Review of The Moon and Sixpence

This is perhaps W. Somerset Maugham's greatest story. It is not at all about Gaughin, although he used that painter's destiny as a kind of model and background structure for his deep inquisition into the nature of creativeness, its diabolical infliction and self-destructiveness, and the story could be seen as both a compliment to Gauguin, almost romanticising him, and a very thorough character assassination of him. Gauguin himself never caught leprosy but died of heart failure at 54 mainly as a consequence of abusing laudanum and morphine. George Sanders makes a terrific performance, however, as the unbearably arrogant cad who walks over the corpses of wrecked human lives after having used them and scratching them when he couldn't get anything more out of them. It's possible that Gauguin was something like that himself, like Strickland he did leave his wife and five (!) children, and like Strickland's wife, his Danish wife could never forgive him for abandoning her for art. So there are parallels indeed, but Maugham as the great connoisseur of human nature that he was, goes deeper and makes a complicated human monster out of the artist who at the same time has irresistible powers of attraction to everyone he drags into his life. Even his best friend Geoffrey Wolfe (Herbert Marshall) who knows him well enough to loathe him from top to bottom and tries to break up any association with him, constantly returns to him in a kind of sado-masochistic fascination by him. It's a great and troublesome story with many concerns, but the best part of it is that Maugham made it better than the probably rather humdrum and trivial reality it was modelled on.