The Razor's Edge

“The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end, he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. Then my book, if it is read at all, will be read only for what intrinsic interest it may possess. But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.” 

Maugham foreshadows the end of the story in which Larry, having achieved his quest for meaning, becomes a Christ figure, a holy man passing briefly through the lives of other people, changing them, perhaps, but remaining invisible himself. In light of this analogue, this passage shows Maugham writing about Larry much as the apostles wrote about Jesus in the synoptic Gospels of the New Testament.

For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they were born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learned to walk, the games they played as children, the old wives’ tales they overheard, the food they ate, the schools they attended, the sports they followed, the poets they read, and the God they believed in. It is all these things that have made them what they are, and these are the things that you can’t come to know by hearsay, you can only know them if you have lived them. You can only know them if you are them.”

Throughout the story, people like Isabel and Gray are motivated by the peculiarly American value of work for work’s sake as well as the sense of American exceptionalism and the obligation to participate in and contribute to “The Great Experiment.” Older nations like England and France are steeped in different values, therefore Maugham, an Englishman, can never entirely understand the feelings and compulsions of his American characters.

In listing the kinds of experience that shape an individual, Maugham employs parallelism (e.g., the food they ate, the schools they attended) to clearly delineate each item in the list. This also creates a euphonic poetic rhythm. Typically, speakers order a list of items from the simplest object to the most complex—but Maugham reverses that order, which gradually increases the speed and force of the paragraph. He opens at his normally languorous pace, then as each phrase grows successively shorter, the reader has the sense of being pulled downhill from a walk to a headlong run.

“[Elliott Templeton] was a colossal snob. He was a snob without shame. He would put up with any affront, he would ignore any rebuff, he would swallow any rudeness to get asked to a party he wanted to go to or to make a connection with some crusty old dowager of great name.” 

Maugham gives a succinct and slightly comic summation of Elliott’s character. “Snob” in itself is an amusing word to repeat, and again, Maugham employs parallelism and meter to impart a lively bounce that reflects Elliott’s energy as well as his essential silliness and superficiality.

“I have what I can only call an intuition that there was in the soul of that boy some confused striving, whether of half-thought-out ideas or of dimly felt emotions I could not tell, which filled him with a restlessness that urged him he did not know whither.” 

Maugham summarizes Larry’s driving conflict. At this point, Larry doesn’t even have enough knowledge to define what he wants to know. The first half of his journey will be to acquire enough knowledge to be able to identify what he ultimately seeks.

“Let’s be sensible. A man must work, Larry. It’s a matter of self-respect. This is a young country, and it’s a man’s duty to take part in its activities […] There’s never been such a chance for a young man. I should’ve thought you’d be proud to take part in the work that lies before us. It’s such a wonderful adventure.”

Isabel expresses the American ideal and the sense of national euphoria created by the financial boom of the 1920s. She has a particular definition of work. She rejects Larry’s suggestion that he might like to work in a garage. She sees him selling bonds in Gray’s father’s company or engaging in some other industry that will fuel market expansion.

“Isabel had been brought up in a certain way and she accepted the principles that had been instilled into her. She did not think of money, because she had never known what it was not to have all she needed, but she was instinctively aware of its importance. It meant power, influence, and social consequence. It was a natural and obvious thing that a man should earn it. That was his plain life’s work.” 

This illustrates two conflicting ideas about money that Maugham explores in the story. Isabel can afford to regard money as unimportant because she has never had to experience want. She has no sense of money’s necessity to survival because she has never had to work for it and never expects to.

Larry also regards money as a convenience rather than a necessity because he knows he can always work for it. His wants are so small that he must work only as much as he cares to. Ultimately, he concludes that it is burdensome to have more money than he needs to supply his immediate requirements.

“You know, at one time I made quite a little reputation for myself as a humorist by the simple process of telling the truth. It came as such a surprise to most people that they thought I was being funny.” 

Maugham said of his own writing that he invented nothing. His strength wasn’t in imagination (he claimed to have none) but in his keen observation and understanding of the people around him. No doubt that insight could be funny to people startled by a truth they hadn’t previously recognized for themselves.

“Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn’t that that made her evil. Evil doesn’t spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defenses it set her free to be herself. Don’t waste your pity on her; she’s now what at heart she always was.”

Isabel is making a statement on the nature of evil, but the statement’s veracity is dubious. Her words may be an answer to Larry’s question as to why a good God permits evil to exist, or they may merely reflect Isabel’s impatience with what she perceives as frailty; the narrative makes fairly obvious that it is the latter case. She cannot possibly understand Sophie’s grief and self-destructive impulses when Isabel herself, while fond of her husband and children, has no passionate attachment to them.

“When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself? At best he can only sacrifice his only begotten son.”

In addition to expressing some philosophical doubts about the tenets of Christianity, Maugham is explaining Larry’s compulsion to rescue Sophie. Self-sacrifice may be the one way in which humankind can exceed God, but that in itself is vanity. At this time, although Larry has developed some power of healing, he has not achieved that degree of enlightenment that would enable him to realize that Sophie doesn’t want to be saved.

“Darling, when it came to the point I couldn’t see myself being Mary Magdalene to his Jesus Christ. No, sir.”

Sophie expresses her sense that being rescued and redeemed by Larry felt demeaning to her. Larry, although exhibiting some powers of healing, had no right to impose that power on Sophie, and he made her miserable by doing so. Larry may be on the path to achieving enlightenment, but he fell, temporarily, to temptation.

“I was moved and I think a few tears trickled down my cheeks. An old, kind friend. It made me sad to think how silly, useless, and trivial his life and been. It mattered very little now that he had gone to so many parties and hobnobbed with all those princes, dukes, and counts. They had forgotten him already.”

Regarding the search for meaning and higher purpose, Maugham regards Elliott as a failure. In the life Elliott pursued, he was not rewarded with the same kindness and loyalty he gave to the people he admired. However, in the novel’s introduction, Maugham remarks on how little influence Larry may have had on the world. There’s a parallel between these two men. Both sought something higher than themselves in their own ways and as they understood it, and both their contributions of kindness to the world may ultimately have no impact. Is one necessarily better than the other? Should their success be measured in terms of the love returned to them?

“I loved flying. I couldn’t describe the feeling it gave me, I only knew I felt proud and happy. In the air, ‘way up, I felt that I was part of something very great and very beautiful […] I felt that I was at home with infinitude.”

In his career in the air corps, Larry caught a glimpse of something greater than himself, and later, when he had his first close encounter with death, those two experiences combined into the driving passion that shaped the rest of his life. Larry can’t describe the feeling of satisfaction—and he feels he doesn’t need to. All that matters is the unity with transcendent reality.

“I wondered how they could continue to pray without misgiving to their heavenly father to give them their daily bread. Do children besiege their earthly father to give them sustenance? They expect him to do it, they neither feel nor need to feel gratitude to him for doing it, and we have only blame for a man who brings children into the world that he can’t or won’t provide for. It seemed to me that if an omnipotent creator was not prepared to provide his creatures with the necessities of existence, material and spiritual, he’d have done better not to create them.”

Maugham had strong moral and philosophical reservations about Christianity and religion in general. He saw its injustices and illogic, and here he expresses, through Larry, his feelings regarding a God who claims that human beings are his children but doesn’t seem to take responsibility for their welfare as a father should.

“‘You had a great deal of success,’ [Larry] went on. ‘Do you want to be praised to your face?’

‘It only embarrasses me.’

‘That’s what I should’ve thought. I couldn’t believe that God wanted it either. We didn’t think much in the air corps of the fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his CO by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.’”

Larry—and through Larry, Maugham the author—expands on his thoughts regarding the relationship of God with his creation. Larry believes that God’s apparent hunger for praise suggests a moral weakness on the part of the deity but also on the part of those who are willing to degrade and debase themselves to support God’s vanity. Returning to the metaphor of God as father, Larry asserts that a good father would not rejoice in the praise and flattery of his children; rather, a father should derive his satisfaction from seeing his children thrive.

Additionally, “do your best according to your lights” reflects Maugham’s conclusion at the end of the book that each of his characters achieved success according to their own understanding.

“‘But how can a purely intellectual conception be a solace to the suffering human race? Men have always wanted a personal God to whom they can turn in distress for comfort and encouragement.’

‘It may be that at some far distant day greater insight will show them that they must look for comfort and encouragement in their own souls. I myself think the need to worship is no more than the survival of an old remembrance of cruel gods that had to be propitiated. I believe that God is within me or nowhere. If that’s so, whom or what might I worship—myself?’”

This is Larry answering the fictional Maugham’s question, but he might be speaking for Maugham the author. Having felt throughout his life like an outsider, Maugham may have had a greater-than-usual inclination to look inward for comfort rather than outward. After the death of his mother when he was six years old, he had no one to whom he could turn for emotional support. Additionally, he had an acute stammer, which further isolated him by making communication difficult and provoking ridicule from other children at school.

“I’ve always felt that there was something pathetic in the founders of a religion who made it a condition of salvation that you should believe in them. It’s as though they needed your faith to have faith in themselves. They remind you of those old pagan gods who grew wan and faint if they were not sustained by the burnt offerings of the devout.”

Again, Maugham valued internal validation over external. He saw it as weakness to look outward for what should be inner enlightenment. He perceived as rather sad those characters who needed the validation of admiration from other people to see themselves as worthy.

“[The yogi] taught that it is not essential to salvation to retire from the world, but only to renounce the self. He taught that work done with no selfish interest purifies the mind and that duties are opportunities afforded to man to sink his separate self and become one with the universal self.”

This has always been Larry’s approach to work. He has no interest in working for gain or acclaim or for any greater cause. When he works, it is only to supply his own basic needs or to keep his body occupied and free his mind from worldly concerns.

“I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as a pure spirit partook of loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained.”

A few paragraphs later, Larry observes that this is similar to what has been described by other mystics before him. This experience occurs at a high place where he can see the sky ahead and above and look down to a lake far below him. As when he is flying, he has this ecstatic experience when he feels himself to be high above the earth and perhaps high above worldly concerns.

“But why should we of the West, we Americans especially, be daunted by decay and death, hunger and thirst, sickness, old age, grief, and dissolution? The spirit of life is strong in us.”

Larry is talking about the philosophy of the transmigration of souls (reincarnation). The goal of each new incarnation is to eventually achieve such perfection that one is released from the endless cycle of life after life. Larry, however, rejects the desire for release. His passion for life is such that the suffering and hardship are no deterrent and are even to be welcomed.

“You Europeans know nothing about America. Because we amass large fortunes you think we care for nothing but money. We care nothing for it; the moment we have it we spend it, sometimes well, sometimes ill, but we spend it. Money is nothing to us; it’s merely the symbol of success. We are the greatest idealists in the world; I happen to think that we set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.”

While Larry himself has no interest in money even as a symbol, he’s able to recognize the value that people like Isabel and Gray place on it. This reflects Maugham’s conclusion at the end of the story that each of his characters has achieved success as they see it. It also illustrates Larry’s ability to love without judgment. He may disagree with Isabel’s and Gray’s values, but he does not see the individuals as contemptible.

“‘You attach more importance to money than I do.’

‘I can well believe it,’ I answered tartly. ‘You see, you’ve always had it and I haven’t. It’s given me what I value almost more than anything else in life—independence. You can’t think what a comfort it’s been to me to think that if I wanted to I could tell anyone in the world to go to hell.’

‘But I don’t want to tell anyone in the world to go to hell, and if I did the lack of a bank balance wouldn’t prevent me. You see, money to you means freedom; to me it means bondage.’”

While Isabel and Gray regard money as a symbol of success, Maugham sees it as a tool—a means of security. Because he has it, he need not debase himself or be beholden to anyone. Larry, on the other hand, experiences the same freedom because he regards money as unnecessary to his survival.

“‘My dear, I’m a very immoral person,’ I answered. ‘When I’m really fond of anyone, though I deplore his wrongdoing it doesn’t make me less fond of him. You’re not a bad woman in your way and you have every grace and every charm.’”

This is what makes Maugham such an effective point of view character in the story. Whatever he thinks of his characters in reality, his fictional self maintains an emotional distance, telling their stories without judgment.

“People can say what they like, but marriage still remains the most satisfactory profession a woman can adopt.”

Suzanne, who throughout her life has supported herself, quite happily, as a “mistress,” puts into words a reality for women of all social classes. The kind of work that is acceptable for women to do tends to be menial and low-paid. For the most part, only men have access to the means of earning a livable income. A woman who wants any financial security, but who isn’t in a position to inherit it, is best served by finding a man who can provide for her.