Introduction

There are certain books that do not merely tell a story but pose a question so unsettling, so quietly destabilizing, that they continue to murmur in the reader’s mind long after the final page has been turned. The Moon and Sixpence is one of these rare works. First published in 1919, it remains one of the most provocative meditations ever written on the nature of artistic genius, the terrible cost of obsession, and the gulf that separates the comfortable lives most of us choose from the dangerous, untethered existence of those who answer a higher and more merciless call. To open this novel is to be drawn into a dialogue that has never been resolved and perhaps never can be: what do we owe to the world, to those who love us, and to ourselves—and what happens when these debts cannot all be paid at once?

W. Somerset Maugham wrote this book at the height of his powers, when he was already among the most successful and widely read authors in the English-speaking world. He had achieved fame and considerable fortune through his plays and his earlier fiction, most notably the great autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage. Yet for all his worldly success, Maugham was a man perpetually fascinated by those who lived outside the boundaries of convention, those who refused the bargains that society offers in exchange for security and respectability. He was, by his own admission, a watcher of human nature—a man who stood slightly apart from the lives he observed, recording their absurdities and their tragedies with a clinical eye and an unexpectedly tender heart. In this novel, that fascination found its purest and most concentrated expression.

This edition has been carefully prepared as a modern translation, adapted for the contemporary reader. What this means in practice is that the timeless substance of Maugham’s vision has been preserved entirely, while the occasional obstacles that a century of linguistic drift can place between a reader and a text have been smoothed away. The original is written in prose of extraordinary clarity and elegance—Maugham was famously a master of the lucid, unpretentious sentence—but even so, certain idioms, references, and rhythms belonging to the early twentieth century can momentarily interrupt the spell that good fiction casts. The aim of this adaptation is to ensure that nothing stands between you and the experience the author intended: the slow, mounting astonishment, the moral vertigo, the dark comedy and the deeper sorrow that this story produces. You will find the narrative voice as wry, as intelligent, and as quietly devastating as it has always been.

A Story Born from a Real and Restless Question

Before you begin, it is worth understanding something of the impulse that gave rise to this novel, for it will deepen your appreciation of what you are about to read. Maugham was inspired, in part, by the life of the French painter Paul Gauguin, the stockbroker who abandoned his career and his family in middle age to pursue painting with a singularity of purpose that struck most of his contemporaries as nothing less than madness. Gauguin eventually traveled to the South Pacific, where he produced some of the most luminous and influential canvases in the history of modern art, dying in relative obscurity and poverty. It is essential to understand, however, that The Moon and Sixpence is not a biography and makes no pretense of being one. Maugham took the bare outline of this astonishing trajectory—the abandonment, the obsession, the flight to the tropics, the posthumous recognition—and used it as the scaffolding for an entirely invented character and an entirely original meditation. The protagonist of this novel, Charles Strickland, is not Gauguin, and Maugham takes considerable liberties that would be unforgivable in a historical account but are precisely the privilege of the novelist.

What Maugham was really after was not the documentation of a particular life but the dramatization of a phenomenon. He wanted to understand, or at least to confront, the type of human being who is so consumed by a vision that all ordinary human ties—love, duty, kindness, decency—become to them as insubstantial as cobwebs to be brushed aside. This is a deeply uncomfortable subject. We are taught, and we mostly believe, that a good life is built upon our obligations to others: that the man who abandons his wife and children to chase a private dream is a scoundrel, that selfishness is a vice and consideration a virtue. Maugham does not dispute these moral truths so much as he sets them beside another, more troubling possibility: that genuine artistic genius may be fundamentally incompatible with conventional goodness, that the creation of something beautiful and lasting may require a ruthlessness that ordinary morality cannot accommodate. The novel never resolves this tension. It simply holds it up to the light and turns it slowly, allowing us to see all its facets, including the ones we would prefer to look away from.

The title itself encodes this central conflict, and it is worth pausing over, because Maugham nowhere explains it within the pages of the book. The phrase derives from a review of Of Human Bondage, in which a critic remarked that the protagonist of that earlier novel was so busy yearning for the moon that he never noticed the sixpence at his feet. Maugham was struck by the image and repurposed it. The moon represents the unreachable ideal, the transcendent aspiration, the beauty that lies beyond practicality and possession. The sixpence—a small silver coin—represents the ordinary currency of daily life: money, comfort, respectability, the modest pleasures and securities that most people spend their lives accumulating. The genius at the heart of this story is a man who has fixed his gaze entirely upon the moon and trodden the sixpence into the mud without a backward glance. The question the title quietly poses is whether such a man is to be pitied, condemned, envied, or worshipped—and whether the rest of us, scrabbling after our sixpences, have ever truly looked up at the moon at all.

It is a remarkable feature of this book that it refuses to make its central figure sympathetic in any conventional sense. Many novels about artists invite us to forgive their cruelties because of their gifts, to indulge their excesses as the necessary eccentricities of greatness. Maugham does something far bolder and far more honest. He presents a man who is, by almost any humane standard, monstrous—cold, contemptuous, indifferent to the suffering he causes, incapable of gratitude or remorse—and he refuses to soften these qualities or to sentimentalize them. And yet, by the end of the book, the reader is left in a state of profound and unresolved awe. We do not love this man. We may not even respect him. But we cannot dismiss him, and we cannot stop thinking about what his existence implies about the nature of greatness and the price at which it is purchased. This refusal to provide easy moral comfort is one of the great strengths of the novel and one of the reasons it has endured.

The narrative structure deserves a word of preparation as well, because it is unusual and contributes greatly to the book’s particular power. The story is told not by the protagonist himself, nor by an all-seeing narrator, but by an observer—a writer, never named, who encounters the genius at various points across many years and pieces together his story from his own fragmentary experiences and from the accounts of others. This narrator is one of Maugham’s most characteristic creations: urbane, ironic, self-deprecating, endlessly curious about human behavior, and possessed of a sharp wit that he turns as readily upon himself as upon his subjects. He is not a passive recorder. He has opinions, prejudices, and limitations, and he is fully aware of them. The effect of this technique is to make the central figure even more enigmatic and unreachable, because we never have direct access to his inner life. We see him only as others see him—from the outside, through a fog of gossip, speculation, and incomprehension. This means that the reader is placed in the same position as the narrator: forced to grapple with a mystery that can never be fully solved, to interpret a man who refuses to explain himself, to draw our own conclusions about a soul that remains finally opaque.

This narrative distance is not a flaw but a deliberate and brilliant choice. Maugham understood that the true subject of his book—the alien, almost inhuman quality of pure artistic compulsion—could not be conveyed by allowing us inside the mind of the artist. To do so would be to domesticate it, to make it comprehensible, to reduce the inexplicable to the merely psychological. By keeping the genius at arm’s length, observed always from a baffled and fascinated distance, Maugham preserves the essential strangeness of his vision. We are never permitted the comfortable illusion that we understand this man. We can only watch him, as the narrator watches him, with a mixture of repulsion and reluctant wonder.

The World of the Novel and the Journey It Will Take You on

The geography of this book is itself part of its meaning, and the journey it describes is both physical and spiritual. It begins in the drawing rooms of Edwardian London, that world of careful manners, social ambition, and literary luncheons that Maugham knew so intimately and rendered with such delicate satire. The opening movement of the novel is, in many ways, a comedy of manners—a sharp and amusing portrait of a particular stratum of society, of the small vanities of artistic and social aspiration, of the way reputations are made and unmade over teacups. Maugham’s eye for the absurdities of this world is unfailing, and there is great pleasure to be had in his portraits of the minor characters who populate it: the ambitious hostesses, the self-important critics, the dabblers and the strivers. The early chapters establish a tone of civilized irony that makes the eruption of the central drama all the more shocking.

For when the disruption comes, it comes with the force of an earthquake breaking through a manicured lawn. A respectable middle-aged man, a stockbroker, a husband and father, a figure of such complete and reassuring ordinariness that no one had ever thought him capable of an interesting act, suddenly does something so inexplicable that it shatters every assumption those around him had made about the nature of human beings and the predictability of human lives. From this point, the novel becomes a pursuit—the narrator’s pursuit of an explanation, and the protagonist’s pursuit of something he can barely articulate even to himself. The action moves from London to Paris, from the comfortable to the squalid, from the world of bourgeois security to the world of poverty, hunger, and creative struggle. And finally it moves much farther still, across oceans, to the islands of the South Pacific, where the story reaches its strange and unforgettable culmination in a setting of overwhelming natural beauty and primal simplicity.

This trajectory—from the constrained and artificial to the wild and elemental—mirrors the inner journey of the central figure and dramatizes one of the novel’s deepest themes. Civilization, Maugham suggests, is a kind of cage, comfortable and well-appointed, but a cage nonetheless. Most of us are content to live within its bars, exchanging freedom for safety, depth for ease. But there are a few who cannot breathe within those confines, who must break out at any cost, even if the price is everything they have and everyone who loves them, even if it means descending into degradation and isolation in pursuit of a goal that no one else can see or understand. The movement of the story toward ever more remote and untamed landscapes is the physical expression of this flight from the cage of ordinary life toward some final, uncompromising freedom.

The South Pacific section of the novel deserves particular mention, for it represents some of Maugham’s most beautiful and atmospheric writing. He traveled extensively in the region and knew its landscapes and its inhabitants firsthand, and the descriptions of tropical beauty, of the lush and indifferent splendor of nature, carry a weight of lived experience. There is a sense, in these final movements of the book, of having passed beyond the moral categories of European civilization into a realm where different laws apply—or where, perhaps, the only law that matters is the relentless inner law of creation. The reader should be aware that the novel was written a century ago and reflects, in places, the attitudes and assumptions of its era regarding race, gender, and the cultures of the Pacific. These attitudes belong to the historical moment of the book’s composition. A thoughtful contemporary reader will recognize them as such, and will be able to appreciate the genuine power and beauty of Maugham’s vision while maintaining a critical awareness of its period limitations. To read older literature well is to hold these two responses in balance: to receive what is timeless and true, while understanding what is dated and historically conditioned.