‘Liza of Lambeth’ by W. Somerset Maugham
First novels can be an enlightening experience for writers and readers alike, but some are more successful than others.
As we look back at the careers of many writers, there is much to be gained from a deeper consideration of their earliest work. For Salman Rushdie that was ‘Grimus’, a minor novel some might say, and certainly one overlooked by the critics as well as the general public, but read in the light of what Rushdie was to later produce, the clues were there that we had on our hands the most creative user of language of his generation. Ernest Hemingway is another good example; his first full book, ‘The Torrents of Spring’, is quite unlike anything that followed. It is a comedic novel, with many asides and interruptions by the author, and much that might be termed precocious, even precious.
And then there are authors like Jane Austen. The first novel that she completed, though not the first to be published, was also by far her weakest novel. ‘Northanger Abbey’ suffers from a notable lack of presence, and has none of the writer’s confidence that was to gild the pages of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility.’ Austen even succumbs to parody at one stage in her work, taking pot shots at the Gothic mysteries of Ann Radcliffe. There is a reason why this was not the first Austen novel to see the light of day.
Likewise W. Somerset Maugham. Later a celebrated novelist known for the refinement of his wit, his first novel gives little clue as to where he was heading. ‘Liza of Lambeth’ is a struggle to read, and very well could have been the terminus in both senses for Maugham’s career.
‘Liza of Lambeth’, published 1897, a full eighteen years before the more wide-read and more easily-appreciated ‘Of Human Bondage’, is clearly the product of Maugham’s early career as a doctor working in the slums of London. The story follows the amorous adventures of a young girl in Lambeth, who spurns a man who seems to love her, and instead takes up with one old enough to be her father, and already married to boot.
We are introduced to Liza in similarly indirect way to how Victor Hugo introduced his hunchback. We are taken along a street in Lambeth firstly, the residents languishing in the heat; one of the best lines in the book appears here, though by the end you rather lament the rarity of such wit. Describing the conditions in the street, and how everybody is affected by the temperature, Maugham writes:
“Worst off of all were the very young children, for there had been no rain for weeks, and the street was as dry and clean as a covered court, and, in the lack of mud to wallow in, they sat about the road, disconsolate as poets.”
That last phrase is a gem, but when you return through the remainder of the sentence, some serious problems emerge. Firstly, you wonder if this is the kind of novel that Maugham should be writing. After all, how sensitive to the working class is somebody going to be who alludes to tennis courts? And then who draws the connection between the children of the street, and pigs in their sty? This problem repeats itself throughout the novel; at one stage Maugham likens the reaction of the proletariat to the antics of some vaudeville entertainers to ‘royalty listening to de Reszke.’ The other problem with the passage is, clearly, Maugham’s fixation on the comma.
We hear some chatter on the street as the neighbourhood gossips stand around with nothing else to do. For some reason, most ill-advised, Maugham has decided to render all of the dialogue in Cockney. Here’s one example, which also introduces the idea of there being too many pregnancies in the slums:
“’You’re abaht right there, ole gal,’ said Polly. ‘My word, ‘Arry’, if you ‘ave any more I’ll git a divorce, that I will.’”
This approach has two consequences. Firstly, and to advantage of the writer but not the audience, all of the characters end up sounding entirely the same. It’s nigh on impossible, as you read the book, to tell one person from another based on what they say, or how they say it.
Secondly, and to the total discredit of the characters, the book becomes a lot harder to read quickly. Whilst my eye skipped merrily along over most of Maugham’s own sentences, it stumbled time and again when the characters were talking; consequently the people in the book all come across as exceedingly thick because they seem to talk so ponderously.
After a few pages of nothing happening, an organ grinder arrives on the scene, though why he would want to is something I never discovered. He is there to provide entertainment for the locals, but for us readers he shows something more useful. One charge that many have levelled against Maugham is his ready reliance on cliché. We only have to wait a few pages of his debut to see how true this was, right from the start. Here is his description of the organ grinder:
“The organ man was an Italian, with a shock of black hair and a ferocious moustache.”
I’m surprised that we weren’t also told his name was Mario.
Finally we welcome our protagonist, Liza, who appears in a fine dress and shows her neighbours how an expert dances. To give Maugham his due, this is a well-designed scene, one of only a few that work so well in the book, as it serves to show us something of Liza’s character, how free and adventurous she is, and also to demonstrate to us how highly she is regarded in the street.
At the end of the dance, however, she is accosted by a stranger new to the area, a man with a thick beard who overpowers her and gives her a kiss she doesn’t seem entirely to have wanted. When he does, her reaction is telling:
“She blushed to the very roots of her hair.”
Why is that telling? Because again, instead of telling us anything useful, Maugham resorts to cliché. When we meet Liza’s beau, Tom, he is embarrassed to talk to her:
“’Liza’, he said, blushing to the roots of his hair.”
He gets little further, though later we learn that he intends to ask her hand. When he eventually does, Liza rejects him; her thoughts are directed towards the strong stranger, a man by the name of Jim Blakeston who, despite being married with many children (and his wife pregnant, no less), is as attracted to Liza as she is to him.
Thus we are also introduced to one of the recurring tropes in Maugham — the rejection of a marriage proposal.
Later Maugham begins hinting towards the theme of domestic violence; there is a conversation between two older married women, during which he has Mrs Stanley say this:
“’But the language ‘e used, an’ the things ‘e called me! It made me blush to the roots of my ‘air; I’m not used ter bein’ spoken ter like thet.’”
This use of the expression is partially acceptable, or would be if it was the only instance in the novel; it is, after all, the kind of thing that you would expect to hear somebody say in conversation. It is not, though, one a professional writer should ever use as a descriptive device in a serious work of literature.
And yet Maugham is not finished, even there. Sneaking around at night, Liza bumps into one of the other tenants of her house:
“’Mr ‘Odges! Strike me, you did give me a turn; I was just goin’ aht.’ She blushed to her hair, but in the darkness he could see nothing.”
So Maugham has a fondness for the expression, but at least it half-way tells us something. When he is cruel, he is cruel with style. His description of Sally, Liza’s best friend, as having teeth that ‘could masticate an iron bar’, is delightfully bitchy. In describing Jim Blakeston’s wife he is blithely ungenerous:
“One could see that she was a woman of great strength, notwithstanding evident traces of hard work and much child-bearing.”
Though you rather have to wonder what he meant by these evident traces of child-bearing. However, in his description of Jim Blakeston, one of the most important characters in the novel, he is remarkably unpoetic, saying simply that he had ‘large, masculine features.’ You hope — against hope, really — that he’s not simply saying that Jim had a big penis.
Anyway, Liza and Jim’s relationship grows, though for the first half of the book they do no more than flirt and spend time together. The threat of violence always looms large, as it does over every woman in the novel, and as it did over every woman in the society of the time. This changes, or seems to, at the close of the seventh chapter. Here we have a passage written with more purpose and attention than most in the book. As Liza and Jim enter a dark passageway it becomes clear Jim has had enough of simply flirting with his mistress. The writing becomes more minimal and more pure and the action draws the reader in:
“Liza,” he said in a whisper, “will yer?”
“Will I wot?” she said, looking down.
“You know, Liza. Sy, will yer?”
“Na,” she said.
He bent over her and repeated — “Will yer?”
She did not speak, but kept beating down on his hand.
“Liza,” he said again, his voice growing hoarse and thick — “Liza, will yer?”
She still kept her silence, looking away and continually bringing down her fist. He looked at her a moment, and she, ceasing to thump his hand, looked up at him with half-opened mouth. Suddenly he shook himself, and closing his fist gave her a violent, swinging blow in the belly.
“Come on,” he said.
And together they slid down into the darkness of the passage.
Forgetting the uncomfortable allusion to sex that the piece finishes with, this is powerful stuff, and I was driven on to see what happened next. Let’s not forget that this is a work that came out at the very end of the nineteenth century, and such a frank admission that rape exists would have been especially provocative. What would Maugham say next?
Well, what came after was an enormous let-down. The following chapter reads as if Maugham has started a new story, or has decided to drop the story-line he was working towards. There is no rape. Liza does carry some of the wounds of the night, but otherwise:
“She stretched out her legs and gave a long sigh of delight. Her heart was full; she thought of Jim, and the delicious sensation of love came over her.”
Where did that come from? This doesn't seem to be the same novel that I was just reading. It’s as if Maugham realised he had gone further than what was strictly acceptable in the society of his time, and had recanted.
But what if there was a rape? What if Jim Blakeston did forcibly coerce Liza into having sex with him? There seems to be enough in the text to suggest that this happened, but if that’s the case, there must be something enormously morally repulsive in the fact that Liza woke the next day in such a glorious mood. Is Maugham really suggesting that, actually, she may have wanted it? I can only hope that somewhere I have misread or misinterpreted the text, because otherwise this is simply repugnant.
Maugham moves along slowly now; we have to work through several pages describing…well, for one thing, describing a bowl of wax fruit in Liza’s sitting room, to which we are treated to nearly a full page, and then another page talking about all the other things in the room, including the reproduction pictures and the furniture. In a better novel you would think that this all meant something, but I think here Maugham is just name dropping, or perhaps practicing for when he writes about a subject more likely to engage his finer sensibilities.
Liza seems happy in her little affair, though constantly worried that she might be found out. Of course she is, immediately, and soon it is revealed that the whole street knows her secret, and they begin turning against her.
Soon Sally gets herself married, the ‘happy couple’ enjoying the ‘happy event’, and shortly after Jim brings up the possibility of divorcing his unhappy wife. However, this never seems likely, and before long we see the darker side of Jim coming to the fore as he takes up drinking to a greater degree. At around the same time, the theme of domestic violence resurfaces; Sally’s marriage is less happy and less secure than it seemed on her wedding day, and she is given a black eye as proof.
Eventually, as was bound to happen, Mrs Blakeston decides to mark her territory, and engages Liza in a particularly one-sided fight. The description of the confrontation is reasonably well-done, though I can’t imagine Maugham delighting in the action, and some of what we see and hear is particularly unliterary. For instance, has anybody ever been known to say ‘Take that!’ before striking their opponent? I know of some examples, but nothing beyond Warner Brothers.
There then follows a reconciliation of sorts between Liza and Tom, who offers once again to marry her, even though, as she tells him, she’s pregnant with Jim’s baby. Despite his pleading that he doesn't mind, Liza obstinately refuses to let him cheapen himself by associating with her.
Still recovering from the battering she had taken, Liza and her mother stay up one night drinking heavily; in the morning, Liza feels horrible. Twice in the space of a page Maugham gives us this sentence:
“And strange pains that she did not know went through her.”
We now enter a period in the novel that goes some way to redeeming what came before, and I suspect that the prime reason for Maugham’s ever having written this story was so that he could relate the anecdotes that the book ends with.
Liza has a miscarriage, and a particularly disastrous one it is too. As she lies on her deathbed and is visited by first Tom and then Jim Blakeston, who arrives almost too late, Liza’s mother is joined by Mrs Hodges, a nurse who lives upstairs, and Mrs Kemp, a neighbour. Together they engage in a little conversation, seemingly forgetting that Liza is bleeding to death in the next room.
The nature of their conversation, and the way in which it is reported, strikes me as being somewhat Zola-esque, a thought that I owe to a review of the book in the Times on its initial publication. The assembled characters get into a discussion about the best material for the casket, be it oak or elm, and then an anecdote is relayed about how one unfortunate soul was packed into a coffin too small for him, and how the family had had to stand on the lid in order to close it.
It’s this kind of minor detail that can make a book, and here it works tremendously. Parts of the writing are as hackneyed as anywhere else in the novel, and yet the impression you get is of a writer of buried talent working his way towards displaying it.
The critical reception to ‘Liza’ has changed over the years, tending to soften as what Maugham wrote about gradually became less scandalous.
The Times was particularly scathing in its review on the novel’s initial publication. They termed it ‘a striking example of misemployed talent,’ though their review betrayed more the social conditions of the day than any real criticism of the writing:
“It is difficult to imagine how any writer with pretensions to refinement can have grovelled to acquire the necessary knowledge, or, having acquired it, should have forgotten self-respect so far as to embody it in fiction.”
Going further, they suggest that Maugham “consistently aims at shocking sensibilities or scandalizing average delicacy.” That may have been the case at the turn of the century, but clearly we have come a long way since. In my opinion the strongest part of the book is roundly criticised; “[T]he deathbed scene is disgusting almost beyond expression.”
The review finishes on a more hopeful note, though still there is a backhanded compliment there for Maugham to receive:
“We should have preferred to ignore this singularly unpleasant novel were it not that, reading between the lines, we have the conviction that the author is capable of better things, for he has sensibilities himself, although ignoring them in his readers…”
Selina Hastings, in her wonderfully exhaustive ‘The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham’, described the book as ‘by any standards an accomplished work of fiction and impressive indeed for a first novel.’ While I do not agree with all of her sentiments, I grant that many of the sequences in the book are well-executed.
Against heavy competition in the literary market on the year of its release, ‘Liza of Lambeth’ performed well in the shops. That same year Maugham graduated from St Thomas’s, and though now qualified to become a doctor, he decided to leave the profession before he entered it fully and to devote himself instead to his writing. As Hastings relates, “[T]he success of his novel gave him the assurance to leave medicine altogether, a decision which with hindsight he came to regret.” His next books were not a success, and soon Maugham found himself struggling with a poverty that would not have surprised the residents of Vere Street, Lambeth.
