Collected Essays (21 page)

It is the fate of a good biographer that the reviewer neglects him for random reflections on his subject. Mr Carrington’s is a very good biography – we are not left, as we so often are when we have closed an official life, with the thought, ‘At least here is a quarry where other men in the future may dig more profitably.’ Mr Carrington has dug with effect: the quarry is exhausted, and, as Kipling would have wished, future writers need concern themselves only with the work.

1956

SOME NOTES ON SOMERSET MAUGHAM

1

‘A
WRITER’,
Somerset Maugham declared in these ‘variations on some Spanish themes’, ‘is not made by one book, but by a body of work. It will not be of equal value; his books will be tentative while he is learning the technique and developing his powers; and if, as most writers do, for it is a healthy occupation, he lives too long, his later work will show the decline due to advancing years, but there will be a period during which he will bring forth what he had it in him to bring forth in the perfection of which he is capable.’ To this last-mentioned period
Don Fernando
belongs; it is Maugham’s best book.

It will be an unexpected book for those to whom Maugham still primarily means adultery in China, murder in Malaya, suicide in the South Seas, the coloured violent stories which have so appreciably raised the level of the popular magazine. But there is a more important Mr Maugham than that: the shrewd critical humane observer of
Cakes and Ale
, of the best Ashenden stories, of the preface to the collected tales. The characteristic most evident in these books and in
Don Fernando
is honesty. It has emerged slowly out of the cynical and romantic past; there are passages in
The Trembling of a Leaf
and
The Painted Veil
which Maugham must have found acutely embarrassing to remember, and it is interesting to learn in
Don Fernando
that Maugham’s extensive knowledge of Spanish literature was accumulated when he was young, to provide him with material for a romantic Juanesque novel which he never wrote. Instead of Don Juan then we have Don Fernando, the innkeeper and curio dealer who forced Maugham unwillingly to buy an old life of Ignatius Loyola, and it is with this life that his study of old Spain starts.

The contrast is peculiarly piquant between the opulence of the material (the fierce asceticisms of Loyola and St Peter of Alcantara, the conceits of Lope de Vega, the ribaldry of the picaresque novelists, the food and the architecture and the painters of Spain, the grim bright goaty land) and Maugham’s honest unenthusiastic mind. I do not mean pedantic or unimaginative. Honesty is a form of sensitivity, and you need a very sensitive ear to detect in the verbose plays of Calderon ‘faintly audible, while this or the other is happening, the sinister drums of unseen powers’. One may smile at the idea of Maugham doing one of Loyola’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’ and finding it extremely severe (‘I thought I was going to be sick’), but it is that quality of honest experience which gives his style such vividness.

Tarragona has a cathedral that is grey and austere, very plain, with immense, severe pillars; it is like a fortress; a place of worship for headstrong and cruel men. The night falls early within its walls and then the columns in the aisles seem to squat down on themselves and darkness shrouds the Gothic arches. It terrifies you. It is like a dungeon. I was there last on a Monday in Holy Week, and from the pulpit a preacher was delivering a Lenten sermon. Two or three naked electric globes threw a cold light that cut the outline of the columns against the darkness as though with scissors. . . . Each angry, florid phrase was like a blow and one blow followed another with vicious insistence. From the farthest end of the majestic church, winding about the columns and curling round the groining of the arches, down the great austere nave, and along the dungeon-like aisles, the rasping, shrewish voice pursued you.

Don Fernando
may be superficially discursive; Maugham is in turns critic, tourist, biographer (to find short lives as shrewd and amusing we must go back to Anthony à Wood and Aubrey), but he is working steadily forward towards the statement of his main argument: ‘It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art – in man.’ To that man Maugham has rendered the highest kind of justice, whether he is the playwright of artificial situations or the unknown sailor who, when the Armenian bishop, Martyr, begged a passage, replied, ‘I will take him in my ship; but tell him I go to range the universal sea.’

2

Somerset Maugham’s short stories are so well-known that a reviewer may be forgiven for dwelling chiefly on the preface which Maugham contributed to the collected tales. It is a delightfully ‘sensible’ essay on the short story, and the more valuable because it represents a point of view not common to many English writers. English short-story writers of any merit of recent years have followed Chekov rather than Maupassant.

Maugham is a writer of great deliberation even when his style is most careless (‘burning mouth’, ‘nakedness of soul’, ‘mouth like a scarlet wound’); he will never, one feels, lose his head; he has a steady point of view. The banality of the phrases I have noted do not indicate an emotional abandonment; they indicate a rather blasé attitude towards the details of his stories; narrative is something which has to be got through before the point of his anecdote appears, and Maugham is sometimes a little bored and off-hand in the process. The anecdote to Maugham is very nearly everything; the anecdote, and not the characters, not the ‘atmosphere’, not the style, is primarily responsible for conveying Maugham’s attitude; and it is the anecdote as contrasted with spiritual analysis, Maupassant with Chekov, that he discusses in his preface with great justice to the opposite school.

I do not know that anyone but Chekov has so poignantly been able to represent spirit communing with spirit. It is this that makes one feel that Maupassant in comparison is obvious and vulgar. The strange, the terrible thing is that, looking at man in their different ways, these two great writers, Maupassant and Chekov, saw eye to eye. One was content to look upon flesh, while the other, more nobly and subtly, surveyed the spirit; but they agreed that life was tedious and insignificant and that men were base, unintelligent and pitiful.

This comes very generously from a disciple of Maupassant, and Maugham’s praise of his master is never exaggerated. ‘Maupassant’s stories are good stories. The anecdote is interesting apart from the narration, so that it would secure attention if it were told over the dinner table; and that seems to me a very great merit indeed.’ The best of Maugham’s stories too are anecdotes, the best are worthy of Maupassant, and his failure really to reach Maupassant’s rank is partly his failure to stick to the anecdote. Too many of his short stories sprawl into the proper region of the novel. Take for example
The Pool
, where the scene changes from the South Seas to Scotland and back to the South Seas, where the action covers years, and of which the subject is the marriage of white and half-caste. Nor did Maupassant’s preference for the anecdote imply a method which Maugham finds only too necessary: the method of the ‘yarn’, of the first person singular. He defends the convention ably in his preface, but in a collected volume the monotony of the method becomes apparent. One has only to remember how this convention of the first person was transformed by Conrad, to realize a strange limitation to Maugham’s interest in his craft.

This air of being at ease in a Sion which he so candidly and rightly despises is rather pronounced in his defence of the popular magazines. As he explains in his preface, he came to the short story late in his career, he was already known as a dramatist, and it is not surprising that his stories have always been welcomed by the magazines. His good fortune has blinded him to the demands which the popular magazine makes on less famous writers. When he remarks: ‘It has never been known yet that a good writer was unable to write his best owing to the conditions under which alone he could gain a public for his work’, he has been misled, I think, by his own success. Writers belonging to a less easily appreciated school than the anecdotal, who depend for their market on the intellectual magazine, are lucky if they can earn twenty pounds by a short story, while the writer who fits the taste of the popular magazine may well earn ten times that sum.
*13
It is seldom that financial worry is a condition for the best work.

3

Kinglake once referred to ‘that nearly immutable law which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be uttering every now and then some sentiment not his own’, and compared an author with a French peasant under the old
régime
, bound to perform a certain amount of work upon the public highways. I doubt if any author has done – of recent years – less highway labour than Maugham. I say ‘of recent years’ because, as he himself admits in this summing-up of his life and work.
*14
he passed like other writers through the stage of tutelage – and to the most unlikely people, the translators of the Bible and Jeremy Taylor. That stage lasted longer with Maugham than with most men of equal talent – there is at the heart of his work a humility and a self-distrust rather deadening in their effects, and his stories as late as
The Painted Veil
were a curious mixture of independent judgement, when he was dealing with action, and of clichés, when he was expressing emotion.

An author of talent is his own best critic – the ability to criticize his own work is inseparably bound up with his talent: it
is
his talent, and Maugham defines his limitations perfectly: ‘I knew that I had no lyrical quality. I had a small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make to enlarge it much availed me. I had little gift of metaphor; the original and striking simile seldom occurred to me’, and in a passage – which is an excellent example of his hard-won style at its best, clear, colloquial, honest – he relates his limitations to his character:

It did not seem enough merely to write. I wanted to make a pattern of my life, in which writing would be an essential element, but which would include all the other activities proper to man. . . . I had many disabilities. I was small; I had endurance but little physical strength; I stammered; I was shy; I had poor health. I had no facility for games, which play so great a part in the normal life of Englishmen; and I had, whether for any of these reasons or from nature I do not know, an instinctive shrinking from my fellow-men that has made it difficult for me to enter into any familiarity with them. . . . Though in the course of years I have learned to assume an air of heartiness when forced into contact with a stranger, I have never liked anyone at first sight. I do not think I have ever addressed someone I did not know in a railway carriage or spoken to a fellow-passenger on board ship unless he first spoke to me. . . . These are grave disadvantages both to the writer and the man. I have had to make the best of them. I think it was the best I could hope for in the circumstances and with the very limited powers that were granted to me by nature.

‘It did not seem enough to me merely to write’, and even in this personal book the author is unwilling to communicate more than belongs to his authorship; he does not, like a professional autobiographer, take us with commercial promptitude into his confidence. His life has contained material for dramatization, and he has used it for fiction. There is the pattern in his writing and we are not encouraged to look for its reverse in life: the hospital career (the public pattern is in
Liza of Lambeth
); the secret agent in Geneva (we can turn to
Ashenden
); the traveller – there are many books. The sense of privacy, so rare and attractive a quality in an author, deepens in the bare references to secret service experiences in Russia, just before the Revolution, of which we find no direct trace in his stories.

The nearest Maugham comes to a confidence is in the description of his religious belief – if you can call agnosticism a belief, and the fact that on this subject he is ready to speak to strangers makes one pause. There are signs of muddle, contradictions . . . hints of an inhibition. Otherwise one might trace here the deepest source of his limitations, for creative art seems to remain a function of the religious mind. Maugham the agnostic is forced to minimize – pain, vice, the importance of his fellowmen. He cannot believe in a God who punishes and he cannot therefore believe in the importance of a human action. ‘It is not difficult’, he writes, ‘to forgive people their sins’ – it sounds like charity, but it may be only contempt. In another passage he refers with understandable scorn to writers who are ‘grandiloquent to tell you whether or not a little trollop shall hop into bed with a commonplace young man’. That is a plot as old as
Troilus and Cressida
, but to the religious sixteenth-century mind there was no such thing as a commonplace young man or an unimportant sin; the creative writers of that time drew human characters with a clarity we have never regained (we had to go to Russia for it later) because they were lit with the glare and significance that war lends. Rob human beings of their heavenly and their infernal importance, and you rob your characters of their individuality. (‘What should a Socialist woman do?’) It has never been Maugham’s characters that we have remembered so much as the narrator, with his contempt for human life, his unhappy honesty.

1935–8

THE TOWN OF MALGUDI

T
HE
financial expert’s office was under a banyan tree: his office furniture an old tin box. From the first pages of Mr Narayan’s novel
The Financial Expert
we are back in the town of Malgudi with which for nearly twenty years we have been as familiar as with our own birthplace. We know, like the streets of childhood, Market Road, the snuff stalls, the vendors of toothpaste, Lawley Extension with its superior villas, the Regal Haircutting Saloon, the river, the railway. We expect at any moment to see the Bachelor of Arts waving a long farewell to a friend from the platform, small Swami wrapped in his adventurous dreams coming down Market Road, Mr Sampath at the door of his dubious film studio. It is through their friendly offices that we have been able to meet these new – and rather doubtful – characters: Margayya, the financial expert himself, who graduates from the banyan tree to publishing, and back to more elaborate and more crooked banking (but how innocent is all his crookedness); Dr Pal, ‘journalist, correspondent and author’; and Margayya’s son Balu whose progress from charming childhood to spoilt frustrated manhood is perhaps the saddest episode Mr Narayan has written.