April 2025
“Take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else.”
Friends,
Somewhere in W. Somerset Maugham’s 700-page novel Of Human Bondage (1915) is a line that goes:
"…and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since [i.e., since leaving school], faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised to his active imagination and what it gave.”
I’ve been thinking these days about disillusion and disappointment. Part of this has to do with my choice of reading, which besides Maugham’s devastatingly bleak Of Human Bondage also includes several books on the misadventures of Antarctic explorers.
Much more of it probably has to do with the contemporary political situation…
I found Of Human Bondage in the free library outside the house (inner cover inscription: “Lily, Find your path. Enjoy the Journey. Love, Uncle Ben.” Thanks Uncle Ben!). The back copy described it as “one of the great novels of the twentieth century.” I’d never heard of it. But I saw that Jane Smiley supplied the introduction and that was all the recommendation I needed.
In the novel, disillusion is inextricable from the adolescent’s coming-of-age. As we read, Philip Carey, who we follow from age 8 or 9 to about age 30, works his way bitterly and often disastrously through various episodes where the promise of a situation or ideal falls short of its reality. It took me a while to feel committed to the novel; Philip is hard to like, especially early on. Gradually, though, I found myself if not rooting for him at least interested in what might happen next. By the halfway point, I started to feel like I might be really enjoying the novel. By about page 500 I’d decided it was, really, as great as the back cover told me. I had also developed quite a fondness for Philip. He had utterly transformed in front of my eyes. I wanted the best for him.
For all his difficulties, Philip emerges at the end of Of Human Bondage if not an authentically whole person (never resolved are strong undertones of a repressed homosexuality), then at least a basically decent, sympathetic one. Having wrestled with his disillusionments and worked through his disappointments, Philip is able to find something we can (maybe? kinda?) understand as happiness. It’s a portrait of a personality successfully navigating the trials and regrets of youth.
Mid-month, I read a New York Times article that ran surprisingly along these themes. It was about a meeting Trump had at the Kennedy Center (part of his fascistic cultural takeover). It was the first thing I’d ever read that made Trump seem almost human to me:
We know Trump has a penchant for hyperbole and self-deception, so we have to take “special abilities” with a grain of salt. The example - that he could pick out notes on the piano (presumably after hearing a melody) - might speak to an aptitude, but hardly makes him a musical genius. Still, it’s clear that music is something he has an actual passion for, and it’s sad to read about a child dissuaded from following their passion by a domineering parent.
Interestingly enough, about a third of the way through Of Human Bondage, Philip has a similar experience while attending an art school in Paris to learn to become a painter (his youthful passion).
Walking along the street with the master painter Foinet, Philip asks Foinet to come by his studio to judge his work “to tell me frankly if you think it worthwhile to continue.”
‘I don’t understand’ [said Foinet].
‘I’m very poor. If I have no talent I would sooner do something else.’
‘Don’t you know if you have talent?’
‘All my friends know they have talent, but I am aware some of them are mistaken.’
Foinet’s bitter mouth outlined the shadow of a smile, and he asked:
‘Do you live near here?’
Philip told him where his studio was. Foinet turned around.
‘Let us go there. You shall show me your work.’
‘Now?’ cried Philip.
‘Why not?’
After looking at Philip’s paintings, Foinet lights a cigarette and asks if Philip has private means. “Very little,” Philip tells him. “Not enough to live on.” “I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence on his art,” Foinet responds.
‘I’m afraid that sounds as if you didn’t think I had much chance.’
Monsieur Foinet slightly shrugged his shoulders.
‘You have a certain manual dexterity. With hard work and perseverance there is no reason why you should not become a careful, not incompetent painter. You would find hundreds who painted worse than you, hundreds who painted as well. I see no talent in anything you have shown me. I see industry and intelligence. You will never be anything but mediocre.’
Philip obliged himself to answer quite steadily.
‘I’m very grateful to you for having taken so much trouble. I can’t thank you enough.’
Monsieur Foinet got up and made as if to go, but he changed his mind and, stopping, put his hand on Philip’s shoulder.
‘But if you were to ask my advice, I should say: take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else. It sounds very hard, but let me tell you this: I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and had taken it.’
So, I love just about everything about this exchange. For one thing, it’s a wonderful demonstration of the psychology of good dialogue, where underlying everything each character says is only the truth of their personality and experience: Philip the anxious tyro, ready to put too much stock in the advice of the master (‘I’m very grateful to you for having taken so much trouble. I can’t thank you enough.’ - how heartbreaking!); Foinet the cynical, bitter master whose own artistic world is being supplanted by the experiments of the daring young Impressionists (the novel is set in the 1880s).
So while it can be tempting to read Foinet’s advice to Philip as a kind of stand-in for the elder Maugham’s advice to his younger self, or as a general statement of the novel’s that absent greatness (which is what Philip is after, and why he is so concerned about his “talent”) the pursuit of art has no purpose, Foinet’s bitter last line (“I would give all I have in the world if someone had given me that advice when I was your age and had taken it”) pulls the rug right out from under that reading: Foinet’s “advice” emerges from his own disillusion, not from some font of Truth.
But I also love this exchange because of the way it dramatizes a very real kind of conversation—one that persist even today. Talent is indeed something artists worry about. And like Philip, many a young artist wishes some wise elder could tell them, “Yes, you have talent” or “No, you don’t have talent” and save them all the time and trouble of failing (or succeeding) on their own. This wish is borne from self-doubt.
But not only is “Do I have talent?” an impossible question, it’s also a meaningless one. What, after all, is talent? Not even Philip and Foinet can agree. For Philip, talent is about the capacity for greatness. When he tells Foinet, “I’m very poor. If I have no talent I would sooner do something else,” he isn’t equating talent with financial success; he’s speaking as a romantic. Something like, “I’m happy to suffer and wallow in poverty so long as I can know that what I am creating can make that suffering and perdition worthwhile, i.e., of historical significance.”
Foinet’s response is in opposition to this view: “You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh.” In this sense, Foinet isn’t really talking about talent at all. As a master, he knows that all one has is “industry and intelligence” to work with, the two qualities he does see in Philip. Instead, he’s getting the measure of the young artist. In contemporary writing circles, the attitude is much the same. “If you can do anything else,” goes the usual advice, “you should do it.” And just like with Foinet’s gesture of stopping and putting his hand on Philip’s shoulder - a gesture meant to communicate an uncharacteristic kindness - this advice is meant as a kindness, but is borne of an inner cynicism, a deep seated personal disillusion. Nothing more.
Which brings me back to DT. Like Philip, Trump was dissuaded from pursuing his passion by an elder he respected. But there the similarity between them ends. Philip worked through his disillusionment and moved on, applying the skills he’d developed as a painter to other facets of his adult life. He struggled. Trump, on the other hand, appears to still live in the pre-disillusionment of his youth, where a raw, undeveloped musical potential might yet promise a future greatness. He’s like the high school senior who lists “voted most likely to succeed” on their resume. Except that such foibles in the young are forgivable - for them potential is everything.
At some point, though, we make choices that focus our efforts and energies within smaller spheres. Inevitably, certain dreams are set aside. For those, like Philip, who navigate these small devastations successfully, the setting aside of a former dream resides in the heart as only a small sadness, part of the multifaceted tapestry of a fully lived life. For others, it remains a festering sore and a haunting regret - not so different from the kind of bitterness Foinet displays. And then there are the Trumps among us who lack the self-awareness, the courage, and the creativity to resolve the loss of a dream in any particular direction at all. Never disillusioned, they persist in the illusion. And they constantly invite us to participate in the illusion with them. We used to call these people fools. Now they run the government.
In the case of both Philip and Trump (and maybe this is a bit self-serving), I do wonder what might have been if, instead of being told to “take your courage in both hands and try your luck at something else,” they’d been told that art was something worth being courageous for.
I can hear the Philips and the Fred Trumps of the world in an uproar already. “All you’ll get is more second-rate artists!”
Surely though a second-rate artist is a much better thing than a second-rate dictator.
(And I didn’t mention Hitler once.)
Your friend in reading,
Evan
Becca’s Pick of the Month
“I don’t know, man,” Becca says. “I did read this New Yorker article about the potato famine. I don’t really know what to say about it though. They don’t call it the potato famine. They call it the Great Hunger.”
Becca explains that the article is a review for a book called Rot. She hands me a copy of The New Yorker and asks me to type out the final paragraph, which, she says, pretty much sums it all up:
Above all, “Rot” reminds us that the Great Hunger was a very modern event, and one shaped by a mind-set that is now again in the ascendant. The poor are the authors of their own misery. The warning signs of impending environmental disaster can be ignored. Gross inequalities are natural, and God-given. The market must be obeyed at all costs. There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen now.
When I’ve finished, Becca says, “Maybe it’s just too depressing though. It’s just another depressing thing in people’s in-boxes. You’re welcome. I’ll read something better this month.”
I loved this, Evan. Now I might have to read Of Human Bondage.