I’ve read Of Human Bondage three times.Today at the library, I checked it out again. I suppose there have been fifteen or twenty other other novels I’ve read more than once (Slaughterhouse Five and The Dick Gibson Show come to mind). Actually though, I’m not much for encores, whether it’s books or movies.

The third time I read the book was in 1993. That was the year Annie Proulx’ The Shipping News was published to great fanfare. Everybody was talking about it, so I picked it up. I remember enjoying it despite considering it horribly overwritten and self-consciously poetic. After finishing the book, I wanted to reread Of Human Bondage. I don’t remember it as a conscious decision. It was simply as if I my reading brain needed it, in the same way your body will give you an appetite for specific foods when your system demands certain nutrients.

Today, reading Maugham’s own introduction clarified my need. He speaks of his early fiction writing, then his shift to playwriting, then back to fiction: “I no longer sought a jewelled prose and a rich texture, on unavailing attempts to achieve which I had formerly wasted much labour. I sought on the contrary plainness and simplicity. With so much that I wanted to say within reasonable limits, I felt that I could not afford to waste words and I set out now with the notion of using only such as were necessary to make my meaning clear. I had no space for ornament.”

In the first chapter of the novel — two pages — we meet the hero, Philip Carey, a child at the time. He is taken to the bed of his mother hours before her death from the difficult stillbirth of another baby boy. Only two minutes of reading and it brought me to tears. Again. But I’m an easy cry.

I think of the other novels I gravitate to — not just novels, but stories, essays, even poems — the language is direct. Figurative speech weighs too much. You fill up too quickly. (I’ll let that be my one metaphor in this piece).

In a moment I will start the third chapter. But first a quick trip to Wikipedia. (I like the feature they have at the bottom of each literature entry called References in other Literature.) “A college student named Eddie tells Buffy Of Human Bondage is his security blanket.”

Nice. Written in a way Maugham might have, himself, if he was a writer for Buffy.