All reviews copyright 1984-2021 Evelyn C. Leeper.
CAKES AND ALE by W. Somerset Maugham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/01/21]
I am also slogging my way through the Hugo finalists. Okay, "slogging" is probably unfair--many of the finalists are quite good. But even as I see the list of what remains for me to read, I find myself thinking about W. Somerset Maugham's CAKES AND ALE, started and sitting on my shelf waiting for me to continue. It is delightful and witty and enjoyable, and frankly more enticing than most of the science fiction waiting for me.
Some examples of Maugham's writing:
"The wise always use a number of ready-made phrases (at the moment I write 'nobody's business' is the most common), popular adjectives (like 'divine' or 'shy-making'), verbs that you only know the meaning of if you live in the right set (like "dunch"), which give ease and a homely sparkle to small talk and avoid the necessity of thought. The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried this device to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication."
"A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country."
"After mature consideration I have come to the conclusion that the real reason for the universal applause that comforts the declining years of the author who exceeds the common span of man is that intelligent people after the age of thirty read nothing at all. As they grow older the books they read in their youth are lit with its glamour and with every year that passes they ascribe greater merit to the author that wrote them."
[The above assumes they don't re-read them and discover the suck fairy--a creature who comes to old favorite books or other media that one has not revisited in years, takes away everything in them that one loved, and makes them suck--has been at work.]
[After noting that Evelyn Waugh disparages the first person narrative] "All the same I can find one reason why certain novelists, such as Defoe, Sterne, Thackeray, Dickens, Emily Bronte, and Proust, well known in their day but now doubtless forgotten, have used the method that Mr. Evelyn Waugh reprehends."
"It is strange (and instructive) to read now the book that created such a sensation; there is not a word that could bring a blush to the cheek of the most guileless, not an episode that could cause the novel reader of the present day to turn a hair."
[Sort of like seeing what films got "A" certificates in Britain decades ago, or even "X" ratings here.]
"And I reflected also that there is no example in literary history of an author committing suicide while engaged on the composition of a literary work. Whatever his tribulations, he is unwilling to leave to posterity an uncompleted opus."
"She never had anything but praise for the new Mrs. Driffield; she was not exactly pretty, she said, but she had a very nice face; of course she wasn't quite, quite a lady, but Edward would only have been uncomfortable with anyone too grand. She was just the sort of wife for him. I think it may be not unjustly said that Mrs. Barton Trafford fairly ran over with the milk of human kindness, but all the same I have an inkling that if ever the milk of human kindness was charged with vitriol, here was a case in point."
And for those who visit authors' home to see where they sat, and wrote, and ate, Maugham has this to say: "He wouldn't let her change a thing and she had to go to work with the greatest care; she says she simply couldn't have lived in it and she was determined to have things right, so she had to change things one by one so that he didn't pay any attention. She told me the hardest job she had was with his writing desk. I don't know whether you've noticed the one there is in his study now. It's a very good period piece; I wouldn't mind having it myself. Well, he had a horrible American roll-top desk. He'd had it for years and he'd written a dozen books on it and he simply wouldn't part with it, he had no feeling for things like that; he just happened to be attached to it because he'd had it so long. You must get Amy to tell you the story how she managed to get rid of it in the end."
He also has one character quoting Dickens but implying it was his own words: "What I always say to my boys is, if you've got a pound and you spend nineteen and six you're a rich man, but if you spend twenty shillings and sixpence you're a pauper. Look after the pence, young fellow, and the pounds'll look after themselves."
COLLECTED STORIES (VOLUME 2) by W. Somerset Maugham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/15/21]
I have returned to W. Somerset Maugham and his COLLECTED STORIES (VOLUME 2) (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-001872-7). These are billed as being set in the South Seas, though there are some set elsewhere. Most are novelette length (around 15,000 words, give or take). All are gems, and usually have a bit of a twist in the end, albeit an often predictable one.
"The Vessel of Wrath" tells of Miss Jones, a straight-laced missionary and her attempts to reform (or have deported) Ginger Ted a drunken reprobate. But the fates conspire to send them together to a an isolated cholera-ridden island.
In "The Force of Circumstance", while Guy, a white planter from Malaya, is on vacation in England, he meets and marries Doris and takes her back to Malaya. She is full of good intentions but discovers there are aspects of Malaya that she simply cannot adjust to.
"Flotsam and Jetsam" has another Englishwoman who marries a white expatriate in Malaya. She expects glamour and excitement in the jungle, but finds that she has made a big mistake.
On the surface, "The Alien Corn" is a well-known story: someone wants to undertake an artistic career against his family's wishes, both sides agree to a trial period at the end of which his talent will be judged by an expert, and if he is lacking, he will give up his hopes and follow the family's plans. But there is another level: the family is Jewish, but has changed their name and hides their origins, trying to pass themselves off as Englishmen for many generations.
But the story also raises the question of whether Maugham is promoting anti-Semitic tropes. Certainly the first-person narrator seems to do so, but the question is whether those view represent Maugham's views, or the views held by much of the English population of the time and placed into his narrator. Not every first-person narrator is the voice of the author. And in fact Maugham says this explicitly in a preface to this volume: "... the 'I' who writes is just as much a character in the story as the other persons with whom it is concerned." Maugham goes on to use this as an explanation of why the 'I' may be better in some way than the writer, but it is also a reason not to attribute all the characteristics of 'I' to the writer.
In this case, however, one can discover that Maugham expressed anti-Semitic feelings when writing as himself, so one much concede that these negative views are indeed Maugham's own. Then, of course, one is left with the question of what to do when an artist whose work you respect turns out to be (as one person has understated it) "a jerk." As that person has said, it is much easier when the artist has been dead for years (and especially if their work is in public domain), but more difficult if your continued purchase of their books or music or whatever is putting money in their pocket.
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/22/21]
And now comments on the rest of W. Somerset Maugham's COLLECTED STORIES (VOLUME 2) (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-001872-7).
Maugham's humor shines in "The Creative Impulse", with passages such as:
"Mrs Albert Forrester wrote of the valley of the Loire with its memories of du Bellay, of Chartres and the jewelled windows of its cathedral, of the sun-swept cities of Provence, with a sympathy all the more remarkable since she had never penetrated further into France than Boulogne, which she visited shortly after her marriage on an excursion steamer from Margate. But the physical mortification of being extremely seasick and the intellectual humiliation of discovering that the inhabitants of that popular seaside resort could not understand her fluent and idiomatic French made her determine not to expose herself a second time to experiences that were at once undignified and unpleasant; and she never again embarked on the treacherous element which she, however, sang (Pax Maris) in numbers both grave and sweet."
and
"She admitted herself that it was her style, sonorous yet racy, polished yet eloquent, that was her strong point; and it was only in her prose that she had occasion to exhibit the delicious, but restrained, humour that her readers found so irresistible. It was not a humour of ideas, nor even a humour of words; it was much more subtle than that, it was a humour of punctuation: in a flash of inspiration she had discovered the comic possibilities of the semi-colon, and of this she had made abundant and exquisite use. She was able to place it in such a way that if you were a person of culture with a keen sense of humour, you did not exactly laugh through a horse-collar, but you giggled delightedly, and the greater your culture the more delightedly you giggled. Her friends said that it made every other form of humour coarse and exaggerated. Several writers had tried to imitate her; but in vain: whatever else you might say about Mrs Albert Forrester you were bound to admit that she was able to get every ounce of humour out of the semi-colon and no one else could get within a mile of her."
Maugham also ventures into the fantastical. In "The Dream" a man keeps dreaming about his own death. "Lord Mountdrago" has a man who has disturbing dreams about a political enemy--and that the enemy seems to know about. "The Taipan" has everything, but one day he sees two coolies digging a grave in the British cemetery. He spends the rest of the day trying to find out who died, but no one seems to have passed away. But what about the grave? These sound like "Twilight Zone" stories, and "A Friend in Need" (about a successful businessman agreeing to help an impoverished friend, but only with what is basically a bet), while not fantasy, is also extremely reminiscent of a "Twilight Zone" episode.
"Virtue" visits a common theme in Maugham's work, marital infidelity. Here it is a happily married woman who leaves her husband, but in his fiction Maugham looks at all the variations: happy couples, bored couples, unhappy couples, infidelity by the husband, infidelity by the wife, even infidelity in bigamous or "common-law" marriages.
Other stories are in this same vein. "The Colonel's Lady" seems like a completely boring woman to her husband, and then she writes a volume of poetry that takes the literary world by storm--and then he slowly realizes it is about a bored wife who has a passionate love affair. "Jane" is similar in the sense of the sudden emergence and blossoming of a woman from dullness and obscurity. "The Social Sense" is yet another story about a marriage going downhill and a wife having an affair. In "The Consul", the eponymous character tries to advise an Englishwoman who married her Chinese lodger in England, only to discover when she got to China that he wasn't rich, and they would have to live in a hut not only with his mother, but with his (first) Chinese wife. And "The Round Dozen" is about a "bigamist" who has married eleven women and wishes he could make it a round dozen. ("Bigamist" seems the wrong term for someone with eleven wives, but I don't think "hendecamist" is a real word.) "The Human Element" and "In a Strange Land" are other stories about the strange directions (and objects) of love.
Even "The Closed Shop" is in this group. It was written in 1926, by which point Reno was already a divorce destination, so Maugham may have been inspired by that town. In any case, in this story, a Latin American country decides to cater to "divorce tourism", but the large number of unattached women causes problems in the prostitution industry.
"The Man with the Scar" is a beggar in Guatemala. When the narrator asks an acquaintance about him, he gets a quite dramatic and romantic (in the sense of the 18th century literary movement) story, and also the details of how he got his scar. This is similar to "The Bum", in which the narrator keeps trying to remember why the bum he sees looks familiar, and then remembers he knew him years before in Rome.
"The Treasure" that Richard Harenger finds is the perfect house-parlourmaid, perfect in everything he expects, but ultimately perfect in unexpected ways as well.
"The Verger" may be the most famous of the tales in this book. A verger loses his job when the new vicar discovers that he is illiterate. Despondent, he starts walking home, looking for a tobacconist where he could get a cigarette. But he doesn't pass one, and this leads him on a surprising path, with a classic ending.
"Footprints in the Jungle" is a long mystery story, though more mysterious to the characters within the story than to the reader. One problem, of course, is basically the result of the "Chekhov's Gun" situation. There is no point in introducing a fact, or even telling a story, unless there is something interesting about it. If I start a story telling you how proud Wilson Garfield was of his new bicycle, the bicycle better play an important role in the story. If it doesn't, the reader will feel deceived. (Actually, Maugham violates this rule in "The Man with the Scar", but the violation is what makes the story memorable.
In "The Door of Opportunity" Anne and Alban are living in Malaya and happily married, until one day a murder and rebellion on a nearby plantation exposes the lie on which their marriage was built.
All in all, well worth the reading. Up next: Volume 3, devoted to stories about Ashenden, a British agent during World War I.
THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR: A RECORD OF A JOURNEY FROM RANGOON TO HAIPHONG by W. Somerset Maugham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/11/2015]
THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR: A RECORD OF A JOURNEY FROM RANGOON TO HAIPHONG by W. Somerset Maugham (ISBN 978-1-55778-216-8) purports to be non-fiction, a break from the particular requirements of writing fiction. But there are a lot of incidents which seem very similar to the (fictional) stories that Maugham wrote. The story of the woman who followed her fiance all over Asia, finding him no matter how hard he tried to cover his tracks, seems more like a fictional construct than something that had really happened. The translator who eventually revealed that he translated all of Maugham's speeches of greeting to village headmen into the same speech, even though Maugham spent hours crafting a different speech each time, is too perfect as a story to be presumed to be true.
"But now that I come to this part of the book I am seized with dismay. I have never seen anything in the world more wonderful than the temples of Angkor, but I do not know how on earth I am going to set down in black and white such an account of them as will give even the most sensitive reader more than a confused and shadowy impression of their grandeur. ... It would be enchanting to find the apt word and putting it in its right place give the same rhythm to the sentence as he had seen in the massed gray stones. ... Alas, I have not the smallest talent for this sort of thing..." (Actually, he had several more sentences of the "apt word" sort.) Well, clearly he does have talent for this, but I do not, which is why when I was writing my Cambodia/Vietnam log, I got completely blocked at the Angkor Wat portion and eventually decided just to say that enough other people had written more and better that I was not going to try to be a completist about it.
Maugham writes about villages he visited unchanged by time--people live exactly as they did for hundreds of years. This may have been true in the 1920s, but now technology has reached into the most remote villages. Partially, this is because governments want to exercise more control, so all sorts of government workers visit villages, rather than just one minor official once every year or two. These workers bring with them technology. There are immunizations for the children, or an electrical generator, or (these days) cell towers. World War II resulted in a lot of roads and airstrips being built, and these along with motorboats and four-wheel drive vehicles make distributing consumer goods to remote areas more feasible.
At the end, Maugham compares Burma and Annam (Vietnam). He says, "I do not suppose the Annamites like it any more than the Burmese that strangers hold their country. But I should say that whereas the Burmese only respect the English, the Annamites admire the French. When in the course of time these peoples inevitably regain their freedom, it will be curious to see which of these emotions has borne the better fruit." While one might argue that Vietnam is indeed in better shape than Burma, whether this can be traced to the French rather than the English as colonizers is questionable. For starters, the Vietnamese had been promised independence from the French if they fought against the Japanese in World War II. After the war ended, the French returned, and it took almost ten years for the Vietnamese to throw them out. This was followed by what was effectively a civil war with American intervention for twenty years, which was followed by conflicts with Cambodia and China. Surely all this had as much effect on their emotions as any admirations they may have had for the French in the 1920s.
THE PAINTED VEIL by W. Somerset Maugham:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/29/2008]
THE PAINTED VEIL by W. Somerset Maugham (ISBN-13 978-0-099-50739-0, ISBN-10 0-099-50739-0) was this month's selection for the "original" book discussion group. Mark and I had seen the movie a while ago, and Mark suggested the book for the group. The screenwriter changed a lot; more specifically, he added a lot. There is no aqueduct-building in the book, and no insurrection or civil war. (The ending is also significantly different.) I think the reason for this (besides wanting to add action sequences) was that the book was told entirely from the main character Kitty's point of view, and that was considered undesirable for the movie. First of all, it would mean that the lead actress would be in every scene, which is hard work. And second, this in turn would make the film "a woman's film", at least to the backers, meaning that it would not attract a wide enough audience. So the screenwriter added scenes of Walter Fane in the lab, scenes of Walter Fane in the hospital, scenes of Walter Fane by the river, and so on. Of Kitty's feelings about the nuns and their life and emotions--the main focus of the book--very little is left.
They also moved the location of the British "colony" from Hong Kong, to Shanghai, for reasons I can't figure out. (Maugham himself had to change it from Hong Kong to the fictional Tching-Yen when the book first came out for legal reasons.)
The notions of marriage in THE PAINTED VEIL seem very similar to Jane Austen's: Kitty is pressured to marry by her mother because, as she ask, "How long can you expect your father to support you?" Also, her younger sister gets engaged and Kitty feels she must marry, or be "shamed" by her continued spinsterhood. This is expressed more explicitly in the novel, which gives more of Kitty's history, rather than just the few days before her wedding.