At the Koi Community Centre class on Saturday morning we talked about some quotations from Somerset Maugham‘s novel, Of Human Bondage. Here is the first quotation we looked at:
Philip is choosing between the kind, considerate and likable Norah, who is offering him the happiness of a stable relationship, and Mildred, a waitress who is indeed “heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping – and who does not love Philip at all.
Mildred also speaks in cliches and stock phrases. For example, she often describes Philip as,
a gentleman in every sense of the word.
During one argument Philip reacts against being called a “gentleman” and his reaction was the second quotation that we looked at in class on Saturday:
What d’you suppose I care if I’m a gentleman or not? If I were a gentleman I shouldn’t waste my time with a vulgar slut like you.
Our third and final quotation finds Philip thinking about the role of friendship in a man’s life and how close friends can drift apart:
It was one of the queer things of life that you saw a person every day for months and were so intimate with him that you could not imagine existence without him; then separation came, and everything went on in the same way, and the companion who had seemed essential proved unnecessary.
Class member Mr Amano observed that if “him” were changed to “her” then the case would be true of former girlfriends…
In the case of Somerset Maugham, he was not fussy about the gender of his lovers. Indeed, the character of Mildred was apparently based on his experiences with a young homosexual called Harry Philips.
By the way, it was her role as Mildred in the 1934 film Of Human Bondage that brought Bette Davis her first major critical acclaim and set her on the road to stardom. Here is the first part of the film, all of which is available on YouTube:
DH