Novel: The Moon and Sixpence

Overview
W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919) follows the life of Charles Strickland, a staid London stockbroker who abandons his comfortable middle-class existence to pursue an uncompromising artistic vision. Loosely inspired by Paul Gauguin yet fully fictional, the novel is narrated by an English writer who pieces together Strickland’s story from encounters and testimonies, reflecting on the uneasy balance between genius, morality, and the social order. The title opposes the moon, an ideal that pulls a man beyond convention, to the sixpence, the small coin of everyday respectability.

Plot
The narrator first meets Mrs. Strickland in polite London society and is startled when her husband abruptly deserts her and their children to live in Paris. Seeking him out, the narrator finds Strickland living in squalor, painting obsessively with total indifference to hunger, comfort, or human ties. Taciturn, rude, and frighteningly self-absorbed, Strickland offers no apology: he paints because he must, and the world can go hang.

In Paris, Strickland is sheltered by Dirk Stroeve, a kindly, mediocre Dutch painter, and Stroeve’s gentle wife, Blanche. When Strickland falls ill, Blanche nurses him back to health; Strickland repays their charity by seducing her, then casting her off once his desire fades. Blanche, devastated and torn from her husband’s devoted care, kills herself. Strickland’s response is chillingly aesthetic: he suggests the affair and its aftermath were only meaningful as material for his art. Stroeve, broken, returns to Holland, leaving Strickland to drift on.

Years later the narrator tracks the painter to Tahiti. Through a local madam, Tiare Johnson, and a colonial doctor, Dr. Coutras, he reconstructs Strickland’s final chapter. In the islands, Strickland takes up with a Tahitian woman, Ata, whose family builds them a home in the hills. There, away from Europe’s chatter, he works with ferocious concentration, discovering a new light and primitive intensity that unlock a visionary style. He develops leprosy, goes largely blind, and paints the walls of his house with a great mural cycle. Near death, he commands Ata to burn the house, leaving only ashes and the doctor’s awed testimony that the lost paintings were sublime. Strickland dies obscure, unrepentant, and fulfilled on his own terms.

Characters and Perspective
Strickland is depicted as both monster and seer: ruthless, brutal in honesty, incapable of empathy, yet radiant in purpose. The narrator, urbane, skeptical, often ironical, prefers nuance over judgment, yet cannot evade the moral wreckage Strickland leaves behind. Dirk Stroeve represents human warmth and conventional sentiment; his tragedy with Blanche exposes the cost of idolizing genius. In Tahiti, figures like Tiare and Dr. Coutras act as witnesses, showing how Strickland’s force bends lives around him even in exile.

Themes
Maugham explores the tyranny and purity of artistic vocation. Strickland’s greatness is inseparable from his inhumanity, raising the question of whether art justifies cruelty. The novel opposes bourgeois decency to the demands of creation, yet resists simple answers: the narrator both admires the work and recoils from the man. Exile and primitivism function as liberations and illusions; Tahiti grants Strickland the conditions to realize his vision, while also exposing colonial fantasies about the “primitive.” The title crystallizes the book’s tension: most people stoop for the sixpence of security, while a rare few reach for the moon and scorch everything that binds them to earth.