Maugham second thoughts

Based on his introduction and too little else, I wrote on the blog that in his 1930 memoir of a 1923 journey across Southeast Asia, "The Gentleman in the Parlour," Somerset Maugham was "above-it-all." I picked the book up again and went right through it and realized my facile put-down was unfair. It's true that Maugham never really engages "the natives." But he isn't condescending either, unusual for European travel essayists of that era. It leaves Maugham melancholy that he speaks none of the local languages and so is unable to connect. Joe and I have been fortunate; to the extent that we have been able to interact with Thais, Laos, Cambodians and Vietnamese at all, it's because so many educated people in the region speak passable or good English. No such luck for Maugham.

Maugham's single sketch of an Asian is of an English-speaking Burmese woman who exacted a historic revenge on a French official who jilted her. Using her royal court connections, the woman learned that the Burmese king, Thebaw, had made a secret deal that gave the French control of Mandalay. The spurned lover ratted the French out to the British, who marched on Mandalay and overthrew the pro-French king. Maugham's other portraits, of Europeans he encountered on his trip---a Frenchman who advertises in a newspaper for a wife; an Italian priest alone in the jungle converting Buddhists away from a philosophy he respects; a Brit who tries to buy respectability but can't---are all pointed, as well as maybe-too-tidy in a way that hints of embellishment by this gifted creator of tales.

Maugham never mentions that did not travel alone. The preface to the Orchid Press edition of "The Gentleman in the Parlour" reveals that accompanying Maugham on his journey of several months was his "lifelong companion," Gerald Haxton. This omission by Maugham seems disingenuous, though I guess that a popular male author in the 1920s could not repeatedly refer to "my boyfriend Jerry" without paying too heavy a price.

On the blog, I wrote little about Angkor Wat, chosing to let Joe's pictures show the great Khmer temples. But Maugham's prose descriptions are very fine, and they made me wish we had not visited the temples only in bright sunlight. Of the main temple, Maugham says, "It is an impressive rather then a beautiful building and it needs the glow of sunset or the white brilliance of the moon to give it a loveliness that touches the heart. It is grey veiled by a faint green, which is the color of the moss and the mould of all the rainy seasons it has seen, but at sunset it is buff, pale and warm. At dawn when the country is bathed in a silver mist the towers have an aspect that is strangely insubstantial; they have then an airy lightness which they lack in the hard white light of noon."

In a few pages, 159-166, Maugham provides one of the best explications of Buddhism I have read. He readily takes to it, a "way of life rather than a religion." Buddhism's acceptance of the transitory nature of all things seems so sensible to Maugham, and it makes him happy. His opinions about "share my beliefs or you die!" religions are unfavorable. He loves the Buddhist idea that earning merit through good behavior will get you an easier time of it in a future life. Of reincarnation, however, Maugham also says, "There is only one fault that I can find in it: it is incredible."