If today he is remembered mostly for his 1915 masterpiece Of Human Bondage and a few other outstanding novels, back in his time readers looked upon him as the cantor of the decadence of the British Raj, particularly in the Malay archipelago. The stories range from The Lotus Eater where a man envisions a life of bliss in the Mediterranean, to the astringent tales of The Outstation and The Back.William Somerset Maugham is probably one of the most commercially successful but least critically appreciated writers of the twentieth century. Ashenden is a novelist in his fifties who during the course of the narrative has several meetings with another. In Cakes and Ale, the most literary of Maugham’s novels, the narrator assumes the name Willie Ashenden, one that Maugham had used in his collection of short stories based upon his work as an intelligence agent (Ashenden, 1928).
Rain is featured in Maugham's short story collection, The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Seas Islands (1921). Finally, in 1944 he published the novel The Razor’s Edge, part of which was set in India, where he travelled in 1938.by William Somerset Maugham. In 1922, he undertook an adventurous journey in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which he then described in the travelogue The Gentleman in the Parlour, released in 1930. In the second half of 1919 he visited a China in turmoil, an experience he drew on when writing On a Chinese Screen (1922), a semi-forgotten collection of sketches that in his words constituted ‘not a book, but the material for a book’, and The Painted Veil (1925), a novel of adultery and revenge set between Hong Kong and the mainland. In 1916–17, he travelled to Hawai’i, Tahiti, and other islands in the Pacific, which he then used as the backdrop for several short stories collected in The Trembling of a Leaf (1921), as well as the novels The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and The Narrow Corner (1932). His literary engagement with Asia and the Pacific was not limited to Malaya.
He had no prejudice against Orientals indeed, he was deeply fond of them. Macgregor stiffened at the word “nigger”, which is discountenanced in India. While George Orwell’s stay in Burma resulted in the masterpiece Burmese Days (1934) and several essays highly critical of British rule—to understand the critical verve of his work one just has to think of passages like ‘Mr. While you—well, that’s your particular line’ (Collis 1938, 20).Another criticism was that his tales and travelogues did not have an explicit political dimension, quite unlike the writings of George Orwell (1903–50), who was working as a policeman in Burma in the early 1920s, just as Maugham was travelling through the country.
As Maugham’s biographer Selina Hastings (2009, 295–96) wrote: ‘Orwell portrayed the colonial oppressors at worst vicious, at best stupid and dull: a dull people, “cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets”. In these, he largely limited himself to the description of the lowly passions of the British side of colonial society—their loneliness, boredom, drunkenness, lust, and madness. It always pained him to see them wantonly insulted’ (Orwell 1974, 30)—Maugham only wrote a couple of travelogues that were largely composed of his own existential and literary musings, and a handful of short stories set on rubber estates and remote outstations.
This must be disappointing to present-day Malay and Indian and Chinese and Eurasian readers of his stories, but we have to remember that (apart from the fact that Maugham had no time to learn Malay or Chinese or Tamil) the Western attitude to the Far East was very different in Maugham’s time from what it is today. These residents were invariably Europeans—planters, colonial officials, businessmen, or just men living in exile to escape from trouble or sadness at home—and there is little evidence that Maugham gained, or wished to gain, any direct knowledge of the lives and customs of the native peoples of the East. While in an obituary he praised Maugham’s collections of Malayan stories as containing some of the finest examples of writing in English, with a ‘width of observation was something new in English fiction, as was the willingness to explore moral regions then regarded as taboo’ (Burgess 1965, cited in Hastings 2009, 329), in an introduction that he wrote in 1969 for a new edition of these same stories that he himself had prepared, he was much more dismissive:He stayed in no one place very long, but he usually managed to absorb something of the atmosphere of each town, village or rubber estate he visited, and he always made quick contact with the local residents. Given his deep emotional attachment to Malaya, it is not surprising to discover that Burgess considered Maugham little more than an interloper. Burgess spent five years in the 1950s as a teacher and education officer in the British Colonial Service in Malaya, gaining fluency in written and spoken Malay language and authoring no less than three novels set in the country, the so-called The Malayan Trilogy (2000). Burgess’s Hit JobThe strongest indictment of Maugham’s writings on the Far East comes from Anthony Burgess (1917–93), another heavyweight of contemporary British literature.
Becoming very popular with the world opening up again. A dialogue between Toomey and his agent sets the general tone: ‘Now the next thing is a travel book. It is here that Burgess brings to light what he really thinks about Maugham’s fame as a cantor of colonial Malaya and, more broadly, the East. The novel even includes a few chapters set in the East. While undoubtedly a minor masterpiece, Earthly Powers was a castigation of Maugham for both his bubbling private life—the memorable opening line read: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me’—and his inability to overcome his reputation as a second-rate, commercial writer. In fact, it has recently come to light that in earlier drafts of the book the main character was named Kenneth Markham Toomey, a name much closer to Maugham’s, and that the author changed it at a very late stage of writing, probably not to offend the nephew of the deceased writer, whom Burgess had recently met and befriended (Biswell 2012).
The British Empire, he was very struck with the British Empire. He insisted on taking me to the Lucullus, Wembley. That would be jest fahn ah gayess.
(Burgess 1980, 211)Toomey/Maugham, we are told, is in it just for the money, his writing nothing more than a heist aimed at taking advantage of the gullibility of the public. Damn and blast.’ That was the cigarette. You end up with two books, one throwing harsh tropical light on the other. Really short ones, two and a half of their pages with a big illustration—you know the sort of thing, the memsahib in her camisole threatening a leering muscular coolie with a broken gin bottle. They’ll arrange a contract for twenty stories, half and half for foreign rights, then perhaps another twenty if all goes well. One thousand dollars per story.
Philip happens to be in Malaya because he felt the urge to heed the ‘call of the East’ after reading a book by Joseph Conrad, but is now disillusioned. The mystery lay perhaps in the provenance of the meat for the curries’ (Burgess 1980, 230).The criticism becomes slightly more articulate with the introduction of Philip, a young British doctor with whom Toomey falls in love, reciprocated. I stayed at the Raffles Hotel which Willie Maugham, under their later notepaper heading, was to laud as breathing all the mystery of the fabled East.
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