Of Human Bondage

Last night I finished Somerset Maugham’s opus Of Human Bondage which, at 600+ pages, is lengthy even by the generous standards of the bildungsroman. The middle part of the book is occupied with what is arguably the novel’s best-remembered episode: young Philip’s miserable love affair with the horrid Mildred. In the introduction to the Penguin edition, University of Saskatchewan professor Robert Calder describes her as having “few redeeming qualities,” but I would go further and venture she has none whatsoever. Philip’s love for her is by turns baffling, enraging, and fascinating. Calder posits that Philip is enslaved by the need to redress her initial spurning of him. In this, he is abetted by the insecurity of his deformity (a club-foot) and an undeveloped sexuality.

Harrowing as it is, the portions of the novel which spoke directly to me--especially at this point in my life (especially, in fact, this week in my life)--were not so much those which pertained to Mildred, but rather Philip’s casting-about for meaning and direction in life. Raised by his uncle, an unaffectionate and miserly country curate, Philip, in the first of many characteristic acts of rejection, declines a scholarship to Oxford and elects to study German in Heidelberg. From there, his wanderings take him eventually to Paris, where, upon the suicide of a fellow art student, he becomes disillusioned with the bohemian life. Next, the protagonist returns to England and London where he becomes apprentice to a chartered accountant, a position he botches totally and is forced to leave. Finally, he settles on medicine, his father’s profession, and he sets off again to London to attend school.

Throughout it all, the meager inheritance left to him by his parents depletes, and in the novel’s final quarter Philip is made destitute by both a loss on the stock market and an astonishing act of cruelty on the part of Mildred. He is forced to leave medical school and live on the street. It is here that, as I was reading in Sabor y Cultura on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, I felt that Philip’s plight touched a nerve with me particularly. A few choice passages which set my heart racing with uncomfortable recognition are here reprinted:

“It was because he could not believe in the reality of his experience that he did not give way to utter despair.”

“His uncle and the solicitor would of course do something for him, but he dreaded their reproaches [at his profligacy]. He did not want anyone to reproach him: he clenched his teeth and repeated that what had happened was inevitable just because it had happened.”

“He tried with all his might not to think of the life he was leading.”

“Philip thought of those early days in Heidelberg when Hayward, capable of great things, had been full of enthusiasm for the future and how, little by little, achieving nothing, he had resigned himself to failure. Now he was dead. His death had been as futile as his life. He died ingloriously, of a stupid disease, failing once more, even at the end, to accomplish anything. It was the same now as if he had never lived.”

Philip eventually rights himself, but it does not come without a cost. The dreams which had given his youth such a fire are virtually extinguished by the novel’s troublingly upbeat ending, and Philip’s attempt to convince us (and himself) that he is satisfied with the dull bourgeois safety which awaits him in a passionless, anodyne marriage is not entirely convincing. That being said, the misery of poverty, which Maugham depicts with vivid immediacy, convinces thoroughly--and the novel is uniquely frank in its treatment of fiscal affairs and their importance to the life of the soul. Two years after leaving medical school and being reduced virtually to a pauper’s life, Philip at last receives a modest inheritance from his uncle who dies after long illness. Having finally become solvent, Philip remarks upon the folly of romanticized poverty:

“He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. He knew that the lack made a man petty, mean, grasping; it distorted his character and caused him to view the world from a vulgar angle; when you had to consider every penny, money became of grotesque importance.”

This assessment squares with my own limited experience and the notion that although money itself may not make one happy, its lack will almost certainly bring unhappiness, if not, as in Philip’s case, outright despair. As the bitter and aged art instructor Foinet remarks to Philip in Paris, “money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make complete use of the other five.” “There is nothing,” he continues, “so degrading as the constant anxiety about one’s means of livelihood.”

These days, my own anxiety encompasses both income and the search for a meaningful life. Philip is thirty when Of Human Bondage ends and he finds himself married and settled into a steady profession. My nearness in age to Maugham’s surrogate/protagonist notwithstanding, I would like to think my story diverges completely from Philip’s in that I have always been certain of my desire to act. Where Philip’s journey was marked by its continually changing aim, my own life has consisted of constant recalibration of means to the same, consistent end. It is only very recently that I have allowed myself to consider abandoning that very end which had once, almost exclusively, defined me, but to which I have lately felt a slave.

No one, of course, should be made to feel a slave to anything, and I am perhaps exaggerating the pull of acting’s promise. In Philip’s case, it is a revelation late in the novel of life’s meaninglessness, which ironically sets him free: “If life was meaningless,” he notes, “the world was robbed of its cruelty.” True enough, I say. The question is not whether there’s a point to life, but whether one can find one’s happiness in the rubble. That remains to be seen.

A Survey of Recent Writers Strike Coverage

As the Writers Strike heads into its sixth week, one is tempted to quote from Joan Didion’s essay on the last Writers Strike in 1988. Didion contended that the strike wasn’t so much about money but rather “respect, and about whether the people who made the biggest money were or were not going to give a little to the people who made the less big money.” This time around, public opinion seems to be squarely on the side of the writers. As reported in the Los Angeles Times on December 6, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has hired a PR firm to counter the image that has gained currency in the media of a coterie of money-grubbing moguls resentfully pinching pennies from the talented artists in their employ. The alliance, the Times reports, “initially considered hiring Joe Lockhart, a former White House spokesman for Clinton, but he wasn't available.”

Variety recently reported on the discrepancy between east and west coast coverage of the strike in an article that touched on coastal differences generally where the Industry is concerned. “Compared with Hollywood,” Variety notes, “where seemingly every waiter, hairstylist and P.A. is hustling a script, entertainment in Gotham -- especially the narrow slice directly affected by the walkout -- is a flyspeck in a city bustling with finance, fashion, publishing and 8 million other stories.”

(This, incidentally, aligns with my assessment of Los Angeles after five weeks in residence. Last night I remarked to a friend that I think I would like the city a good deal more if I wasn’t an aspiring actor. To those who are, of necessity, painfully aware of the movements of the biz, LA provides no escape and the ubiquity of Industry chatter can sometimes feel mightily oppressive. Gridskipper, the Gawker Media “urban travel guide,” touched on this subject in an Onion-esque titled bar guide dated on December 5: “LA Bars for Getting Hit On by Unemployed Industry Douchebags.” The article lists the likeliest Hollywood pubs for unwelcome pick-ups by sad-sack Tinseltown aspirants: “You know the type: He's been on unemployment for the past six months, but now things are 'really starting to come together,' like he's going to start his own agency with none of this bullshit, and he's also finally going to get SAG, and his buddy has this idea for a script that's guaranteed to sell, and when it does he's, like, totally going to produce it.”)

Further Writers Strike coverage notes the difficulty of conducting a strike with a union whose members’ disposable income—and ability to endure a strike—varies wildly. The LA Times ran an article on December 6 regarding various discounts and benefits offered to west coast WGA members. “The union also has a list of 40 places in and around Hollywood with free or discounted items and services for writers with a union card,” writes the Times. The Times also interviews a "life coach" (seriously) who is offering free counseling to union members. “So far, however, she said no one has taken her up on her offer.” Clairvoyant Kris Cahill, on the other hand, “said she had received [a] nibble from a writer on strike.”

Meanwhile, late-night talk show hosts continue to pay their striking staffs out of their own pockets, a stop-gap solution which, as Bill Carter writes in the New York Times, can only continue for so long: “Estimates of what it is costing the hosts range from about $150,000 a week to as high as $250,000 a week, depending on the size of the staffs.” Carter notes that some hosts are better equipped than others to continue with this type of arrangement. David Letterman, for instance, is the highest-paid host, making around $35 million a year. “But some of the other hosts are making single-digit millions — a lot of money, but obviously not enough to pay out hundreds of thousands a week indefinitely, especially because the hosts themselves are going without pay during the strike.” At the same time, the studios producing these shows are currently “saving more than $1 million a week in costs for those shows, and still were taking in significant revenue from advertisers for repeats.”

Finally, Los Angeles Times columnist—and WGA member—Joel Stein writes about his experience on the picket line and the opportunity it provided him for networking, an oft-noted side benefit of the strike. “Picket lines,” Stein writes, “are the best networking opportunity ever invented.” He continues:

“My schmoozing, though, was amateurish compared to that of a small group of super-attractive people amassing spellbound crowds. It turned out they were not writers at all but actors. ‘I think networking is all this is,’ explained ‘American Dad’ writer Chris McKenna. ‘Especially the SAG [Screen Actors Guild] people. It's, “Hey I love your show. If you ever need voice work ...” and then they give you their card.’”

Stein’s finest moment on the picket line occurred when Seinfeld creator and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David showed up to lend his support: “When I introduced myself, [David] responded, ‘Joel Stein, the writer?’ I felt very important until I realized that was the safest thing in the world to say to someone on a WGA picket line.”