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| William Somerset Maugham |
Homage to Maupassant
Henry Shukman
Sat 29 May 2004 00.47 BST
When I was 13 and had just arrived at a new school, our first set text was Cakes and Ale. It still baffles me even now that someone thought a bunch of 13-year-olds might enjoy Somerset Maugham's dissection of the making of literary reputations. Hugh Walpole (who he now?) was cut down to size, while Hardy was seen to grow like some natural phenomenon.
As with many of my set texts over the months to come, I read only enough to cobble together a take on it. Maugham's prose had an old-fashioned ring to it, and lacked the clean, contemporary sound of Orwell, my god at the time. He also seemed full of an arrogant sense of knowing how things ought to be; he was stuffy, and pertained to an old order that had had its day. All in all, that early taste might easily have put me off for life.
It was while teaching in the one-cow desert town of Las Cruces, New Mexico, nearly two decades later that I rediscovered Maugham. While in Britain his critical reputation (never high) sank ever lower, American letters seemed to have quietly accommodated him as a 20th-century great, a master-chronicler of the late days of empire. (A first edition of Of Human Bondage recently sold in New York for $51,000.) I began rereading him while there.
It was "The Fall of Edward Barnard" that first hooked me. A long story about a well-to-do young Chicagoan who goes out to the South Pacific in order to rise within a trading company, then come home - laden with dollars and prospects - to marry his preppy bride-to-be, it stunned me. First there was the glorious Tahitian setting, rendered with irresistible laconic ease; then the story itself: Edward Barnard falls in with a reprobate uncle of his bride, the family's black sheep, who has fled from his murky past to Tahiti, and instead of becoming a mercantilist, he finds his soul, as well as a beautiful local girl, and decides that a money-free life in a pareo beside a warm lagoon is much better than wealth in dismal, grey Chicago. "Gradually all the life that had seemed so important to me began to seem rather trivial and vulgar. What is the use of all this hustle and this constant striving?... I want to make more out of my life than that... I never knew I had a soul till I found it here." He doesn't come home.
I could hardly believe this was the same knowing man who had depressed me during puberty. It was a story full of humanity. This writer was basically a hippy. Drop out and tune in. Maugham! But it's true: Maugham has a few creeds, one of them being happiness above all else. He doesn't care for duty at all. In the diminutive "Judgement Seat" (just four pages), for example, a love triangle who have valiantly and miserably upheld the marriage vows through several dismal decades, all because they think they ought to, are not just sent to Hell by the Almighty for their pains, but "annihilated" entirely: "Where the three poor souls had stood - was nothing." God's comment is: "I have often wondered why men think I attach so much importance to sexual irregularity."
Maugham's best-known story must be "Rain", which has been made into several movies as well as plays and a musical. It tells the story of the missionary Davidson who desperately tries to "save" the prostitute Sadie Thompson. Without giving the game away (in case there is someone who hasn't read it), the balance of conversion tips unexpectedly. Here too, Maugham attacks missionary values, and in effect applauds those who live for the pleasures of this life. (Indeed, busybody missionaries who try to wreck happy, native customs are a recurring target of his.)
As with a number of his best, "Rain" is a quiet act of homage to his avowed master Maupassant (his "Boule de Suif "). Similarly, Maupassant gets a nod in "Mr Know-All", in which the narrator finds himself sharing a cabin with an unctuous, conceited Levantine. But at dinner at the captain's table, when the Levantine compliments a wife on her magnificent necklace and the husband tells him it's just a fake, he can't resist pointing out the husband's error, until he catches the imploring look in the wife's eye. He guesses the story behind the necklace (adultery), and does what Maugham has already allowed us to see, in just a few pages, will be the hardest thing for him: namely, climb down and pretend that he believes the jewels to be fake. It may not sound like much (and it isn't one of his very greatest), but it is tender-hearted and immensely likable nonetheless. It is also one of three homages to Maupassant's necklace that Maugham managed to produce, each of them an excellent story in its own right.
After Conrad and Lowry, with their sonorous, lush, demiurgical depictions of the Tropics, Maugham's descriptive writing seemed perfunctory - even, well, prosaic. Yet it was entirely effective: "Below them coconut trees tumbled down steeply to the lagoon, and the lagoon in the evening light had the colour, tender and varied, of a dove's breast." Plain and simple, even at his most purple: Maugham early on professed to have renounced adornment in his prose, and it was surely a good thing.
Maugham also carries a hallmark of great fiction in his feel for the mystery of character. Why does Robert Forestier (in "The Lion's Skin") take his play-acting as an English gentleman on the Riviera (in reality he used to wash cars in Mayfair) so far as to run, fatally, into a burning house in order to rescue a dog? Why does Izzart not recognise his own courage (in "The Yellow Streak")? Maugham rightly offers no answers, but impresses the questions on us.
So why is his reputation so low in Britain? For one thing, he tends to gets judged by his worst work. Even Christopher Hitchens, in a recent Atlantic Monthly, picked on the novel The Razor's Edge, a lacklustre, drawn-out retelling of "The Fall of Edward Barnard", and nowhere near as good, for a bout of Maugham-bashing. He also reckoned the much-anthologised "The Outstation" to be his best colonial story. Rubbish: there are many better. There's even an earlier telling of the same plot, "Mackintosh", that far outdoes it in playfulness and humanity.
It's as if some strange grudge lingers in the literary air. It's all the odder that it seems to have cleared in America, in spite of Edmund Wilson's double-damning of Maugham (twice he attacked him in the 1950s as the ultimate in "mediocre"). But Americans read short stories, and perhaps that makes the difference. Maugham is like Chekhov: a sometime playwright and doctor, whose greatest work was his stories. He is one of those 20th-century writers whose stories are better than their novels: like Hemingway, Isaac Bashevis Singer, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Ellen Gilchrist.
If there are, broadly speaking, two lineages of short story - the plot and the epiphany; the story-driven, punchline-delivering Maupassant-Maugham kind, and the revelatory Chekhov-Joyce-Carver kind - the second surely gained ascendancy in the 20th century. Perhaps critics haven't liked Maugham's rather detached view. For example, in some ur-logic of story-telling, the way his jewellery stories yoke together gems and adultery seems entirely right. Any medieval fabulist or Renaissance romancer would surely sympathise. But an ironical take on the patterns of human foible was somehow inimical to 20th-century realism, not to mention modernist experimentalism. Despite the many suicides and murders, the ruined lives and broken people, the adulterers, opium-addicts and alcoholics, he was seen as frivolous.
It seems the fate of a certain type of master to be old-fashioned, and therefore damned at the start. (David Lean's Dr Zhivago was described by Pauline Kael in the New Yorker as "stately, respectable and dead".) Perhaps in Britain, too, Maugham is an uncomfortable reminder of history, of just how much the country (however rightly) has lost. Easier to dismiss him as mediocre.
THE GUARDIAN
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