Mrs. Craddock (edition 1979)

W. Somerset Maugham

Mrs Craddock

Vintage Classics, Paperback, 2000.
8vo. xi+292 pp. Preface for The Collected Edition, 1955 [v-xi].

First published by Heinemann, 1902 [bowdlerized].
The original edition first published by Heinemann, 1928 [with minor revisions and a new preface].
Preface further expanded for The Collected Edition, 1955.

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From a historical point of view, Mrs Craddock is Somerset Maugham's most important novel after Of Human Bondage, his ninth work in the genre and the first book from his mature years. But Mrs Craddock was written as early as 1900. It was only Maugham's third novel, after a short slum tale, Liza of Lambeth (1897), and one lame (and lurid) historical ''romance'', The Making of a Saint (1898), though it was published fourth – after The Hero (1901) because it was considered much too daring for its time and some passages had to be omitted.

At the time Maugham was almost completely unknown and his bibliography included only one collection of short stories more (Orientations, 1899). Considering all that, Mrs Craddock shows an astonishing advance, both in the matter and in the manner, and is not such a huge surprise that it was one of his few early books which Maugham chose to reprint in The Collected Edition more than a three decades later.

Apparently the book was first published in this condition, with all omissions from the original manuscript restored, a new preface and a number of minor corrections by the author, as early as 1928. In 1937 it appeared in Heinemann's The Collected Edition and in 1955 was reprinted with the Preface further revised. This Preface occupies an honourable place in the long series of introductory pieces Maugham wrote for this prestigious edition. It is one of his longest, most informative and most fascinating prefaces. And it is important to be read before the novel itself.

The preface is also one of Maugham's funniest pieces of writing. An essential part of his charm always was that he never took himself very seriously. Don't get me wrong. He did take his writing extremely seriously. It was by far the most important thing in his life. But he didn't take himself, and indeed the world, too seriously. This is especially true about his younger self, both as a man and as a writer. This is how Maugham describes – to my mind hilariously – the corrections he made to his own book:

The author had been dead for many years, and I used the manuscript as I would that of a departed friend whose book, unrevised by him, had been entrusted to me for publication. I left it as it was, with all its faults, and contented myself with minor emendations. The author's punctuation was haphazard, and I did my best to put some method into it. I replaced the dashes which he used, I fear from ignorance of a complicated art, with colons, semi-colons and commas; I omitted the rows of dots with which he sought to draw the reader's attention to the elegance of a sentiment or the subtlety of an observation, and I replaced with a full stop the marks of exclamation that stood all over the page, like telegraph poles, apparently to emphasise the author's astonishment at his own acumen.

[A little later, while still having fun at his once-self, Maugham becomes more serious:]

But I crossed out a great many somes, certains and rathers, for the author of this book had an unhappy disinclination to make an unqualified statement. I was ruthless with the adverbs. When he used five words to say what he could have said in one, I replaced them with the one; and when it seemed to me that he had not said what he wanted to, I ventured to change what he said for what I could not but think he meant. English is a very difficult language to write, and the author, with whose work I was taking the liberties I have described, had never been taught it. The little he knew he had picked up here and there. No one had ever explained to him the difficulties of composition or the mysteries of style. He began to write as a child begins to walk. He took pains to study good models, but, with none to guide him, he did not always choose his models wisely, and he devoted much care to writers who now seem to most of us affected and jejune.

[Maugham finishes this delicious preface with a neat self-assassination on the hapless young fellow. This can be corroborated by his other writings and, if you choose to believe, was no mere pose. Maugham of the late 1920s was a vastly different man – which also means a vastly different writer – than the one from the late 1890s:]

He was not only a foolish young man; he was supercilious, cocksure and often wrong-headed. If I met him now I should take an immediate dislike to him.

The preface also contains a most fascinating description of the people and the times – the landed gentry during the 1890s – the novel exclusively deals with. It is of great importance to keep in mind a number of aspects. Even by the late 1920s the late Victorian era must have looked unbearably old-fashioned. Today it looks, to me, as if it happened when Ancient Greece and Imperial Rome still existed. It requires a powerful imagination to picture the gentlefolk from the English countryside at the time. Everything in them, from their clothing to their characters, was very, very different than what is common nowadays. London was the only part of the world, besides their local neighbourhood, that many of them knew; ''the Continent'' was a fabled land that few had ever seen.

Most important of all, the landed gentry were stupendously class-conscious folk, rather sexist and somewhat pre-occupied with religious devotion. To give the word to Mr Maugham again:

It was the end of an era, but the landed gentry, who were soon to lose the power they had so long enjoyed, were the last to have a suspicion of it. Owing to the agricultural depression, land was no longer a source of profit, but, except for that, they were quite satisfied that things should go on as they had in the past. They had only disdain for the moneyed class that was already beginning to take their place. They were gentlefolk. It is true that for the most part they were narrow, stupid and intolerant; prudish, formal and punctilious. But they had their points, and I do not think the author was quite fair to them. They did their duty according to their rights. That some should be born to possess a fine estate, and others to work upon it at a miserable wage, was in the nature of things; and it was not for them to cavil at the decrees of inscrutable Providence. The landed gentry were on the whole decent, honourable and upright. They were devoid of envy. They had good manners and were kindly and hospitable. But they had outgrown their use, and perhaps it was inevitable that the course of events should sweep them away.

This extensive quotation is justified by the hardly disputable fact that Maugham was by far his best critic. It is rather unfortunate that he wrote very little about his works, for his criticism, especially as regards to his early works, is fascinating and illuminating. One does not, of course, have to agree with everything. But one is unwise to neglect anything. The following passage is revealing both about some strange tendencies in the novel and, on a more personal level, about the author as a young man:

I do not know why, unless he had learnt it from Matthew Arnold, he was of opinion that the English were philistines; and for wit, brilliance and culture you must go to the French. He never missed a chance to have a fling at his own countrymen. With a certain naivete he took the French at their own estimate of themselves, and never doubted that Paris was the centre of civilisation. He was better acquainted with the contemporary literature of France than with that of his own country. […] The only excuse I can make for his attitude, besides his youth, is that for him England signified constraint and convention, whereas France signified freedom and adventure. I highly disapprove of a way he had now and then of stepping out of his novel and in sarcastic terms directly addressing the reader. Where he learnt this bad practice I cannot tell.

Keeping all this in mind, let's have a look inside the book.

On re-reading Mrs Craddock I was surprised how engrossing I found it. The previous time it was a chore; it took me some three times more time to read it than the thrice longer Of Human Bondage did. But this time it read like a thriller. To be sure, there are some verbose descriptions of nature and there are some clumsy, even turgid, passages that the mature Maugham of the 1920s could not possibly have penned. The prose is rather florid and elaborate, bearing little relation to the simplicity for which Willie was to become notorious later. But it's no big deal. As I have already said, for a fellow of 26 with such slender bibliography, the novel is a spectacular achievement.

Mrs Craddock is somewhat unusual in that it is very much a character-driven book. Although the novel is written in the third person, and from several points of view, by far the greatest part of it is occupied by the mind of Bertha Craddock. Some thirty-five years later Maugham repeated the experiment of viewing the world through a woman's eyes with Theatre (1937) and Julia Lambert, a great deal more accomplished novel in every aspect and a vastly different main character, respectively (not to mention that the world, and England in particular, changed out of recognition during these four decades).

There is not much of a plot but there is enough to allow for masterful depiction and development of at least one character. In short, Bertha Ley falls madly in love with Edward Craddock, marries him against all social rules and takes the consequences of her action. In addition to the married couple, there are some delightful bonuses in the minor characters. These include cynical observers like Miss Ley, dashing playboys like Gerald Vaudrey, and a colourful bunch of country folks well suitable for Maugham to sharpen the rapier of his social satire. If you happen to be bothered by spoilers, stop here.

Spoilers ahead.

It might be a good idea to start with a little observation about the plot. Despite its very static nature, it is not in the least stale and it seldom drags. To enliven the otherwise harrowing marital drama, Maugham – even then, at 26, already a consummate craftsman – introduces a number of different episodes. These include a honeymoon in London, a tennis party at the Craddocks, Bertha's winter in Rome, and her stay in Paris (in the form of letters, more alluded to than described). Most important of all are Miss Ley's cold and rational mind, a very fine corrective of Bertha's impulsive nature, and Gerald Vaudrey, the romance with whom is of crucial importance.

Bertha's marriage is a nearly complete failure, and the reason for that is the complete incompatibility of her character with that of her husband. It is easy to be impatient with her, especially in the beginning when she is head over heals in love and Edward is perfect, everything he says beautiful, everything he does wonderful. But one is unwise to be angry with Bertha. She has a terrible defect that deserves sympathy, not contempt. Maugham takes pains to emphasize her overactive, ''fervid'' imagination that ''seldom permitted her to see things in any but false light''. This unfortunate ability to perceive everything larger than life is, to my mind, not without some inspirational value. It certainly makes for a sharp contrast with the painfully literal minds of Bertha's neighbours in the country.

The development of Bertha's feelings for Edward is one of the places where the mature Maugham can be sensed most strongly. It is beautifully described, with many subtle nuances outlined with great clarity. Bertha's love for her husband finally dies exactly as it was born: more or less instantly. But in between she runs the whole gamut from ecstatic adulation to passionate hate to, finally, supreme indifference. When Edward dies – thrown by his horse, a plot detail I am especially pleased with – Bertha is quite intelligent and self-conscious to realise, and be worried about, her own callousness, her own feeling of relief, of a newly-born freedom.

The ending of the book is curiously ambiguous and disturbing. Just like in the end of Of Human Bondage I am not at all sure whether Philip finally escapes from the bondage or falls in its greatest trap, here I am left a little at sea what it was all about. One of the book's greatest ironies is certainly the very first sentence: ''This book might be called also The Triumph of Love''. In fact, a much more appropriate title would be ''The Triumph over Love''.

The whole book, spread over a period of about ten years, is really Bertha's fight to overcome the bondage of love (another striking, if superficial, similarity with Philip Carey). Does she succeed? I am not sure. In the last pages she is still but thirty years old and, as made clear by the memorable episode with her swimming naked in the sea, every bit as sensuous as she was in the beginning of the story. It is a little chilling to reflect how her life would develop further, what her next falling in love would bring. One hopes that after two nearly catastrophic encounters with Cupid, she knows how to manage her heart.

Though a most intelligent woman, Bertha could never make up her mind about love. Occasionally she despairs that it's useless and hopeless and causes only suffering. But for the most part she is convinced that it is by far the greatest thing in the world. But if this is so, why did she do nothing when she finally met somebody (Gerald) who could fully respond to her flaming passion? That's a glaring contradiction and it must have been deliberate. She is clearly as madly in love with him as he is with her. Yet she doesn't ask him to stay in London, nor does it occur to her to elope with him in the States. Why not?

The latter would have been especially wonderful. The lovers would have enjoyed themselves and their affair, since they are both highly intelligent people, would have ended gracefully with the death of the sexual passion; or, even better, would have grown into something more permanent, if less ardent. Moreover, the beaches of Florida seem the perfect place for the occasion, far away from the prudish and priggish Englishmen that are simply dying to pry into your private affairs, apparently authorized by God to do so. Of course such an affair represents a major break of the social conventions. But if love is that strong, as Bertha believes most of the time, surely it can take that, can it not?

All this, it seems to me, makes Bertha look much like a pawn or a puppet. And this, most disturbingly of all, not in the hands of some mighty Providence or Fate with the capital ''F'', but in the chains of love. In the case of Edward she has a fine excuse, but in the case of Gerald she has not. I wonder if this ambivalence about love is not one of the reasons for the enduring popularity of this book, a very surprising popularity for so early a work of Maugham. The greatest benefit for the reader is that Bertha is intelligent enough to recognise it. This book, indeed, might have been called The Futility of Love.

Also, it may well be that the story is more complex than that.

To get a further insight into Bertha's perplexing soul, where everything is black or white but nothing is grey, we must examine Edward's mind as well. There are several features in him which signed the death warrant of their marriage from the very beginning. For one thing, Edward turned out to be a cold fish in the bed and, for another, intellectually he is quite inferior to Bertha. There is no better illustration of the latter than the books both newlyweds took for their honeymoon: Meditations of Marcus Aurelius for Bertha and The Mystery of the Six-fingered Woman, which Edward bought because the title seemed attractive to him.

But never mind that. The main problem is that Edward is a stupendously insensitive fellow. He is not deliberately cruel or anything like that, nor is he some kind of callous monster. The man is simply, naturally and completely incapable of feeling for his fellows. He genuinely lacks empathy, and he is certainly not intelligent enough to realise it. His normal reaction to Bertha's constant and admittedly annoying scenes is telling: ''Women are like chickens, when they click and cackle sit tight and take no notice.'' He is the epitome of mediocrity in each and every sense, intellectual and emotional. He is the chap who is always cheerful and nothing can disturb his equanimity. This is simply because he doesn't feel anything too deeply. Bertha's greatest problem, of course, is exactly the opposite. Small wonder that their marriage is unsuccessful.

But note that Maugham goes to a lot of trouble to secure the reader's sympathy by Edward, if necessarily not to same degree as the one for Bertha (although this, I guess, depends on the reader). He is neither a buffoon nor a caricature. In fact, he is not entirely indifferent to his wife either, as clearly shown by the care he lavishes upon her in the end of the book. Moreover, Edward's common sense is an admirable quality in itself. So is his ability to keep his head in an emergency, as demonstrated during the harrowing night of Bertha's delivery. It is unfortunate that these wholly commendable virtues should be somewhat impossible to co-exist without certain lack of intelligence and emotional insensitivity. But that's the way it is.

Edward is described perfectly by the cynical Miss Ley as ''a miracle of rural excellence''. Later, in a conversation with the exceptionally dissolute and utterly charming Gerald, she is even more eloquent:

'My dear Gerald, Edward is a model: he is the typical Englishman, as he flourishes in the country, upright and honest, healthy, dogmatic, moral and rather stupid. I esteem him enormously, and I ought to like him much better than you, who are a disgraceful scamp.'
'I wonder why you don't.'
'Because I'm a wicked old woman; and I've learnt by long experience that people generally keep their vices to themselves, but insist on throwing their virtues in your face. And if you don't happen to have any of your own, you get the worst of the encounter.'

So why does Bertha fall in love with a guy who is so obviously so unsuitable for her? To be sure, the sexual element is powerful, at least in the beginning when Edward is tall, strong and handsome, the dream of every woman; and when later he becomes fat, with bloated skin and thin hair, this does have its effect on Bertha. But this is not the whole story. Far from it. If it were merely lust, the marriage would have ended far sooner than the years it actually took to disintegrate. My own tentative theory is that Bertha, if only unconsciously in the beginning, had a staunch respect for qualities love normally doesn't care about. She might have felt, perhaps she had some dim hope, that Edward's almost pathologically literal view of the world would act as a kind of antidote to her feverish nature. It might have turned out that way. Towards the end, from the pedestal of her Olympian indifference, Bertha was able to appreciate Edward's virtues as never before:

She wondered whether absence had increased his affection, or whether it was she who had changed. Was he not unchanging as a rock? She knew that she was as unstable as water and as variable as the summer winds. Had he always been kind and considerate; and had she, demanding passion that it was not in him to feel, been blind to his deep tenderness? Expecting nothing from him now, she was astonished to find he had so much to offer. But she felt sorry if he loved her, for she could give him nothing in return but complete indifference; she was even surprised to find herself so utterly callous.

It is also possible that the whole thing was a complete delusion on Bertha's side. In this case the chances are that it would not have worked at all, even if they had had the chance. The gap between them, even in their late and relatively happy years, was still pretty huge. One may at least hope that the next time she falls in love Bertha would have an affair, rather than marriage, and then – only after the initial passion has cooled down – decide what to do.

However that may be, the book does raise a number of profound questions about the nature and the value of love, the (in)compatibility between essentially different natures, the role of the mind and the power of the body in our lives, and other such tricky conundrums. And the book not only raises the questions, but it actually supplies some speculative, provocative and stimulating answers. Ironically, Maugham's notion about the novel being a kind of late Victorian portrait is the least interesting part about it.

Among the minor pleasures of the book, at least in terms of characterisation, Miss Ley must take the palm, no matter that she appears very little. She is the proverbial sharp-tongued spinster for whom life is a playground; her motto might be something like ''so long as one keeps one's head cool, one can get a lot of fun out of it''. Several years later she developed further by appearing as a more central character in The Merry-Go-Round (1904), another of Maugham's fine early achievements, and a few decades later, being the alter ego of his young self, she was transformed into the more sophisticated Ashenden or the nameless first person narrator. Perhaps her closest relative among Maugham's creations from his mature years is Mrs Tabbret, the woman of the world (vastly cynical, of course) from the play The Sacred Flame (1928). Nothing can describe Miss Ley better than few of her words, added to those already quoted:

Marriage is always a hopeless idiocy for a woman who has enough of her own to live upon.

...and one's greatest duty in this world is to leave people alone.

The fact is that few women can be happy with only one husband. I believe that the only solution of the marriage question is legalised polyandry.

Miss Ley is by all means a most admirable creature. But the most important lessons to be learned from her are negative ones. For one thing, her rationality is quite excessive, and her coldness is sometimes scary; her intelligence makes her a great deal more interesting than the dumb Edward, but it is not always easy to like her. For another, sometimes she is curiously obtuse, no doubt because she prides herself on her own insight into the minds of other people just a little too much. That's a very dangerous trap simply because it is so easy to fall in it; and it is very flattering to one's vanity to think that one knows everything that happens in the heads of the others. Of course one never does. And one should never forget that. Last and least, there are in Miss Ley, especially during the affair between Bertha and Gerald, some hints of prudishness that are rather amusing. She is a fascinating creature all the same, if sketchily drawn.

Other minor bonuses in the novel include Maugham's earliest attempts at social satire, something he would later polish to the point of perfection, and a number of ironical touches that make the reading so much more entertaining. Only a few of these can be addressed here.

Probably the most amusing touch of irony is the difference between Bertha's opinion of Edward and that of their neighbours in the country. This is simply hilarious. In the beginning Bertha has to fight everybody (except Miss Ley who, as always, is content to observe) because her marriage is scandalous in its disregard of class. She is the mistress of Court Leys and, coming of age, inherits a good deal of money. Edward is her tenant and, by comparison, penniless. The reaction of Dr Ramsay, Bertha's guardian, is especially amusing. He is positive that Edward is an honest and upright and full of virtues ''gentleman-farmer'', but he nevertheless accuses the poor fellow of being a fortune-hunter. It is quite clear, of course, that he can't stomach the class discrepancy.

(Maugham never had any patience with class prejudices, nor with various forms of snobbishness, and he seldom missed the opportunity to have fun with them. Such themes are more than prominent in his later work. Novels like The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Razor's Edge (1944), or short stories like ''The Creative Impulse'', ''The Round Dozen'', ''Jane'', ''The Human Element'' and ''The Door of Opportunity'', to name but a few, make an abundant use of social satire. Needless to say, these later works are much more subtle than anything in Mrs Craddock. Many of Maugham's unforgettable social and intellectual snobs – to a smaller extent, his class-conscious freaks as well – are complex creatures with much to recommend them. But that is another story.)

Quite unexpectedly, however, Edward soon becomes the greatest local celebrity. Everybody adores him because of his endless kindness and his outstanding farming abilities. Nobody has any idea of his spiritual emptiness, nor can anybody but Bertha comprehend it at all. Dr Ramsay confesses that he was wrong and Edward is indeed a capital bloke. When Bertha remonstrates with him that her husband is a complete moron, and callous to the bone, he can't for the life of him understand. The glorious climax of Bertha's disillusionment with Edward's perfection marvellously coincides with his entering into the local politics where, of course, he soon becomes the darling of the County Council. With a little help from the London circles, one suspects, he can easily run for a King, perhaps under the name ''Edward the Dumb''.

The abominably class-conscious character of those ancient times is also lampooned in a number of minor characters, most notably the superbly supercilious Mrs Branderton or the even more lost in self-adulation Mrs Mayston Ryle. Despite being from the same class, they think that Bertha is putting on airs, yet it never occurs to them that she has very good reasons for doing so. Though only twenty-one, she has travelled widely through the Continent and she is more widely read than all of her countrymen taken together. The contrast is very effective and very funny. Of course the mighty ladies are outraged at Bertha's crime against their class but later fall under Edward's spell as well. This is even funnier.

In later years Maugham had little respect for the clergy or for the army, too, and there are some impeccably elegant, yet scathing, attacks on both here. The religious fanatics are lambasted in the characters of the fiercely pious Miss Glover, always keen on mortifying her flesh and showering Bertha with devastating sympathy, and her meek brother, the Vicar of Leanham, who is memorably described as ''resignation driven to death''. As for the army, the intensely stupid General Hancock and his two daughters, who were ''dreadfully plain, but pretended not to know it'' and whose ''united ages made the respectable total of sixty-five years'', make brutally effective targets. Another very minor character, Mr Atthilll Bacot, just by the way comes with the most merciless observation on the matter:

As far as I can make out, when a man has shown himself incapable of doing anything else they make him a general, just to encourage the others. I understand the reason. It's a great thing, of course, for parents sending their sons into the army to be able to say: "Well, he may be a fool, but there's no reason why he shouldn't become a general.

In his very next novel (published before this one), The Hero (1901), Maugham had another opportunity to poke fun at the narrow minds and vast prejudices of the fellows in the army or of the ladies much too full of themselves. He didn't miss this one, either.

Quite apart from all that, Maugham himself has some bits of wisdom dispersed through the text that are of more than passing interest. Sometimes these do sound preachy, especially the reprehensible practice of addressing the reader directly that the author remarked upon in his preface; I imagine Willie blushed fiercely while reading them in his old age. But some are gems worth quoting and pondering. Here is one favourite that might have come from the mouth of Miss Ley:

Happily men don't realise how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient.

In his authoritative study Bibliography of the Works of W. Somerset Maugham (1973), Raymond Toole Stott was very high-handed, and plain wrong, when he stated that, with the possible exception of Liza, this novel is the only one among Maugham's early works which is ''today at all readable''. This is pure nonsense. But Mr Stott also remarked, very perceptively, that Mrs Craddock is the first novel in which distinctive hints of the mature Maugham can be discerned. Now this is quite true: beside his first two novels, this one is a towering achievement. In a way, this novel is historically analogous, if literary inferior of course, to Of Human Bondage (1915) as a work in which Willie finally discovered himself, his own true and unique style. Of course at the turn of the century he could not have known that this style would change out of recognition a decade or so later.

With the possible exception of his first collection of short stories, Mrs Craddock is certainly the first place where Maugham showed a real promise for the future. Then again, short stories always came more easily to Willie. I guess he found the form more appealing; just like Tchaikovsky was never sure of his grasp of form when he composed symphonies, so Willie was always, I think, a little uneasy with the novel. Nevertheless, he did a superb job with this one on all fronts: style, content, structure. Its faults are minor. Its merits are considerable. I must have been very drunk to give it two stars the last time I read it. Now I have re-read it mostly for its historical importance in the Maugham canon. But, as it turned out, it has a great deal more to offer. I'll save the rest for the next re-reading. ( )

Mrs Craddock is an emotional, witty and thought-provoking story about a young woman who marries beneath her in a fit of passion and ends up with a husband and a life that are not what she thought they would be. Somerset Maugham writes women so well that it's often hard to believe that the female characters' observations and inner musings were written by a man. I came across lines that seemed like they could've been written by Jane Austen or Dorothy Parker, and it also put me in mind of Kate Chopin's The Awakening. I fell in love with the title character. A wonderful book - highly recommended.

***************

A side note I found interesting: The forward in my edition talked about how hard it was to find a publisher for this book because of its "controversial" content. Maugham actually had to leave out quite a few scenes to get it published. (All of which have been restored in current editions.)

After reading the book all I can conclude is that it must have been controversial simply to have an unhappily married female character who was dissatisfied with her husband even though he was a decent man. There wasn't too much more than that to object to. Maybe that shouldn't surprise me for a book published in 1902, but it really did! Especially since Maugham had already had critical and commercial success as an author by that time. ( )