For whatever reason, I had the feeling that I should read
something “serious” and “literary.” The
Donnell Library Center had a special book case of “classics” in paperback near
the stairs, to the left, so I looked them over.
After some deliberation I decided
to check out the Bantam Classic mass market paperback of Of Human Bondage, Maugham’s long and famous novel. This edition had a grotesque modern painting
on the cover, a woman eating pie and a store clerk hacking away at a huge
ham.
Like millions of people before me, I was thrilled by how
good a novel Of Human Bondage
was. Maugham’s style was smooth and
easy, and his attitude towards life and love in accord with mine. In many ways, the issues Maugham was
addressing and his sensibilities reminded me of Proust, but whereas reading
Proust was a challenge, reading Maugham was comfortable. Here was a new author to add to my pantheon
of favorites, and one whose work was relaxing, and would not put a strain on my poor brain.
I have read several Maugham novels since then, checking
them out from various libraries. Shortly
after moving to the Mid West, my wife bought me a charming old two volume boxed
set of Maugham’s stories. I guess I have
read about half the stories collected therein.
Gene Wolfe mentions Maugham in Pandora
by Holly Hollander, which I read a few days ago, and this put Maugham into my
mind, so yesterday I took my boxed set off the shelf and decided to read a few
stories I hadn’t read yet. (Showing
uncharacteristic foresight, in the endpapers of my Maugham books I have Post-it
notes indicating which stories I have read, so it was easy to find new ones.)
Over the last two days I have read four Maugham stories, and
enjoyed them all.
“Miss King.” In my edition there is a typo on the
contents page, an inappropriate period after “Miss King.” I would like to think this has some kind of
mystical or eldritch significance.
“Miss King” is one of the semi-autobiographical Ashenden
stories. Ashenden is an English writer
who, during the First World War, acts as a British intelligence agent in
Switzerland, much as Maugham himself did.
This is an entertaining story, but it is lacking in plot, and is mostly
a sort of mood piece about what it is like to be a secret agent in a neutral
country full of spies, and a series of sketches of odd international
characters; German spies, Swiss police detectives, decadent Egyptian royalty
and their frail old English servant, as well as the French and British intelligence
agents. The episode that ends the story
is a sort of ironical commentary on death, and reminded me of the stroke
suffered by Marcel’s grandmother in The
Guermantes Way – while we die the people around us find our demise
insignificant, or are irritated at the inconvenience we are causing them.
“Giulia Lazzari.” This is another Ashenden story. Chandra Lal, the smartest and bravest of
Indian independence fighters, a man who has caused riots and planted bombs that
have killed innocent people, is now in Germany along with other militant
anti-British Indians. British
intelligence has made eliminating him a priority, and they have devised a means
to do so: Chandra has fallen in love
with an Italian woman, Giulia Lazzari, who is in Allied custody. Ashenden is given the job of forcing Lazzari to
trick Chandra into coming to France, where the French government can seize him.
This story is quite plot-driven: what will happen to Chandra
Lal and Giulia Lazzari? There is also a
philosophical theme: deception, masks, and the way people’s actions do not
necessarily reflect their true feelings.
All the characters in the story lie, withhold information, wear
disguises, or put on some kind of act, out of love, patriotism, or mere
selfishness.
“Episode.” This is one of those stories with an
elaborate frame. There is a first person
narrator, who tells you all about his friend, a guy who has tuberculosis. This tubercular gentleman volunteers to visit
first-time offenders in prison and comfort them, give them advice, help them
prepare for the return to the outside world, etc. He tells the narrator a story told to him
about one of the inmates he works with.
So we are getting this story third or fourth hand. There is a whole theory about these framing
devices, how they add to verisimilitude and challenge the reader with layers of
narrative unreliability, but I sometimes wonder if there frames are
inefficient, a waste of everybody’s time.
Luckily Maugham’s style is so smooth and pleasant that the frame is not
at all a problem here, and Maugham, at the end of the story, uses the framing
device to point out the callousness and heartlessness of the average person (or
perhaps just the callousness of the average middle or upper class person
towards the lower classes; class is one of the themes the story returns to
again and again.)
The main story is about the doomed love affair between a
handsome working class man and a beautiful girl whose working class parents, by
dint of sacrifice and hard work, have been able to develop a prosperous shop
and send their daughter to college. I
wouldn’t be surprised if some people thought this story melodramatic,
sentimental soap opera nonsense, but I was moved by it.
“Flotsam and Jetsam.” This is one of Maugham’s many stories about Europeans
living in the East, and how they deal with life far from home in a strange
climate and landscape, surrounded by people of an utterly different culture. This one takes place in Borneo. An anthropologist who hasn’t seen a white
person in two years gets a fever, and his Chinese servant brings him to the estate
of a rubber planter who lives with his wife.
This couple is miserable, and they hate each other. The man, though of
English blood, was born in Borneo and neither the natives nor the British
immigrants in the area accept him as one of them, with the result that the couple has no friends. The wife misses England,
which she has not seen in 16 years, but the rubber business has been bad to
them, so there is no money to take a trip to England. She talks to herself and has a terrible
nervous tics. Eventually we learn that
the wife never loved her husband, and merely married him because she was
stranded in the Orient with no means to survive. After two years of marriage she had an affair
with another planter, whom her husband killed upon discovering the affair. For the last 14 years the couple has lived
with only one goal in mind, to achieve revenge by making each other
miserable.
This story has some weaknesses. For a
reason I can’t understand Maugham introduces the anthropologist character but
then does not have this character learn the couple’s terrible secret or upset the status
quo. The anthropologist suspects there is some dreadful
secret, but when he recovers from his fever he leaves without having solved the
mystery, and it is the omniscient third person narrator who tells the reader
the secret of the murder. I can’t help
but feel that Maugham could have structured this one a little better.
*********
So, four stories, all worth reading, one (“Episode”) powerful,
one (“Flotsam and Jetsam”) flawed. Not a bad tally.
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