And as a mature reader, when I recently came across a copy of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage in the library bookstore, I recalled a high school encounter with words that made little sense to me. My high school English teacher, Mrs. Pearliss Pruitt, had a copy of Of Human Bondage — #66 in Modern Library's 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century — on the classroom shelf. (Mrs. Pruitt is the same English teacher who often said that she enjoyed a joke just as much as anyone, then thought it was the height of cleverness to joke with us, "After you pine, balsam." The pun never failed to elicit confused shrugs from the class, yet I still remember it 50 years later.) I picked up the book, glanced through it, and found that the last few pages had been pasted over with blank pieces of paper. Supposedly there was something in this book so scandalous and corrupting of the young that it had to be hidden away, even if the book were still available on the shelf. Maybe it was done intentionally to titillate the uninitiated, like telling a child not to read something, knowing that's exactly what he'll do. Oh, those clever English teachers. I signed it out immediately and took it home.
It's the coming-of-age story of Philip Carey, a sensitive young man, born with a clubfoot, and consumed by an intense longing for love, art, experience. He goes to boarding school, struggles to fit in, fails to become an artist in Paris, attends medical school, and begins a tortured love affair with a cold-hearted London waitress. Gee, that sounded just like my high school life story (OK, not really) but my family always did say I was just too damn sensitive. The book has been turned into multiple movie versions (1934,1946,1964). It was the '34 film that made Bette Davis a star and featured Leslie Howard as Philip. The novel and the film scandalized the nation with its gritty realism of loose women who abandon their babies and a gruesome death from syphilis (changed to TB in the movie). It's a raw expose of the price of passion when we are in bondage to our emotions. Again, like being in high school.
Anyway, after getting the book home, I didn't bother to read any of the thick paperback but held it over a steaming teakettle and managed to get the cover-up off the pages so I could read what was underneath. But the hidden passages didn't seem that remarkable or scandalous to me — just Sally and Philip chatting while walking, then something unspecified is said as she darkens and he blanches. The reader is left to put two and two together, and my literary-addition skills then were limited.
Of course, Maugham is intentionally oblique as this is 1915 literature for puritanical, sexually-repressed America. (D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover hadn't yet been published and made its way to America, even in bowdlerized form, with its frequent use of fuck and cunt and a penis nicknamed John Thomas.) So Maugham's obliqueness and my own immaturity — as reader and human being — left me clueless. Certainly there was nothing there to compel me to read anymore of this indecipherable book where the characters spoke in circles and the text was indefinite and vague. In fact, I've never read the entire book, only the last few pages that had been pasted over to protect my youthful innocence!
Looking for smut or dirty words or strange bedroom behavior in London and Paris (at this point, all bedroom behavior was strange to me, not just Anglo-French), I found nothing but meaningless words on those final pages. In my eyes, there was nothing warranting a cover-up, nothing about women as sensuous beings, youthful pre-marital sex, feared accidental pregnancies and illegitimate babies, potential abortions, abandoned careers, destroyed lives. And I could not understand Philip's tired resignation to abandon his career because "the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect." I was too young and inexperienced for this book. Reading the concealed words, I fathomed none of this, yet, as you can see below, all was there, just beneath the darkening and blanching.
Clearly, this time I wasn't sensitive enough. I re-glued the paper to the book, none the wiser, and returned the unread novel to the shelf. It has stayed unread.
Ben Wiley, one of our Creative Loafing film reviewers, is also an advocate for paper and print. Dead trees, if you will. He volunteers at a local library bookstore and enjoys engaging with readers and their books. Our series BookStories will highlight some of these Ben, Book & Beyond encounters.
This article appears in Mar 1-8, 2018.