Read The Gentleman In the Parlour Online
Authors: W Somerset Maugham
The Gentleman In the Parlour
The Gentleman in
the Parlour
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Paul Theroux
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
Other Works by W. Somerset Maugham
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409088028
Published by Vintage 2001
6 8 10 9 7
Copyright © the Royal Literary Fund
W. Somerset Maugham has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
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First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann in 1930
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THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR
William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine, but the success of his first novel,
Liza of Lambeth,
published in 1897, won him over to letters.
Of Human Bondage,
the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of
The Moon and Sixpence
his reputation as a novelist was established. At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and short story writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of
The Trembling of a Leaf,
subtitled
Little Stories of the South Sea Islands,
in 1921, which was followed by seven more collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical
The Summing Up
and
A Writer's Notebook.
In 1927 Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965.
OTHER WORKS BY W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Novels
The Moon and Sixpence
Of Human Bondage
The Narrow Corner
The Razor's Edge
Cakes and Ale
The Merry-Go-Round
The Painted Veil
Catalina
Up at the Villa
Mrs Craddock
The Casuarina Tree
Christmas Holiday
Liza of Lambeth
The Magician
Theatre
Then and Now
Collected Short Stories
Collected Short Stories Vol. 1
Collected Short Stories Vol. 2
Collected Short Stories Vol. 3
Collected Short Stories Vol. 4
Ashenden
Short Stories
Far Eastern Tales
More Far Eastern Tales
Travel Writing
On a Chinese Screen
Don Fernando
Literary Criticism
Ten Novels and their Authors
Points of View
The Vagrant Mood
Autobiography
The Summing Up
A Writer's Notebook
In 1922, when William Somerset Maugham was hugely successful as a playwright, short story writer and novelist, and even something of a socialite, he dropped off the map to take the long and occasionally rigorous journey recorded in this book. He had gone by ship from Britain to Ceylon where he met a man who told him of the joys of Keng Tung in the Shan States of remote northeastern Burma. This provoked him to travel via Rangoon to Mandalay, where he embarked by mule for this supposedly enchanted place. Twenty-six days later he arrived. He recorded its virtues in his notebook and then plodded on to the Thai frontier, where a Ford car awaited, to take him to Bangkok. After that, a ship to Cambodia, a trek to Angkor, another river trip to Saigon and a coastal jaunt via Hue to Hanoi. The book finishes there, though in fact, he traveled onward to Hong Kong, crossed the Pacific, crossed the United States, crossed the Atlantic and, back in London, resumed his writing career and his socializing. But he did not get around to writing this book until seven years later, and I think this fact needs to be taken into account when evaluating this oblique and selective travel narrative.
He wrote a great deal in the interval after the trip,
The
Painted Veil
(1925), and after another voyage to Singapore and Malaya the powerful stories in
The Casuarina Tree
(1926),
Ashenden
and its stories of espionage (1928), and at least two full-length stage plays. In this time he made at least one more visit to the United States, and in 1927 bought the grand house on the Riviera he named the Villa Mauresque. Here, in luxury, he finished his novel
Cakes and Ale
and at last wrote
The Gentleman in the Parlour.
Both these books were published in the same year, 1930, at what one of his biographers called the peak of his career.
The Gentleman in the Parlour
received the mixed, not to say envious, reviews that Maugham habitually got from critics who, well-aware that Maugham was wealthy, successful as a writer, socially connected, something of a snob, and living in style, saw little reason to praise him.
Maugham was given no credit for enduring difficult travel, yet parts of the trip were arduous. He toured the extensive complex of temples at Pagan in Burma, necessitating a trip down the Irrawaddy, and spent almost a month on the mule on the trip to Keng Tung. In Cambodia he sailed up the Tonle Sap River and crossed the wide lake to view the then remote precincts of Angkor, at the time just a fantastic set of uninhabited ruins in the jungle.
But the delay between the trip and the book interests me. Invariably a person who wishes to write a travel book goes on a journey and writes the book immediately afterwards. The notable exception is Patrick Leigh Fermor who walked across Europe from Holland to Constantinople in 1933-34, but did not write his account of the trip until many decades later â
A Time of Gifts
(1977) and
Between the Woods and the Water
(1986). These books are so fresh and full of detail you'd hardly know that such a long period of time had elapsed.
In Maugham's case, the hiatus made a difference, both for good and ill. I don't think it would have been the same book if he'd written it on his return home. The book's tone and
structure is the result of this passage of time. The book is less detailed but more reflective, more deliberate, more artful and even contrived as a result; it summarizes, it avoids divulging much about the traveler's true personality and predilections. The high points are the mule ride through upper Burma, the period of time in Bangkok, and the description of Angkor.
In the course of the book, Maugham analyzes the wish to travel and the nature of a traveler. These observations are telling for the way they apply to Maugham himself: âWhen [the traveler] sets out on his travels the one person he must leave behind is himself.' The text does not bear this out. And as for the nature of the travel book, âif you like language for its own sake, if it amuses you to string words together in the order that most pleases you, so as to produce an effect of beauty, the essay or the book of travel gives you an opportunity.' This assertion also seems to me questionable. A travel book ought to be the opposite of an exercise in style, but rather a personal way of seeing the world as it is.
âThough I have traveled much I am a bad traveler,' Maugham says in another place. âThe good traveler has the gift of surprise.' Maugham adds that he lacks this: he takes customs as he finds them. He views travel as liberating, a refreshment: âI travel because I like to move from place to pace, I enjoy the sense of freedom it gives me,' and he goes on in this vein, ending, âI am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.'
These statements are wonderfully direct, and seem candid, but we know that in this travel book Maugham took extensive liberties; and that in his life and his work he was a master of concealment and indirection.
In great part,
The Gentleman in the Parlour
is a book of stories â travelers' tales, mostly; not Maugham's but those of the people he meets. This book is filled with distinct and well
told stories: the Mandalay tale of the marriage of George and Mabel, in Thazi the irregular alliance between Masterson and his Burmese mistress, in Mong Pying the story of the priest's isolation, in Lop Buri the story of Constantine Faulkon, the Bangkok fable about Princess September, various tales from shipboard, including how the French governor found his wife, and at least two more, one involving the old friend Grosely, the other about the American Elfenbein.
The stories appear to have been related to him by people he met, or in the case of âPrincess September' imagined in a sort of delirium during a serious bout of malaria in Bangkok. But some of these stories had been written prior to the trip â in some cases many years before. âPrincess September' he wrote for one of the tiny volumes in the library of Queen Mary's Doll House in 1922. The tale purportedly told to him on the ship to Hong Kong was the short story âA Marriage of Convenience', which had been written in 1906, and was published in the
Illustrated London News
in that year. The Englishman Masterson, who may or may not have related the story of his liaison with a Burmese woman who bore him three children, in the Burmese town of Thazi, appeared as a short story, âOn the Road to Mandalay', in the December 1929 issue of the
International Magazine,
It was later published in his
Collected Stories
under the title âMasterson'.
Except for âPrincess September', which does go on a bit (and seems anything but a malarial inspiration), the stories are arresting character studies and add the local color (dissipated colonial, lots of drink, love affair without benefit of clergy) that gave the Maugham short story, especially the far-flung subject, its tang. They also serve to prove Maugham's assertion in the short story âMasterson' (and in Chapter X), âI was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seen before and would never see againâ¦I have in this way learned more about men in a night (sitting over a siphon or two and bottle of whisky, the hostile, inexplicable world
outside the radius of an acetylene lamp) than I could have if I had known them for ten years.'