The Moon and Sixpence
by W. Somerset Maugham
Summary
A conventional London stockbroker named Charles Strickland abandons his wife, children, and career at forty with no warning and almost no explanation, drifting first to Paris to paint in poverty and obscurity before eventually settling in Tahiti. There he takes a native wife, fathers children, and spends his final years producing work that only a handful of people ever see, indifferent to money, recognition, or the family he left destroyed behind him. Maugham narrates the whole story through an unnamed writer who tracks Strickland's story secondhand, through the people Strickland used and discarded along the way, and the narrator's own baffled fascination with a man who explains almost nothing about himself carries the book, since Strickland himself never once justifies his cruelty in his own words. Strickland eventually contracts leprosy and paints his last and greatest work directly onto the walls of his island hut while he is dying and going blind from the disease; per his explicit instructions, his wife burns the house down after his death, destroying the painting along with him.
Maugham refuses to soften the cost of Strickland's genius, or to pretend that genius and decency travel together, and the novel's real tension comes from watching a narrator, and a reader alongside him, keep almost admiring a man whose behavior gives them no honest reason to. It reads briskly, closer to a character study built out of anecdote than to a conventional plot, and its refusal to resolve Strickland into either hero or villain is exactly the point.
Maugham loosely modeled Strickland on the painter Paul Gauguin, spending a year in Paris in 1904 talking to people who had known him and later visiting Tahiti himself in 1916 during a South Seas journey, though he later said the novel used only the broad facts of Gauguin's life and exaggerated the man's real cruelty well past its historical record.
Historical Context & Significance
William Heinemann published The Moon and Sixpence in London on April 15, 1919. Maugham was among the most widely read novelists in the English speaking world through the 1920s and 1930s, and critics of the period often treated that same popularity as evidence against him, one reason he never won a major literary prize despite his commercial dominance for decades.
The novel's title borrows a phrase a Times Literary Supplement reviewer had used of an earlier Maugham hero, so busy yearning for the moon that he never saw the sixpence at his feet. It has drawn a 1925 stage adaptation, a 1942 film starring George Sanders, a 1959 television production with Laurence Olivier, and a 1957 opera by John Gardner, and it remains one of the most widely read fictional treatments of Gauguin's life, however loosely it actually follows the historical record.