W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
The Gentleman in
the Parlour
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Paul Theroux
VINTAGE BOOKS
London
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
About the Author
Other Works by W. Somerset Maugham
Introduction
Preface
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Chapter XLII
Chapter XLIII
Chapter XLIV
Chapter XLIV
The History of Vintage
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Published by Vintage 2001
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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
Introduction
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 sa
y 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 – 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: ‘When [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, ‘if 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.
‘Though I have traveled much I am a bad traveler,’ Maugham says in another place. ‘The 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: ‘I 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, ‘I 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 – 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 ‘Princess 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 – in some cases many years before. ‘Princess 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 ‘A 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, ‘On the Road to Mandalay’, in the December 1929 issue of the International Magazine, It was later published in his Collected Stories under the title ‘Masterson’.
Except for ‘Princess 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 ‘Masterson’ (and in Chapter X), ‘I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seen before and would never see again…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.’
But Maugham did not do a lot of sitting alone over whisky with a stranger. Maugham was by nature reticent – because of his stammer, not much of a raconteur; because of his homosexuality, unforthcoming about his personal life and his loves. One of the important facts he withholds in this book is that he was not alone on the trip. He traveled with his lover and companion Gerald Haxton, who was eighteen years younger and although a drunkard and something of a rogue, was helpful in ice-breaking and meeting locals, as well as making arrangements en route, in many respects Maugham’s common law husband. In The Summing Up, Maugham explained. ‘I am shy of making acquaintance with strangers, but I was fortunate enough to have on my journeys a companion [Haxton] who had an estimable social gift. He had an amiability of disposition that enabled him in a very short time to make friends with people in ships, clubs, barrooms, and hotels, so that through him I was able to get into easy contact with an immense number of persons whom otherwise I should have known only at a distance.’
But you get the impression in this book that Maugham was alone, encouraging strangers in their disclosures, battling the uncertainties, struggling against the difficulties, solving the problems of transport and tickets, and all the rest of the hassles that make travel at times such a colorless bore. The first time I read this book I admired Maugham’s stamina and capacity to deal with solitude. And then I read a few biographies and I realized that Maugham was not alone and was often traveling in style.
The revelation that the traveler presented in his or her book as a solitary wanderer is not that unusual. Bruce Chatwin never said that he invariably traveled with a friend, V. S. Naipaul did not reveal that he was never alone in his travels, but always (as his biographer showed) with his wife or his long-time mistress Margaret; Graham Greene was very nearly helpless without a constant companion, since he was unable to drive a car or use a typewriter, and the same can be said for Wilfred Thesiger, who never traveled alone. There are many other examples of the gregarious traveler presenting himself, of herself, as a solitary wanderer. There is no shame in this, though it makes the actual solitary wanderers, such as Doughty on camel back in the Empty Quarter of Arabia Deserta, seem almost heroic.
So Maugham was traveling with his friend and lover. And he said that he dictated the larger part of the book to him en route. He omitted the last part of the trip (Hong Kong to London). He included previously written material. And some of what he wrote appeared as non-fiction in this book and fiction elsewhere. And yet, for this manipulation, the book is perhaps his most satisfying narrative of travel.
In the Preface to the collected edition of On a Chinese Screen Maugham wrote that The Gentleman in the Parlour was not, like On a Chinese Screen, the result of an accident … ‘I wanted to try my hand again at the same sort of subject, but on a more elaborate sca
le and in a form on which I could impose a definite pattern. It was an exercise in style.’ This ‘style’ is not discernible; structurally. It is a conventional travel book though the itinerary is Maugham’s own, and even if they have been manipulated, the stories of the expatriates are wonderful.
Although he seems to be writing about himself the whole time, he discloses little about himself. He loses his temper at one point (his room wasn’t ready), but he soon deflates himself. He talks a little about his drinking habits; he reveals that he once took opium. Like many writers who insist that they are not very interesting, he is highly observant. His description of Angkor is one of the best I have ever read, and his account of the Thai court is subtle – an insider’s glimpse at Asiatic royalty; and (though he claims to be unimpressed) he does justice to the French-looking city of Hanoi. Maugham the narrator has no passion, though passion throbs in the people he encounters and in their tumultuous lives. Maugham’s voice is that of the man who narrates his fiction, the watchful writer, humorless but reliable. There is hardly any difference between the man telling this story and the third-person narration of his fiction. Only now and then there is the flicker of a bias, as with the hosiery salesman Elfenbein, about whom he writes, ‘He was the kind of Jew who made you understand the pogrom,’ which is vicious. But Elfenbein was the occasion for a Maugham first, perhaps one of the earliest recorded instance of the expression ‘a chip on his shoulder’, as when he says of Elfenbein, ‘He was a man with a chip on his shoulder. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to slight or injure him.’
Maugham himself had a chip – perhaps more than one. But in general, he was stoical, even intrepid, in his travels. His traveling off the beaten track makes this book not just unusual but (to me the greatest attribute of the travel narrative) a valuable historical document.
In this curious, active, even hearty period of his life, traveling in the Far East and the Pacific, eavesdropping, note-taking, he was at his best, and was perhaps his happiest. A person only sets out on such a trip if he is confident, hopeful that he will discover something new. Maugham, a lonely man, was sensitive to the loneliness of others and keenly aware of his own limitations. Travel was a way of isolating himself, and after traveling became too much trouble, he found relief if not happiness himself in his own splendid isolation at the Villa Mauresque, where he wrote this book, recalling his happier moments, on the road.