So many years have passed since I read The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham and yet his words seem more relevant today than ever.
“He had a feeling that he was on the threshold of a discovery which he must make for himself.”
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge
My mom gave me The Razor’s Edge (not sure why) many, many years ago, thinking that I might enjoy more serious books than the thrillers that I had been devouring within hours of getting my hands on them (I was in high school, what would you expect?)
Picture Credit: https://www.amazon.ca/Razors-Edge-Penguin-Twentieth-Century-Classics/dp/0140185232
I started reading about Larry Darrell expecting him to be a Jay Gatsby but as I read the story, the thriller-reading teenager in me felt her heart sinking in a way she hadn’t experienced before. It wasn’t sinking so much as thinking. Yes, my heart was thinking. How did Maugham manage that?
Larry had been a World War I pilot who returned home completely transformed. He didn’t take the great job in finance (any bells ringing?), didn’t marry his beautiful, ambitious fiancée, didn’t want a house, or a settled, conventional life. I still remember reading where Larry tells his fiancée Isabel that he wanted to ‘loaf and think’ instead of working for money. At the time, I may have treated that concept as philosophical fiction – but I probably didn’t realize that the younger me was taking notes.
Larry Darrell was the anti-hero who was deeply disinterested in the definitions of success that the society had constructed for him and the ambition economy that had just begun to boom. He was, in many ways, an antithesis to Jay Gatsby. Where Gatsby built a mansion to reclaim lost love, Larry gave up both mansion and love, perhaps to reclaim himself? I was unnerved and impressed, to say the least.
Consider the publication year of The Razor’s Edge: 1944. The middle of another great war. But look at the timelessness of the conflict that the book brings to life. The pull of conventional success versus the hunger for something deeper and harder to pinpoint.
Larry is not a hero at all. He is the archetype of the vagabond and loafer – reading philosophy in attic rooms, working in a coal mine for ‘experience’, drifting through Paris and India with a vague and undefined aim to understand life’s purpose… basically everything that any family in any century would label as failure.
And yet, long before the ambition economy came along with Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Matt Damon etc., Maugham had laid the foundations of the dropout culture, an anti-hustle anti-optics inner peace movement through Larry’s character, maybe inspiring the future generations of FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) followers who are trying to save up enough to vanish from the corporate grid…
When I read this in high school, it made me uneasy and, truth be told, that unease never really left me. Amidst all the data-driven optimizations, scaling efficiencies and monetization, hard questions often pop up. What are we really trying to hack? What if you don’t want to climb the success ladder? Does that make you lazy? Or just tired of playing the game? Whose game is it anyway?
Be it Sophie’s downfall as a widowed alcoholic, Isabel’s envy and moral failure, or Elliott Templeton’s empty funeral, the story questions the ideal picture of conventional progress and reveals darker truths lurking behind sunny narratives.
Picture Credits: https://newcriterion.com/article/w-somerset-maugham-the-pleasures-of-a-master/
Razor’s Edge is a gentle reminder that success may not necessarily be the right metric. It also gives rise to an uncomfortable thought that you may be spending years chasing things you don’t actually want, simply because you’ve learned to – or been told to – want and desire them.
Larry may not be everyone’s hero but he has definitely reached the levels of chill that most people would do anything to achieve. He showed us that leaving a game (or a war) may look like failure from outside, but may be a far wiser choice than we realize.
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Contributed by
Aashisha Chakraborty
