There are joys, too, the joy of freedom from conventional notions of success and failure… the joy that arises naturally when there is no separation between you and what you experience.
—Ken McLeod, Musings, Where Practice Takes You
A friend recently spoke about a book that changed her life. Reading W. Somerset Maugham's The Razor’s Edge as a young woman in the 1960s, she discovered the possibility that life need not be organised around the social expectations of her family and culture. Taking this path did indeed lead to feeling like she lived on a razor's edge.
On her recommendation I read the novel for the first time. Although written more than eighty years ago, how prescient it feels. Many of the attitudes and aspirations Maugham portrays so poignantly have become deeply embedded in many cultures. The questions behind the novel seem even more relevant and urgent now than when Maugham first asked them.
Set in the years following the First World War, The Razor’s Edge follows Larry Darrell, a young American pilot whose war experiences lead him to ask profound questions about the meaning and purpose of life. Returning home, he is expected to marry Isabel Bradley, pursue a successful career, and take his place within the prosperous American upper-middle class. Instead, he finds himself uninterested in the pursuit of wealth, status, security, and comfort. He cannot fully explain what is calling him, only that he must discover this for himself.
Larry’s decisions bewilder those around him. Isabel loves him deeply but cannot imagine a future without financial security and social standing. Willing to give him the pricacy of time and space, she meets him in Paris two years after he begins his search, and realises that his search has barely begun and commitment to it has not changed. After she and Larry end their engagement, he wanders through Europe, studying philosophy and religion while supporting himself as a manual labourer. His actions don't feel like a rebellion against society so much as a response to an irresistible need to know.
Larry eventually travels to India, studies with a spiritual teacher, and experiences a profound shift in understanding—discovering an inner freedom and contentment that doesn't depend on external circumstances. He returns to America, not as a guru or a social reformer, but to a simple life ungoverned by ambition, attachment, or the need for recognition. Throughout Maugham's novel he stands in contrast to the other main characters, whose lives revolve around wealth, romance, reputation, or social prestige. Isabel remains imprisoned by the choices she has made; her uncle, Elliott Templeton by his obsession with status; and her friend Sophie MacDonald is overwhelmed by grief and addiction. Larry alone appears genuinely at ease. His choices suggest that he awakened to a different way of inhabiting the world and meeting daily experience.
When The Razor’s Edge appeared in 1944, it anticipated a growing hunger that would emerge more fully in the 1950s and 1960s. Alongside books such as Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Allan Watt's The Way of Zen, it introduced many Western readers to a different understanding of what it means to live well. The relevance of The Razor's Edge has only deepened. In the decades since it was written, humanity has achieved unprecedented levels of material prosperity, technological innovation and consumer choice, hand in hand with severe ecological degradation, seemingly intractable social and political conflict, increasing loneliness, anxiety, and a widespread sense of disconnection. Against this backdrop, Larry Darrell’s choice to live without concern for conventional notions of success feels more relevant than ever. The Razor’s Edge endures both as a portrait of our materialistic and transactional age, and because it asks a question that feels increasingly relevant: if comfort, consumption, and achievment cannot satisfy our deepest longings, what kind of life can?