Tue 23 Mar 2010
A Review by Dan Stumpf: W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM – The Magician.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM – The Magician. William Heinemann, UK, hardcover, 1908. George H. Doran Co., US, hardcover, 1908. Reprinted many times, in both hardcover and soft. Silent film: MGM, 1926 (with Alice Terry, Paul Wegener; director: Rex Ingram).
The villain of Somerset Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician was loosely — very loosely — based on Aleister Crowley, and the novel is as close as Maugham ever came to writing pulp, an all-out mellerdrama with sinister sorcerer, helpless heroine, ho-hum hero… there’s even a Van Helsing character written in to help move the plot along.
Said plot involves the corpulently wicked Oliver Haddo being publicly (and justifiably) humiliated by the Good Guy and taking his vengeance by magically seducing his Innocent Fiancee to be used as a pawn in the Dark Arts. And so on.
Parallels with Dracula (1897) are not far to seek. Interestingly, though the major get-the-plot-across passages seem a bit hurried and obvious, with purple vapours, lurid visions and such, the less relevant chapters, sketching out the emotional effects of all this on the characters, are really quite effective. Maugham may not have been a great author, but he was a damgood novelist and it shows here.
I may have indicated that the horror novel parts of The Magician fall a bit flat, and they do mostly — up to the end. The climax of this book in Haddo’s hellish castle is as frightening as anything you’re apt to read in this genre, and it stays in the memory.
Etext: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14257
Editorial Comments: Dan wrote this review in November 2005. I felt that it was appropriate to post it now, considering the way the comments following Walter Albert’s review of the 1931 film version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde happened to flow.
As they went along, they (the comments) seem to have morphed themselves into a discussion first of the filmed version of The Magician then onto Mr. Maugham’s contribution to literature in general.
March 23rd, 2010 at 5:12 pm
Dan
Great review of the book. You point out its strengths and weaknesses effectively. I was struck by the relationship to DRACULA too — and a bit to Richard Marsh’s less well known but then popular THE BEETLE.
As for Haddo and Crowley I suspect Maugham was keeping an eye to England’s notorious slander laws. By the time Wheatley used Crowley as the model for his Mocata the man’s reputation was such that no one could have libeled him.
Maugham isn’t a great writer in the literary sense, but he is a first class storyteller, and as you point out a skilled novelist. I don’t suppose he is much read these days though he’s easy enough to find in most bookstores and his THE RAZOR’s EDGE, UP AT THE VILLA, and THE PAINTED VEIL have been major films fairly recently.
Maugham was never afraid of a bit of melodrama or pulp elements when needed (“As God is my witness, I still love the man I killed.”), and his style of writing, while a bit dated today, is so casual and simple that it still reads well. Reading Maugham is a bit like listening to a gifted raconteur while enjoying a whiskey and soda in a West End club.
March 23rd, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Paul Wegener, the lumbering who stars here as Oliver Haddo was a noted director and actor in German Expressionist cinema, his film THE GOLEM (which he made in 1914, 1917, and 1920) is a forerunner of FRANKENSTEIN and one of the great films of that school with Wegener both directing and playing the monster. He also starred in and directed an early version of THE STUDENT OF PRAGUE (1913).
He directed his last film in 1937 but acted until 1951. He also played the title roll in the 1927 SVENGALI and Professor Ten Brinken in the film of Hans Heinz Ewers horror classic ALARUNE among others.
April 4th, 2010 at 10:47 am
Dan, that review makes the book sound as if it were written with me in mind.
I also loved the edition that’s pictured with it. It appears to be the vintage of some of the books I have on my shelves (“The Beetle,” “The Sorcery Club,” and Montague Summers “Victorian Ghost Stories”) and would make a great companion volume for them. ABE, here I come!
Good comments, too, by David on Paul Wegener. A winner all around!
October 18th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Not bad,; better, imo, than Dracula, for after all, WSM is a far better writer than BS.
Crowley reviewed ‘The Magician’ as a letter in Vanity Fair, signed ‘Oliver Haddo’. One can google and read it.
He focuses mostly not on the slander(cruel, obvious and with all of Maugham’s maliciouness)but on the inordinate number of plagarisms, which are obvious indeed.
BTW, Haddo is based quite closely upon Crowley, not loosely.
* As all this century-old stuff is public domain, isn’t it about time for a bio-pic about AC and his varied life? Mountaineer, spy, cad, tarot deck designer…
Best of Fortune,
Carl
July 28th, 2019 at 9:04 pm
Somerset Maugham was a great writer and he wrote three masterpieces, Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor’s Edge. Critics take him at his word when he said of himself that he was the best of the second-rate but that is pretty disingenuous, as far as I can see. What makes Maugham great are his characters who come alive on the page. What he was not was a great innovator. I don’t think it interested him in my opinion. Greatness is a strange term but since everything is relative it too must be taken with a grain of salt. My own aim is to be a great writer and even I am not sure what that means. Perhaps greatness is like pornography. You can’t define it exactly but you know it when you see it.