In 1891, Paul Gauguin, one of the greatest French  impressionist or post-impressionist painters,  

left his wife and children in Copenhagen, Denmark  and never returned. Born in 1848 in Paris,  

at the time of the Parisian revolution, he was  in his 40s when he made the jump. Not only did  

he escape his wife and children, he also escaped  European civilisation when he permanently settled  

in Tahiti, French Polynesia, where he  produced some of his greatest paintings.  

In 1897, while in Tahiti he learnt that his  favourite daughter was dead. His own health  

had deteriorated immensely. The house he was  living in was about to be lost to the bank.  

At the height of despair, he painted  one of the most iconic paintings of  

all times. “Where Do We Come From?  What Are We? Where Are We Going?” 

This iconic painting fits in with our topic today.  Today, I will discuss one of the most beautiful  

English novels of all time. The Moon and Sixpence  by Somerset Maugham, published in 1919, tells the  

story of an anti-social artist who, just like Paul  Gauguin, propelled by immense artistic creativity,  

escapes it all, abandoning his job, wife, and  children to become one of the greatest artists of  

all time. Unlike Robinson Crusoe,  who accidentally left civilization,  

our hero in this novel is intentional about it.  He feels stifled by the tedium of modern life,  

so runs away in search of artistic freedom and  mental clarity, something we all want but cannot  

have. Before I tell you the story and discuss  its themes, let me tell you who the author was. 

Author:  

William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874  in Paris. Aged 10 he moved to England to  

study at King’s School in Canterbury. Later,  he went to Heidelberg University in Germany  

and studied medicine to become a doctor. But  it turned out, he had talent in writing. His  

writing success meant he didn’t have to become  a doctor. It’s a lot easier sitting behind a  

desk daydreaming than being in a hospital full  of sick people screaming and blood everywhere.  

Ok that’s a bit dramatic. But no doubt writing  is far easier than being a doctor. I think it was  

the right choice. A doctor cures your physical  illness, and a great novelist cures your soul. 

He became a celebrity in his early  30s after the success of his play  

Lady Frederick in 1907. He took  the London play scene by storm as  

all the major theatres were queuing up to stage  his plays. His storytelling success meant he had  

money so he traveled a lot, and then settled in  the sunny side of France. Actually his traveling  

had another purpose. It turns out he was a  spy working for the British government. Not  

sure how good a spy he was, but no doubt  he was a genius when it came to writing. 

Maugham was 44 when he wrote The Moon and  Sixpence. Some call it a mid-life crisis.  

Maugham turned that into a novel. A lot of  great literary works were written when their  

authors were in or close to their forties.  Maugham died in 1965 in France, aged 91. 

Summary The title of The Moon and Sixpence refers  

to an artistic minded person or a superfluous  man in Russian literature. Someone whose head  

touches the moon while his body is beaten down  in search of pennies on the ground. We dream and  

dream on the inside but on the outside we scrape  a living by collecting pennies from our jobs. 

It’s a very short novel, narrated by a young  writer from London, who tells the story of  

a misanthropic artist, Charles Strickland who  just like Paul Gauguin works as a stockbroker  

in London and just like Guaguin lives a  comfortable life with his wife and children.  

His wife is a kind of socialite who loves to  have people over at her house and talk about  

literature and art. Charles, however, shows  little interest in other people. He’s quiet  

and always finds it difficult to articulate  himself in words. He knows he’s an outsider,  

so he has chosen not to say much because  he doesn’t want to rock the boats. 

Quote: “Man’s desire for the  approval of his fellows is so strong,  

his dread of their censure so violent, that  himself has brought his enemy within his gates;  

and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always  in the interests of its master to crush  

any half-formed desire to break away from the  herd. It will force him to place the good of  

society before his own. It is the very strong link  that attaches the individual to the whole.” p. 49

Since, language is not his best  suit, is he hiding something?  

You bet. Most quiet and aloof people are quiet  for a reason. This is the paradox of life,  

bubbly people have not much to say but  they talk anyway, while quiet people,  

on the other hand, have plenty to say but  they don’t have the words or the will to say.

Our hero, Charles Strickland endures this stifled  existence for years, but then at some point he  

decides he has had enough. One day he wakes up  in the morning and packs his bag and leaves.  

Not only is he deserting his luxurious life in  London, he is abandoning his wife and children.  

But why face poverty and homelessness  himself, and make his family destitute  

and penniless who might not even survive. What  could possibly be the reason for this madness? 

Our anti-social hero is an artist on the  inside or “… some wild creature of the  

woods.” p. 101. He is a man possessed. Quote:  “He is no longer an individual, but a thing,  

an instrument to some purpose foreign to his  ego.” p.102. What’s his demon? It’s art. He is  

an artist whose desire to create is so immense  that nothing else in the world matters to him.  

He just wants to make art. That's the  sole purpose in his life. That’s it. 

Charles Strickland’s wife panics and asks  our narrator to go and find her husband.  

Where has gone? Well, it doesn’t take  Sherlock Holmes to know his destination.  

Paris is of course an obvious place  where all 19th and early 20th century  

aspiring artists ended up. Picasso,  Van Gogh, James Joyce, and more all  

ended up there. Artists are good at  escaping but not so good at hiding. 

The narrator tracks him down in Paris. He lives  in a very poor hotel and works as a painter.  

But you know what? Despite his terrible living  condition, the man is at home. He’s incredibly  

happy. Luxury or no luxury the man is free. He’s  free from his family, friends and job. That is why  

mad people head towards a mountain. To escape the  heaviness of society. He was like in a prison in  

London. He was drowning. Quote: “When a man falls  into the water it doesn’t matter how he swims,  

well or badly: he’s got to get  out or else he’ll drown.” p. 43. 

While in Paris, his personality changes  completely. Almost unrecognizable. He was  

a submissive, docile family man in London  but in Paris, he has turned into a savage  

animal. He is careless and often nasty towards  others. He doesn’t care about other people.  

Why? Because he is driven by an  unexplainable desire to create art,  

so nothing on the outside matters to him. His  life in Paris is miserable, yet he is happy and  

determined to paint. It doesn’t matter where he  lives, in the gutter or in some 5 star hotel,  

as long as he can fulfill his  artistic goal, he is content.

His paintings are, however, ridiculed by  people and nobody takes him seriously, except  

one successful Dutch artist, Dirk Stroeve. Vincent  Van Gogh was a close friend of Paul Gauguin. They  

had a love-hate relationship. Here too, it is  the same story. Dirk is Charles’s savior when  

he becomes seriously ill. He takes him to house  and looks after him. At first, his wife, Blanche,  

protests that she does not like Strickland since  he is rude and anti-social. But Dirk sees a genius  

inside Charles, so he does everything to help  the artist shine. But here is the biggest irony  

in all. It soon becomes clear that the wife is  in fact infatuated with the homeless artist.  

We know what happens next, the wife sleeps with  him. But the worst is yet to come for the host. 

Dirk, the kind gentleman  who rescued our hero artist,  

gets kicked out of his own house. The  homeless artist has taken his wife now.  

Oops! As Nietzsche said, genius artists do  not follow social conventions. Society shuns  

on people stealing other people’s partners,  but this never even occurs to our hero here. 

Not only that, after breaking up the couple apart,  he starts ignoring Blanche. She was too naive,  

thinking she could turn a beast into a man. She  thought she could tame him. Quote: "When a woman  

loves you she's not satisfied until she possesses  your soul. Because she's weak, she has a rage for  

domination, and nothing less will satisfy her.  She has a small mind, and she resents the abstract  

which she is unable to grasp. She is occupied with  material things, and she is jealous of the ideal.  

The soul of man wanders through the uttermost  regions of the universe, and she seeks to imprison  

it in the circle of her account-book. Do you  remember my wife? I saw Blanche little by little  

trying all her tricks. With infinite patience she  prepared to snare me and bind me. She wanted to  

bring me down to her level; she cared nothing for  me, she only wanted me to be hers. She was willing  

to do everything in the world for me except the  one thing I wanted: to leave me alone.” P.132 But  

unfortunately, this is not a Disney fairytale.  It’s real life. Charles is untameable. He’s a free  

artistic beast. Blanche is heart-broken when he  completely ignores her. Soon after she dies. 

So our artist hero, first abandons  his own wife and children in London,  

then when gets helped by a stranger in Paris, he  sleeps with his wife to break the couple apart,  

then leaves the wife in the cold which leads her  to end her own life. He cares not for a soul.  

No family, friends or society is as important  as his art. In fact, he is so possessed, that  

his deeds or misbehaviour doesn’t even register  in his mind. He has no excuse, and doesn’t even  

try to justify his behaviour. Since he’s so  preoccupied with his artist creativity that  

he cannot understand the pain his actions cause.  Quote: “I don’t think of the past. The only thing  

that matters is the everlasting present.” p.72.  Just like a zen buddhist, he is in the moment. 

Charles Strickland exhausts every means  of making a living in Paris. Here is the  

crazy thing about. He refuses to sell any  of his paintings, determined to keep them  

unknown because he doesn’t want to be  famous. After a while Charles finds Paris  

also stifling. It’s too close to London.  It’s the centre of European civilisation.  

He wants more freedom. He wants to be in the  wild, because true artists are like wild beasts. 

He leaves Paris and goes to Marseille; there the  narrative is second hand so things aren’t as clear  

as it was in Paris and London. Anyhow after  some time there, he finds himself in hot water  

after a fight with another man who threatens  revenge once returned from hospital.  

Charles has to escape. Escape he does, he  leaves France for the remote Island of Tahiti,  

where the story continues second hand,  told by three people, a hotel owner who  

finds Strickland a wife, a friend who played chess  with him, and finally a doctor who cared for him  

much to Strickland’s opposition and he was witness  to his death and burial. They all confess to their  

failures in spotting the genius. The honesty of  simple people is almost artistic and beautiful  

and represented on a similar if not the  same level as that of Strickland’s genius. 

Tahiti seems almost a magical place, distant  from the hardship and realities of life in Paris.  

In Tahiti, he finds the local women a lot  easier to deal with than European women.  

Quote: “As lovers, the difference between men  and women is that women can love all day long,  

but men only at times.” P. 142 The Tahitian  women don’t ask questions. They don’t try  

to tame him. They don’t try to play  games with him. They let him be. They  

let him paint. He paints like crazy. His  artistic juice is flowing like fireworks. 

But living in Tahiti has its own problems. It’s  true that civilization or modernity has provided  

us with security but has taken our freedom.  In Tahiti he has his freedom but it comes at  

a cost. Soon he develops leprosy which leaves  him blind. Now surely he can't paint anymore?  

You’re wrong. He continues to paint like crazy.  He paints some of his masterpieces while blind. 

So first it was London and his family who  stifled him. He moved to Paris for some freedom.  

But Paris was just another prison. He moved  to Tahiti, outside the European civilisation.  

But even in Tahiti, he was inside a  prison. His own two eyes. You’re only  

free when you cannot see anything. Now,  he is free from everything and everyone. 

When he dies, he leaves behind some amazing  paintings. But the man is even destructive  

after his death. His dying wish to  his wife was to burn his paintings.  

She fulfils his wishes. Despite that  he leaves some great paintings behind. 

There, our artist hero’s story  ends. Our artist genius is no more.  

But he made a wave. A big one.  Paul Gauguin was one of the most  

brilliant artists of the 19th century.  He died in 1903 in French Polynesia. 

Analysis The question is do you have to  

escape modernity to be a genuine artist? Nietzsche  says yes. We have become too human and too tame.  

The social forces are far more potent in taming  us today as we have become more glutenous, lazy,  

and docile. According to Nietzsche, modernity  is based on rationality. What does it mean?  

It means everything we do in life is rationally  calculated, merits and demerits are weighed  

against one another. While it makes our lives  very safe, less risky and we live longer.  

But on the negative it kills our creativity,  risk-taking and courage to be spontaneously free. 

Rationality makes you safe while passion  makes you an artist.We are all born artists  

but society through the education system, social  norms and conventions tame us. Here is a quote  

from Somerset Maugham’s own memoir titled, The  Summing Up: “The artist can within certain limits  

make whatever he likes of his life. In other  callings, in medicine for instance or the law,  

you are free to choose whether you will adopt them  or not, but having chosen, you are free no longer.  

You are bound by the rules of your profession;  a standard of conduct is imposed on you. The  

pattern is predetermined. It is only the artist,  and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.”

There are risks on both sides, being an artist  or not being an artist. Everything in life comes  

with costs and benefits. The stereotype of  a hungry artist is rooted in some truth.  

Also the stereotype of soulless  9-5 is also rooted in some truth.  

It’s a trade-off. It comes down to freedom  versus stability. Quote: “Only the poet or  

the saint can water an asphalt pavement in  the confident anticipation that lilies will  

reward his labour.” P.44 A rational man would  see nothing but stupidity in such endeavour. 

Maugham also plays with the theme of blindness  as a liberating force. At the end of his life,  

the artist lost his sight but it made his art even  more strikingly beautiful. This reminded me of  

a short story by the American writer, Raymond  Carver, called Cathedral in which a blind man  

opens a prejudiced man’s eyes through painting a  cathedral. I have discussed the short story in my  

top 20 American novels. But here, blindness means  you’re not distracted by things on the outside,  

you look on the inside, the collective  subconscious, which is the ultimate source  

of artistic genius. When one door closes, another  one opens. It’s a cliche but it is certainly true.  

You can say that the more you have things in your  possession, the less you are yourself. The more  

tools an artist has, the less creative he becomes.  Today, technology has made life easier, yet  

also has made us totally reliant on it. Without  modern comfort, a lot of us cannot do anything.  

Our smartphones entertain us. But most of the  time bored people or unhappy people create art. 

Writing 

Somerset Maugham was a great writer. His language  is beautiful, yet very precise and to the point.  

The paintings and scenes are exquisitely  described. Now I will read a couple of  

passages from the novel, in which Maugham  describes two paintings by Paul Gauguin.  

You can see the beauty of how two art forms,  literature and visual art, come together. 

This first one describes Guaguin’s  painting, titled “Woman with a Mango''  

completed in 1891. Quote: “Tall and  extremely stout, she would have been of  

imposing presence if the great good-nature of her  face had not made it impossible for her to express  

anything but kindliness. Her arms were like  legs of mutton, her breasts like giant cabbages;  

her face, broad and fleshy, gave you an  impression of almost indecent nakedness,  

and vast chin succeeded to vast chin. I do not  know how many of them there were. They fell away  

voluminously into the capaciousness of her bosom.  She was dressed usually in a pink Mother Hubbard,  

and she wore all day long a large straw hat. But  when she let down her hair, which she did now and  

then, for she was vain of it, you saw that it was  long and dark and curly; and her eyes had remained  

young and vivacious. Her laughter was the most  catching I ever heard; it would begin, a low peal  

in her throat, and would grow louder and louder  till her whole vast body shook. She loved three  

things—a joke, a glass of wine, and a handsome  man. To have known her is a privilege.” p.162

The second painting is “Still life with  Mangos” completed in 1898, just a few years  

before Guaguin’s death in 1903. Quote: “The  colours were so strange that words can hardly  

tell what a troubling emotion they gave. They were  sombre blues, opaque like a delicately carved bowl  

in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre  that suggested the palpitation of mysterious life;  

there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid  flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual passion  

that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire  of Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the  

berries of holly—one thought of Christmas  in England, and the snow, the good cheer,  

and the pleasure of children—and yet by some  magic softened till they had the swooning  

tenderness of a dove's breast; there were deep  yellows that died with an unnatural passion into  

a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as  the sparkling water of a mountain brook. Who can  

tell what anguished fancy made these fruits? They  belonged to a Polynesian garden of the Hesperides.  

There was something strangely alive in them, as  though they were created in a stage of the earth's  

dark history when things were not irrevocably  fixed to their forms. They were extravagantly  

luxurious. They were heavy with tropical odours.  They seemed to possess a sombre passion of their  

own. It was enchanted fruit, to taste which might  open the gateway to God knows what secrets of the  

soul and to mysterious palaces of the imagination.  They were sullen with unawaited dangers,  

and to eat them might turn a man to beast  or god. All that was healthy and natural,  

all that clung to happy relationships and the  simple joys of simple men, shrunk from them in  

dismay; and yet a fearful attraction was in  them, and, like the fruit on the Tree of the  

Knowledge of Good and Evil they were terrible  with the possibilities of the Unknown.” P.194

The Moon and Sixpence is an incredible story of  hardship and immense human desire to create art.  

The story is also immensely inspiring and  uplifting that perhaps one day you could be brave  

enough to follow your own lofty dreams in pursuit  of your artistic ambition. For Strickland, art was  

an escape because he didn’t want to be famous or  rich. He used art as a tool of escape. At the end,  

he gave instructions to burn down the walls  on which he had painted. For him, his mission  

was complete as soon as he dipped his brush in  paint and applied it on a surface. That’s art. 

This is an incredible novel. What do you think?  

Where do you want to escape to?  Let me know in the comments.