The Razor's Edge

Larry Darrell, the novel’s protagonist, is a little over average height, thin and wiry, with high cheekbones and hollow temples. He has a remarkably sweet nature and an aura of goodness that attracts people to him. He grew up in the same upper-economic class as Isabel and Gray. He is torn between his need to understand the meaning of life and the expectations placed on him by Isabel and her family. Isabel thinks of Larry as “weak” because he was always agreeable to following the crowd. She’s correct in the sense that he is largely passive at the outset of his quest, but she fails to recognize the inner drive that compels him when he sees something he really wants (for example, when he joins the army air corps while still underage).

Larry doesn’t seem to entirely understand other people. He never recognizes that Isabel still harbors a passion for him or that Sophie doesn’t want to be saved. He might have avoided the incident with Ellie (at the farm in Part 3, Chapter 2) if he had been more attentive to social nuances. Perhaps his inability to connect fully with others contributes to his impulse to find peace and comfort within himself rather than turning to something outside. This social disconnect may also be the reason that he achieves a sense of completeness only when he is alone and high above the world where he doesn’t feel like a stranger in a strange land.

Larry’s inner-directedness expresses itself in an instinct for privacy. He keeps other people at a distance. He rarely tells anyone where he lives, and he dislikes personal questions. He is likely to come and go without warning or explanation. Although he is personable and makes friends easily, he rarely makes profound or intimate connections, and he walks away from people as easily as he meets them.

Maugham never seems fully comfortable with Larry’s plan to wander America as a kind of messianic figure offering enlightenment to seekers like himself. He wonders if Larry would have been better off if he had married Isabel or Sophie. Immersion in the physical world might have eventually overcome his sense of alienation. In the end, Maugham can only accept that Larry is an unusual and remarkable person, and perhaps his goodness will really impact the world.

Isabel is tall and pretty with a youthful plumpness that she eventually leaves behind, deliberately sculpting herself into a chic and highly cultivated woman. Throughout the story, she exhibits persistence, determination, and an iron will. When Larry arrives home injured and shell-shocked from the war, she is attracted to the romance of the wounded hero and pursues him until he falls in love with her. She’s undoubtedly drawn to the aura of goodness that surrounds him, but she never fully understands that part of him. Isabel belongs to the world of her uncle Elliott. She values names and titles, leisure and expensive clothes. Having a strong will and strong opinions, Isabel is quick to judge others harshly, which gives Maugham an opportunity to address moral questions as they arise in the story.

When Isabel relates the story of how she pursued him, Larry laughs and tells Maugham that Isabel is a liar. He is joking, but he has put his finger on an underlying truth about Isabel. In her destruction of Sophie, she demonstrates a ruthless willingness to deceive in order to achieve her ends. She effectively perpetuates a lifelong lie in allowing Gray to believe she loves him. She also has a capacity for self-deception. She firmly—and wrongly—believes that Larry is a virgin, a completely baseless conviction. She can’t acknowledge that jealousy influences both her belief in his “innocence” and her vilification of Sophie.

The Maugham character likes and sympathizes with Isabel, but many readers won’t find her to be a likable character. Maugham tells us that she lacks tenderness. She can be harshly judgmental. Gray’s devotion deserves better from her than fondness. Her attachment to her children is distant. Her values are superficial. She can be ruthless, hurtful, and jealous. Each time she is confronted with the choice between hard work and comfort, she takes the easier road. The only time the reader sees her sacrifice her own desire is when she sets Larry free instead of forcing or manipulating him into marrying her and giving her the life she wants. In the end, she achieves her desire to live a gracious life, but she has missed every opportunity to grow from hardship.

Tall, slender, and elegant with gray hair, Elliott is nearing his fifties at the outset of the narrative. He is notoriously and unapologetically a snob, a tireless pursuer of connections with high society. Maugham suggests that Elliott’s love of high society is driven by romanticism. Elliott believes the modern-day lords and ladies reflect an age of pomp and gallantry. Even the appeal of the Catholic Church may lie in its magnificent costumes and rituals. Elliott can believe in a God who values outward displays of importance—exactly the kind of God that Larry Darrell finds contemptible.

Elliott is also generous and kind. He likes to be helpful, and he doesn’t forget people who have helped him. He has an acute social intelligence and a genius for saying exactly the right thing to put everyone at ease. He served with the ambulance corps in the war and gives money to charitable causes.

There was much speculation as to whom Maugham might have used as the model for Larry’s character. One suggestion throws some light on Elliott as well. In August 1944, British MP, Chips Channon, an Anglicized American, wrote in his diary,

I saw much of Somerset Maugham, who never before was a friend. He has put me into a book, ‘the Razor's Edge’ and when I dined with him, I asked him why he had done it, and he explained, with some embarrassment, that he had split me into three characters, and then written a book about all three. So I am Elliott Templeton, Larry, himself the hero of the book, and another: however I am flattered, and the book is a masterpiece [...] (Channon, Henry. Rhodes James, Robert, ed. Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).

It is difficult to imagine how Elliott and Larry could emerge from the same model. Elliott is vain where Larry is modest; snobbish where Larry is tolerant; conventional where Larry is a stranger in a strange land. Of the two, it seems likelier that Elliott was Maugham’s favorite; he is the closest thing in the book to a comic character, and Maugham gives him the most humorous lines—for example, when Elliott, the unparalleled snob, says, “if there’s one thing in the world I detest and despise, it’s snobbishness” (97).

Elliott remains faithful to his superficial values even after the people who shared those values abandon him. He dies rejoicing in the anticipation of moving in the highest circles of heavenly society. 

When Maugham first meets Sophie, he describes her as “drab” and plain with mousy hair. However, she has wit and a sense of irony that hints at unseen depths. Later, the reader learns from Larry that she has intellectual curiosity, reads widely, feels deeply, and writes poetry. That passion and depth of feeling mean she is acutely destabilized when she loses her husband and child, and she turns to casual sex and chronic intoxication to cope with the loss. Isabel is being unjust when she declares that Sophie must always have been “bad” underneath, but she is indirectly (if unkindly) identifying that Sophie’s intensity of feeling made her vulnerable to self-destruction. It is Isabel’s distortion, having no passion in her own character, that defines passion as badness.

Maugham seems to have a soft spot for Sophie not as the sad and beaten woman who was “rescued” by Larry but as the woman who is caught in a cycle of self-destructive, maladaptive coping through substance use. She seems to him to be most alive and beautiful when she is in this more chaotic state. Maugham may be romanticizing the grave reality of Sophie’s situation, but he also notices her spiritless quality when Larry tries to play savior.

Gray Maturin is tall, broad-shouldered, and increasingly fat as he grows older. He has been in love with Isabel for years and has all the qualities Isabel wanted to find in Larry; he derives his sense of identity and worth from work, and he regards money as a measure of his success—and when he loses that, he loses his sense of self. Isabel also wants to ascribe to him some of the qualities she loved in Larry. She describes the time Gray spends alone in the marshes near their plantation as a period of healing and uplifting, but Maugham suspects this is wishful thinking.

Gray isn’t articulate. He frequently talks in clichés and wouldn’t be able to describe a transcendent experience if he had one. Perhaps Isabel finds in him a blank slate on which she can write what she wants to find. He is sweet-natured and adores Isabel and their children. He deserves more from Isabel then mere fondness, but he may not be astute enough to realize that she doesn’t return his love with the depth of tenderness. However, he may love her enough that it doesn’t matter.