The Skeptical Romancer (3 page)

These are all rarer qualities than one might suppose: D. H. Lawrence, for example, traveled everywhere at the same time as Maugham did, and caught Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico with a vividness and immediacy that few travelers have matched in the eighty years since. Without even trying to, Lawrence could pick up the smells, shapes, instincts of a place, grow bewitched by them and then become violently disenchanted – all inside a week. He had every gift, you could say, except patience and moderation. Aldous Huxley, meanwhile, who later became one of the most open-minded explorers of the mind, nonetheless traveled around Asia in his
Jesting Pilate
like the acerbic young man of London salons that he was, finding in each place he visited an excuse for a witticism or a hasty dismissal. One of Maugham’s great gifts, by comparison, was to give us the impression that he’s always where he wants to be, unburdened by any mission or publishing contract, even if his way of taking in Burma is to play patience in his room, or to sweeten the evening with some Proust. Instead of chafing against what’s around him, he seems to give in to whatever the moment brings.

One way of measuring any traveler is to see how deep and wide his influence runs, eighty years after his travel books
appeared. It’s hard to read Graham Greene, for example, without seeing Maugham, and his mix of worldliness and romanticism, his investigations of skepticism and faith, behind many of the scenes (they even both wrote works called
The Tenth Man
, both launched unexpected attacks on pity and both ended up on the French Riviera); and when one meets Paul Bowles’s defining stories of travelers consumed by the places they visit, one can recognize Maugham as one of the few people who’s been there before him. Pick up
Hotel Honolulu
, by Paul Theroux, and you’re reading, essentially, one of Maugham’s collections of South Sea stories, though with sexual explicitness and modern rage included; tour the world with the incomparably fluent and attentive Jan Morris and you see a distinctive English blend of tolerance and acuity that, even in its cadences often (those rich descriptive sentences that begin with adjectives), brings you back to Maugham. The most serious and searching traveler of the post-colonial world, V. S. Naipaul, managed to assist his escape from his native Trinidad by writing a schoolboy essay on Maugham – it won a competition – and, more than fifty years later, after winning the Nobel, was endowing the protagonist of two late novels with the curious name, “W. Somerset Chandran,” a tribute, clearly, to the traveler by whom he seemed haunted (and whose visits to India in 1939 he there invokes).

Maugham’s interest was not in sights, he says repeatedly; one of his favorite devices, in every book of travels, was to warn us that he’s not very diligent about seeing the sights, sits in his room reading Jane Austen while others are busy taking in guidebook facts and, in truth, prefers less information to more. But what he was doing while he was not taking the packaged expeditions that were the stuff of other travelers was to go off “on the search for emotion,” as he put it in his book on Spain, and to investigate the human costs and complications of foreignness: when he visits China, for one, what he mostly gives us are thumbnail sketches of the priest, the diplomat, the restless wife, even the inn or the illusions that are a feature of almost any foreign place. Traveling around Southeast Asia, he collects “characters” at every turn – runaways, men of the cloth, drifters with unexpected tales of betrayal and obsession,
some of them (as in Greene again) settled for life in a foreign place they know will never be home, others pining for an England they know they’ll never see again.

Maugham’s descriptive gifts, his evergreen capacity for being swept away, mean that he does give us indelible evocations of the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, the temples of Thailand (which he loves for both their shamelessness and dazzle – Maugham, one feels, is the rare traveler who would not have looked down on Las Vegas, but would instead have found there poignant dramas of paid love and failed resolve); but what stays in the mind from his books of travel is the people he meets, their savory stories, the detours he enjoys, the riffs he suddenly takes off on (remembering Heidelberg and the promise of youth while he’s bumping around Spain, or suddenly offering us a fairy-tale in the middle of his stay in Thailand). Indeed, he is, in his unrepentant waywardness, a forerunner to those counter-culture travelers of today who say that it’s always in the digression, the getting lost, the unexpected diversion that the joy of travel comes. Trains of thought can take you places that no other trains reach at all.

Again, the image many of us have of an elegantly bespoke man living near Nice and consorting with Winston Churchill, Noël Coward, Cecil Beaton obscures the central fact about Maugham, which is that he was a stowaway at heart, and the hunger for rebellion, the fondness for the wastrel, his lifelong wish to get away from the small-world circles he knew and out into the wild (or at least the unknown) was what drove his writing; in that regard, travel was both a vehicle and a metaphor. One of the works of his that many probably recognize even now is
The Moon and Sixpence
, about a thriving London stockbroker who throws it all over to go to live in Paris and Tahiti – like Gauguin – and just paint. Yet that impulse is everywhere in Maugham, playing at the edges of most of his stories: some of them concern men who have made just that flight, and cannot imagine, in Hawaii or Vietnam, how they ever could have survived the years in rainy Europe; and some of them enact the same process themselves, as you can feel Maugham stretching his limbs and (to some degree) letting down his hair, as travelers have always done, and asking, in
Thoreauvian cadences, at the end of his first book of travel, “What is the use of hurrying to pile up money when one can live on so little?”

To this day, the first hippie novel ever written – in 1944 – might be said to be
The Razor’s Edge
(or at least it shares that distinction with some of Hesse’s work, perhaps, a little of Henry Miller, maybe some Novalis): at sixty-nine Maugham was turning himself into an idealistic young man who was leaving the comforts of Chicago behind to seek out truth in the Himalayas. In life Maugham himself embarked on a three-month (and characteristically difficult) trip around India when he was sixty-three, seeking out swamis and yogis; and he told his friend Christopher Isherwood, a few years later, that his greatest wish, when he turned seventy, was to return to India and study Shankara.

This was not, ever, part of the popular image of the brittle, Wildean playwright and habitué of grandes dames’ lounges, but it is what makes Maugham feel so fresh and even liberating today (and it is what made him so famously impatient with one of the other great observers of expatriation, Henry James, who, coming from America, was transfixed by those grandes dames’ lounges). He kept a young man’s eagerness for knowledge – and therefore adventure – about him always. Every morning, he said, he read some philosophy, the way others might do yoga, and he could not encounter a doctrine or vision of life, it often seems, without wanting to explore or engage it. Read his grand apologia,
The Summing Up
, and you find him as metaphysically alive and excited as that German who just spun out his creed to you over dinner in a little candlelit restaurant in Ladakh last night, or that Canadian who’s traveling the East to find the heart of transcendental existence. The last words of this most flexible of souls, always open to experiment and journey, concluding
The Partial View
as he turns eighty, were “I am on the wing.”

*

When I began to set about making a collection of Maugham’s travels, my first – and second – instinct was just to find a way to reprint
The Gentleman in the Parlour
in its entirety; for twenty
years it had led me around Asia, and whenever anyone asked me what he or she should read before coming to the continent where I have lived for almost half my life, I referred them to Maugham, whose book seemed to me as up-to-date as any of this season’s offerings. But when I reread that work, I was reminded that it exists in fragments and comes in and out of focus. I had remembered many unforgettable scenes and moments; but when I went back to it, I saw that I had remembered them partly because there were lots of drab or lusterless scenes between them. In some ways it is a collection, an anthology of disparate pieces already. And
On a Chinese Screen
and
The Land of the Blessed Virgin
are likewise sketchbooks, really, that do not attempt to tell a story, or to weave a narrative, with beginning, middle and end, but simply alight on points of interest, hopping from vignette to vignette as a restless bird might do.

So the best way of doing justice to the travels was to catch them in the round, I thought, geographically divided and in single scenes and parables that remind us of Maugham’s curious capacity for seeming almost middle-aged when young and often surprisingly boyish even in his later years. The power of his novels comes nearly always from their passionate engagement in the dramas they record; though the narrator is taking these in from the sidelines, he gets so involved in the convulsions that he describes that we do, too. But the strength of the travel writing lies in its disengagement, its careful observations – always relieved, again and again, by moments of transport that carry the writer away almost in spite of himself.

One of Maugham’s most frequent maneuvers – he uses it in virtually every book – is to note, as he writes at the beginning of his short story “Honolulu” that “the wise man travels only in imagination” or to assert, as he did even on his early trip to Spain, “It is much better to read books of travel than to travel oneself; he really enjoys foreign lands who never goes abroad.” Yet having professed this, and claimed to be a skeptic and a stay-at-home, he scrupulously fails to live up to his own advice and does just what he says he shouldn’t. He does go to Honolulu, in spite of his injunction, and there meets a traveler whose story he would perhaps never have listened to if he’d met the
man in London or New York. And he does travel, visibly, around the wilds (so much so that he contracted malaria, fell into some rapids, often almost died), and comes away with castaways and romances that he can put into a frame once safely back at his desk.

On his nintieth birthday – he had enjoyed Japan and Italy in his eighties – he admitted, “I have wandered all my life and it would be no bad thing to die while making a sentimental journey to the one place on earth where, for me, there is beauty still and a contentment that I have found nowhere else.

“I refer to Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. I have one desire left, which is to return to that lost village in the jungle in the Far East.” I only wish he could have done so, and thus captured yet another place that many of us flock to today, always humbled – and excited – by the fact that this smiling watcher has been there before us, and, while not seeing all of the sights, shown us everything worth seeing.

Pico Iyer

IN LONDON NOW
, as I write, the rain of an English April pours down; the sky is leaden and cold, the houses in front of me are almost terrible in their monotonous greyness, the slate roofs are shining with the wet. Now and again people pass: a woman of the slums in a dirty apron, her head wrapped in a grey shawl; two girls in waterproofs, trim and alert notwithstanding the inclement weather, one with a music case under her arm. A train arrives at an underground station and a score of city folk cross my window, sheltered behind their umbrellas; and two or three groups of workmen, silently, smoking short pipes: they walk with a dull, heavy tramp, with the gait of strong men who are very tired. Still the rain pours down unceasing.

And I think of Andalusia. My mind is suddenly ablaze with its sunshine, with its opulent colour, luminous and soft; I think of the cities, the white of Andalusia cities bathed in light; of the desolate wastes of sand, with their dwarf palms, the broom in flower. And in my ears I hear the twang of the guitar, the rhythmical clapping of hands and the castanets, as two girls dance in the sunlight on a holiday. I see the crowds going to the bull-fight, intensely living, many-coloured. And a thousand scents are wafted across my memory; I remember the cloudless nights, the silence of sleeping towns, and the silence of desert country; I remember old whitewashed taverns, and the perfumed wines of Malaga, of Jerez, and of Manzanilla. (The rain pours down without stay in oblique long lines, the light is quickly failing, the street is sad and very cheerless.) I feel on my shoulder the touch of dainty hands, of little hands with tapering fingers, and on my mouth the kisses of red lips, and I hear a joyous laugh. I remember the voice that bade me farewell that last night in Seville, and the gleam of dark eyes and dark hair at the foot of the stairs, as I looked back from the gate. “
Feliz viage, mi Inglesito
.”

It was not love I felt for you, Rosarito; I wish it had been; but now far away, in the rain, I fancy, (oh no, not that I am at last in
love,) but perhaps that I am just faintly enamoured – of your recollection.

AT THE CHURCH
of the
Espirito Santo
, in a little chapel behind one of the transept altars, I saw, through a huge rococo frame of gilded wood, a
Maria de los Dolores
that was almost terrifying in poignant realism. She wore a robe of black damask, which stood as if it were cast of bronze in heavy, austere folds, a velvet cloak decorated with the old lace known as
rose point d’Espagne
; and on her head a massive imperial diadem, and a golden aureole. Seven candles burned before her; and at vespers, when the church was nearly dark, they threw a cold, sharp light upon her countenance. Her eyes were in deep shadow, strangely mysterious, and they made the face, so small beneath the pompous crown, horribly life-like: you could not see the tears, but you felt they were eyes which would never cease from weeping.