This one was a real charity shop bargain. Twelve stories in a nineteen forties hardback, six hundred or so pages for one pound. Some of these were familiar, but from so long ago that it was time to re-assess them. Others were completely new to me. Another point of interest is that this is Maugham’s own choice. There is no foreword, though, and the dates of original publication are not given, although I think most of them date from the nineteen twenties. This is a very strong selection with not a weak story in it.
Actually, he’s cheated a little on the title, because one of the stories was three separate stories in its original published form, but more of that later.
Rain, perhaps his most famous story, is here of course. It is a tale of the moral battle between a missionary and a prostitute in Samoa and I found it just as compelling as before. The pacific setting is vividly evoked, but perhaps the most impressive thing is a feature that it shares with several of the others here, the sense of proceeding to a dramatic climax with perfect pacing.
I have always preferred The Letter, I suppose because it is a crime story. A woman is on trial for shooting an intruder. The problem for the defence is that she fired all six bullets into the man. I enjoyed that one again, as well. It’s like a whole novel in miniature. This is a common opinion, I know, but I think the stories of the dying days of the British empire in Malaya are some of Maugham’s best work. They are written with ironic, clinical detachment; he did train as a doctor, after all. There is probably a thesis waiting to be written about doctor-writers. Conan Doyle and C S Forester of Hornblower fame are others.
The Outstation stuck in my mind for years, because of the light it throws on a particular quirk of human nature. The two men at the lonely jungle station in Malaya are so different in background, temperament and general approach, that they cannot help but irritate one another. One of them has the Times delivered from England. The newspapers are of course long out of date by the time they arrive, but he opens them in strict date order, one at a time. The incident that brings the friction to a head is when his rival takes the whole bundle and reads them in one go, leaving them in a mess on the floor. Here is the perfect illustration of two different approaches to life, deferred as opposed to instant gratification.
The title story was new to me. With its out of season English seaside setting and the tale of a bigamist it reminded me rather of Patrick Hamilton. It’s also quite funny. As with several of the others, he avoids any problems of construction or point of view by making the narrator a sort of version of himself. The narrator’s presence in well-to-do or artistic circles is explained by characters being aware of his reputation as a writer.
In The Creative Impulse, the tale of the husband of a “highbrow” writer who runs off with the cook, he is sending up the literary world and saying something about popular taste and literary success. The writer has depended on the income provided by the dull husband who her smart friends disparaged. It is the cook who gives the writer the idea of writing a detective story which then becomes her only bestseller. Maugham himself walked a fine line between the popular and the “highbrow”, and was in his day hugely successful as novelist, short story writer and dramatist.
I had worried how Mr Harrington’s Washing would work outside the context of the entire set of Ashenden stories. It’s a little difficult for me to tell, as I am very familiar with that book, but I think it works perfectly on its own, based as it is on Maugham’s first-hand experience of revolutionary Russia, when working as a spy. This is the long story that was originally three separate ones, but combined like this it becomes the entire tale of Ashenden’s time in Russia. Again, this story of American innocence abroad proceeds to a poignant climax. In the Ashenden book as a whole, Maugham brought something new to the spy story, a sense that it is a complex game and a nasty business, very influential on later writers and quite different from the patriotism of Erskine Childers or John Buchan.
One of the best of all is The Door of Opportunity, a story I had not read before. It begins with a couple returning to London after a long time in the east. We realise that all is not well between them, in fact the wife is on the point of leaving the husband. Then in a long flashback, we find out what happened in Borneo to make her lose faith in him, a man who was destined for the very top of the colonial service. There is an echo of Lord Jim here and indeed it’s difficult not to think of Conrad when reading Maugham’s eastern stories. In the story Neil Macadam, Maugham puts quite a stinging criticism of Conrad’s work into the mouth of a character. Was this his own view, I wonder?
Just how good is Maugham as a writer of short stories? Pretty good, I would say, because they remain highly readable and the best ones have that tendency to lodge firmly in the memory. I think he’s at his best when writing about abroad, because he is able to sketch a foreign location very clearly with few words, and his detached style works well to convey the loneliness of characters in remote, isolated locations.
A good illustration of Maugham’s character as a writer can be found in the introduction to his choice of Kipling’s stories. He considers Kipling’s The Bridge Builders to be a good realistic story that has gone slightly wrong because of the “mystical” interlude in the middle. Maugham did not share Kipling’s view of the empire as a benign, civilising enterprise. His concern was always the vagaries of human nature, nothing else. The world he wrote about may be long gone, but human nature does not change. It’s quite something to have looked so keenly into it that his stories have fascinated generations of readers.
The Good Reader 