The Razor's Edge

Larry Darrell returns from the First World War changed by watching a friend die saving his life, and rather than settle into the comfortable Chicago marriage his fiancee Isabel expects of him, he leaves for Paris to read philosophy and, in his own vague words, to loaf. Maugham, appearing in the novel as himself, an author who keeps running into Larry over the following two decades, traces him through a spell working in a French coal mine, months at a Benedictine monastery in Alsace, reached through a monk he meets in Bonn, whose brothers cannot answer his questions about suffering, and finally a long stay in India, where an encounter with a holy man modeled closely on the real guru Ramana Maharshi leads Larry to a moment of mystical realization on a mountainside. Isabel, unwilling to live on Larry's modest means, marries the wealthy, conventional Gray Maturin instead, and Maugham follows the wider circle around them, including Isabel's status obsessed uncle Elliott Templeton and a troubled friend, Sophie, whom Larry tries and fails to save from alcoholism and an early death. Having found the peace he set out for, Larry ultimately gives away the small inheritance that has funded his search, declines Isabel's late attempt to win him back, and returns to America to live anonymously as an ordinary working man, seeking nothing more from the world that spent the whole novel trying to make him want more.

Maugham writes in his familiar, conversational voice, folding long stretches of other people's stories into his own supposed encounters with them over drinks and dinners, and the novel reads easily and quickly despite the size of the philosophical questions Larry is chasing. Its warmth comes from Maugham's own skepticism, he never fully endorses Larry's mysticism and lets Isabel's more worldly logic argue back convincingly, so a reader is left, deliberately, without a clear verdict on which of them chose better.

Maugham had visited Ramana Maharshi's ashram in Tamil Nadu himself in 1938, and the meeting shaped Larry's own spiritual awakening directly. Christopher Isherwood, already immersed in Vedanta study in California, helped Maugham translate the verse from the Katha Upanishad that gives the novel its title and epigraph, about the path to salvation being as difficult to tread as the sharp edge of a razor.