Theatre by W. Somerset Maugham

I finally finished my first Somerset Maugham novel. I knew I'd love his writing. I knew I'd enjoy this book, and I was thoroughly enjoying the writing and characters up until the last ten pages when I began to suspect that no one could pull off a satisfying resolution in so short a time.

Theatre tells the story of Julia Lambert, the "greatest actress in England." Julia is talented, beautiful, and despite a modest upbringing manages to charm the rich, the aristocratic, the royal, with her acting talent and wit. She attends beautiful parties where she says scandalously funny things, does wonderful impressions of other actresses, and has a loyal following of rich and smitten patrons. Her long marriage to her theater manager, Michael, is affectionate but seems to be sexless. The couple no longer has a sexual attraction to each other, it seems, but imbued in their scenes together is the familiarity and comfort of two people long accustomed to each other. While both characters make clear that they do not fully understand the other - Michael insists that Julia doesn't care about sex, which Julia believes herself smarter than Michael in many ways - they do understand each other in certain crucial ways that make you believe that their marriage really could have lasted so many years. Michael is not greedy enough to have stayed with Julia had he been truly unhappy, nor is Julia so ambitious that she would have stayed with Michael simply to further her career. The two genuinely loved each other when they married, and if both have felt their lust of each other fade over the years, neither seems to be mind very much. Julia continues to compliment Michael's beauty, and Michael continues to manage Julia as the brilliant actress that she is.

For Julia is an amazing actress. One reads little of her time on the stage itself, but one is always aware of how Julia arranges herself to appear to her best advantage in front of her husband, her friends, her would-be lovers, and her actual lovers. To say it plainly, she is manipulative, artful, and downright deceitful. But that discounts the beauty of these very deceptions. Julia is very clever, and very intelligent. She sees people for who they are, for what they desire, for what they most want to see, and she ever affects to give this to them. She changes her tact and expression to present the best version of herself to her friends, and so it is often unclear who Julia really is. Is she the intelligent, refined, sensitive woman she presents to her friend Charles Tamerley? Is she the playful and easy lover she acts toward Tom Fennell, her young lover? Or is she indeed the deceitful person her son Robert believes her to be? In the end, the reader knows better than any character in the book, but I still wonder if I know, truly, who Julia is. She is artful, she is talented, captivating, and she has a dark and (to me) enjoyable sense of humour. She is a mighty actress. But she is ultimately not very kind, rarely sincere, and uses her friends to her own advantage. She has so many stories woven for so many people in her lives that at times she must be very careful not to get the threads crossed. But ultimately it is all done to benefit herself.

I think Somerset Maugham is brilliant. I loved his depiction of Julia. He has a talent for crafting small but not insignificant characters with a few quotes and a description of their hat. But he also saw such a complex character so clearly as he wrote this novel. He deftly handled how Julia would react to slights, to embarrassment, to disappointment. In the end, he knew his character best, and we are left looking in, trying to understand as well as he what Julia truly desires from her life. For in the end, what she seems to want is the triumph of interpreting best how life appears to be. In the final scene, she sits, alone and unrecognized, in a crowded restaurant, the victor in a battle of wills with her former lover and an ambitious young actress, and she watches couples dancing on the floor before her, and reflects that it is her gift that gives people's lives meaning. She says to herself, "Roger says we don't exist. Why, it's only we who do exist. They are the shadows and we give them substance. We are the symbols of all this confused, aimless struggling that we call life, and it's only the symbol which is real."

I felt at first that Somerset Maugham had given us no conclusion. A novel must have a conflict, and a resolution, and in the end the conflict is not between Julia and the young man who drops her, or between Julia's public and private person, but instead between the stage and real life. And in Julia's opinion, the stage wins out. There is a conflict here between the real world and this actress, but the resolution is that Julia is interpreting us at every moment, and that while she exists to give us meaning, we exist to give her the raw stuff of which plays are made. I cannot help but feel disturbed to find myself a shadow dependent on an artist as great as Julia to make me real. And yet I think of Somerset Maugham, of Virginia Woolf, of James Joyce and Jane Austen, and indeed I am dependent. Reading their work has shown me that my own thoughts are not unique - others have thought as I do, have grown up, have loved, have made mistakes and tried to correct them just as I have. I do not mean to compare myself to the great heroes and heroines, but the fact is that these very heroes and heroines, the Miss Elizas and Gatsbys and Mrs. Dalloways, do exist as mirrors against which we hold ourselves. We live, we breathe, we act, and these great writers see, interpret, and publish, and suddenly we have characters and plots that so remind us of some part of our lives, but with more meaning, more grace, more importance. Reading these books provides some interpretation for my life, some version of truth to consider. And Julia's plays, Julia's acting, does the very same for her audience. And so perhaps these people do depend on Julia, in some way. Perhaps she does hold all the power.