A Summing Up of The Summing Up > IDEAS & IDEALS

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 In 1938, at 64, William Somerset Maugham, English playwright and novelist, published a small book called The Summing Up in which he, as the unpretentious title suggests, summed up his life and art. "Not an autobiography nor a recollection," as the author says, this unclassifiable book is not a great book as such, but with its wholesome wisdom of life, the incisive commentary on the art of writing, and the philosophical reflections upon the world and the human nature, it has all the elements any great books in the world ought to have. If not a great book, it surely is a unique one.

     I came to open it recently once again, at 50, thirty years after I had read it for the first time when I was a sophomore at college. I decided to use it as a main textbook in my English Reading class for the sophomore students. All the underlined parts here and there throughout the book looked familiar and strange, taking me back to the time of my college days, and bringing a flood of fond as well as bitter memories associated with my youth. I could not help but smile at so many words and phrases circled with a red pencil. I had to look them up all in the English-Korean dictionary.

     Reading the same book for the second time that has left a strong impression on you in the first reading after a long interval is a very strange and awkward experience. It is like meeting your old flame, or visiting your dear hometown after an absence of many years. You become nostalgic before it, and usually get disappointed in it. You can rarely revive or recapture the lost passion and pleasure. You feel it is not what it used to be or ought to be. You find all the enthusiasm or the bouncing spirit has considerably waned with time, inevitably. You realize that you have lived with a vague longing for it, but it is not what you have expected it to be. And, first of all, we rarely read the same book twice in our life.

     But the encounter with Mr. Maugham after 30 years in The Summing Up was a quite a new experience. It was like meeting an old teacher who had not a bit grown older during the whole time he was away. He spoke with vigor, honesty and authority about all the subjects on life and art as ever. Since I grew up myself physically as well as intellectually during the time, I thought I could look down upon him now, but I was wrong. He was a high mountain as ever, and I was a little boy standing before it. It was a sad but sweet defeat for me.

     But I felt I was quite closer to him now. During the last thirty years I saw more of the world and man, and now many new lines in the book that had escaped my notice at my first reading rushed to me with new meanings. Some consolidated my views, some confirmed my convictions and some others clarified my doubts on the fundamental questions of life and assumptions of art -- so much so that I felt I was exalted suddenly to the intellectual level of the author, and even fell into an illusion that I was Mr. Maugham himself and wrote The Summing Up myself.

     Awaking, inevitably, from the sweet but sad illusion, it slowly dawned upon me that I could write an amusing essay by borrowing, nay, stealing some of his ideas and expressions, as if they were mine. This thievery, I thought, could not be a crime or felony. It would rather do some good to the readers as well as the late author. The original book and the author, like the sun, could be too much glaring and dazzling for the naked eyes of ordinary readers, and scare away them who have no special purpose and training for it. My essay, like the light of the moon, will be mild and soothing, simple and clear, and more than aything else, not lengthy.

     I was very happy, first of all, to find that Mr. Maugham and I have common impatience with the writers who write unclearly. I had once thought vaguely that obscurity in writing was inevitable when there were great and profound ideas to be expressed, but I felt liberated when he, that great writer, said clearly and convincingly that "people often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly." He added that "it is natural enough that a writer should not find a precise expression for a confused idea." In short, to think and write clearly is the first lesson we must learn from Mr. Maugham. What is not clear is simply phoney.

     I had once looked up with envy and admiration to those who pretended to speak several foreign languages, and I, in youthful pride and vanity, let the rumor go that I would master French and German in addition to English. Mr. Maugham told me not to live in a dream. "Unless you devote your whole life to it, you will never learn to speak the language of another country to perfection," he said. My English, poor as it is, would surely have been much worse if my devotion to it had been divided or distracted by the other foreign languages. The fact that Mr. Maugham himself could speak several languages fluently left me at a complete  loss for a moment, but I thank the linguistic genius for the practical advice. We cannot compete with a genius. Mr. Maugham was one. I decided to be satisfied with being just a diligent English teacher.

     Mr. Maugham observed keenly the arrogance and prejudice into which most of the intellectuals and the artists are apt to fall. He warned that "there is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having ploughed a thousand fields." Right. Reading many books itself is pointless unless it produces more corns of wisdom for the readers. All our intellectual and artistic activities should ultimately be directed to the betterment of humanity one way or another, I think.

     It seemed I had looked forward to old age with some dismay, or ignored it completely, when The Summing Up came into my hand for the first time. I was twenty then and could not or would not accept the picture of me dozing in a rocking chair. I would rather die, once I thought, than be unable to play soccer anymore. That would surely be why I had skipped or had not noticed the following lines then, but which caught my eyes now. "Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth." I drew a long line under this sentence with a red pencil.

     The other day I met my old love by chance on the street, shook hands and parted with no pangs of jealousy. I stopped playing soccer three years ago without regret. I often get angry with my wife and children for disturbing my pleasure of dozing in my armchair before the TV set. I am no longer dismayed at my old age. Certainly I owe to it large part of my peace of mind I enjoy these days.
          (July 18, 1991)