W. Somerset Maugham - Best Short Stories

Back in 2022, I picked a collection of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham for the Back to the Classics challenge. I decided to read it slowly, starting in January, and enjoy each story before plunging on to the next. This strategy backfired in that I read it so slowly that I only finished it up earlier this month.

17 stories, 456 pages, 18 months, but what great stories! 

Mostly set in the years between the wars, these stories chronicle the last days of the British Empire although a few are set in England as well. This is a world of civil servants and actual servants, following protocol, dressing for dinner, and lives spent mostly in quiet desperation. But don't let that turn you off. The prose is elegant and precise. Maugham is a master of the genre, often twisting the knife as the curtain comes down.

Here's a deep dive into the first story, which I just reread.

The Letter - set in Singapore, after WWI. The wife of a rubber plantation owner in the neighboring Dutch East Indies confesses to murdering a neighbor who tried to rape her while her husband was away on business and the lawyer handling the case begins to doubt her story. Very much a picture of colonial life in which the local people work it out so that they hold the cards in a very quietly masterful way. The story shows how the oppressed get their own back, and how manipulation can be a double-edged sword.

Mr Joyce is the lawyer in Singapore. Leslie Crosbie is the woman who confessed to the murder of Geoffrey Hammond, and Robert Crosbie is her husband. Leslie is elegant rather than pretty; she has an abundance of pale hair. She is quiet and does lace. Robert Crosbie is robust and plays tennis to relax. Geoff was injured in WWI and had a limp that ended his dancing days. The Chinese clerk working for Mr Joyce tells the lawyer that a friend of his has a letter that Leslie wrote to Geoff, implicating them in an affair, and he says the friend would be willing to sell the letter. What should Mr Joyce do? He faces an ethical dilemma in that he could be hiding evidence that could sway the jury with regards to whether Leslie's killing of Geoffrey was self-defense.

Maugham developed The Letter into a play shortly after publishing it in a short story collection in 1926, and it has been adapted for both film and TV a few times as well as a musical and an opera. I can see why--in the end, a very chilling story that is unsettling.

Other stories in the collection are The Verger, The Vessel of Wrath, The Hairless Mexican, Mr. Harrington's Washing, Red, Mr. Know-All, The Alien Corn, The Book-Bay, The Round Dozen, The Voice of the Turtle, The Facts of Life, Lord Mountdrago, The Colonel's Lady, Rain, P. & O. 

I have a feeling I will be picking up this volume from time to time when I am in the mood for a bit of Maugham.

The Painted Veil - W. Somerset Maugham

First and foremost, Somerset Maugham is an exquisite writer. His prose has an elegant simplicity that is so moving and powerful. 

Written in 1925, the same year as The Great Gatsby, I found myself comparing the main character, Kitty, with Gatsby's Daisy. Cut from the same thin, wispy, pretty cloth, they share a shallowness and a weak will along with a loveliness that gets them into trouble. It is their ticket and their burden. 

Along the same lines, Charlie Townsend, the cad of the story, reminds me so much of Tom Buchanan in Gatsby as well. Handsome, philandering, selfish--a person who smashes things up and then retreats back into his money or "vast carelessness." 

Obviously, the parallels I saw between Kitty/Charlie and Daisy/Tom are my own retrospection and  thinking about the world of the 1920s--post Great War, post Victorian, post Edwardian, imperialistic.

The Painted Veil takes place in Hong Kong and a cholera-stricken village in mainland China, with bits and pieces in London. Narrated in the third person, this is Kitty's story--her journey from a London debutante to the wife of a doctor first in Hong Kong and then in mainland China and then back to London for the reckoning. 

It wasn't until Kitty and her husband Walter arrive in the village that I started marking passages. The scenes in Hong Kong are stifling, but scenes in the village are breathtaking.

The morning drew on and the sun touched the mist so that it shone whitely like the ghost of snow on a dying star. Though on the river it was light so that you discern palely the lines of the crowded junks and the thick forest of their masts, in front it was a shining wall the eye could not pierce. But suddenly from that white cloud a tall, grim, and massive bastion emerged. It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand.

There were times that I felt so frustrated with Kitty, wanting her to be a heroine that I could admire, but that's not fair. Maugham gave me her story, shabby in parts and shameful in others, but one in which Kitty does grow in self awareness so that by the end she can declare to her father that she wants her unborn child, whom she believes to be a daughter, "to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person , independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take to life like a free man and make a better job of it than I have."

This is such a marked contrast to Daisy Buchanan who could only wish for her daughter to "be a fool- that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool," that I have to say that perhaps Kitty is a heroine I can admire after all. 

The title is from the opening lines of a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley, which is actually a pretty good synopsis of the story:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live

Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,

And it but mimic all we would believe

With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear

And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave

Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.

I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,

For his lost heart was tender, things to love,

But found them not, alas! nor was there aught

The world contains, the which he could approve.

Through the unheeding many he did move,

A splendour among shadows, a bright blot

Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove

For truth, and like the Preacher found it not. 

There's another poetry reference that I particularly liked--it's from Oliver Goldsmith's An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog. Remember, "the dog it was that died."

The only other work by Maugham that I've read is Cakes and Ale, ten years ago. Now I'm inspired to read The Razor's Edge, which I've owned for years but never read, and Moon and Sixpence. Not sure I have it in me to read Of Human Bondage though. And the movie version? I always say I'm going to watch the film adaptation of books but rarely actually get around to it. But, maybe this time...

Yep, another book for the Back to the Classics Challenge - 2021, in the category twentieth century classic.

Cakes and Ale

"Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Sir Toby Belch to Malvolio in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night

Cakes and Ale, by W. Somerset Maugham, is my first Maugham and has graced my tbr shelf for quite awhile now, but I was inspired to read it when I learned that a number of fellow book bloggers were reading it this summer.

Overall, I liked it and it held my interest, though it was a trifle odd in places. I do enjoy reading about writers, the process of writing and publication, truth in fiction, and the double-edged sword of the fame, acclaim, and success. Published in 1930, Cakes and Ale, or The Skeleton in the Closet, is reputed to be somewhat autobiographical, with its main author characters, Edward Driffield and Alroy Kear, being loosely based on Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole. The latter is best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, whose works have fallen in such neglect that I had to look him up on Wikipedia.

The real subject of the novel, however, is Driffield's first wife, Rosie, a low-brow, luscious sexpot who sleeps with any man she happens to like, and unabashedly indulges in "cakes and ale." Much as I enjoyed reading about Rosie and her influence on the life of the author, also a successful writer (based on Maugham himself), she never really felt real to me, which is a bit ironic because the plot of the novel is around Driffield's second wife wanting Alroy Kear to write a whitewashed version of Driffield's life after his death. The narrator, William Ashenden, who knew Driffield and Rosie when he was young, resists the whitewashing and the theme of the novel centers on the interplay and interdependence of truth and art.

There's a lot to think about here--which representation of Rosie is the most accurate: the woman as described by Ashenden as he writes what he remembers of his relationship with her years earlier, the woman painted by the artist who redefines her blousey barmaid style as ethereal beauty, Driffield's account of her philandering the night after the death of their daughter of meningitis, the good people of Blackstable who can't get over the fact that she was a barmaid, Driffield's second wife who forever sees her as a threat that must be denied, or the photographs that show her to be prosaic.

The same multi-faceted, refracted set of images is provided for Driffield as well. As Ashenden says near the end of the book when he is looking at photos of Driffield that were taken when he was a young man:

The face you saw was a mask and the actions he performed without significance. I had an impression that the real man, to his death unknown and lonely, was a wraith that went a silent way unseen between the writer of his books and the fellow who led his life, and smiled with ironical detachment at the two puppets that the world took for Edward Driffield.

The difference between Rosie and Driffield comes down to the fact that he is a writer and she is not. Both are unknowable--everyone is essentially unknowable--but Driffield can free himself through his expression of truth as he sees it in his art. After expounding on the limitations and pitfalls of being a writer, Ashenden says, with regards to a writer:

But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness...he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story...to forget all about it. He is the only free man.

Again, the irony of this is that after he is dead, his second wife and fellow writers conspire to stuff him back in the box labeled "Edward Driffield, writer," and any truth about who he really was dies with him.