Novel
The Moon and Sixpence
William Somerset Maugham · 1919
Synopsis
A young writer meets in London, at a tea at a novelist's house, the wife of a stockbroker whom everyone considers uninteresting. After seventeen years of marriage, the man leaves for Paris, leaving only a letter of a few lines, with no explanation. His wife sends the narrator to bring him back, convinced that there is a woman behind it. He finds him in a wretched hotel, resolved to paint and indifferent to what he is leaving behind. A Dutch painter of no great talent recognises his and supports him.
Context
The novel appeared in 1919 and is loosely inspired by a French painter who died in the Marquesas in 1903, whose trail its author followed in Tahiti during a voyage in the Pacific in 1916 and 1917. He did not seek exactness: the man he depicts is English, and what was troubling is softened, syphilis turned into leprosy and the liaisons with very young girls reduced to a single union. In a house where the painter had lodged while ill, he found a glazed door that the painter had painted and bought it; it stayed in his collection until he sold it at Sotheby's in 1962.
Who it is for
About three hundred pages; translated into French as early as 1928. The painter's life in Tahiti is reported second-hand by those who knew him.
Prizes and reception
Adapted for the cinema in 1942 by Albert Lewin, with George Sanders as the painter; the film was nominated for an Oscar for its music.
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