Everytime I picked Somerset Maugham’s books, two thoughts simultaneously would occur to me: the books were heavy and thick, and the print was too small. Consequently, I kept thinking, maybe when I find a better print, or when I have time.

A few days ago and quite accidentally, I ran into one of his short stories “A Friend in Need”. Now, normally, were I a somewhat-educated person, I would not have understood it. Perhaps I would have even disliked it for wasting my time with a mere anecdote. After all, we can only appreciate based on how much understanding we possess. If the understanding is not relevant or is lacking, the appreciation would not materialize.

It helped that I consider the concept of ‘friend’ as it is being bandied about around me, with the careful cynicism of a weather-beaten mind of someone who finds the widespread hypocrisy among people utterly repulsive. This is why Maugham’s story attracted me, as I wanted to know what this man who has been so loudly lauded by a niche group of readers thinks of the concept of friendship? Was the praise justified?

It also helped that only a few months ago I had began reading “The Mask of Sanity” by Hervey Cleckley. Perhaps Hervey’s book is the very first that documents in literaristic detail, what is means to be a psychopath. Movies always have a way of distorting reality and re-introducing a fakeness to our lives that is pleasant because we know it’s not real (I’ll come to this point again). Steven Seagal once said that the reason most people liked action films that involved violence was because most people thirsted for justice and fairness.

This is a profound statement, whether Seagal really said it or not. It implies the world has a lot of injustices and unfairnesses in it, and that is a damning statement of the state of humanity at least in our own times. In a similar vein then, the distortion movies introduce, however fake in most cases, is not always a bad thing, and perhaps it satisfies certain psychological needs that should have been met in reality (such as the world becoming juster instead of the escapism offered into the justice achieved within a movie, which we all know is a movie, and therefore not real.).

Coming back to psychopaths, their depiction in popular media and movies is a far cry from the realities on the ground–in reality. Hervey’s book suffers from certain myopisms, but in the main, his interviews and reports of different types of psychopaths provides a hard-to-find-elsewhere cues to the problems normal humans face. If you had a neighbor who got into a quarrel with you for no reason at all, and could not be appeased no matter what, well then, according to Hervey, your neighbor is a psychopath.

When we meet someone for the first time, and somehow the person seems to display anti-social, anti-good-will elements, there is a very high probability that the person is ill, and psychopathic. But Maugham surprised me with a very deep moralistic psychology that extended Hervey’s definition even further. The surprise was not due to disagreement but agreement: after reading Maugham’s story, yet another piece of puzzle clicked in place for me.

Maugham begins the story with a benign and ordinary description:

> He was a tiny little fellow, very slender, with white hair,   
a red face much wrinkled, and blue eyes. I suppose he was about   
sixty when I knew him. He was always neatly and quietly dressed   
in accordance with his age and station.    

He also describes his psyche:

> He played a good game and a generous one. He did not talk   
very much, either then or later when we were having drinks,   
but what he said was sensible. He had a quiet, dry humour.   
He seemed to be popular at the club and afterwards, when he   
had gone, they described him as one of the best.    

Then he goes into further detail, family, and the impression he left on the narrator:

> I met his wife, fat, elderly and smiling, and his two daughters.   
It was evidently a united and loving family. I think the chief thing   
that struck me about Burton was his kindliness. There was something   
very pleasing in his mild blue eyes. His voice was gentle; you could   
not imagine that he could raise it in anger; his smile was kind.  
Here was a man who attracted you because you felt in him a real love  
for his fellows. He had charm. But there was nothing sentimental about  
him: he liked his game of cards and his cocktail, he could tell a good 
and spicy story, and in his youth he had been something of an athlete.  
He was a rich man and he had made every penny himself. I suppose one  
thing that made you like him was that he was so small and frail;  
he aroused your instincts of protection. You felt that he would  
not hurt a fly.   

Then, Burton (the man described above) tells a story (within a story!) about an acquaintance who, having lost everything to gambling and drinks, came to him for a job:

"I looked at him for a bit. I could see now that he was all to pieces.   
He'd been drinking more than usual and he looked fifty.  

'"Well, isn't there anything you can do except play cards?' I asked him.  

"'I can swim,' he said.  

"'Swim!'  

"I could hardly believe my ears; it seemed such a silly answer.  

"'I swam for my university.'  

"'I was a pretty good swimmer myself when I was a young man,' I said.  

"Suddenly I had an idea.  

Here, Burton offers the poor drunk a challenge in exchange for a job (even though initially he had said he had no jobs for him):

> When I was a young man I swam from there round the beacon and   
landed at the creek of Tarumi. It's over three miles and it's   
rather difficult on account of the currents round the beacon.   
Well, I told my young namesake about it and I said to him that   
if he'd do it I'd give him a job.  

"I could see he was rather taken aback.  

'"You say you're a swimmer,' I said.  

'"I'm not in very good condition,' he answered.  

"I didn't say anything. I shrugged my shoulders.  

Here and there Maugham sprinkles cues for us, though. The shrug in response to someone’s plight is an interesting cue as it shows elements of psychopathology.

The story goes on:

> "The swim shouldn't take you much over an hour and a quarter.   
I'll drive round to the creek at half-past twelve and meet you.   
I'll take you back to the club to dress and then we'll have   
lunch together.'  

"'Done,' he said.  

"We shook hands. I wished him good luck and he left me.   
I had a lot of work to do that morning and I only just   
managed to get to the creek at half past twelve. I waited   
for him there, but in vain."  

“Did he get frightened at the last moment?” I asked.

“‘No, he didn’t. He started swimming. But of course he’d ruined his health by drink. The currents round the beacon were more than he could manage.’ We didn’t get the body for about three days.”

Notice victim-blaming (But of course he’d ruined his health by drink) ? That’s another cue to psychopathic behavior, but it is also practiced by narcissists. It’s also possible Burton was both a psychopath and a narcissist, more of latter, though as Maughman says he was always well-dressed and ‘he had charm’. (Of course, I am not implying if you are charming and well-dressed you must be a narcissist; but all narcissists pay extra attention to these two aspects as special weapons in their social arsenal. The narcissist and psychopath both do this, but they somehow tend to overdo it, so that’s how you know.).

Maugham then delivers his verdict:

> I didn't say anything for a moment or two. I was a little shocked.   
Then I asked Burton a question. "When you offered him the job, did   
you know that he'd be drowned?" He gave a little mild chuckle and   
he looked at me with those kind blue eyes of his. He rubbed his   
chin with his hand.  

"Well, I hadn't got a vacancy in my office at the moment."  

The verdict is important because a normal person, a healthy person like the narrator, should be shocked at the frivolity with which someone’s life was played with. Maugham pours a whole avalanche of irony and sarcasm when he mentions ’those kind blue eyes of his’, to illustrate how a person may appear normal but be anything but.

This was also suggested by Hervey. The psychopaths he interviewed and managed were almost normal, and hence legally sane. But throughout their case histories, a pattern would emerge that would clinically confirm a problem, an illness that manifested itself in different ways in different people. Governments like things in neat, pre-packaged, categorized order, and definitions are among them. The definition of sanity, according to law, is too narrow and rigid and black-and-white, whereas in reality, the situation is a fluctuating gray for at least 10% of the population (and more in some societies).

While there are advantages to such purism in certain quarters, in terms of abnormal psychology, the disadvantages far outweight the advantages, but a solution is equally difficult to be contemplated or proposed because of the nature of the problem. If psychopathology manifests itself differently in different people, and in differing digrees, it will be impossible to scientifically label it in any meaningful way, let alone act on that science for the ‘greater good’; in fact, if such a labeling were to materialize, it would very likely lead to even more social ills, because of the potential of abuse (remember Inquisition?).

Maugham refines Hervey’s definition to include also people who so mildly and benignly hurt their fellow human and yet feel no qualms, as depicted in the story. For all intents and purposes, they are or appear normal, but every now and then, they do things that shocks an objectively mentally healthy person of sound morals. Maugham’s story is a good case study for law as well, as it might spur us to think whether Burton is legally responsible for the drowning?

The difficult questions as they relate to social order and good, we will leave for apparatchiks. Thus, the immediate impact of reading Maugham’s short story, at least for me, was that it surprised me that Maugham had a similar cynicism as I have: that he saw through the kind blue eyes and deep into the soul and reality of the semi-psychopath, and was shocked to discover it. This poses a host of new questions for me, as it makes me even more suspicious of the fellow humans smiling at me with their kind eyes. But the suspicion can always be tempered with observation. Action is a good metric for a true measure of personality, and this basically means, I would prefer as neighbors, friends, colleagues etc, persons who, even if they should not have kind eyes, their kindness should be manifested in their actions.

And to distrust first impression, and keep updating them as we go.