgar and Rowley.

For Maugham, satisfied to work within the code, it was a simple decision to end the story with the match between Mary and Rowley.  In the value system at play, nothing else could have happened.  It was merely Maugham’s skill in providing or withholding advance signals that gave the conclusion anything like surprise.

But in addition to traditions of family and sexual identity, we saw in the book a vastly greater stabilizing force at work on Mary and her circle.  Giddens believes that science in the high modern moment paradoxically commanded a formulaic power that made it function as if it were a constraining tradition.  This was so in spite of the central role of science in upsetting traditional truths.  (Reflexive Modernization, 94)  In Up at the Villa, the British Empire in a somewhat analogous manner functioned as a constraining tradition.  This was so in spite of the disruptive social, political, and economic effects of Empire around the world, particularly in India, where Edgar served.

Even Rowley’s satirical perspective on Edgar could not significantly reduce the importance attached to the imperial system that he served.  Edgar, Rowley said, was “a great man posing as a great man.” 

Mary and Edgar elegantly operated the cultural code of Empire as they brought their relationship to an end.  He was about to become one of the top Empire-builders in India.  He needed a proper and resourceful English spouse by his side.  Mary was unmoored by her husband’s premature death from the traditional English social system upon which Empire thrived; she needed a new berth.  Edgar could provide it, even though she did not love him.  But they agreed that her misadventure made their marriage untenable from the standpoint of Empire.  Their stylishly mannered parting scene celebrated the supremacy of Empire over personal gratification.  

But the cultural code of Empire operated also in the sorry fate of poor Karl Richter in the story.  British class superiority necessarily attended Britain’s worldwide imperial project.  Mary gave her seemingly generous gift to this soul drifting on the mounting chaos of Europe because she saw him as an object of pity.  She never expected to connect with him person to person except in one exchange of sheer physical passion.  Karl remained outside her sense of imperial British identity.  He was one of the perpetual “other.”  Along with Italian servants, starving workmen, other penniless refugees, and the hordes in distant places under the sway of British Empire-builders such as Sir Edgar Swift, Karl was someone to control or use, not to understand.

When Rowley, acting comfortably within his class, got rid of Karl’s body, he marginalized the man’s physical being just as Hitler earlier had marginalized his human qualities by erasing his national identity.  Karl was an object in a drama about the British ruling class.  His inherent human value, seen through the prism of race and class that a later writer might have employed, was of only fleeting interest to Maugham and his imperial creations.  The shadow of this worthless outsider, dead and safely removed from the villa, did not cross the narrative path as the story came to its contented end in the wedding plans of Mary and Rowley.  The outrage that present-day readers might feel at this treatment helps to measure how far into the past the high modernity of Maugham’s fiction has slipped.

Present-day readers also might see, at the same time, the complicity of Maugham’s style with his presentation of these high modern actors—the fit of the book’s artistic “inside” with its “outside” significance.  Maugham’s economical choice of incidents and their tight narrative relationships purported to be an instrument aiming to reveal the truth of things, the reality of British imperial life from the inside.  The real truth would remain after he eliminated—through artful omission and concision—whatever falsities might impinge.  Maugham’s narrative style presumed to take on something of the formulaic power of modern science, remarked upon by Giddens.  This was the underlying presumption, indeed, of most realistic fiction of the high modern moment.  If the real truth was too elusive to emerge, at least the empirical style would give readers the satisfying impression of truth.  Maugham’s narrative method thus could convey the power of traditional values even as it revealed the adventurous impulse of high modern characters caught in a tense drama.  His readers could feel that his story touched the truth of the world they knew and affirmed.

The real truth, of course, was that that world was about to begin crashing.  With it eventually would go the narrative conventions that seemed to illuminate it so persuasively.  The values and style of high modernity would begin to vanish.  But reading Up at the Villa many decades later would allow us briefly to reclaim them and ponder their passing. 

 

  Richard P. Richter 4 December 2003  All rights reserved