Tag: Short stories

For Esmé, with Love and Squalor by J D Salinger

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There are two good reasons for writing about J D Salinger’s 1950 short story, For Esmé, with Love and Squalor. First, 6th June 2024 will be the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. And second, I recently heard a BBC radio programme about Salinger’s time as an American serviceman in England during the war, which forms the background to this story.

The story is in two distinct parts, or perhaps three, because a short introductory section makes it clear that the narrator is looking back from a happy and settled present day at events that took place sometime earlier.

A bored and lonely American soldier stationed in England in the run-up to D-Day is spending his day off wandering round the town in the rain. The church notice board catches his eye and he goes inside to watch the children’s choir practice. It strikes him that one particular young girl in the choir seems a bit different to the other children.

He meets the girl again later when she comes into the teashop with her governess and small brother. She detaches herself from the governess, comes over to the table where the narrator is sitting alone and strikes up a conversation. Esmé is poised and perfectly mannered in the English upper-class style. She is slightly precocious in her use of language, using words that are a bit beyond her years and not always quite correct. We find out that her father has been killed in the war. Her mother is also dead, but that is not explained.

The narrator has already told us that his fellow soldiers are solitary types and Esmé instantly says, to his surprise, “you’re at that intelligence school, aren’t you?”, perhaps explaining why that should be.

She gets the narrator to admit that in civilian life he is a short-story writer. She hopes that he will write a story for her. As we read on, we realise that the story we are reading is, as the title tells us, that very story. She hopes that he will return from the war “with all his faculties intact” and promises to write to him.

If that is the “before” part of the story, there is now an abrupt switch to “after”. The scene changes to occupied Germany at the end of the war. The narrator identifies himself as “Sergeant X”. A page of description makes clear that his war experiences have left him a dreadful state. He has spent some time in hospital. He chain-smokes but can’t taste the cigarettes, his gums are bleeding, and he can’t sleep. He has what we call today PTSD: “Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter like insecure luggage on an overhead rack.”

He contemplates a book by Goebbels left behind in the house the American soldiers live in. It belonged to a woman, an official in the Nazi party who the narrator himself arrested. There is an inscription in her handwriting: “Dear God, life is hell.”  

There is a fleeting reference to the Hurtgen forest. This was in fact the gruelling battle that Salinger himself was involved in. It’s also made clear that the narrator and his jeep-mate, “Corporal Z”, have been involved in the whole campaign, from D-Day to VE day.  

He takes out a letter from a pile of correspondence that he has put on one side and not read. It is letter from Esmé, enclosing the gift of her father’s watch, with its smashed face. This loving gesture from the young girl he befriended is the beginning of healing for him. He has been unable to sleep and suddenly feels very tired. The nightmare is over. He realises that his faculties are, despite everything he has been through, intact.

The story is only twenty-eight pages long, beautifully written and profoundly moving. It appears to be quite autobiographical, closely based on Salinger’s real-life wartime experiences. It makes its meaning as much by what is understated or not quite stated as much as by what is said directly. It brings home the very real human cost of the liberation of Europe, both for soldiers and civilians.

It’s also worth noting that Salinger’s state of mind after his experiences in the war influenced his descriptions of Holden’s mental troubles in his famous novel The Catcher in the Rye, published in 1951.

Mrs Bathurst by Rudyard Kipling

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Rudyard Kipling’s story Mrs Bathurst was published in 1904 and reveals Kipling as a rather more modern writer than he is usually considered to be.

The plot makes use of the cinema and it may well be the first piece of fiction to do so. The fractured style of the story may be modelled on the cinema, rather in the way that one can see the early poetry of T S Eliot making use of cinematic imagery.  

The term “It” to describe a woman’s appeal to men appears here, a usage that Kipling is thought to have invented, to go alongside the many phrases he added to the language. What makes the story feel modern is the way it is told and it may be that part of what Kipling is telling us here is the impossibility of ever really knowing anyone else.

On the South African coast, just after the Boer war, the narrator is sitting and talking to his railwayman friend, Hooper. They are then joined by a royal marine, Pritchard, and a sailor, Petty Officer Pyecroft, who is a recurring Kipling character. At first the story seems to be going nowhere, as the four men chat about the idea of going absent without leave, as opposed to desertion.

But as the tale progresses, the first-person narrative gives way to dialogue. The narrator is merely a convenient device to set the scene for the anecdote that follows. There is no authorial voice or viewpoint. The tale is told in a fragmented way, mostly by Pyecroft, who does not quite understand the events he is recounting. As he says “all I know is second-hand so to speak” and there is no help given to the reader to interpret any of this.

He tells of his shipmate Vickery’s obsession with a Mrs Bathurst who kept a small hotel for sailors in Auckland, New Zealand. It’s never made clear exactly what the relationship between Vickery and Mrs Bathurst might have been in the past. The marine, Pritchard, is also familiar with her and the hotel and he describes to the others what she is like.

The finale with its striking visual image of two charred corpses is provided by Hooper, who has dropped hints about this earlier in the tale. One body can only be identified by false teeth and a tattoo, and the identity of the other remains a mystery. Different parts of the story have been told by Pyecroft, Hooper and Pritchard, who were more witnesses to events than participants, and the reader must piece it all together as best they can. Everything has been seen from the outside.

Not every question raised by the story is answered at the end. What exactly took place in the meeting between Vickery and the captain of his ship before he was sent ashore? And at the very end it appears that Hooper is going to remove the false teeth from his pocket but thinks better of it.    

The use of the film image of Mrs Bathurst herself is very interesting. It’s mentioned that someone in the audience jumps when they see the image of the train pulling into the station. Was Kipling familiar with the story about the audience reaction to the Lumiere Brothers’ first showing of their film or was this the true source of it?

There is also the question of just why Vickery is so obsessed with the film of Mrs Bathurst. He thinks it was taken in London, gets drunk after seeing it, then insists on going back to see it again four nights in a row, with Pyecroft in tow to confirm that it is indeed her on the screen. It has been suggested by Dr Oliver Tearle that Mrs Bathurst is dead. There are hints in the story that this may be so. That interpretation would make it a sort of ghost story. On the other hand, it is very difficult now when we are surrounded by moving images of people both alive and dead, to feel the impact that early films made on their first audiences.

However one reads it, this is certainly one of Kipling’s most cryptic tales. In his memoirs he wrote about his method of writing, which was to cut, lay the story aside for a while then go back to it and cut some more. He considered that what had been cut would have a lingering influence on the words that remained. One can see how this story might have been written in that way.

Rather ironically perhaps, there is no known surviving film footage or audio recording of Rudyard Kipling himself.

At the End of the Passage by Rudyard Kipling

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I’ve been re-reading some of my favourite Rudyard Kipling stories, as I do from time to time. I consider him one of the best of short story writers, but it has to be said that there are few writers whose best and worst are so far apart. His stories range from the unforgettable to the unreadable. At the End of the Passage is one of the good ones, I think.

Four young colonial administrators in India are in the habit of getting together once a week for a game of whist. They are prepared to travel a considerable distance to do so, because they are the only Europeans for miles around. Over dinner they discuss the difficulties they face and the way life in India is misunderstood back in England. The host, Hummil, is in a thoroughly bad temper and the doctor stays behind to find out what is the matter. It turns out that he has not slept for days and is haunted by nightmare visions. He has even seen his own double sitting at the table.

The doctor gives him medicine to help him sleep and disables his guns, in case Hummil is tempted to shoot himself. He offers to send him off on sick leave, but Hummil refuses because his probable replacement is married and he thinks that neither the man nor his wife are physically robust enough to cope with the environment. I won’t spoil the story for those who have not read it by describing what happens after that.

Part of what makes the story so gripping is the vivid way in which Kipling conveys the harshness of the conditions and the effect that has on those who are not used to them. “There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon – nothing but a brown purple haze of heat.”

These men have a shockingly relaxed attitude to death. If they haven’t heard from someone for a week, they check up on him to make sure he is still alive. Suicides and deaths from cholera are quite common. They are all under thirty, but are described as “lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness”.

All this takes its psychological toll and here we come to the point. Has Hummil been driven slowly mad by all this, or is there a supernatural explanation for his mental afflictions?  

This 1890 story is presented with gaps in the narrative and ambiguities that anticipate the style of Kipling’s later work where the reader has to work quite hard to understand just what exactly has happened and what it might mean.

On the one hand, Kipling is presenting the lives of administrators in India in a realistic way to a readership that may be unfamiliar with life there. On the other, the story can be read as Kipling’s admission that the imperial enterprise is doomed to fail, because the environment is simply too difficult for those not born to it to thrive in.

That’s the funny thing with Kipling. He’s regarded as the great propagandist for empire, yet a close reading often reveals that he is actually saying something rather different.   

The Birds by Daphne du Maurier

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The Birds by Daphne du Maurier, in which large flocks of wild birds suddenly attack humanity in a systematic and highly organised way, was published in 1951. It has been somewhat overshadowed by the film that Alfred Hitchcock made from it in 1962. The story is actually rather darker than the film and read today seems startingly original, the precursor of the sort of ecological disaster science fiction produced by John Wyndham, J G Ballard and others in the later 1950s and early 1960s. It’s also been given a fresh relevance by the Covid emergency.

Du Maurier was reported not to like the film and after reading the story I can quite see why. The events are relocated to a sunny California and it all seems like a local problem. In the story, winter seems to come to the bleak Cornish landscape in the blink of an eye and it’s not clear at first if it is the weather that is making the birds behave in such an odd way.

There is a gradual, growing unease that this is not just a local problem. It turns out to be a national emergency, then perhaps a worldwide one. This progression is conveyed by the change in the radio broadcasts until the final silence. It has perhaps the darkest ending of any fiction apart from Nevil Shute’s On The Beach, in which humanity is wiped out by nuclear fallout.

The story is very much of its time, the post-war era of rationing, austerity and government control. Memories of the Plymouth blitz are still fresh and the main source of news is the wireless. Could it be that the Russians are somehow responsible for the aggressive behaviour of the birds?

It’s difficult at first to get the authorities to take the reports of the bird attacks seriously. Once they do, there is a fear that they will not act appropriately. After military aircraft have been shown to be ineffective against the massed birds, it becomes clear that the farm labourer and his family are on their own and must depend on themselves for survival. Order and civilisation are fragile and have broken down entirely under the onslaught of the birds.

It’s never really explained what might have caused nature to rise up against humankind in this way, whereas the film does hint at an explanation. One can’t help feeling that this story is somehow a response to the atomic bombs and the revelations about the concentration camps, the sense of living in a world that had changed utterly, but du Maurier leaves it open for readers to make up their own minds.    

I myself think there is a link to Du Maurier’s Kiss Me Again Stranger and the idea in that story that Britain might not actually be entitled to claim the moral high ground over what took place during the recent war.   

The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling

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I’m always aware, writing these pieces, that I’m trying to point people in the direction of stories, novels and poems they may not have read. I try to avoid spoilers as much as I can for that reason. I’m faced with a bit of a quandary here, because it’s difficult to say anything at all about The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling without giving away too much and spoiling the effect of reading it for the first time.

I’ll just say that this 1925 story of first world war bereavement is one of Kipling’s most powerful. It’s quite short for a Kipling story of this period, only about fifteen pages, and this concentrates the effect. Any selection of his best stories tends to include it, and rightly so, I think.

It was collected in volume form in Debits and Credits, Kipling’s first collection to be published after the war had ended. This also contains the stories in which members of a masonic lodge help each other to overcome the psychological scars of the conflict. One of these is the mysterious A Madonna of the Trenches. I don’t think it was an accident that The Gardener was placed at the end of the volume. 

Kipling was a successful man both artistically and financially, but his life was touched by tragedy. His daughter Josephine died of pneumonia at the age of six in 1899. His only son John was posted as missing at the 1915 battle of Loos and his body was not found during Kipling’s lifetime. Kipling later worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Gardener came out of his experience of the war and its aftermath.

There’s a sense in this story that Kipling is speaking to all those who had lost relatives on the western front. One can only imagine what it can have been like to read it when it was first published, in a world where everyone knew somebody who had lost someone.

We can be sure that the details of the visit to the Belgian cemetery are accurate. Kipling lays the scene before us with cinematic detail, the thousands of wooden crosses yet to be replaced by gravestones. How can the main character possibly find the grave she is looking for?

The last page or so of this story packs an emotional punch ensuring that once read, it will never be forgotten. Indeed, the meaning of the story depends on a single word on that last page, which inspires the immediate desire to re-read it, to make sure that one has understood correctly.

Kipling introduced many phrases to the English Language; even now he scores quite highly in a list of quotations. It’s often the case that people know the words but not who wrote them.

How many people know that he was responsible for the poignant inscription that is still visible on so many gravestones in France and Belgium?

“A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.”

The London Embassy by Paul Theroux

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The London Embassy by Paul Theroux was published in 1982. It is not so much a novel as a collection of linked short stories, narrated by the same American diplomat who featured in a previous book, The Consul’s File. He has now been posted for a term of duty in London. It rather reminds me of the writing of Somerset Maugham.

It’s a sort of fictional parallel to Theroux’s own life as an expatriate American writer in London. One suspects that the diplomat’s observations of London and its natives are very much Paul Theroux’s own. This is London seen clearly through the eyes of an outsider. It is these observations that give the book its fascination: “The city had been built to enclose secrets, for the British are like those naked Indians who hide in the Brazilian jungle – not timid, but fanatically private and untrusting.”

The narrator’s work brings him into contact with all kinds of eccentric characters and odd situations. His neighbours include a quiet civil servant and a loud motorcyclist, heard but never seen. Are they, in fact, one and the same person?  

He has to deal with a mentally unstable American poet, a cross between Robert Lowell and Ezra Pound. There is an encounter with a group of expensively educated and mindlessly prejudiced schoolboys.

 It is made clear that he is not a spy (they are based on the third floor) but his job does involve the gathering of information. He almost enters the world of espionage when he is approached by a wily Russian would-be defector, and manages to outwit him. He has to employ similar sleight of hand when he is tasked with enforcing the embassy’s rather informal dress code.  

Perhaps best of all is the story “An English Unofficial Rose”, in which the narrator is under the impression that a young woman wants a romantic relationship with him, when her real reason for seeing him is something quite different. As he says: “Language is deceptive; and though English is subtle it also allows a clever person –one alert to the ambiguities of English – to play tricks with mock precision and to combine vagueness with politeness. English is perfect for diplomats and lovers”.

This book is almost forty years old now, and this is not quite the London of today. In general the social attitudes of the narrator are quite modern, almost ahead of their time, but here and there is a reminder that things have changed, just as the American Embassy is no longer the building in Grosvenor Square.

Paul Theroux’s sojourn in Britain also produced the excellent The Kingdom By the Sea, a lightly fictionalised record of his trip around the coastline. In the end, though, he did not stay in Britain, but settled in Hawaii, where he was a neighbour of ex-Beatle George Harrison. Who can blame him?                 

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

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It really has turned into the summer of Conrad for me, as anyone who has read some of my earlier posts will know. I have greatly enjoyed re-discovering his writing. This one is another old friend, that I first read many years ago.

The Duel is one of Conrad’s novella-length works. It was first published in 1908 and is based on a real-life story of two officers in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of duels with each other over a period of many years.

In Conrad’s story, this mutual antagonism begins over a trivial incident when D’Hubert and Feraud are young lieutenants, and goes on for years, with the origin of the quarrel long since forgotten. Outsiders believe there must be some terrible enmity between them, that perhaps they fell out over a woman. It only ends when both men are retired generals.

This covers a longer period of time and is also told in a more conventional manner than many Conrad works. It is a linear narrative with none of the time shifts for which he is famous. It is mostly seen from the point of view of one character, D’Hubert.

It’s plain from the opening sentence that Conrad intended this to be rather more than just the story of the two main characters. “Napoleon the First, whose career had the quality of a dual against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army.”

The tale of the long association of these two men becomes nothing less than the story of the rise and fall of Napoleon’s France, a picture of the era, its politics and its military attitudes. The two men “pursued their private contest through the years of universal carnage”.

These two soldiers fight campaigns all over Europe, and experience the harshness and brutality of the retreat from Moscow, described here in detail. Yet there is a sense in which their relationship as opponents somehow benefits them. The code of honour says that a duel can only be fought between those of the same rank, so as one of them climbs the ladder of promotion the other is inspired to follow him.

The defeat of Napoleon brings great changes. The plight of the cashiered ex-soldiers, the “living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest” who now languish on inadequate pensions is quite poignant. Feraud does not know what to do: “No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist.”

But D’Hubert seems to regret this changed state of affairs, too. “He felt an irrational tenderness toward his old adversary, and appreciated emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish.”

By the end the reader may think that this strange relationship was the most important of their lives to both men. Is than an echo here of that other Conrad “double” story, The Secret Sharer?

This story was originally called The Duel, but was later also published as The Point of Honour. The 1977 film adaptation used the title The Duellists. It is a very fine film, Ridley Scott’s first as director, with marvellous photography of the French countryside.

 

The House by Walter de la Mare

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At the beginning of Walter de la Mare’s story The House, a tired and elderly man arrives back at his house in the country, late at night. We learn that he is to leave the house for the last time in the morning. Two female servants, the only other occupants, have already left. During the night, the man, who we know only as Mr Asprey, goes on a final tour of the house, where he has lived all his life, it seems. Rooms contain memories, regrets…or are they ghosts of some sort?

He sees himself as an unhappy small boy. The room that used to be his parents’ summons up a vision of his father’s grave. A portrait of a woman reminds him that he never declared his love to her.

As he goes round he makes careful notes of things to do. But these are major things, such as leaving an heir to inherit the house. It is as if he is making an inventory of his regrets, the things left undone in life.

There is an odd atmosphere, and the reader begins to wonder. Is the man actually alive? Is all this taking place in some mysterious zone between life and death? Is it a real house or a symbolic one, representing the man’s life or personality?

He ponders a manuscript, given to him by a friend for a critical appraisal; he had not read it when his friend died suddenly and he never returned it to the friend’s wife.

In the kitchen, he finds a wallet hidden in a drawer. It was presumed stolen by one of his servants many years before and led to her dismissal. When he turns round, the wronged servant is sitting at the table. He hands the wallet to the woman. Then she disappears, taking the wallet, which he had assumed to be real, with her. We are on the borderline between the physical and the insubstantial here.

He accidentally spills a pot of coffee over the list he has so carefully compiled, making it illegible, with no time left to write another one.

He is expecting some kind of “conveyance” to come for him in the morning. But finally, he steps through the front door into an “infinite waste of wasteless light”, and the door closes by itself behind him. He seems to be in another world, but one that is familiar to him. If this is death it feels like an awakening. “It looked as if he must be intended to walk. And so he set out.” So ends a story that will linger long in the reader’s mind.

I can give only the merest flavour of this extraordinary story. It is difficult to do it justice. It think it is connected in some way to De la Mare’s poem The Railway Junction, which was published around the same time, the mid-1930s, I think, and has similar symbolic undertones.

De la Mare relies on elusiveness and ambiguity. There is often a dreamlike mood in his atmospheric stories, written with the precision of language we would expect from such an accomplished poet. Here, as in so many of his stories, we are not quite sure  exactly what has happened. The effect is a bit like watching a film where something might or might not be glimpsed at the corner of the screen. Each reading of a De la Mare story can reveal a new emphasis or meaning. They almost demand to be read more than once, but the reader will find it hard to settle on one fixed, solid interpretation.

De la Mare’s stories have rather gone out of fashion, but there are signs that interest in his work is reviving. A selection was published by the British Library not long ago. They are often categorised as “ghost stories” and compared to the work of Henry James in this field. Certainly, the subtle, shifting atmosphere so characteristic of De la Mare is closer to Henry James than M R James, but also similar to the later stories of Rudyard Kipling.

Another reason for the comparative neglect of these stories might be that whereas M R James’ ghost stories were collected into one volume which has stayed consistently in print, De la Mare’s were spread over several different collections. There is not even general agreement as to which of his many short stories should be considered as “supernatural” or “ghost” stories.

There is an excellent BBC radio series of readings of five De la Mare tales. It turns up on Radio 4 extra from time to time or can be found on YouTube. The House, alas, is not one of the stories featured.

Roald Dahl goes back to school

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I mentioned Roald Dahl in my recent Patrick Hamilton piece. The Hamilton radio play had reminded me of a particular story. Not long afterwards, by one of those strange coincidences, I saw a TV documentary on Dahl and the story was mentioned by name. It is called Galloping Foxley and is one of Dahl’s adult stories, first published in the early 1950s. I have not read it for many years. It has stayed in the back of my mind, though, ever since.

It is quite a straightforward story. A railway commuter, William Perkins, is a businessman with a very settled routine. He is put out when a stranger appears on the platform one morning and pushes himself into Perkins’ group. The disruptive stranger insists on sitting in the same compartment as Perkins, taking the seat opposite. Perkins fumes about the intrusion of this man into his daily journey, until a few days later, he recognises the newcomer as Bruce Foxley, the boy who bullied him mercilessly at school, many years before.

This brings all his memories of being tormented to the surface. He sits in the train compartment re-living such delightful experiences as cleaning Foxley’s study, being beaten by him, etc. He decides to identify himself and is shaken when the man replies that he is Jocelyn Fortescue, who attended Eton, not Repton, as Perkins and Foxley did.

When I read it, I was convinced that Perkins had simply made a mistake, that the whole thing was in his mind, and that the memory had been brought back by the man he thought he recognised acting as a catalyst. I accepted that it was a mistake, but what seemed so disturbing, was that the memory of his unhappiness was lurking there, just waiting to come to the surface again.

After checking on Wikipedia, I now realise that there are other possibilities that I did not spot when I read the story. Apparently, the story was adapted for the first series of Tales of the Unexpected. In the TV version, the man who denies he is Foxley, is asked by Perkins again and gives a slightly knowing look when he denies it a second time. This implies that he has recognised Perkins but has given a false name.

This dramatises what is only implied in the story; that the stranger might after all actually be Foxley. If he is in fact Foxley, does he deny it because he is ashamed of his conduct at school? Or is his denial a way of tormenting Perkins all over again? Has he only re-appeared in Perkins’ life to carry on the bullying in a more refined, adult way?

There is of course also the possibility that the man is who he says he is, but that he is a perfect example of the same “type” as Foxley, ie public school bully, and it is this that Perkins has responded to, rather than a facial resemblance.

I do not have a copy of the full text to hand, so I cannot check how much importance Dahl gives to the facial resemblance.

Roald Dahl apparently disliked his public school and had similar unhappy experiences there. Perhaps, haunting as it is, this is not so much a short story as a semi-autobiographical meditation on the power of unhappy memories to last a lifetime.

The Round Dozen by W Somerset Maugham

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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.