The Magician (William Somerset Maugham)
The Magician (English. The Magician ) is a novel by William Somerset Maugham , which was published in 1908 by William Heinemann in London. The German edition was published in 1958 by Scherz Verlag in Bern. "A Black magic novel" - the subtitle of the English original - refers to the topic of black magic .
content
Arthur Burdon, a young surgeon from London who is aspiring, seeks out 19-year-old Miss Margaret Dauncey in Paris under a pretext. Arthur wants to marry Margaret. He is the orphan's guardian. Arthur pays the poor girl a two-year stay in the city on the Seine . Margaret, who wants to learn to draw there, lives with 30-year-old Miss Susie Boyd on Boulevard du Montparnasse. The French doctor Dr. Porhoët, an old friend of Arthur's late father, introduces the three Englishmen to his friend, the magician Oliver Haddo, in Paris . The English country gentleman Mr. Haddo from Staffordshire knows each other - like his friend Dr. Porhoët - best in necromantic literature. The squire Haddo Homonculi breeds on his remote, shabby property in Skene near the village of Venning near Euston . These creatures, which are artificially hatched under heat, can be effectively nourished by the blood of a virgin.
Arthur's beautiful plan is thwarted. Margaret does not marry her patron, but the extraordinarily corpulent Oliver Haddo. The young girl fell for the necromancer after he hypnotized her. The exact scientist Arthur considers the occult scientist Haddo to be a charlatan. Nevertheless, he asks Dr. Porhoët for an incantation after Lady Margaret Haddo's mysterious death . Arthur thinks Haddo is Margaret's murderer and wants to take revenge for the heinous act of blood. The vengeance succeeds. Arthur strangles the opponent with his bare hands - but not really, but telekinetically . When Arthur, along with Susie and Dr. Porhoët advances into Haddo's estate, the three actually find the bloated monster strangled under his pulsating and even ominously chattering homunculi. As the disturbed intruders withdraw from the gruesome laboratory, Arthur quickly sets Haddo's country house on fire. The twitching homunculi burn with their dead lord and master.
It looks like Susie and Arthur will find each other. Miss Susie loved Arthur from the beginning. Margaret had recognized this while she was alive and requested the connection shortly before her death.
Self-testimony
In the “Fragment of an Autobiography” that precedes the German edition used, Somerset Maugham, who modeled the protagonist of the novel, the magician Oliver Haddo, was the British occultist Aleister Crowley .
Allegation of plagiarism
Aleister Crowley had reviewed the novel in its year of publication at Vanity Fair and accused Maugham of plagiarism . In addition to one work each by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth , Franz Hartmann , Éliphas Lévi and Mabel Collins , Crowley performed Die Insel des Dr. Moreau from the pen of HG Wells as supposedly partially used templates.
interpretation
More than a hundred years after the novel was published, its (few) parapsychological passages sometimes seem ridiculous. For example, the passage in which Arthur - again with the help of Dr. Porhoëts - evokes the spirit of the deceased loved one. The surgeon actually hears Margaret's voice from the grave. Nevertheless, the novel is a work of art in the sense that the contrast between the matter-of-fact, sober Arthur and the magician Haddo makes the text worth reading at all times. In addition, the entertaining reading is free of the beginner blunders that appear in the previous novels. Meant are Liza von Lambeth and Mrs. Craddock .
filming
Rex Ingram filmed the novel in 1926 . In this American silent film, Paul Wegener played the magician Haddo, Alice Terry played Margaret and Iván Petrovich played the young surgeon Arthur.
German edition used
- The magician. A parapsychological novel. Translated from the English by Melanie Steinmetz and Ute Haffmans. Diogenes, Zurich 1975, ISBN 3-257-20165-6 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ eng. William Heinemann
- ↑ eng. W. Somerset Maugham bibliography , entry The Magician (1908)
- ↑ Edition used, p. 4 above
- ^ French Boulevard du Montparnasse
- ↑ see edition used, p. 8, 6. Zvu and p. 11, 2. Zvu