Old Man with a Razor

THE RAZOR'S EDGE -- W. Somerset Maugham--Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

Somerset Maugham, always a discreet man, has been so imprudent as to live to a ripe age (70) when novelists are usually far past their prime. But, unlike some of his other books, The Razor's Edge is not a potboiler. Nor is it a mess of dotage. It deserves to rank after Of Human Bondage (1915) and The Moon and Sixpence (1919) as one of his three major novels.

Confessional. Maugham disarmingly calls attention to the fact that he is making his first attempt to write a novel about Americans: "I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. ... I do not pretend that [the characters] are American as Americans see themselves; they are American seen through an English eye."

Furthermore he points out that he has chosen, for him, a strange central character to write about, a man whose only significance is spiritual. Says Maugham: "I am of the earth, earthy; I can only admire the radiance of such a rare creature, I cannot step into his shoes." Finally he confesses, "If I call this a novel it is only because I don't know what else to call it."

But Maugham is such a subtle old sinner that it is a pleasure to hear him in the confessional, even if he goes there more to disarm his confessor than for the good of his own soul. The Absolute. His hero, who rambles through the lives of all the other characters, is Larry Darrel, a Chicago boy whose ready-made certainties were buried in World War I. He comes back from war unwilling to go to college, unwilling to settle down and marry wealthy Isabel Bradley--even indifferent to the Parisian fleshpots offered him by Isabel's expatriate Uncle Elliott. He wanders through Europe picking up saints and sinners, already feeling that "the sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over . . . the path to Salvation is hard." Each time he reappears among his friends he is a little more remote and baffling.

Ultimately he stumbles off a ship in India. There in the peace and abnegation of an ashrama he finds what he has been seeking. With his training in the Vendanta behind him, his mystical "illumination" achieved, he returns to the U.S. with faith in the Absolute, a humble belief in selflessness and the life of the spirit.

The Finite. Even to those readers whose concern with the Absolute is strictly limited, Larry's quest will be neither implausible nor ridiculous. Despite his interest in extraterrestrial matters, Maugham remains throughout on very good terms with the world.

One of his favored characters is Elliott, the suave expatriate, who dictated from his deathbed: "Mr. Elliott Templeton regrets that he cannot accept Princess Novemali's kind invitation owing to a previous engagement with his Blessed Lord." Another is Suzanne Rouvier, a middle-class courtesan befriended by Larry, whose amiable moral outlook and shrewd achievement of respectability are vintage France and vintage Maugham.

Still another is Maugham himself, who appears in the book without self-consciousness, emitting characteristic worldly wisecracks, and this time without even a faint disguise. Samples from his conversations with the debutante Isabel:

Isabel: "Will you be awfully shocked if I tell you something?"

Maugham: "I think it very unlikely."

Isabel: "I thought I'd get him to come home with me and once I'd got him there, well, it was almost inevitable that the inevitable should happen."

Maugham: "Upon my word you couldn't put it more delicately. . . ."

Isabel: "I remember once asking him if he wanted to write. He laughed and said he had nothing to write about."

Maugham : "That's the most inconclusive reason for not writing that I've ever heard."

Maugham has also succeeded in producing five Americans who are credible to other Americans -- "that tumultuous conglomeration of humanity, distracted by so many conflicting interests, so lost in the world's confusion, so wistful of good, so cocksure on the outside, so diffident within, so kind, so hard, so trustful and so cagey, so mean and so generous . . . the people of the United States."

Perhaps 20 years ago Maugham could not have written about either mysticism or Americans with quite so straight a face. For all his life Maugham has endeavored to write skillfully and never in passion. Now age and art have refined his feelings to the vanishing point. The Razor's Edge is the crowning triumph of that utterly dispassionate virtuosity to which he has always aspired--a persuasive as well as an entertaining book, by a man of 70 who is still "of the earth, earthy," about a young man who has found a faith.

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