The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing by W. Somerset Maugham
Yet a great traveler is also measured not just by how clearly he sees the world around him, and excavates the past; but by how much, in doing this, he manages to describe the future. The wayfarer with his eyes open and his senses alert sees beneath all the details he observes outlines of those features that will never change, the way he catches in the girl of fourteen the grandmother of a later age. In this regard Maugham stands up as well as any traveler of the twentieth century. Go to Chiang Mai tomorrow and you will meet a man who threw over his comfortable life in London for the less visible benefits of a cozy room in the wilderness, with a local girl who “understands” him even if she does not speak much of his language. In the same neighborhood, you’ll meet a missionary, warning all visitors from London against such girls – and such a life – and an Englishwoman not very comfortable with the fascinations of the East and the positions into which they have thrust her. The Thais you see will be charming, supple, infinitely gracious and attentive and perfectly attuned both to reading a visitor’s needs and to meeting them, for mutual benefit.
Go to a bar in Honolulu, visit the new China being “definitively” covered in so many current books and you’ll meet the same – and find, moreover, that somehow Maugham has caught what is really going on better than that foreign correspondent (or roaming moralist) living in Shanghai in the twenty-first century, and so eagerly reporting on “what’s new.” Places have characters as much as people do, and it is the rare – the invaluable – traveler who, in wandering around China in the 1920s, can not only give you China of the year 2010, but the societies of Hong Kong, Paris, Buenos Aires, and the expat circles you will find in them even now. Maugham was never just a neutral observer, and some readers today may object to the fact he’d never heard of “political correctness”; he makes free with his opinions, writes off whole cultures in a sentence, calls a Chinaman a Chinaman and a thief a thief. Like any good companion he keeps you alive with the very energy and fullness of his judgments. I relish his writing even when – sometimes especially when – I’m sure that he’s wrong, and his finding “insipid” food in Thailand and calling the Thais “not a comely race” prompts me to try to formulate an answer.
The point, really, is that Maugham was not interested in the exotic as such – though he responded to its magnetism and always gravitated to the unknown; in every place he went, he was digging up the familiar, and recalling the anatomy teacher who had taught him, dissecting bodies, that “the normal is the rarest thing in the world.” Over and over he shows us how “ordinary”-seeming men hide the most extraordinary lives, while extraordinary men cannot hold our interest for long. His interest in people was so consuming, in fact, and agile that he asks us to deepen what we understand by the word “extraordinary.” And abroad, freed of the clutter and distraction of home, we see many things – especially our own people – more clearly and more tellingly than we would at home. For Maugham, always pragmatic, travel was a great way of claiming the freedom he craved (from society and from habit) and of getting away from everything that he knew much too well (or that knew him much too well). It also allowed him to collect more types and tales in a week than he could find in a year in London.
For many there was something of the Chinese sage in Maugham, sitting at a little distance from the human drama, taking it all in with a smile and committed to a creed of detachment and a sense of the impermanence of the world. “A mysterious Asiatic influence pervades the face of this Anglo-Saxon grand seigneur,” the French painter Edouard MacAvoy recorded. “Today he wears a pure Buddhist mask. He has wisdom, renunciation, profound peace born of complete disillusionment, a skeptical gaiety.” And yet what gives his writing its life and charm is that he always knew that succumbing to illusions, in love or travel, is one of the greatest pleasures that life affords (and he gave himself up to what went against his better judgment constantly). His voice is never more British than when he went to China, dining with the lords of the foreign community and remarking on the occasional local as if that person were an exotic creature observed in its native habitat; and yet his Olympian view of things, his remaining unfazed – in fact tickled – by the constant changes in the world make him seem more of a Confucian than many of the Confucians he meets. He could understand and give unusually deep and sympathetic accounts of Confucianism or Buddhism – of mysticism or hedonism – because he could find, when he needed to, those elements in himself.
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 indel
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.”
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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
PICO IYER is the author of many books about travel, including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul. His most recent book is The Open Road about the fourteenth Dalai Lama.
A VERY YOUNG TRAVELLER IN SPAIN
from The Land of the Blessed Virgin
THE SPIRIT OF ANDALUSIA
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