Additional Note: "The Hero" by W. Somerset Maugham Google Books: 1908
If you have your own book journal, you can stop the presses, so to speak, and add something to what you published. I wish I could add this to the last post I wrote on this book, but once you put the pictures in a post, the post itself becomes unstable. This additional note will have to do.
I thought about this review all day. I knew I left something out regarding my reactions to this book. I still like the book. There is no question on that, but it addresses a situation that I have argued in my life with friends and family. It is the question of Captain James Parson's reluctance to marry his fiance, Mary. She had been waiting for him for five years. He had asked her to marry him when he left to go to war in South Africa. It is basic to the plot of the book. James no longer wants to marry her and learns to finally detest her and finds he would do anything than marry her.
During the last election, there were two people running for election, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain. One of the criticisms that some of my friends had was that when McCain came back from Viet Nam he was a POW, he did not want to be married to his wife anymore although she waited for him. She had gained weight from an automobile accident she had. He divorced her and married a wealthy woman who was very beautiful. I agreed with some of the those who said that he did a dishonorable thing.
Then I remembered in my childhood my aunt who was so good to me as a child who raised my mother when they left Harbin, Manchuria to live in Beijing, China. She had met my uncle in Beijing and they fell in love and she came to this country and then sponsored my mother five years later. It was later that I found out that my uncle divorced his wife to marry my aunt. My aunt and uncle were happily married for over 50 years until he died.
I could go on about people I knew who left one spouse to marry others because they were unhappy and went on to live happy lives. I decided that no one should be forced to live with a spouse they don't want to live with. That is like living in the dark ages. In the book, I thought with the present state of things that maybe James could have married Mary and just had affairs on the side, but he was not the sort to do that. His parents were happily married and he wanted the same.
I was a bit of a prig when growing up. Luckily, I grew out of it. I was raised by a church culture who stated that once you are married you are married for life. A man does not have a right to divorce a wife and get a new one. It is hard on the woman, but harder if she has to live with a man who can't stand her. I still hear those so-called rules in Christian churches that the only way a man can get a divorce is for adultery. If a woman's husband is an alcoholic and beating the crap out of her she is out of luck according to their rules. He has to leave her for another woman for her to get a divorce and for her to be able to re-marry.
Maugham was writing that book during a time when honor and those rules were more strict than they were when I was a kid and certainly worst than the 21st century. Maugham was a gay man who could never come out but stayed in the closet for his entire life. James was in an intolerable situation and his way out may have seen a bit extreme but it was in keeping with who James was.
