The Painted Veil: W. Somerset Maugham

 

The Painted Veil: W. Somerset Maugham

Make-believe and the Real

Title of Maugham’s books, especially his novels, are always intriguing.

A critic once poohpoohed one of his books saying it had the usual Maugham fare - a mishmash of old themes. His next story collection was titled, Mixture as Before. Title and epigraph of The Painted Veil come from P.B. Shelley’s poem Lift Not the Painted Veil. It is more profitable to read the complete poem – presuming one hasn’t read it yet – after they have finished the book. One can then variously interpret Maugham’s allusion to a painted veil.

In the preface, Maugham recounts how he came to write the book. ‘I think that this is the only novel I have written in which I started from a story rather than from a character. It is difficult to explain the relation between character and plot. You cannot very well think of a character in the void; the moment you think of him, you think of him in some situation, doing something.' Idea for the story was suggested to him by Dante’s Purgatorio. In Maugham’s expert hands, the Italian story of a gentle woman whose husband suspected her of infidelity and took her to a castle, where he believed the noxious vapours would kill her, became the story of English Kitty and Walter, and the location changed to Hong Kong. Maugham had travelled in China in 1919-20. He was particular about authentic settings for his tales. The fascinating locale of his stories – especially the South China sea islands – that he describes with concision, accuracy, and an unostentatious detachment, add an irresistible charm to his books.

Maugham was notorious for reproducing in his stories, and quite often without dissimulation, the lives of people he had come to know. Book ran in to problems from beginning. While it was being serialised in a magazine, a couple with the same names as the main characters, complained. Lanes became Fanes. After the book had been issued, government of Hong Kong threatened to bring a suit, objecting to the use of colony as the setting for the novel. Book was recalled and Maugham changed Hong Kong to the mythical colony of Tching-Yen – Original name was restored in later editions. Publicity helped the sales of the book, which achieved immediate success. Wily Maugham was pleased, and wrote to a friend, ‘I got something like 500 pounds of free advertisement. … And the book jumped straight into the best-seller list’.

…

Kitty is a harebrained, shallow, and strikingly beautiful daughter of an equally vain and trifling woman, Mrs Garstin. Mrs Garstin is ‘a hard, cruel, managing, ambitious, parsimonious, and stupid woman’. She is an unrepentant snob who relentlessly seeks high society – ‘In twenty-five years Mrs Garstin never invited anyone to dine at their house because she liked him.’ Kitty’s father, Bernard Garstin, a small-town solicitor is ‘painstaking, industrious, and capable’, but ‘he had not the will to advance himself’. Mrs Garstin treats her husband like dirt, who had failed to fulfil her ambitions.

All her hopes are set on her elder daughter Kitty – ‘By arranging good marriages for her daughters, she expected to make up for all the disappointments of her career’. She ruthlessly drives Kitty to seduce covetable young men of society. Kitty effortlessly imbibes the superficial, frivolous ways of her mother. She refuses all the proposals that come her way, till she realises she is past the age that young men of standing desire in their bride. She meets Walter Fane, a lowly bacteriologist in colonial service, who is on leave in London. He falls in love with the beautiful Kitty in their first meeting. And Kitty marries Walter 'in panic'.

Maugham needed real people as model for his characters. There are striking similarities between Walter and the author himself. Like himself, Walter’s shyness ‘was a disease’. Walter never made a speech if he could avoid it. Maugham, due to his stammer, was morbidly afraid of speaking in public. Like Maugham, Walter thinks himself not very lovable. He was unnaturally sensitive, ‘for which his acid tongue was a protection’. Maugham too was famous for his acerbic humour and sarcastic wit. Kitty bears much likeness to Syrie, Maugham’s wife, whom he never loved. His portrait of Syrie in his memoir, Looking Back uncannily reminds one of Kitty - The book, written when he was 88, and in which he painted a searing portrait of Syrie, was universally derided by critics and writers, some of who were his ardent fans.

Kitty comes to Hong Kong with Walter, where he is stationed. She soon learns how she despises him – ‘He was dull. Oh, how he’d bored her. … He thought himself so much better than anyone else, it was laughable: he had no sense of humour; she hated his supercilious air, his coldness, and his self-control. It was easy to be self-controlled when you were interested in nothing and nobody but yourself. He was repulsive to her. She hated to let him kiss her. What had he to be so conceited about? He danced rottenly, he was a wet blanket at a party, he couldn’t play or sing, he couldn’t play polo and his tennis was no better than anybody’s else.  Bridge? Who cared about bridge?’ Walter’s moderation of speech exasperates her. His prudence puts her back up – ‘If nobody spoke unless he had something to say, Kitty reflected … the human race would soon lose the use of speech’. I cannot but gasp seeing the unnerving resemblance between the author and Walter - even the game of bridge, that was Maugham’s lifelong passion.

Kitty is starved of fun in the alien city where Walter is immersed in his work all through the day. Walter dotes on Kitty, but in his self-controlled, undemonstrative way. Kitty is seduced by the exceedingly charming, debonair assistant colonial secretary, Charles Townsend. She had hated Walter and was revolted by this maudlin, cloying acts of devotion. This helped her to wholeheartedly surrender into her infatuation for Charles without any scruples.

Walter soon discovers their affair. Novel begins with a superbly conceived nerve-racking scene when, Charles and Kitty are in her bedroom and suddenly realise that there is someone at the door. ‘They saw the white china knob of the handle slowly turn. They had heard no one walk along the verandah. It was terrifying to see that silent motion. A minute passed and there was no sound. Then, with the ghastliness of the supernatural, in the same stealthy, noiseless, and horrifying manner, they saw the white china knob of the handle at the other window turn also. Kitty, her nerves failing her, opened her mouth to scream; but, seeing what she was going to do, he swiftly put his hand over it and her cry was smothered in his fingers.’

In a series of ingeniously conjured situations, Maugham describes how the self-possessed, reticent Walter confronts the knowledge of Kitty’s betrayal. He surprises Kitty by admitting that he knew Kitty had no love for him – ‘I never expected you to love me, I didn’t see any reason that you should, I never thought myself very lovable. I was thankful to be allowed to love you. … What most husbands expect as a right I was prepared to receive as a favour.’

Maugham’s incredible sense of drama, his marvellous skill to describe a most delicate situation in the story in a simple prose, in a crisp, unpretentious manner, devoid of any sentimentality, is dumbfounding. His dialogues remind one of the decades he was the top playwright in London, as they narrate and advance the story. Here Walter, in one of his rare loquacious moods, lays bare his disenchantment with Kitty - ‘I had no illusions about you. I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty-headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you. I knew that you were second-rate. But I loved you. … I knew how frightened you were of intelligence and I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew.’

Walter volunteers for medical work at Mei-fan-tu, a city in China, where a deadly epidemic of Cholera is raging. The previous incumbent, a medical missionary, has recently succumbed to the scourge. He offers Kitty two choices. If Charlie is willing to marry her immediately, after divorcing his wife, he is willing to divorce Kitty. Otherwise, he asks Kitty to accompany him to the accursed Mei-fan-tu.

Kitty is inconsolably afraid at the prospect of travelling to an epidemic-infested city. She is blinded in her love and believes Charlie will only be too glad to marry her. When she meets him, he is annoyed. Kitty learns that what for her was life-sustaining love, was just a fling for Charlie. He plainly refuses to sacrifice his career and family for Kitty's sake and advises her to accompany Walter to Mei-fan-tu. ‘It’s no more risk for you than for him. In point of fact there is no great risk if you’re careful.’ Kitty is crestfallen by this vision of Charley’s character – "I know that you're selfish, selfish beyond words, and I know that you haven't the nerve of a rabbit, I know you're a liar and a humbug, I know that you're utterly contemptible. And the tragic part is'--her face was on a sudden distraught with pain--'the tragic part is that notwithstanding I love you with all my heart".

She goes to Mei-fan-tu with Walter, there being no other place where she can seek refuge in her misery.

Walter, never fond of small talk, is now like a stranger to her. He is faultlessly polite but aloof like a fellow-traveller in an inn. He is busy the whole day in cholera-relief. Kitty is devastated on losing Charlie. She has glimpsed his self-regarding, mean, and shallow soul but can’t stop loving him. She realises that Walter has some remarkable qualities, but ‘it was curious that she could not love him but loved still a man whose worthlessness was now so clear to her.’

Kitty befriends Waddington, the customs official – a funny little man with ‘ugliness that was not without charm’. He has voluntarily stayed behind in the death-stricken city to help the local administration. In Waddington, Maugham has created a lovable character, perhaps the most captivating in the book. ‘He was not witty … but had a dry and incisive way of putting things’ that made his company exciting. Having lived ‘for many years in out posts … his personality had developed in eccentric freedom.’ He brings the news of devastated city to Kitty, and is never short of praise for Walter, who had fearlessly jumped into the pool of suffering thousands, to alleviate their misery – ‘I respect him. He has brains and character; and that, I may tell you, is a very unusual combination. … If any man single-handed can put a stop to this frightful epidemic, he’s going to do it. … He’s risking his life twenty times a day.’

A few French nuns live in a convent in the city. Waddington takes Kitty there, perhaps only to pull her out of her wretched loneliness. Kitty is amazed at the peace inside the convent, while outside its walls, city is burning under the wrath of cholera. The unflustered ease with which nuns run their daily chores: prayers, looking after the sick in their infirmary, playing guardian to the orphans in their care, training young girls in vocations; the serene and affectionate demeanour of mother superior; leave her wonderstruck.

Kitty is deeply impressed by nuns’ selfless work and manages to convince them to let her work in the orphanage. Kitty’s sorrow is not hidden from the mother superior. She once consoles evidently distraught Kitty thus – ‘You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one’s soul’.

The illimitable human suffering in the city, nuns calmly absorbed in their work amid the heartrending desolation, Walter imprisoned in his sorrows but working his fingers to the bone like a soul possessed of death-wish, and the funny, whisky-loving Waddington with his facetious wit, make Kitty realise the worthlessness of her own woes – ‘What did it really matter if a silly woman had committed adultery and why should her husband … give it a thought’.

Kitty could even see the common life she had lived till now and finds it exasperating that Walter should still permit these trifle matters to ruin his happiness. Maugham brings out these changing emotions of the characters in his superbly written dialogues. Here Kitty is pleading with Walter not to bother with her shallow personality – ‘I think you do me an injustice. It’s not fair to blame me because I was silly and frivolous and vulgar. I was brought up like that. … It’s like reproaching someone who has no ear for music because he’s bored at a symphony concert. Is it fair to blame me because you ascribed to me qualities that I hadn’t got? I never tried to deceive you by pretending I was anything I wasn’t. I was just pretty and gay. You don’t ask for a pearl necklace or a sable coat at a booth in a fair; you ask for a tin trumpet and a toy balloon’.

Kitty cannot understand why an intelligent person like Walter should fail to appreciate that ‘beside all the terror of death under whose shadow they lay … their own affairs were trivial’. But Walter cannot accept the truth about Kitty – ‘It was all make-believe that he had lived on, and when the truth shattered it, he thought reality itself was shattered’. Sting of unrequited love doesn’t heal easily. Knowledge, that the person one cannot help loving is unworthy of their love, only sharpens this agony. Walter couldn’t forgive himself for having loved Kitty.

Maugham’s dramatic invention is yet not exhausted. He inserts another shrewd surprise in the tale. Walter’s griefs are deepened. Kitty, in spite of the circumstances, gradually discovers peace and happiness in work at the convent. And in the company of Waddington’s wry wit enunciating Tao – ‘Some of us look for the Way in opium and some in God, some of us in whisky and some in love. It is all the same Way and it leads nowhither’. She often wonders – ‘was it not pitiful that men, tarrying so short a space in a world where there was so much pain should thus torture themselves?’

Walter dies of cholera. His last words are – ‘The dog it was that died’. Later, Waddington, on being asked by Kitty informs her that this is the last line of Goldsmith’s poem An Elegy of the Death of a Mad Dog. In it, a mad dog once bites a pious Christian. To the wonder of the people of the town, it’s the dog that died of the bite, not the man. Allegedly, the pious man was more toxic than the mad dog. Does Maugham imply that Walter in his anger and desolation, brought Kitty to the cholera infested city, believing that this would be her death? But in the end, it was he – unable to purge himself of his hatred of Kitty – who died of cholera. And had he, before his death, seen Kitty’s change of heart?

Kitty returns to London to find her tyrant mother dead and her father preparing to leave for Bahamas, where he is to take over as the Chief Justice. An inveterate cynic that Maugham was, he cannot resist the temptation of seeing human folly for what it is, when such an opportunity presents in the narration. In some brilliant passages he shows how fickle Kitty's redemption may have been, as he chronicles her brief sojourn in Hong Kong, on her way to London.

End of the book is uncharacteristically purple. Maugham puts some stuffy dialogues in Kitty’s mouth and mawkish hopes in her heart. Was he nervous to end the book on a sad note?

…

Shelly exhorts us not to lift the painted veil which those who live called life. It is interesting to speculate on the connections Maugham wanted the reader to discern between his story and the metaphor. It can apply to Walter’s disillusionment with Kitty and life, when fate lifts the veil that hides the reality. Walter’s emotions seem to mirror Shelly’s lines.

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.

Maugham could equally be referring to the lifting of the veil of conceit, vacuous passions, and trifling pursuits, from Kitty’s life as she discovers a soulful life of spirit and ethereal joys in Nuns’ company amid the misery that has gripped the cholera-afflicted city.

But a careful reading of the sonnet, reveals another meaning. Shelly’s painted veil is the life led by every human being. Shelly seems to be suggesting that the truth of existence – which none, not even a preacher, can ever discover – is hidden behind this veil, knit by our hopes and fears. To disregard the real as an illusion and to believe the fib of our mind as real, has been the preoccupation of poets since ages. Yet, the idea has spawned many supremely beautiful poems.

Maugham uses the age-old themes of love and betrayal to tell a tale of the pursuit of deeper meaning and eternal joys in a workaday life; and almost succeeds. Book is short, plot is engrossing, characters are vividly drawn, story moves swiftly, and effortlessly carries the reader along. It is written in a prose that is lucid, elegant, and replete with an urbane wit, as one constantly finds in a Maugham book.

I said almost succeeds, because, the book fails to command the vast spaces of human mind that hanker after the sublime – however illusory this landscape may be. It relates the suffering of the protagonists but loses steam when author tries to connect this to the universal truths of existence. One glimpses such grand vision – the seamless dissolution of individual travails in the ubiquitous vagaries of human fate – in Maugham’s   novels Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, and in many of his short stories viz., Flotsam and Jetsam, The Vessel of Wrath, Mackintosh. I also discovered this magnificence of thought in Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River, and Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, The Human Factor, The Quiet American.

Painted Veil is another incredibly competent tale by the master story-teller, but it stops short of being profound.