Poor Beast

It is taking me a long time to read Maugham's "The Moon and Sixpence" because of work. It has been crushing my bones and leaving me to lay. Then there are birthweeks to attend to and friends to argue with, so in the twenty or so minutes left me before I collapse into my bed, I've crept along with the novel. I didn't think I would finish it for the writing wasn't hitting me anywhere. The language was not significant and there was little image making. But then--BAM! Blanche, the wife of Dick Stroeve, the technical painter who suffers Strickland's constant lambasts in order to be around genius, tells him she is leaving him, that she has fallen in love with Strickland. It is too painfully good at this point, for Stroeve tells her that he has worshipped her and that no one will ever treat her as well again. And it is true.

I was taught as a child that kindness and good deeds and stalwartness and generosity would be rewarded. All the children's books said so. I think I believed it more than many. That was the trouble with being a good reader, I guess. The dumber kids didn't seem to learn any of the lessons in those books. Most of them are now successful, I assume, having become brutal competitors in the market place. They failed to read the ethics books. But fed the moral lessons we were taught at school and on television in shows like "Superman" and "The Lone Ranger," I felt compelled to stand up for the small and the weak and the timid. And I awaited my reward.

It came in the form of the beatings I took being a "hero." I took them from my teachers, the very ones who had me read those wondrous books, when I tried to stand as the classroom lawyer. "You shouldn't do that," I would say. "It isn't right."

And there were the beatings from bullies, too, the physical ones when I would stand up for the kid getting picked on. "You can't do that," I would say. "It isn't right."

And later on, I learned the lesson that Stroeve is learning just now in the chapter I am reading as he finds that all his good deeds have left him where he lies. Good old Stroeve, such bumbling good will and love for everyone. I want to hold his hand, buy him a drink, succor him awhile.

Then I want to get away. For I've learned one thing. Those mopey eyes won't disappear. They will follow you on and on until you can't take it any longer and you feel you will go mad.

Blanche is leaving him, and she knows it is disastrous, but what is there to do?

I will finish the novel this week. I have a few hours over the holidays. I am too tired, though, to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to walk and rest. My mother and I will have a dinner together tomorrow, but she does not want to cook just for the two of us. "I'll just pick up a roasted chicken at Costco," she reported yesterday on the phone. She must want me to take her someplace nice for dinner, otherwise, it could be terrible. It is one of those damp, warm, gray Thanksgivings we have here every few years that makes you wish to be someplace else. It is too cool for the air conditioner and too warm for the heater and too damp to do nothing about it. It is hard to feel pretty in this weather.

I have not written my narrative for a while now, and I don't know that I can pick up where I left off. It seems too artificial, too contrived. I may jump ahead and write about the big fall, the lesson, the thing that makes me laugh at Stroeve. I am going to look through my journals of that time and perhaps begin to make something of them. Poor Stroeve, the beast. I'll show you what I mean.