Collected Short Stories of Somerset Maugham / Volume One / 30 stories

William Somerset Maugham

Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham 

Volume One

(30 stories)

‘Human nature is very odd, isn’t it?’
‘Very,’ said Landon, helping himself to another glass of brandy.

Simon
March 22, 2018

Biography

William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father was a lawyer. His first language was French. His mother died when he was eight and, when his father died two years later, young Willie was farmed out to his unsympathetic uncle in Kent and then on to the traditional English miserable experience at boarding school. During his unhappy childhood he developed a debilitating stammer.

At sixteen, Maugham refused to continue at The King’s School and was allowed to travel to Germany, where he studied literature, philosophy and German at Heidelberg University. Here he wrote his first book, a biography of opera composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, and he met John Ellingham Brooks, with whom he had an affair. He discovered, in other words, that he was gay.

Maugham returned to England and began to study medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, while writing fiction in the evenings. The success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897, persuaded him to try writing full time. He proceeded to churn out numerous articles, reviews and other ephemeral journalism, while producing a sequence of mostly forgotten novels during the Edwardian period. In 1904 his first play was performed and he turned out to have a great flair for dramatic writing. At one point no fewer than four of his plays were running simultaneously in the West End and he continued to have theatrical success throughout the 1920s.

In the Great War Maugham served in France as a member of the British Red Cross’s ‘Literary Ambulance Drivers’. He met Frederick Gerald Haxton, who became his permanent companion and lover until Haxton’s death in 1944. Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, brought more critical and popular success.

In the same year Maugham became a British agent working for the forerunner of MI6 in Switzerland, keeping tabs on the representatives of all the combatant nations, an experience he recycled into the excellent series of stories collected in his spy book, Ashenden (1928).

After a year Maugham, relieved of espionage duties, came back to London to promote his latest play and, in 1916, he and Haxton made the first of numerous trips to Pacific islands to research the novel which became The Moon And Sixpence, loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin. Published in 1919, it was not only a commercial success but began the process of associating Maugham with settings in the Far East and Pacific, confirmed by his next book, The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (1921).

In May of 1917, Maugham had married Syrie Wellcome, with whom he had a daughter. It was to turn into a very unhappy marriage. In June of 1917 he went on another mission for the British Secret Intelligence Service, this time to Russia to counter German pacifist propaganda and keep the provisional government in power. That didn’t work out so well but Maugham had some fascinating and historic encounters.

After the war Maugham wrote fewer plays but a steady stream of short stories which established his reputation for chronicling life among the fast set on the Riviera, and an equal fascination with life in the Far East and the Pacific Islands. He travelled widely, funding himself by travel articles and features, which he gathered into a series of travel books, and everywhere he went he carefully took notes on the people and places.

In 1927 he and Syrie divorced and in 1928 Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque in Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera. The villa became famous as a great literary and social salon as well as his home.

In 1940, as France fell to German occupation, Maugham fled to the United States. In Hollywood he tried his hand at screenwriting. When Haxton died in 1944, Maugham returned to England, then in 1946 to his villa in France, where he lived until his death. Alan Searle became his companion in this latter part of his life.

Whether at home at Cape Ferrat, at social events in London or Paris, travelling in Spain, America or the Pacific, Maugham made notes and observations, which he worked up into a sequence of short stories which slowly came to eclipse the reputation of his novels.

His Edwardian plays didn’t wear well into the very different atmosphere of the feverish Jazz Decade and not many of his twenty or so novels have lasted – but his short stories have endured.

The stories amount to a collective portrait of remote and exotic places between the two wars, when the European empires of France and Britain were at their height, although the American presence was being felt more and more. Alongside these are elegant portrayals of society life in Paris and London, stories about Spain which he regularly visited, and stories set in country house England of the very comfortably off middle class which recall the settings of Agatha Christie novels or even Wodehouse’s comedies.

By the time of his death in 1965, Maugham had become a kind of poet laureate of a type of refined and gracious upper-middle-class living – in London and the Home Counties, in Paris or the Riviera, and in the oppressive heat of the tropics where gentlemen still dressed for dinner – which had slipped into history.

April 1921 cover of The Smart Set magazine advertising Maugham’s long short story, Miss Thompson, later retitled Rain

In 1951 Maugham’s life’s work of some 100 short stories was collected into a complete edition in three big volumes. These were reprinted as four Penguin paperbacks in 1963.

Short stories volume one

Volume one of Somerset Maugham’s Complete Short Stories is 476 pages long and contains the following 30 stories.

• Rain (1921 – Samoa – 3rd person narrator)
• The Fall of Edward Barnard (1921 – Chicago/Tahiti – 3rd)
• Honolulu (1921 – Hawaii – 1st person narrator)
• The Luncheon (1924 – London restaurant – 1st)
• The Ant and the grasshopper (1924 – London restaurant – 1st)
• Home (1924 – Somerset and China – 1st)
• The Pool (1921 – Samoa – 1st)
• Mackintosh (1921 – Samoa – 3rd)
• Appearance and Reality (1934 – Paris – 1st)
• The Three Fat Women of Antibes (1933 – the Riviera – 3rd)
• The Facts of Life (1939 – London – 3rd)
• Gigolo and Gigolette (1935 – the Riviera – 3rd)
• The Happy Couple (1908 rewritten 1943 – the Riviera – 1st)
• The Voice of the Turtle (1935 – the Riviera – 1st)
• The Lion’s Skin (1937 – the Riviera – 3rd)
• The Unconquered (1943 – Soissons, France – 3rd)
• The Escape (1925 – England – 1st)
• The Judgement Seat (1934 – Heaven – 3rd)
• Mr. Know-All (1925 – on a liner – 1st)
• The Happy Man (1924 – London and Seville – 1st)
• The Romantic Young Lady (1947 – Seville – 1st)
• The Point of Honour (1947 – Seville – 1st)
• The Poet (1925 – Ecija, Spain – 1st)
• The Mother (1909 – Seville – 3rd)
• A Man from Glasgow (1947 – Algeciras – 1st)
• Before the Party (1922 – England and Borneo – 3rd)
• Louise (1925 – England – 1st)
• The Promise (1925 – Claridge’s restaurant, London – 1st)
• A String of Beads (1927 – London dinner party – 1st)
• The Yellow Streak (1925 – Borneo – 3rd)

Style and voice

The voice is humane, civilised and ironic, always detached and urbane. 18 of the 30 stories are told in the first person, the remaining 12 via a third-person narrator. But even the the third person ones often feature a character who observes the action and comments on it with much the same detached urbanity as Maugham’s ‘I’. In other words, the cumulative, ‘centre of gravity’ of all of them, is an urbane man of the world.

In fact the line between Maugham the author and the narrator is deliberately blurred when quite a few of the stories are told in the voice of a famous writer who lives in the south of France and dines at good London restaurants with notable members of the upper classes or writers or opera singers or gentlemen of his acquaintance. This use of his own persona was a particular characteristic of Maugham’s later fiction

(The Happy Couple seems to take place at Maugham’s own house on Cap Ferrat, The Voice of the Turtle in a Bloomsbury apartment where he’s been invited to sign some of his books, and so on).

Obviously the narrating voice of these stories is manipulated in each of them in order to suit the narrative and bring out the story’s points – but, collectively, they create a very consistent world of charming old-world manners and dignified high living, amid which there are sudden surprising revelations.

Take the moment in the story The Promise, where an ageing aristocratic lady is confiding her love life to the narrator.

‘If a man stops loving a woman old enough to be his mother do you think he’ll ever come to love her again? You’re a novelist, you must know more about human nature than that.’

In the third person narratives, I noticed the number of times there is a character who plays a backseat, observing role – the Watcher, the Observer, the Writer – who sometimes barely even speaks. At most The Observer murmurs or nods, as the various troubled or tortured or sometimes comic protagonists pour out their agonies to him.

‘Heaven helps those who help themselves,’ I murmured. (The Facts of Life)

‘I sometimes think you’re quite strong enough to do the things you want to,’ I murmured. (Louise)

‘Don’t forget that you’re English yourself, George,’ I murmured. (The Alien Crn)

Characters rather than people

For a century literary criticism has concerned itself with psychology, especially the depth psychology of Freud which has been spun into hyper-sophisticated theories, not least by the French, much influenced by the Freudian revisionism of the influential Jacques Lacan in the 1950s, and then a cohort of French feminist psychoanalytical critics from the 1970s, who deconstruct all language in terms of its patriarchal sexism.

In complete contrast, although some of Maugham’s stories deal with intense psychological states, most of them begin and many of them continue, at what you’d call a purely social level, with the narrator simply interested in people as they appear, as they present themselves to the eye.

As a token of this, it’s noticeable how the appearance of every character in all the novels and all the stories is noted, often at some length. I kept being reminded of Oscar Wilde’s quip, ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’

Once I’d noticed this I began to consider that there’s some kind of sense in which even the plots of the stories seem oddly external. Even the most intensely terrible and murderous ones – and there are several stories about murders and suicides – retain something detached about them. Of course there’s psychology of a sort involved in all of them, but often it is conveyed by appearance and changes in appearance. We rarely go inside the heads of these tormented characters. They are seen from outside, and even then often at one remove, for the narrator mostly hears about the story ‘later’, via other third-part tellers. Very often he is telling us a story which he himself was told.

Rain

Thus the plotline of one of his most famous stories, Rain, is notoriously intense.

A missionary and his wife are forced to hole up in a cheap boarding house while they wait for a boat to take them onto their mission in a remote South Seas island. Unfortunately, a rough working class woman, Miss Sadie Thompson, who likes putting on ragtime records and entertaining ‘the boys’ in her room, and who we quickly realise is a prostitute, is also staying in the same hotel.

After some shouty confrontations, the missionary undertakes to save her soul and goes every afternoon to pray with her and for her, encouraged by his dry-as-dust missionary wife. All this is observed with characteristic detachment by Maugham’s representative in the story, the calm and phlegmatic Scotsman, Dr McPhail.

After 40 pages of slow build-up the surprise climax comes suddenly in the last few page when the good missionary fails to come back to the room he shares with his sister and his body is then discovered in the sea next morning, still clutching the razor with which he has cut his throat.

After identifying the body, Doctor McPahil returns, stunned, to the boarding house where he finds Miss Sadie putting a ragtime record back on the gramophone and breaking out the scotch with some sailor friends. ‘Pigs. All men are the same. Pigs’, she yells at McPhail- and he understands. In the battle for her soul – in the battle between God and the Devil – the dark lord won, the high and mighty missionary was tempted and fell. He had sex with Miss Thompson, and then had nowhere to hide from his own guilt and remorse.

Obviously, the plot sounds pretty lurid, but it’s only in the last page or so that it turns melodramatic. The previous 39 pages have all been very buttoned-up and British, and the plot developments have been conveyed not only (obviously enough) through the characters’ dialogue and confrontations – but also by their appearances and by the changes in their faces, features, stances and so on which take place during the sequence of events.

Maugham goes to a lot of trouble to really concretely describe his characters’ appearances, their physical behaviour and presence, right down to the last detail.

Mrs Davidson came and stood beside him. She was dressed in black and wore round her neck a gold chain, from which dangled a small cross. She was a little woman, with brown, dull hair very elaborately arranged, and she had prominent blue eyes behind invisible pince-nez. Her face was long, like a sheep’s, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness; she had the quick movements of a bird. The most remarkable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic, and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony, irritating to the nerves like the pitiless clamour of the pneumatic drill.

A little way off [McPhail] saw his wife in a long chair talking with the Davidsons, and he strolled over to her. When he sat down under the light and took off his hat you saw that he had very red hair, with a bald patch on the crown, and the red, freckled skin which accompanies red hair; he was a man of forty, thin, with a pinched face, precise and rather pedantic; and he spoke with a Scots accent in a very low, quiet voice.

[Mr Davidson the missionary] was a silent, rather sullen man, and you felt that his affability was a duty that he imposed upon himself Christianly; he was by nature reserved and even morose. His appearance was singular. He was very tall and thin, with long limbs loosely jointed; hollow cheeks and curiously high cheek-bones; he had so cadaverous an air that it surprised you to notice how full and sensual were his lips. He wore his hair very long. His dark eyes, set deep in their sockets, were large and tragic; and his hands with their big, long fingers, were finely shaped; they gave him a look of great strength. But the most striking thing about him was the feeling he gave you of suppressed fire. It was impressive and vaguely troubling. He was not a man with whom any intimacy was possible.

[The prostitute, Sadie Thompson] was twenty-seven perhaps, plump, and in a coarse fashion pretty. She wore a white dress and a large white hat. Her fat calves in white cotton stockings bulged over the tops of long white boots in glacé kid. She gave Macphail an ingratiating smile. ‘The feller’s tryin’ to soak me a dollar and a half a day for the meanest sized room,’ she said in a hoarse voice.

‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’

Maugham’s prose style

It’s not great writing, there’s nothing fancy or rhetorical about it. And it’s not profound psychology either. But in story after story Maugham is able to limn a character in a paragraph and then lead you slowly by the hand through their tale, leading you in a deliberate dance to unexpected places, surprising revelations or bathetic comic climaxes.

It is, throughout, not an experimental or particularly elegant prose, but eminently practical, limpid and enjoyable. A very clubbable, confiding sort of tone.

I don’t know that I very much liked Landon. He was a member of a club I belonged to, and I had often sat next to him at lunch. He was a judge at the Old Bailey, and it was through him I was able to get a privileged seat in court when there was an interesting trial that I wanted to attend. He was an imposing figure on the bench in his great full-bottomed wig, his red robes and his ermine tippet; and with his long, white face, thin lips and pale blue eyes, a somewhat terrifying one. He was just, but harsh; and sometimes it made me uncomfortable to hear the bitter scolding he gave a convicted prisoner whom he was about to sentence to death or a long term of imprisonment. But his acid humour at the lunch table and his willingness to discuss the cases he had tried made him sufficiently good company for me to disregard the slight malaise I felt in his presence. I asked him once whether he did not feel a certain uneasiness of mind after he had sent a man to the gallows. He smiled as he sipped his glass of port.

‘Not at all. The man’s had a fair trial; I’ve summed up as fairly as I could, and the jury has found him guilty. When I condemn him to death, I sentence him to a punishment he richly deserves; and when the court rises, I put the case out of my head. Nobody but a sentimental fool would do anything else.’

Gossip

Maybe the stories’ success is due on one level to their nature as a sort of higher gossip. Above and beyond the first- or third-person narrator, Maugham often invokes the idea of a community among which certain characters and their stories are well known. This is particularly true of the stories set on Samoa or in Seville, for both of which he conjures up the sense of local communities – not least through the use of native words and vocabulary – where everyone’s business is known, where nothing can be kept secret.

Maugham travelled widely and met many interesting people, high and low, Europeans and ‘natives’, and he quietly soaks up stories, tales, yarns and anecdotes about all of them. People confide in him. He likes stories about people and his characters like telling and listening to stories and the stories themselves often comment on the process of story-making and story-listening.

‘I hope you won’t think it very odd for a perfect stranger to talk to you like this.’ He gave an apologetic laugh. ‘I’m not going to tell you the story of my life.’ When people say this to me I always know that is precisely what they are going to do. I do not mind. In fact I rather like it. (The Happy Man)

I do not vouch for the truth of this story, but it was told me by a professor of French literature at an English university, and he was a man of too high a character, I think, to have told it to me unless it were true. (Appearance and Reality)

Collectively, the stories build up a portrait of a mature and wise man who is fascinated by the endless foibles and weaknesses of human nature, sometimes subtly ironic, sometimes howlingly funny, sometimes bitterly tragic – and who applies the same sympathetic but calm and even tone to all of it.

Middle age

Maybe another element of the effect is related to Maugham’s age. He wrote short stories during the Edwardian decade, but his first successful ones seem to date from just after the Great War, by which time he was well into his 40s. In 1924 he turned fifty. Quite old, isn’t it, to be hitting your stride as a writer?

Maugham’s relative maturity means that he tells his tale with the mellowness of age, the detachment of a man whose passions are beginning to wane, who is able to cast a pretty cold eye on life and death. He is often quizzical, a little puzzled by his characters; sometimes horrified, often urbanely amused – but never really shocked or disrupted. Nothing ever really ruffles his well-bred feathers.

And, of course, Maugham was a Victorian, already in his late twenties when Queen Victoria died. Although he is at home in the world of charabancs, cocktails and parties on the Riviera, he doesn’t bring the wide-eyed youthfulness of a Scott Fitzgerald or the macho posturing of a Hemingway to the French scene. He brings the courteous manners and gracious politeness of a much older generation.

His age means that he often writes about women of a similar age to him, mothers or even grandmothers. When young women are behaving badly, Maugham’s stories aren’t about them but about the worries of the parents. This is a refreshing change from the tortured novels of authors in their twenties who think they are the first people ever to have their hearts broken.

And his homosexuality means that Maugham writes about women in a particular way: he is polite, as always, but he sees them for what they are, with neither the lust of the young male hetero nor the bitterness of the old debauchee. He combines precise external description (as always, it is a hallmark of his approach) with unflinching accuracy about women.

Sometimes it is for comic effect – there are quite a few raddled and ravaged 60 and 70 year old ladies in his stories who are plastered in inappropriate make-up. Often comic, but also compassionate. We all age and wither, and Maugham, writing in his 50s and 60s, knows it. But he also knows that just because people are old, doesn’t mean you should let them off the hook.

Mrs. Forestier was a very nice woman. Kindly people often say that of a woman when they can say nothing else about her, and it has come to be looked upon as cold praise. I do not mean it as such. Mrs. Forestier was neither charming, beautiful nor intelligent; on the contrary she was absurd, homely and foolish; yet the more you knew her, the more you liked her, and when asked why, you found yourself forced to repeat that she was a very nice woman. She was as tall as the average man; she had a large mouth and a great hooked nose, pale-blue short-sighted eyes and big ugly hands. Her skin was lined and weather-beaten, but she made up heavily, and her hair, which she wore long, was dyed golden, tightly marcelled and elaborately dressed. She did everything she could to counteract the aggressive masculinity of her appearance, and succeeded only in looking like a vaudeville artist doing a female impersonation. Her voice was a woman’s voice, but you were always expecting her, at the end of the number as it were, to break into a deep bass, and tearing off that golden wig, discover a man’s bald pate. She spent a great deal of money on her clothes, which she got from the most fashionable dressmakers in Paris, but though a woman of fifty she had an unfortunate taste for choosing dresses that looked exquisite on pretty little mannequins in the flower of their youth. She always wore a great quantity of rich jewels. Her movements were awkward and her gestures clumsy. If she went into a drawing-room where there was a valuable piece of jade she managed to sweep it on the floor; if she lunched with you and you had a set of glasses you treasured she was almost certain to smash one of them to atoms. Yet this ungainly exterior sheltered a tender, romantic and idealistic soul. (The Lion’s Skin)

Irony

The term ‘irony’ is bandied about a lot in literary criticism. In his tragic stories, there is straightforward tragic irony: the protagonist is fortune’s fool, wishing and intending one thing, and then finding that the exact opposite comes about.

Thus in The Pool, the protagonist’s passionate love for the half-breed native woman makes him take a series of decisions which lead her to despise him. In the rather shattering story, Before the party, the nice middle-class family start out fussing about what hat and gloves to wear to the vicar’s garden party until, little by little, it comes out that their widowed daughter’s husband didn’t die of some exotic illness on colonial duty in Borneo, and that he didn’t even commit suicide, a rumour the elder daughter has heard from friends just back from the area. No, what slowly emerges is that the man was a hopeless alcoholic who made their sweet younger daughter’s life a misery and that one night, in a fever of disappointment and rage she murdered him as he slept.

So there’s a shattering irony in the complete disconnect between the nice middle-class chatter with which the story opens and the appalling secret which is revealed.

And then, in another layer of irony, and in a classic example of Maugham’s detached urbanity – despite this bombshell going off in the middle-class family’s nice drawing room – when the servant knocks a moment later to announce that the car has been brought round to the front of the house, mother, father, shocked elder daughter and the murderous younger daughter duly dry their eyes, apply a puff more powder, and set off for the garden party, regardless.

Very English

All this is very English. In the hands of a Sartre or Camus, some of the more intense stories might have been the opportunity for much description of the searing heat and the blinding sun and alienation, about the Absurdity of Existence and the Tragedy of Being. Maugham, on the other hand, rarely expresses much emotion. On the contrary, he often uses the stories to emphasise his stiff upper lip and emotional distance.

In The voice of the turtle, when the preposterous opera singer, La Falterona, shouts abuse at him in his own home, Maugham replies with a studied dissection of her maliciously narrow character which they both know to be true. They stare at each other, cards on the table. And then agree to be civil and return to dinner. Just so.

The traveller

Maugham never loses the habit of airing his lofty, travel writer’s knowledge of the customs and language of wherever the story is set. There are a handful of stories which deal with out-and-out tragedy, murder and suicide – Rain, The Pool, Mackintosh, The Unconquered (an oddity – the only story set during any of the wars of Maugham’s time, viz the German invasion of France 1940), Before the Party. He isn’t shy of using the correct native term to describe for the natives’ clothes, or drink, or dugout canoes. Similarly, the stores set in Spain urbanely let you know that the narrator is a fluent speaker. Naturalmente!

As Maugham knew, it is precisely the attention paid to the little details of daily life, the polite hellos, thank yous and goodbyes, to the exact clothes and shoes and hats which the characters wear – and to the little local phrases, clothes and customs, which make them so human, so mundane, so believable – and therefore the shocking things which happen to them all the more unaccountable and upsetting.

It is part of what lifts them above run-of-the-mill entertainments and makes them worth rereading, even when you can remember the plot – for the skill with which character is etched in and then events and changes in character or perception conveyed through selected details.

Overt comedy

Some of the stories are intended to be comic, for example The Luncheon.

In this story the narrator is middle class but hard up and has to count his pennies very carefully. A lady fan invites herself to lunch with him and dismays him by selecting an expensive restaurant, which he thinks he’ll be able to afford if he chooses the cheapest items. The meal that follows is an ordeal because the well-born lady, while telling him all the time that she prefers a simple luncheon and only ever eats one item, in fact chooses a whole string of the most expensive items on the menu, including champagne.

The comedy derives from her reiterated claim to preferring simplicity and diet, before then ordering meringue and cream – while we observe the narrator’s mounting anxiety and eventual collapse, as he realises he will be spending his entire monthly allowance on just this one meal.

High Life

It’s so obvious maybe it doesn’t need saying, but most of Maugham’s characters come from the English professional upper middle-classes (like his father, a lawyer at the British Embassy in Paris) and live a charmed and elegant life most of us can only dream about. By my count at least four of the stories are set on the French Riviera, in wonderful villas or restaurants; three are set in very nice restaurants or clubs in London; one is set in a fashionable night club in Paris.

In these stories the reader enjoys the pleasure of pure social escapism. None of the characters in these stories seem to work. Captain Forestier in The Lion’s Skin lives entirely on his rich wife’s money, dressing to perfection, playing golf and dining at Riviera restaurants. When Louise in the story of that title marries her second husband, she forces him to resign his commission in the army and then they spend their winters at Monte Carlo and their summer’s at Deauville.

Does anyone live like that nowadays? Doing nothing except lunching and dining and attending smart parties? Reading Maugham’s short stories allows you, for the duration of the reading experience, to vicariously enjoy these charming elegant, if sometimes rather damaged, lives.

ASTROFELLA