The Skeptical Romancer (2 page)

The writer who would at once take his reader on journeys to India, Samoa, Hong Kong and yet somehow always set him at his ease, the man of high culture who often asserted, “The best use of culture is to talk nonsense with distinction,” is best revealed for me in his early novel,
The Merry-Go-Round
, published when he was thirty. That book, typically, unfolds an interlocking set of love stories – stories of great passion and drama – as they are seen by two slightly detached observers: one is a fifty-seven-year-old spinster, Miss Ley, who takes in everything with a wise serenity and pronounces grandly, and somewhat skeptically, on human folly and illusion. The other is a burning young medical student, Frank Hurrell, who cannot contain his hunger for experience. “My whole soul aches for the East, for Egypt and India and Japan,” he cries out at one
point. “I want to know the corrupt, eager life of the Malays and the violent adventures of the South Sea Islands … I want to see life and death, and the passions, the virtues and vices, of men face to face, uncovered.” The language is purple, but the sentiments are as alive and quickening as anything in Hesse or Kerouac, and it’s hard not to recall that Maugham was himself a medical student, who learned early about human suffering, and longed, as he told us, “for fresh air, action, violence,” to be away from the hushed drawing-rooms of England. Even when young, in short, he could summon the perspective of both an elderly, disengaged observer and an eager romantic – and show himself as close to woman as to man.

*

In practice, only four of the seventy-eight books Maugham turned out are generally placed on the shelves marked “Travel”: his classic account of a journey from Rangoon to Haiphong,
The Gentleman in the Parlour
, brought out in 1930; a series of sketches and snapshots called
On a Chinese Screen
, from 1922; a very early, boyish series of wanderings around southern Spain,
The Land of the Blessed Virgin
, published in 1905, that he delighted in mocking and repudiating in later works for its flowery style and juvenile effusions; and a meditation on some figures in Spanish history – explicitly not “a book of travel,” though often categorized as such,
Don Fernando
, in 1935. Yet travel lay behind much of his work, if only because, as Miss Ley says, “Curiosity is my besetting sin,” and as is written of Frank Hurrell, his “deliberate placidity of expression masked a very emotional temperament.” When it came to his masterly appraisal of his life,
The Summing Up
, and to his
A Writer’s Notebook
(joined with
The Summing Up
to make
The Partial View
), it’s hard not to notice how many of Maugham’s central, formative experiences came on the road, or through it.

“More than that, his young book on Spain, though certainly ornate, and without the crisp definition that marks the mature Maugham style, shows us the master traveler as he would always be, under the surface, and before he became an institution and the famous writer “Somerset Maugham.” What we see in it is an ardent, dewy, rebellious boy – a “romancer by profession,”
as he puts it – anxious to be away from England’s enclosedness and gray, and at home already in the south, the world of sunshine and abandon. Later he will develop a more measured, poised voice that has the sound of skepticism trying to keep its boyishness at bay; but here, in this unselfconscious work, is already an original and grown-up sensibility, compounded of a susceptible heart, a careful mind and a spirit that is eager to tangle with the essential questions of life and all its meanings.

What hit me, rereading many of his books to put this collection together, is that Maugham breaks almost every law you might lay down in
Travel Writing 101
: he generalizes wildly, he claims not to be interested in the places he’s visiting, he admits that he’s only hunting for material and often his digressions go on so long that we lose all sense of where we are (in the middle of Southeast Asia, he spins out a long story, not clearly relevant, of a novelist in London). He likens trees in a Thai village to “the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne,” tells us that Asian clothes are much less interesting and various than those you’d see in Piccadilly and cheerfully admits, in the middle of wildly colorful and unvisited landscapes, that his great delight, traveling through Asia, is reading F. H. Bradley’s
Appearance and Reality
.

Yet the cumulative effect of all these transgressions is to give us the impression, as not every traveler does, that he’s having fun. He never seems bored and he seldom loses his temper. The sentences, scrupulously clear and relaxed and unpretentious, seem to come to us from a cozy armchair (or the sedan on which he’s sometimes being carried), and he at once wins our trust with his lack of design and earns our affection precisely by telling us that he’s lazy, unfair and uninterested, a great believer in breaking all the rules. It’s as if he’s simply taking his mind and imagination for a walk, and as they forage, as any dogs might do, he never quite knows where they’ll take him. The air of casual ease is so distinct, you may overlook the fact that he’s sleeping for days in an open rowboat, has a temperature of 105 (just before offering a brilliant appraisal of Buddhism), went on a sixty-day march when he was close to fifty years old.

It might almost seem that circumstances conspired to make Maugham a traveler (and that kindred spirit, an explorer on
the page, drawn to everything farthest from himself). He was born in a country not his own, and when he went to England, at the age of ten, after the sudden death of both his parents, he felt a foreigner there. His training as a medical student encouraged, no doubt, his gift for listening, and for drawing people out, concentrating attentively on their stories and bringing to them a mix of compassion and discernment even as he linked them to certain textbook patterns. His lifelong stammer, moreover, made him even more of a listener, always more eager to hear others’ symptoms than to tell his own; reading him, I am often reminded of the old adage you still hear everywhere in Asia about men being given two ears, two eyes and only one mouth, so as to remember they should see and hear at least twice as much as they say.

Maugham’s father, when the novelist was a boy, had traveled to Greece, Turkey and Morocco, bringing back stories and memories to beguile his youngest child; his mother, when young, “could prattle Hindustani much better than English,” because her own father had served in India. Maugham was a product of Empire, after a fashion, therefore, but never an admirer of it (he could barely speak English when he moved to his ostensible motherland). Where many people travel in order to become something – and to escape the failures that surround them at home – Maugham seemed to travel in order to become nobody, just an anonymous gentleman in a parlor in an inn, and to flee the successes that, he always said, could cripple a man as much as failure could. And as a playwright and a novelist, his business was, explicitly, to get into other people’s minds and lives and voices; traveling, he seemed unable to believe in his own prejudices and always eager to be turned on his head.

He knew the “world,” in the sense of fashionable society, but he was never much taken with it; his early works, like his first book
Liza of Lambeth
, were criticized for paying too much attention to the poor and desperate. His work as a spy – like many a writer, he must have been a natural – doubtless intensified his habit of picking up information, reading the secret codes of life, observing without being observed in turn. Though sometimes caricatured as a homosexual who lived in a world
of privileged men, he had four extended affairs with women (one of whom he married), and thus knew both sides of the table in that sense, too. One of his siblings became Lord Chancellor, a pillar of the British establishment; the other was a gay writer of sorts who never rode on a train – he had a kind of vertigo – and took his own life, with nitric acid, in front of his younger brother’s eyes.

Always as keen and lucid an observer of himself as of everyone else, Maugham saw that travel was in his blood and in his destiny, a place where his needs and his preferences converged. His stammer, he said, made him “a wanderer on the face of the earth” and his interest in everything prevented him from ever staying long in one place. His protagonist in
The Moon and Sixpence
, Charles Strickland, is “eternally a pilgrim, haunted by a divine nostalgia,” a little as Frank Hurrell and then Larry Darrell, the hero of
The Razor’s Edge
, are; Maugham wrote one novel,
The Explorer
, based partly on the adventures of Stanley and a play,
East of Suez
, based on Kipling’s “Ship me somewhere east of Suez, where the best is like the worst.”

“I was ever looking forward, generally to something I proposed to do in some place other than that in which I found myself,” he wrote in a piece called “On the Approach of Middle Age” (included in the anthology of unpublished pieces,
A Traveller in Romance
). And his autobiography confesses to us that “I never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.” At ninety, he spoke of going to Marrakesh – “I shall not stop my travelling” – as if what kept him young and awake, even then, was his abiding feeling that he “would sooner be a fool of twenty-five than a philosopher of fifty.”

*

Maugham, then, was a born subversive who, in his unorthodox way, was always looking for the road less traveled and the humble pleasure overlooked. “For my part,” he wrote with typical assurance in his memoirs, “I would much sooner spend a month on a desert island with a veterinary surgeon than with a prime minister.” More than that, he was a habitual counter-moralist, who could not restrain himself from pricking at piety
and preaching wherever he found it, and yet, unusually, was constantly interested in wisdom and philosophy and mysticism while professing no interest in religion. His official assessments of himself were never quite straightforward – they always diminished his skills too much – and yet you get tantalizing glimpses of him in the travelers he records, like the one in China who “collected neither plants nor beasts, but men.” Most of all, his creed, insofar as he had one, was to try everything – to smoke opium and to visit prisons as well as chapels – and his advice to young wanderers at the end of his life was to do everything, to go everywhere, to explore the vicissitudes of the world. “A novelist must preserve a child-like belief in the importance of things which common-sense considers of no great consequence,” he wrote, late in life. “He must never entirely grow up.”

Yet a great traveler is also measured not just by how clearly he sees the world around him, and excavates the past; but by how much, in doing this, he manages to describe the future. The wayfarer with his eyes open and his senses alert sees beneath all the details he observes outlines of those features that will never change, the way he catches in the girl of fourteen the grandmother of a later age. In this regard Maugham stands up as well as any traveler of the twentieth century. Go to Chiang Mai tomorrow and you will meet a man who threw over his comfortable life in London for the less visible benefits of a cozy room in the wilderness, with a local girl who “understands” him even if she does not speak much of his language. In the same neighborhood, you’ll meet a missionary, warning all visitors from London against such girls – and such a life – and an Englishwoman not very comfortable with the fascinations of the East and the positions into which they have thrust her. The Thais you see will be charming, supple, infinitely gracious and attentive and perfectly attuned both to reading a visitor’s needs and to meeting them, for mutual benefit.

Go to a bar in Honolulu, visit the new China being “definitively” covered in so many current books and you’ll meet the same – and find, moreover, that somehow Maugham has caught what is really going on better than that foreign correspondent (or roaming moralist) living in Shanghai in the twenty-first
century, and so eagerly reporting on “what’s new.” Places have characters as much as people do, and it is the rare – the invaluable – traveler who, in wandering around China in the 1920s, can not only give you China of the year 2010, but the societies of Hong Kong, Paris, Buenos Aires, and the expat circles you will find in them even now. Maugham was never just a neutral observer, and some readers today may object to the fact he’d never heard of “political correctness”; he makes free with his opinions, writes off whole cultures in a sentence, calls a Chinaman a Chinaman and a thief a thief. Like any good companion he keeps you alive with the very energy and fullness of his judgments. I relish his writing even when – sometimes especially when – I’m sure that he’s wrong, and his finding “insipid” food in Thailand and calling the Thais “not a comely race” prompts me to try to formulate an answer.

The point, really, is that Maugham was not interested in the exotic as such – though he responded to its magnetism and always gravitated to the unknown; in every place he went, he was digging up the familiar, and recalling the anatomy teacher who had taught him, dissecting bodies, that “the normal is the rarest thing in the world.” Over and over he shows us how “ordinary”-seeming men hide the most extraordinary lives, while extraordinary men cannot hold our interest for long. His interest in people was so consuming, in fact, and agile that he asks us to deepen what we understand by the word “extraordinary.” And abroad, freed of the clutter and distraction of home, we see many things – especially our own people – more clearly and more tellingly than we would at home. For Maugham, always pragmatic, travel was a great way of claiming the freedom he craved (from society and from habit) and of getting away from everything that he knew much too well (or that knew him much too well). It also allowed him to collect more types and tales in a week than he could find in a year in London.

For many there was something of the Chinese sage in Maugham, sitting at a little distance from the human drama, taking it all in with a smile and committed to a creed of detachment and a sense of the impermanence of the world. “A mysterious Asiatic influence pervades the face of this Anglo-Saxon grand seigneur,” the French painter Edouard MacAvoy
recorded. “Today he wears a pure Buddhist mask. He has wisdom, renunciation, profound peace born of complete disillusionment, a skeptical gaiety.” And yet what gives his writing its life and charm is that he always knew that succumbing to illusions, in love or travel, is one of the greatest pleasures that life affords (and he gave himself up to what went against his better judgment constantly). His voice is never more British than when he went to China, dining with the lords of the foreign community and remarking on the occasional local as if that person were an exotic creature observed in its native habitat; and yet his Olympian view of things, his remaining unfazed – in fact tickled – by the constant changes in the world make him seem more of a Confucian than many of the Confucians he meets. He could understand and give unusually deep and sympathetic accounts of Confucianism or Buddhism – of mysticism or hedonism – because he could find, when he needed to, those elements in himself.