The Razor’s Edge Study Guide

Somerset Maugham was a bestselling writer in England during his time, and his plays attracted national attention. In contrast to his commercial success, critical opinion of Maugham’s work remained mixed. He was born in 1874 to British parents in Paris, where his father served as a lawyer in the British embassy. By the time Maugham was ten years old, both of his parents had died, his mother of tuberculosis when he was eight and his father two years later of cancer. Maugham was then raised by an uncle in England. He went on to university in Germany and then studied to become a physician in London, though he never practiced medicine. In World War I, Maugham served first as a volunteer ambulance driver in France and then as an agent in the British Secret Service. As an ambulance driver, he met Frederick Halston, who would become his lover for the next 30 years. Describing his sexual orientation, Maugham said, “I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer—whereas really it was the other way round.” Maugham kept his sexuality a secret for most of his life, and though he maintained relationships with men, he also married Syrie Wellcome in 1917. The couple divorced in 1929 after having one daughter together, Mary Elizabeth, nicknamed Liza. Throughout his career, Maugham wrote close to twenty novels, nine collections of short stories, and staged over 30 plays.

The novel takes place immediately following the end of World War I. The book’s protagonist, Larry, served in the Canadian air corps to fight in the war. At the time, Canada was a British Dominion, meaning that the country was mostly self-governed but existed as part of the British Empire, so when England entered WWI in 1914 by declaring war against Germany, Canada automatically entered the war as well. Canada devised its own air corps, the Royal Flying Corps, to help meet the British need for pilots. Isabel says that Larry joined the Canadian air corps instead of the U.S. military because he was not yet 18 but was able to convince the Canadian military authorities that he was. Years later, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 occurs, which precipitates Henry Maturin’s death and bankrupts Gray Maturin, leaving Isabel and her family in dire financial circumstances. The 1929 stock market crash signaled the beginning of the Great Depression. In the novel, Larry also spends a significant amount of time in India. England colonized and ruled over India from 1847 until 1950, and Larry travels to India during that time of British rule (as did Maugham when he visited India and Ramana Maharshi in 1938).

In 1934, Paul Brunton (the pen name of British writer Raphael Hurst) published the book A Search in Secret India about his time searching for spiritual insight in India. A Search in Secret India became a bestseller in England and brought the Hindu teacher Ramana Maharshi widespread attention in the U.K. Somerset Maugham would later visit Ramana Maharshi in 1938, writing an essay about the meeting before using Ramana Maharshi as the basis for the character of Sri Ganesha in The Razor’s Edge. In A Search in Secret India, Brunton also describes an experience of spiritual illumination similar to the one Larry experiences in The Razor’s Edge. In The Razor’s Edge, the novel’s protagonist Larry goes against social expectations in a search for spiritual meaning, which he ultimately finds in Hinduism. That narrative, and the novel’s thematic focus on spiritual meaning, anticipate several literary works of the 1950s and 60s, including works of the Beat Generation and Herman Hesse. Notable related works from the Beat Generation include Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, in which the protagonist goes against 1950s social norms to search for spiritual fulfillment across the U.S., and The Dharma Bums, in which Kerouac, an American, searches for meaning through Zen Buddhism. In his novel Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, who was German and Swiss, tells the story of an Indian man seeking enlightenment in the time of Gautama Buddha. Hesse wrote the novel after immersing himself in Hindu and Buddhist texts and philosophy. A recurring protagonist in J.D. Salinger’s later work, Seymour Glass, bears a striking resemblance to Larry in The Razor’s Edge; Seymour is an American who suffers from PTSD following his time in the military during World War II, and his traumatic stress leads him to seek meaning in Buddhism and Hinduism. Seymour Glass can be found in Salinger’s collections Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. It is also worth noting that many of these works by Western writers have received criticism for their depictions of Buddhism and Hinduism, portrayals that critics have described as superficial, inaccurate, culturally appropriative, or all three.