Influences and Critical Reception
Maugham, like Hermann Hesse, was remarkably prescient, anticipating an embrace of Eastern culture by Americans and Europeans almost a decade before the Beats were to popularize it. (It should be noted that Americans had explored Eastern philosophy prior to these authors, notably in the first half of the nineteenth century by the Transcendentalists.) Maugham himself visited Sri Ramana Ashram, where he had a direct interaction with Ramana Maharshi in Tamil Nadu, India in 1938. Maugham’s suggestion that he "invented nothing" was a source of annoyance for Christopher Isherwood, who helped him translate a verse 1.3.14 from the Katha Upanishads for the novel’s epigraph - उत्तिष्ठ जाग्रत प्राप्य वरान्निबोधत | क्षुरस्य धारा निशिता दुरत्यया दुर्गं पथस्तत्कवयो वदन्ति || (uttiShTha jAgrata prApya varAn_nibodhata | kShurasya dhArA nihitA duratyayA pathas_tat_ -avayo vadanti || ) - which means "Rise, awaken, seek the wise and realize. The path is difficult to cross like the sharpened edge of the razor (knife), so say the wise." Many thought Isherwood, who had built his own literary reputation by then and was studying Indian philosophy, was the basis for the book’s hero. Isherwood went so far as to write Time magazine denying this speculation.
Read more about this topic: The Razor's Edge
Famous quotes containing the words influences, critical and/or reception:
“Do not seek anxiously to be developed, to subject yourself to many influences to be played on; it is all dissipation.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.”
—Raymond Chandler (18881959)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)