A Casual Affair

William Somerset Maugham, the most successful English writer of early twentieth century, and equally despised - perhaps, because of his popularity - by the highbrow of literary world,  was of undistinguished appearance in his youth. However, he developed deep, impressive wrinkles as he grew old. These gave his face a sagacious character in his dotage. It appears he had a paintable face. For, he was painted by the most popular portraitist of his time. Gerald kelly was the most prolific, painting him eighteen times. 

But the most famous portrait of Maugham, by which he is recognised by the posterity was done by the painter Graham Sutherland in 1949, when Maugham was seventy five. Sutherland had never done a portrait earlier. After Maugham’s painting, he became a coveted potraitist, and did pictures of many eminent public figures of the time including Churchill. 

Maugham invited Sutherland to stay at Villa Mauresque for seven days. He did many pencil and charcoal studies of Maugham during the week, capturing his facial features, wrinkles, posture, and the piercing expression. The final oil painting was done from these sketches in his studio. The result was a shocking, caricaturist figure. Maugham is shown sitting on a bamboo stool, legs and arms crossed. There are faint shadows of palm fronds in the background, suggesting orient, Maugham's favorite country. There is a hint of a hunch, and face is upturned. Hooded eyes are a little melancholic. Mouth is downturned and chin prominent. Singularity of the portrait lay in its depiction of subject's personality, There is a clear suggestion of disillusionment, but also a disdainful amusement of a dispassionate observer having witnessed human follies for a lifetime. Maugham said that he 'was shocked' when he saw it first, but 'then I began to realize that here was more of me than I ever saw myself'. Gerald Kelly joked that Sutherland had made his old friend look like a madam of a brothel in Shanghai. Maugham bought the portrait, and later donated it to Tate London.

Graham Sutherland's portrait of Maugham

I sketched Maugham first, about two decades ago. I hung the finished picture in my room in the hospital where I was then posted. Since then I have done a couple more. Recently I did two in pen, for the first time. Except for the sketches in pen - as I learnt later, when I read Maugham's many biographies - these were the pencil drawings by Sutherland. Most are now in National Portrait Gallery, London. I wasn't aware of this, and didn't look them up when I visited the iconic gallery about a decade ago.

    

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Love that is never returned

Maugham, in the beginning of ‘A Casual Affair’, another story in his Collected Short Stories Vol 4, declares that though he is narrating the story in first person, he is in no way connected with it. He has merely narrated the facts he came to know, but the reasons for them he has only guessed. He offers an excuse for being presumptuous as to guess the cause: ‘If you are interested in human nature there are few things more diverting than to consider the motives that have resulted in certain actions’.

Maugham was spending two or three days on an island on the north coast of Borneo, and he was staying with the District Officer, Arthur Low. There were few white people on the island and it seemed to Maugham that the couple, especially Mrs low, was glad to see Maugham. She pressed him to stay longer. On a night, after dinner, Mrs Low told Maugham that she had seen him in London at Lady Kastellan’s party.

Maugham remembered the night. Lady Kastellan was a popular member of the London glitterati. Maugham was surprised that Lows had been there. Mrs Low said she too hadn’t fancied being there. She, it appeared, had a terrible time at the dinner. She had found lady Kastellan condescending, though they had been invited by her.

‘She’s a bitch,’ was Mrs Low’s opinion. She also said that though, lady Kastellan affected nonchalance as she welcomed them, a look at Mrs Low told her that she knew everything.

Mrs Low prodded her husband to tell Maugham the story how they had landed at Lady Kastellan’s party. Low was a quiet guy and was not sure he should as it was ‘rather a bad business’. But Mrs Low insisted, ‘If you don’t, I shall.’

Arthur Low was then DO in Selangor. One day he was told that a white man had died in a small town nearby. He hadn’t known that there was a white man there. He went there to investigate. In the town, he was taken to a ramshackle shop by the owner of the shop, above which was the room of the deceased. Door was opened by a Chinese woman. The room was really a cubby hole. It was fetid and almost bare. There was a strong acrid smell of opium. In a corner ‘the dead man lay on his back with nothing on but a sarong and a dirty singles’. He was only bones and skin. It was evident that he had died of starvation. Shopkeeper confirmed that he was an opium addict. It seemed another of those rare, but not unheard-of cases – ‘The white man who goes under and gradually sinks to the last stage of degradation’. Chinese woman, it struck Low, had been fond of him and had kept him for two years on her miserable earnings. When asked if the white man had left any effects, she took out a small parcel from a shabby suit-case and gave it to Low.

Parcel was addressed, in a well-educated writing, to The District Officer, followed by these words: please deliver personally to the Viscountess Kastellan, 53 Carlton House Terrace, London, sw. Low had to examine the contents. The first thing he found inside was a gold and platinum cigarette-case. He was astonished. He had seen that the dead man and the Chinese woman had lived in utmost poverty. Beside the cigarette-case there were about forty or fifty letters, without envelopes, all in the same neat hand as the directions on the parcel. There was no name- they were all signed J. Chinese woman didn’t know the name of the dead man or was unwilling to reveal it.

Low was soon going to England on vacation. He planned to deliver the parcel to Lady Kastellan personally then. But he had to read the letters to know the truth. Letters were the avowal of a passionate love.

It emerged that the writer, the mysterious J, was a clerk in the foreign office. Lord Kastellan was then undersecretary in the Home Office. J had fallen in love with Lady Kastellan and she with him. They both had wholeheartedly given into their passion and believed that their love would last for ever. Then, the catastrophe struck. Lord Kastellan came to know about their love. He and Lady Kastellan have had a frightful row and she moved to her parent’s house. J was miserable. He blamed himself for bringing this misfortune in Lady Kastellan’s life. But he also saw a chance that now their love could attain a natural resolution.

Lady Kastellan was frightened out of her wits. She refused to see J. Lord Kastellan had refused to take the blame. She was terrified of the calumny a divorce would visit on her in London society. J tried to reassure her that all would be fine. Of course, he would have to quit Foreign Office. But he could easily find a job in the colonies. Though, not in luxuries as she had lived till now, he would make her as happy as he could.

Lady Kastellan would hear none of this. She was fond of her life in London and her status as the wife of an Undersecretary of State.

Then, – it appeared from J’s letters – she wrote him that Lord Kastellan had agreed to accept her back, if J would quit his job and leave England.

This was the last letter in the bundle. Apparently, they had exchanged the letters each wrote to the other, in their last meeting. She had destroyed Jack’s while he preserved hers as the memory of a love that gave meaning to his life.

Maugham had known Lady Kastellan for a good many years. She was known to be a beauty and had a reputation for a marvellous self-possession. Maugham was amazed to learn ‘that she had ever surrendered to such passion as the letters suggested’.

When home on vacations, Low wrote to Lady Kastellan explaining who he was and said he had been asked to give her some letters and a gold and platinum cigarette-case by a man who had recently died in his district. Lady Kastellan gave him an appointment.

She was cold as she received him and took the letters and the cigarette case quite matter-of-factly. She was in complete possession of herself. ‘Was there any need to undo the parcel?’, she asked insolently. And added nonchalantly, ‘Did you know Jack well? … I had no idea that he was dead till I got your note. I’d lost sight of him for a long time. Of course he was a very old friend of mine’.

Lord Kastellan suddenly walked in to the room where Low and Lady Kastellan were in conversation and saw the cigarette case in her hand. ‘Mr Low comes from Federated Malay States. Poor Jack Almond’s dead and he’s left me his cigarette case.’ – she said unperturbedly.

Low was shocked to know who the dead wastrel had been.

For, he had known Jack Almond in FMS. Jack had been with a shipping firm in Singapore. He was doing extremely well in his career. He was ‘good at games and all that sort of things’. He was handsome, had a breezy demeanour, was honest, easy to get along – ‘It was not strange that lady Kastellan should have fallen madly in love with him’. Mrs Low had known him only cursorily but thought that ‘he was so tremendously alive. It bucked you up just to talk to him’.

Jack did not take vacation for five years. He finally took a six-months break from work and went to England. Low was at the farewell that expatriates organised for Jack at Singapore. He remembered it was a grand night. Everyone, including Jack, got a little tight. They have had a lark.

Then, Arthur Low was posted to a new station. He couldn’t believe when he was told by some common friends, after many months, that Jack had quite literally gone to pot on his return – ‘It looked as if life had gone out of him’. Low heard that he quit one job after another, or was kicked out every time, till he was quite a waif. His friends tried to help him, but it appeared, ‘he didn’t want to be helped. … he just wanted to go to hell in his own way and be as quick as he could about it’. Low could not, even in his dreams, have imagined that the wasted body of the urhin in the decrepit, stinking room was of Jack Almond.

Lows were perplexed as to why Jack, who seemed to have been in such buoyant mood when he first landed in FMS, should have gone to pieces after he returned from vacations in England. ‘We shall never know’ Mrs Low had sighed.

Maugham waded in smiling, ‘But we can guess. … That’s where the novelist comes in’.

He conjectured that during those first five years Jack was perpetually exhilarated by the thought of his sacrifice – he had given up everything that, to him, made life worth living ‘to save the woman he loved better than anything in the world’. He loved her as intensely now as he had before. Then he went home. He would have been happy to find that she still loved him. But he saw that Lady Kastellan was now a prudent, self-possessed woman of the world who remembered or cared little of their past love. He realized that she had never loved him as he had – she was never the woman for whom he had given up everything in life, his profession, his home, his friends. It broke him. Perhaps he still couldn’t stop loving her.

‘I know nothing more shattering than to love with all your heart, than not to be able however hard you try to break yourself of it, someone who you know is worthless. Perhaps that is why he took to opium. To forget and to remember.’ – This was Maugham’s explanation for the strange misfortune of Jack Almond.

 

Maugham suffered an unrequited love all his life. He wrote on such a love in many of his books including his masterpiece, The Human Bondage. In The Painted Veil  he wrote, ‘the love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned’. In Of Human Bondage. writing on the obsessive, destructive love of the protagonist he said, 'There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved'.