*Of Human Bondage

“Of Human Bondage” is the title of the fourth part of Spinoza's “Ethics”. Somerset Maugham, as a young student, admired Spinoza greatly. So he decided to call his autobiographical novel “Of Human Bondage”, because it came closest to what he wanted to write about. “I was not writing to please”, he says, “I was writing to free myself of an intolerable obsession … I was just firmly established as the most popular dramatist of the day when I began once more to be obsessed by the teeming memories of my past life. They came back to me so pressingly in my sleep, on my walks, at the rehearsals, at parties, they became such a burden to me that I made up my mind, there was only one way to be free of them and that was to write them all down in a book.”

Fact and fiction are inextricably mingled in “Of Human Bondage”. But we easily recognize in it the experience of the author's own life: the death of both parents when he was a small boy; the unhappy years at the vicarage with the clergyman-uncle; the shy, sensitive boy at school, tormented by his fellow-students because of his stuttering (Philip is given a clubfoot instead); the religious experience of puberty with the episode of the unanswered prayer for healing; then the period of rapid intellectual growth in Germany and France; and, at last, the years at the medical school. After Philip's graduation from medical school, reality and fiction diverge. Somerset Maugham devoted himself at once to writing, but Philip to the practice of medicine.

“The book did for me”, Maugham said, “what I wanted, and when it was issued to the world, I found myself free forever from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me.”

“Of Human Bondage” was not favorably received. The English reviews were almost all contemptuous. The hero was a weakling who could not be tolerated by sound, right-thinking men. Here in the United States the New York World called it “the sentimental servitude of a poor fool.” The “Outlook” called it “distasteful”