ABSTRACT
Hulton Getty (HG) had his own vacation home—Lou Pidou—in the South of France, but at the moment it was strictly off-limits. HG intellectualized the Lover-Shadow ad nauseam; he also spent a great deal of time and effort over his long life trying to “concentrate” or “embody” his Lover-Shadow in a string of women. One of Maugham’s biographers maintained that HG was a victim of “the paradox of the polygamist.” In HG’s paradigm, the persona and the Lover-Shadow were the main elements of the human psyche—the hero and heroine of our private dramas. Other complex systems move across the stage and act out their small roles, he said, but they are essentially “subordinate.” In the Experiment, HG seemed to dissect every conceivable aspect of his human experience, including the full story of his two marriages, with all their hopes and expectations, twists and turns, ups and downs.
