W. Somerset Maugham: Collected Short Stories Volume 4

The Story Behind the Stories

Somerset Maugham was one of the most travelled authors of his generation.

He was born in France and lived there in luxury – his father was solicitor at the British embassy in Paris – till he lost both his parents at the age of twelve. He came to live with a prudish, self-seeking Uncle, his father’s brother, vicar of Whitstable, and his German wife, who, though not unkind, didn’t know how to be affectionate to a sensitive child. Till then French was his language. He had to adopt a new country as home, new people as guardians – an unwilling elderly couple, stern, and inept with children, of whom they have had none, and learn a new language to communicate. He felt an alien in a foreign land. He stammered. This disability further withheld him from social communion. 

A poignant anecdote about his childhood illustrates his fear of ridicule and rebuke from strangers when he was young – ‘Tell him I stammer, Uncle,’ young Willie, as he was known, said to his uncle, when being taken to the headmaster of King’s School in Canterbury, where he schooled for next seven years.

His sexual inclinations – he was a homosexual – in a country, where they, if detected, would have branded him a criminal, completed his isolation. He ran away from England frequently, whenever he found an occasion: to America where his plays were being staged or books were being released, during First World War to Switzerland as an agent of British Intelligence and to France as an ambulance driver, to India as a tourist and frequently to the islands of South-China Sea. Finally, he bought a villa in French Riviera, at Cap Ferrat, where he lived for forty years till he died aged ninety-two.

Sense of being an outsider never left him. It immensely influenced his work. Perhaps, it is this remoteness from the throng of humanity – imagined or real, but devastating, all the same – that turned his sympathies towards the vagrants of society, the apostates, the delinquents, the drunkards, the heathen, the debauched, the philanderers, that populate his most alluring work of fiction. He innately got under their skin, and made them behave the way a real person in their situation would have, in his stories.

No writer can keep himself out of his fiction. In one form or another, a part here and a part there, he slips into his characters. Maugham uninhibitedly let his life percolate in many of his books. The narrator in many of his stories, told in first person singular, is unabashedly Maugham. But he projected only few facets of his personality while fiercely guarding those he didn’t want to share. 

Nicholas Shakespeare in his introduction – that is as brilliant as the collection that follows – to an anthology of Maugham’s stories recounts an anecdote of Maugham’s life. Once at the Vivey railway station an elderly lady sighted Maugham, nearing the end of his life and suffering from dementia, playing hide and seek with his male secretary. ‘Yoo-hoo’ cried the old man from behind a pillar and the secretary began reprimanding him. ‘You should be gentle with that nice old man. He thinks he’s Somerset Maugham’, interceded the old lady on old man’s behalf. Maugham had lifelong played this game of hide-and-seek in his fiction. He would even have appreciated the irony – a writer with diminishing powers trying to impersonate himself.

After the First world war, Maugham travelled to the far-off islands in Pacific. He met people who seemed to be governed by different social customs than he was accustomed to. ‘Few of them had culture. They had learnt life in a different school from mine and had come to different conclusions. They led it on a different plane. … They had their narrowness. … their prejudices. They were often dull and stupid. I did not care. They were different,’ he writes in his memoirs, Summing Up. ‘Never been much of a sight-seer’ he indulged his interest ‘in men and the lives they led’.

He, through his friend, Gerald Hexton – for he ‘was shy of making acquaintance with strangers’ – came to know many of these people. All this was grist to the mill of a story-writer’s pen. ‘I seemed to myself to develop the sensitiveness of a photographic plate. It did not matter to me if the picture I formed was true; what mattered was that with help of my imagination I could make of each person I met a plausible harmony. It was the most enchanting game in which I had ever engaged.’

Sitting on the veranda of a lonely Resident’s house, over a game of bridge in the club of a remote island in Pacific, while sharing a drink with the captain on a schooner, he ‘made acquaintance with them with just the degree of intimacy that suited’ him. He wrote in summing up, ‘It was an intimacy born on their side of ennui and loneliness … (an intimacy) that separation irrevocably broke’. It was thus, ‘sitting over a siphon or two and a bottle of whisky … (within) the radius of an acetylene lamp’ men told him stories they would not have told to any other soul in the world.

He took copious notes during his travels in South Seas. But it was four years later that he wrote his first story based on these notes. Story was ‘Rain’. Initially it failed to excite the publishers and the public. But later, it went on to become one of Maugham’s most celebrated stories. It is the first story in the Vol 1 of his Collected Short Stories. I wrote on it some time back.

Scene of most of Maugham’s stories in his last volume of Collected Short Stories, Volume 4, is set in Malaya. Maugham extensively toured the islands of Federal Malayan States, FMS, a British protectorate of four states, established in 1896 that lasted till 1946. As British Raj is always associated with Rudyard Kipling, South America with Graham Greene, and Burma with George Orwell, FMS will forever be a Maugham country.

These stories are mostly about English people in the Malay States. At the time Maugham visited these, British empire was past its glory. But the lives of people, the expatriates he met, had changed little. To an ordinary person, these people led a humdrum life. He summarised this life in a passage in one of his stories, ‘The Door of Opportunity’, in his collection Far Eastern Tales.

What was one to do with these people? The men had come out to the colony as lads from second-rate schools, and life had taught them nothing. At fifty they had the outlook of hobbledehoys. Most of them drank a great deal too much. They read nothing worth reading. Their ambition was to be like everybody else. Their highest praise was to say that a man was a damned good sort. If you were interested in the things of the spirit, you were a prig. They were eaten up with envy of one another and devoured by petty jealousies. And the women, poor things, were obsessed by petty rivalries. They made a circle that was more provincial than any in the smallest town in England. They were prudish and spiteful.

Majority of them were government servants, planters, and traders. They were ordinary man, going about their lives conscientiously. They did their jobs as competently as an average people anywhere. They were as happy with their wives as most men are. They read their Times, that arrived six weeks late at their doorsteps, in a boat that visited their islands once in a week or a fortnight, and brought them their mails too. They visited the club in the evenings, if there was one in their station. Some played tennis, and some billiards, and a few sat on bridge tables. They went to England, once every four years, when they got the home-leave. They found the country that was the centre of their fantasies when they were away, an alien land now. And they longed to get back to their stations in FMS, to their prahus, their veradah-ringed bungalows, their native servants, their casual attire of sarongs, their gin pahits and stegnahs at the club.

These were normal people. But they were a poor material for the type of story Maugham wrote. In the preface he says, ‘I write stories about people who have some singularity of character which suggests to me that they may be capable of behaving in such a way as to give me an idea that I can make use of’. But hurriedly, Maugham assures us that these were the exception.

Greatest of Maugham stories are built around an anecdote. Anecdote plainly illustrates the theme of the story. He does not lose sight of this theme throughout the length of the story of ten to fifteen thousand words. The spellbinding tautness of the narrative takes your breath away. Most of these tales can be narrated in a few sentences over a drink in a bar, over a meal in a restaurant, in a mirthful tittle-tattle among friends, or when passengers prattle on a tedious journey. This ease of the reader in grasping a tale that relates to universal human emotions but is written with urbane wit, is, I believe, what made Maugham one of the most successful writers of twentieth century, and the richest – from his pen – among his peers.

Of all the story tellers, Maugham considered Guy de Maupassant the best. He has straight-facedly written that he modelled his stories on Maupassant’s technique: ‘You can tell it over the dinner-table or in a ship’s smoking room and hold the attention of your listeners. It relates a curious, but not improbable incident. The scene is set before you with brevity, as the medium requires, but with clearness; and the persons concerned, the kind of life they lead and their deterioration, are shown to you with just the amount of detail that is needed to make the circumstances of the case plain.’ This, in nut shell, is his technique too, in most of his stories.

Another aspect of his stories is the esoteric land they relate to. Maugham admired Rudyard Kipling. And writing on his craft, in his essay ‘The Short Story’, in Points of View, he wrote, ‘This is the story the scene of which is set in some country little known to the majority of readers. It deals with the reactions upon the white man of his sojourn in an alien land and the effect which contact with peoples of another race and colour has upon him’. When Maugham set upon the path to be a writer in his early twenties he studied the methods of the masters diligently. He had whole-heartedly adopted this aspect of Kipling.

Many critics derided Maugham for eschewing the tumultuous sociopolitical conditions of his age in his fiction – The crumbling British empire, fledgling nations rising from the ruins of this past behemoth, burgeoning fascism in Europe, genocidal World Wars. He defended himself in the essay, ‘The Short Story’ thus, ‘Only the very ingenuous can suppose that a work of fiction can give us reliable information on the topics which it is important to us for the conduct of our lives to be apprised of. By the very nature of his creative gifts the novelist is incompetent to deal with such matters, his not to reason why, but to feel, to imagine and to invent. He is biased’. Writer cannot be a sage who impartially watches over the drama of life. His very nature influences the way he presents the world and its actors in his stories. He, often unknowingly, loads the dice, ‘and then he uses such skill as he has to prevent the reader from finding him out. … The proper aim of the writer of fiction is not to instruct, but to please.’ I do not know if there is another aim of a reader when he curls up with a book of stories, balanced precariously in the crook of his arm, and momentarily loses the sense of time and space, as waves of pleasure wash over him.

Maugham, in A Writer’s Notebook, appears to dispassionately assess his worth in the future. He said that Of Human Bondage, considered his best book, ‘will be forgotten with many other better books’. A couple of his stories, he speculated ‘will secure a line or two in the histories of the English theatre. And ‘a few of my best stories will find way into anthologies for a good many years to come if only because some of them deal with circumstances and places to which the passage of time and the growth of civilisation will give a romantic glamour’. His prophecy hasn’t proven right. Thousands of the copies of his books continue to be sold even today, most written more than a century ago. His books are being borrowed continuously from libraries. It is estimated that his books have sold about 80-100 million copies till now. This is not ‘a slender baggage, two plays and a dozen short stories, with which’ he claimed he was setting ‘out on a journey to the future’.

Though Maugham was diffident in evaluating his worth – ‘in the very first row of the second-raters’, and although numerous critics thought him a poor writer – 'Division II, Class 1', was Lytton Strachey’s verdict – His admirers too, were not few, including Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell who said  of him ‘I believe the modern writer who has influenced me most is Somerset Maugham, whom I admire immensely for his power of telling a story straightforwardly and without frills.’, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and James Michener. Maugham believed, a writer must be judged by his best work. Maugham’s best was not only the best in its class, but in sheer quantity it overwhelmingly surpassed most writers of his time.

Maugham excelled in the form of short stories, that for lack of a better name, goes by the awkward name of long-short story, or the long-shorts, a story of about 10-15,000 words, too big for a short story and too short for the novella. In Summing Up he writes why he liked this genre, ‘I liked the form. It was very agreeable to live with the personages of my fancy for two or three weeks (Maugham, diligently, day after day, since his early twenties and well into this ninth decade, unfailingly wrote 500 words daily) and then be done with them. … This sort of story, one of about twelve thousand words, gave me ample room to develop my theme, but forced upon me a concision that my practice as a dramatist had made grateful to me’.

Maugham wrote the best stories in this genre. Of the score that he wrote, almost all are exceptional. Vol 4 of his collected short story has almost a dozen of these among thirty in the collection. I chose, with extreme difficulty, four among them to illustrate qualities of short story I spoke about in this essay. In the next essay I will write about them.