A Life Among the Primitive

W. Somerset Maugham Short Story Review

This is False Choices and today I’m publishing a review of an excellent short story by the English writer W. Somerset Maugham: The Fall of Edward Barnard. If you are new here, welcome and feel free to comment below or to share this review, and if you are really feeling courageous please click subscribe and receive all of my writing, reviews and short stories, in your inbox, for free!

W. Somerset Maugham is not as well known as many English authors, and that’s a pity because he was an excellent writer who not only knew how to weave a tale, but also how to paint a picture, and always with a definite purpose, a point of view, that he sought to share while never taking the reader’s patience or intelligence for granted. He is best known in the US for his novels Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge, both of which were made into formidable motion pictures, the latter I reviewed here:

But in England, Maugham was also well known for his theatre work, over 30 plays performed on stage, and his collections of short stories. He was also a well travelled man, having spent several years working as an ambulance driver and then for the British Secret Service during WWI. His stories cover England and the Continent to Hawaii and Samoa, and in the story of Edward Barnard, Tahiti.

For those of you who know The Razor’s Edge novel, or movie, the theme of Edward Barnard, written years earlier, will seem familiar. On offer is an assumed life of unquestioned convention, as defined and limited by wealth and its consumption. Who would forego such a life; beautiful people, in beautiful spaces, buying the finest things, surrounded by gaiety? Well, most of Maugham’s main characters, in fact, choose some other path.

In the case of Edward Barnard of Chicago, the young man is betrothed to a beautiful young woman from a very wealthy family, but then tragedy strikes and poor Edward is no longer marrying material because he’s suddenly penniless. But his girl does not waiver; she stands by him as he makes his way to the south seas to build his own fortune in the ‘trades’. But thrust into this new world is more than just change of scenery for the young man; it challenges all of his assumptions about what’s important and how to live, and he begins a long, slow release from the life that he once so readily accepted. I won’t give away any more of the plot, as I hope you’ll take a half hour and read the story yourself. Here’s the crux of it, when his old friend Hunter visits him in Tahiti to find out what’s happened to his best friend:

‘Don’t be grieved, old friend,’ said Edward. ‘I haven’t failed. I’ve succeeded. You can’t think with what zest I look forward to life, how full it seems to me and how significant. Sometimes, when you are married to Isabel, you will think of me. I shall build myself a house on my coral island and I shall live there, looking after my trees-getting the fruit out of the nuts in the same old way that they have done for unnumbered years-I shall grow all sorts of things in my garden, and I shall fish. There will be enough work to keep me busy and not enough to make me dull. I shall have my books and Eva, children, I hope, and above all, the infinite variety of the sea and the sky, the freshness of the dawn and the beauty of the sunset, and the rich magnificence of the night. I shall make a garden out of what so short a while ago was a wilderness. I shall have created something. The years will pass insensibly, and when I am an old man I hope I shall be able to look back on a happy, simple, peaceful life. In my small way I too shall have lived in beauty. Do you think it is so little to have enjoyed contentment? We know that it will profit a man little if he gain the whole world and lose his soul. I think I have won mine.’

I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts!

It’s interesting to note that there were probably two major influences on Maugham’s ideas. First, obviously, was his experience in WWI. The English like the French and the Germans and the Russians, suffered huge losses and after the war the whole of English society was upended, just as it was elsewhere. So much death, carnage and sacrifice throws out every easy answer and new questions require new solutions. Also, Maugham was a life long homosexual so he had internally fought with questions of the conventional path of life. He ended up marrying for a short period and fathered a child, too. So there were cracks appearing everywhere, inside and out, and Maugham’s writing dealt with them over and over again.

But he never took the easy way out, because there is no easy way. While the life of the south seas offered some new and different alternatives, Maugham never allowed himself easy answers. He saw and described the allure of the ‘primitive’ life, unburdened by the manners and suffocating orthodoxies of the ‘civilized’ existence, but both here in Edward Barnard and other stories of the south seas he was not shy about pointing out the downside of a life without order or conventions. Obviously, the central questions of Maugham’s life are still very much with us today.

You can find the story online here:

https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/edward-barnard/

or here:

https://www.davar.net/EXTRACTS/FICTION/BARNARD.HTM

And for fun: