“Then he saw that the normal was the rarest thing in the world. Everyone had some defect, of body or of mind: he thought of all the people he had known, he saw a long procession, deformed in body and warped in mind, some with illness of the flesh and some with illness of the spirit. He could feel a holy compassion for them all. They were the helpless instruments of blind chance”. This is the reflection which, endorsed by the book’s author on the protagonist, reflects the conceptual design that pervades the work and serves him to explain much of the human misery he confronts the main character with and perhaps, one might guess, also his own. If we think of humans as beings settled on four fundamental pillars, the body, represented by the physical or material aspects; the soul, by the spiritual, moral or mood disposition; the mind, by the rational or intellectual; and the heart, by the emotional or passional, then any defect in one of them will unbalance the owner of such flaw and make him limp and stumble through life as if a table with one leg shorter than the other three.
Philip, the lad whom the story follows from when, already having lost his father, loses his mother victim of a miscarriage, and up to his thirties, an age at which he makes the reflection which starts this review, is the vehicle that Somerset Maugham uses to show the hardships a human being with one of his pillars deficient or poorly compensated must deal with as he trudges through life. In fact, as was disposed by fate, misfortune, or for those who are believers, God's will, Philip was born with an ugly physical defect consisting of a club-foot, a deformity that causes his owner to limp, prevents the practice of sports and even dancing. Such calamities when aided by a loving mother, a supportive family upbringing and an empathic social environment, have good prospects for improvement and thus do not affect the vital balance. But this is not the case of Philip who, orphaned of father and mother in his early years, is taken up reluctantly by his uncle, a scrupulous Anglican vicar, imposing and petulant, and his wife, a sentiments-frigid woman submitted to the arbitrary and loveless indifference of her husband.
In these bitter circumstances Philip’s physical blemish becomes for him an omnipresent curse that unbalances him as a person, hindering his development and integration in the world and making him suffer horrors. This view that the circumstances of life either help or hinder the overcoming of a disability, could be taken as endorsed by the author in the passage in which Philip, as a medical practitioner, must see to a child with a club-foot identical as his but with caring parents present. Brought to the hospital by his parents, the child does not seem to give any importance to his club-foot, which deeply intrigues Philip: “Philip looked at him curiously. He was a jolly boy, not at all shy, but talkative and with a cheekiness which his father reproved. ‘It’s only for the looks of the thing, you know, I don’t find it no trouble’. Philip could not understand why the boy felt none of the humiliation which always oppressed himself. He wondered why he could not take his deformity with that philosophic indifference”.
How does Philip’s body deformity affect his other human dimensions? The problem begins when he becomes aware of it in his contact with other children. We know of the proverbial cruelty of children who, without the malice that would be attributed to an adult, make mockery of comrades with physical differences and Philip’s is not only noticeable but also grotesque. The humiliation he feels for being the constant target of ridicule leads him to develop a heightened emotional sensibility that thwarts his social integration. Trying to end his sufferings Philip relies blindly on the promise of Jesus: "I tell you therefore, whatever you ask and pray for, believe that you have it already, and it will be yours" (Mk 11, 24). It is thus that, when the deadline imposed on God arrives and seeing that, after praying and believing as an obsessed, his club-foot is still intact, Philip discards his faith. Finally, motivated by a keen resentment he strives to skewer his fate with a brilliant professional career built through mental power and voluntarism, only to find out that time goes on and he stays put.
Throughout the years, Philip comes in contact with people who, although show no visible anomaly, like his in the flesh, do have one in other of the human dimensions no less fatal for being not visible: his uncle William has a hard heart that makes him emotionally numb; Fanny Price, the art student, a moral flaw of low self-esteem; Griffiths, an unbridled sensuality that makes him betray his friends and humiliate his conquests; Cronshaw, the poet, ends up consumed by alcohol and despair at not finding in life its meaning; and finally Mildred, the most abnormal of them all and according to Philip’s own conclusion, simply stupid.
The book also tries our wits. For example, what Spanish author Miguel Ajuria, the model who poses nude at art school, foreshadows? Or, who is the English stockbroker who dumps all business to devote the rest of his life to painting?
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