Naked Soul

After reading Moon and Sixpence, I kept thinking about what drives a person like Charles Strickland, a boring middle-aged stockbroker to abandon a comfortable family and all social values to pursue art passionately for the rest of his life.

I asked myself whether there was not in his soul some deep rooted instinct of creation, which the circumstances of his life had obscured, but which grew relentlessly, as a cancer may grow in the living tissues, till at last it took possession of his whole being and forced him irresistibly to action.

The story is told from the point of view of a playwright who pieces together what he witnessed or heard about Charles Strickland. Maugham took the inspiration from the life of Paul Gauguin, one of the most notable post-impressionist French painter.

Like Charles Strickland, Paul Gauguin did abandoned his family, and later left Europe for Tahiti to devote his life to art. Being aware they are different in many ways, I still felt the stories are so true to life. Novels are much better than biographies, sometimes.

When Strickland first came to Paris, he didn’t know how to paint, nor did he know if he’s talented in painting. He just got an urge to paint. It doesn’t matter to him if he paint well or bad. He simply wants to paint what he sees.

“Can you paint?”

“Not yet. But I shall. That’s why I’ve come over here. I couldn’t get what I wanted in London. Perhaps I can here.”

“What makes you think you have any talent?”

“I’ve got to paint.”

He laughed about how the master and other students think his painting was a joke. “When a man falls into the water it doesn’t matter how he swims, well or badly: he’s got to get out or else he’ll drown.” Strickland says.

Lodging in dirty and shabby hotel rooms, he is indifferent of his surroundings, clothes, food, studio, women. Nothing exists around him can take his attention away. “He was blind to everything but to some disturbing vision in his soul. ” And he has no fear of death.

He wore the same suit that I had seen him in five years before; it was torn and stained, threadbare and hung upon him loosely, as though it had made for some else. I noticed his hands, dirty, with long nails; they were merely bone and sinew, large and strong.

People talk a lot about how they don’t care about what others think of themselves. Most of them are just deceiving or hypnotizing themselves. The desire to be respected and loved is probably one of the most deeply rooted instincts. It satisfies the ego and self-esteem.

Man’s desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong, his dread of their censure so violent, that he himself has brought his enemy within his gates; and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always in the interests of its master to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd.

Strickland is different. His passion is naked, unclothed, and barbarian.

He chuckled when he saw the writer trying everything to appeal to his sympathy and conscience to convince him back to his wife. “His eye kept that mocking smile which made all I said seem rather foolish. ”

Here was a man who sincerely did not mind what people thought of him, and so convention had no hold on him; he was like a wrestler whose body is oiled; you could not get a grip on him; it gave him a freedom which was an outrage.

“Look here, if everyone acted like you, the world couldn’t go on.”

“That’s a damned silly thing to say. Everyone doesn’t want to act like me. The great majority are perfectly content to do the ordinary thing.”

The next time the writer dismissed him was when he was saved from deathbed by Dirk Stroeve, an ordinary but commercially successful Dutch painter. Stroeve’s wife, Blanche, fell in love in Strickland, but soon committed suicide after Strickland left her. The writer was astonished when he saw Strickland’s eyes without the slightest guilt.

“Do you remember my wife? I saw Blanche little by little trying all her tricks. With infinite patience she prepared to snare me and bind me. She cared nothing for me, she only wanted me to be hers.”

Strickland also saw that Blanche didn’t truly love her husband either, at least in his definition of love. She married him because she was loved, appreciated and protected.

It is an emotion made up of the satisfaction in security, pride of property, the pleasure of being desired, the gratification of a household, and it is only by an amiable vanity that women ascribe to it spiritual value. It is an emotion which is defenseless against passion.

Even though it seemed like he ruined a family on the surface, Strickland had a point. Why should you love someone if love means ownership? Why should you feel guilty if someone suicide because of you? You can’t blame him because he sincerely doesn’t believe he is wrong.

There was a sardonic sincerity in Strickland which made me sensitive to anything that might suggest a pose..I saw that my disapprobation had in it already something of a pose; and I knew that if I felt it, his own keen instinct had discovered it, too. He was certainly laughing at me up his sleeve.

In the beginning of the story, it was hard to understand why Strickland had to leave his wife to pursue art. After all, Mrs. Strickland considered her husband a dull stockbroker and always surrounded herself with artists and writers. I thought she would appreciated having an artistic partner. And that was her first reaction to the news too.

“If he had any talent I should be the first to encourage it. I wouldn’t have minded sacrifices. I’d much rather be married to a painter than to a stockbroker. If it weren’t for the children, I wouldn’t mind anything. I could be just as happy in a shabby studio in Chelsea as in this flat.”

But then she thought about it again and said he would never came back. Because Amy Strickland thought she could have forgiven him if he’d left her for a woman. But she is obviously not a match against a dream.

In her world, art is something that demonstrate your literacy and social status. You can pursue it like reaching the moon. But in the end of the day you have to pick up sixpence on the ground. Marriage means ownership for her. If her husband loves something more than her, she feel helpless to own him.

When Amy Strickland first got the news, she was wounded by the rumors of affairs more than the fact that her husband had left her. She cried because of his cruelty, and begged the writer to visit Strickland and convince him to come back.

To excite my sympathy she was able to make a show of her unhappiness. It was evident that she had been prepared to weep, for she had provided herself with a sufficiency of handkerchiefs. I couldn’t decide whether she desired the return of her husband because she loved him, or because she dreaded the tongue of scandal.

In the end of the story, when Strickland became a world recognized genius, his wife received huge attention from curious writers and publishers around the world. She called her husband dear Charlie and talked about their perfect relationship. On the walls she put up colorful reproductions of several Strickland’s artworks, and joked that she couldn’t afford the originals. Thinking about how Strickland ordered his last precious wall paintings to be burned to the ground without leaving a stick, it became clear to me now why he had to leave his wife and abandon everything all together.

Ata, the island native girl that Strickland married in Tahiti followed his death order and burned everything. Ruining a masterpiece would be deemed insane and selfish for people living in modern worlds. Even the doctor thought it was his duty to prevent it happening.

“I knew that here was a work of genius, and I didn’t think we had the right to deprive the world of it. But Ada would not listen to me. She had promised. I would not stay to witness the barbarous deed, and it was only afterwards that I heard what she had done. ”

Now it makes sense that Strickland, someone who run away from women and marriage, would spent the rest of his life with Ata in an island. Because she never tried to own him or change him. Like him, she doesn’t need attention or praise from others. It wouldn’t make any difference to Ata if her husband died as a genius or as an unknown painter. She loves him for who he is.

What if Charles Strickland didn’t become an eminent painter after death? Amy would continue talking about her disappeared husband with shame and pity in the rest of her life. She would warn her kids to keep their feet on the ground and not be like their father. Ata would remember her husband as a devoted artist who paint his world with bold and extraordinary colors that she didn’t understand. She would tell her child “your father was a great painter”.

The possibility of not get anywhere is told in the story of Surgeon Abraham who entered St. Thomas’s Hospital with a scholarship. In five years, he gained every prize that was open to him and became a house-surgeon. Then all of a sudden, he throw up a career of honor and wealth, and made up his mind to live the rest of his life in Alexandria during his holiday in Mediterranean. The opportunity of knighthood was opened to another doctor, Alec who always played second fiddle to Abraham.

Alec mocked about how Abraham ruined his life, “Poor devil, he’s gone to the dogs altogether. The thing that counts is character. Abraham hadn’t got character. It seems a rotten thing that a man should make such a hash of life. ” The writer held his tongue and thought about what kind of life is more worth living.

I wondered if Abraham really had made a hash of life. Is to do what you most want, to live under the conditions that please you, in peace with yourself, to make a hash of life; and is to success to be an eminent surgeon with ten thousand a year and a beautiful wife? I suppose it depends on what meaning you attach to life, the claim which you acknowledge to society, and the claim of the individual.

People see Strickland as a weird genius, talented in art but poor in social values. Is it worth spending a whole life only to be recognized after death? He probably never thought about it. He wanted to burn down the artworks because he was already satisfied in the process of making art. He is just someone who wants to live a life that he, only he, is content with. Nothing more.