Although the colony prided itself on maintaining a high level of racial harmony, there was on the whole little interest in indigenous customs or culture. In the FMS, members of the non-European population were generally referred to as “natives” or “Asiatics,” usually in a tone of vague contempt, although any incident of maltreatment of a native by a white man was severely frowned upon. Social interaction was rare, except with the local sultans, who were treated with due deference as their willing cooperation was essential to the imperial purpose. For people of mixed race the situation was especially tricky. Whereas a blind eye was turned to white men visiting brothels and using native prostitutes, it was very definitely not done to appear in public with a Eurasian or Asian woman on your arm. Interracial marriages were vigorously discouraged, and half-castes had a difficult time of it, accepted as equals by neither one side nor the other. Eurasians spoke English with an accent known as “chee-chee,” regarded as comical by Europeans, and many went to considerable lengths to conceal their racial origins. Such a one is Izzart in The Yellow Streak. An old Harrovian, handsome and stylish, member of a distinguished regiment during the war, Izzart has a shameful secret: his mother is of mixed blood. His insecurity on this account and his desperate anxiety to conceal his origins are brilliantly delineated by Maugham:
[Izzart] wondered whether16 by any chance the men at Kuala Solor with whom he was so hail fellow well met suspected that he had native blood in him. He knew very well what to expect if they ever found out. They wouldn’t say he was gay and friendly then, they would say he was damned familiar; and they would say he was inefficient and careless, as the half-castes were, and when he talked of marrying a white woman they would snigger.
If it was tacitly accepted that white men consorted with native women, the subject, if not the practice, of interracial homosexuality was taboo, this despite the fact that a career in the colonies attracted an unusually high proportion of men who had good reason for wishing to avoid marriage at home. It was unspoken but well known that opportunities for a wide variety of casual sex were far greater overseas than in Britain, and the Far East in particular was seen as offering unparalleled largesse. As soon as an Englishman was east of Suez a new world opened before him, from the terrassiers, the boys working the hotel terraces in Cairo and Port Said, to the all-male brothels of Karachi and Tientsin, the easy acceptance of homosexual practices in Siam, and the willing youth of Peshawar on the northwest frontier, where it was said that “to get a boy was easier17 than to pick flowers by the wayside.” Much the same liberal sexual climate existed in the FMS, and Maugham used to say that the most memorable sexual experience of his life had been a moonlit night on a sampan with a boy in Malaya.
Within the British administration of the Malay States, a notable exception to the policy of racial separateness had existed before the war in the custom of concubinage, of white men living with Malay or Chinese mistresses, a custom that had of necessity been widely accepted, as so few European women had been prepared to endure the hardships of life in the East. But in the prosperous postwar period the situation began to change, with more and more men bringing their wives out from home. These were often unsophisticated young women who were ignorant of the world into which they were now introduced, and for some, the discovery that their husbands had had an Asian mistress, and sometimes children, came as a profound shock. Naturally such a state of affairs was meat and drink to Maugham, always intensely interested in sexual relationships, and he describes exactly such an instance in The Force of Circumstance. Doris, newly wed and only recently arrived in Malaya, is blissfully happy with her husband, Guy, and entranced by the exotic surroundings in which she finds herself on their remote outstation. The best part of the day is when Guy returns from his work in the courthouse, and after a game of tennis they sit companionably together looking out at the peaceful river and at the palm trees on the opposite bank:
The blinds on the verandah18 were raised now and on the table between their two long chairs were bottles and soda-water. This was the hour at which they had the first drink of the day and Guy mixed a couple of gin slings…. He took her hand and pressed it.
“Are you happy here, darling?”
“Desperately.”
She looked very cool and fresh in her linen frock.
Gradually, however, Doris begins to be disturbed by the menacing presence of one of the native women from the kampong, who with her three half-caste children has taken to hanging around outside the bungalow. When she asks Guy about her he at first prevaricates, before finally admitting that the woman had been his mistress for ten years and that the children are his. Doris is appalled. Unable to overcome her revulsion, she tells Guy the marriage is over and that she must return to England. Guy pleads with her, but as nothing he says has any effect, he has no choice but to agree, while knowing that Doris’s departure will break his heart. And yet he is not to be left entirely unconsoled. As he sits alone after seeing his wife off to Singapore a small boy sidles into the room.
It was the elder of his two sons.19
“What do you want?” said Guy….
“My mother sent me. She says, do you want anything?”
Guy looked at the boy intently….
“Tell your mother to pack up her things and yours. She can come back.”
“When?” asked the boy impassively….
“To-night.”
Yet if the men were fallible, so, too, were the women. Men who brought wives with them to the tropics “had real trouble on their hands,”20 according to Maugham. “White women were scarce, and bachelors were fair game to the neglected wives of overworked civil servants or planters.” Part of the trouble was boredom. With their husbands out all day, the mems had almost nothing to do, unless they were among the few prepared to interest themselves in local charities or community work. Many found themselves enjoying a far higher standard of living than they had been used to at home, with even the lowest-grade civil servant allotted a spacious bungalow and four or five servants to look after him. Thus domestic responsibilities were few, and as it was not done for a mem to go to market herself, almost her only duty was to order the meals, leaving hours to fill until her husband came home. As a handbook of the period explained,
The chief disadvantage for ladies21 is often the lack of interesting occupation during the day. In the larger towns, where there are European stores, it is possible for a lady to go shopping during the morning, or to visit friends, but in the smaller stations or on estates or mines, life is apt to be monotonous. The climate is unsuited to housework, and too much sewing or reading may have its effect on the eyesight. A lady will therefore often find that time hangs heavily on her hands….
Not unnaturally, love affairs were regarded by some as a welcome diversion—if few ended as badly as that of Mrs. Proudlock, wife of a schoolmaster in Kuala Lumpur. In 1911 Ethel Proudlock was charged with murder, having shot dead William Steward, manager of a tin mine in Salak, who she claimed had turned up one evening when her husband was out and tried to rape her. The court, however, was unpersuaded by her account, concluding that Steward had been her lover whom she had killed in a jealous rage after discovering he was living with a Chinese mistress. Mrs. Proudlock was sentenced to hang, but after an impassioned petition had been signed by friends and supporters, she was eventually granted a free pardon by the sultan.
It was Mrs. Proudlock’s lawyer, E.A.S. Wagner, who in Kuala Lumpur ten years later described the case to Maugham. Immediately alert to its possibilities, Maugham constructed a fictional version, “The Letter,” in which he keeps fairly closely to the framework of events as described in court but adds an ingredient of his own. In the real case no concrete evidence was found of an intimate relationship between Mrs. Proudlock and Steward, but in the story a letter is produced, written by Leslie Crosbie, that leaves little room for doubt that Hammond was her lover. Up to that moment her lawyer had been convinced she had nothing to worry about and that he would have no trouble in est
ablishing her innocence. But the letter changes all that: she is guilty, and unless this damning evidence is destroyed she will be convicted. The incriminating document is in the hands of Hammond’s Chinese mistress; the Chinese woman is prepared to sell, but only for an outrageous sum, and the lawyer has no choice but to ask for the money from Leslie’s nice, stupid, utterly trusting husband, who has never for one moment doubted his wife’s virtue. When he hears the sum required, a terrible realization begins to take hold.
Crosbie grew very red.22 His mouth sagged strangely.
“But …” he could not find the words, his face now was purple. “But I don’t understand … You don’t mean to say they’d find her guilty?” …
Then something seemed to dawn in that slow intelligence of his.
“The Letter,” which first appeared in Hearst’s International in 1924 before its publication two years later in The Casuarina Tree, was to become one of Maugham’s best-known short stories, mainly thanks to its stage and screen adaptations.* Ironically, the one part of the world where it was not popular at all was in Malaya. A member of the Malayan Civil Service who arrived in the country shortly afterward wrote of Maugham’s passage through the FMS that “[it] was clearly marked23 by a trail of angry people. The indignation aroused by his play, The Letter, … was still being voiced in emotional terms when I came by. It was also charged against him that he abused hospitality by ferreting out the family skeletons of his hosts and putting them into his books.” Other, similar accusations followed, and Maugham was so stung by them that for the American edition of The Casuarina Tree he added a tetchy postscript in self-defense:
Some of the smaller communities24 in the countries washed by the China Sea are very sensitive, and their members are much agitated if, in a work of fiction, a hint is given that the circumstances of their lives are not always such as would meet the approval of the suburban circles in which contentedly dwell their cousins and their aunts…. [But] because a reader, unprofitably employing a useless leisure, recognises in a character one trait, mental or physical, of someone he knows and is aware the author has met, it is silly to put the name of this person to the character described and say: here is a portrait.
Such a surly tone was unlikely to soothe hurt feelings, and more than a decade later, resentment at Maugham’s depiction of the colony was still rumbling around the FMS. “It is interesting to try25 to analyze the prejudice against Somerset Maugham which is so intense and widespread in this part of the world,” began an article in The Straits Budget in June 1938.
The usual explanation is that Mr. Maugham picks up some local scandal at an out-station and dishes it up as a short story…. The second cause is disgust at the way Mr. Maugham has explained the worst and least representative aspects of European life in Malaysia—murder, cowardice, drink, seduction, adultery…. always the same cynical emphasis on the same unpleasant things. No wonder that white men and women who are living normal lives in Malaysia wish that Mr. Maugham would look for local colour elsewhere.
At first taken aback, in time Maugham grew relatively indifferent to such accusations, to local fury over those “masterpieces of disloyalty26 and betrayal,” as they were regarded by many decent, uxorious, well-meaning servants of empire. Maugham never denied that he traveled in order to find stories or that the stories he found formed the foundation of his tales. Most of his characters were based on real people, as he admitted:
I tried to make use of them,27 and their problems, as capably as I knew how. That I didn’t portray them, or their emotional circumstances, as attractively as they imagined them to be, earned me, of course, considerable criticism and hatred. On my return visits to many of those places a lot of doors were rudely slammed in my face, I was publicly insulted, and some even threatened to do me bodily harm. But I learned to accept all that….
Both he and Gerald were good listeners, adept at drawing people out, and time and again discovered for themselves the truth of the observation that people talk to strangers in a way they never would to family and friends. While in a bar, or on a club veranda, or staying upcountry with some lonely District Officer, Maugham heard the extraordinary dramas in these seemingly ordinary lives: “sitting over a siphon28 or two and a bottle of whisky [within] the radius of an acetylene lamp … a man has told me stories about himself that I was sure he had never told to a living soul…. I have in this way learned more about men in a night than I could have if I had known them for ten years.” It was thus he learned of the incestuous affair between brother and sister that he describes in “The Book-Bag”; the case of the alcoholic husband murdered by his wife in “Before the Party” was inspired by a couple he met at dinner one evening in Singapore; the basis of “The Force of Circumstance,” of a wife’s discovery of her husband’s illegitimate half-caste children, was told him by a trader staying in the same upcountry rest house; while it was Gerald who heard about the scandal that was to reappear as “Footprints in the Jungle.” The two men were in Sumatra, and Maugham had arranged to meet Haxton for dinner, but as usual Gerald had lingered in the bar drinking, and Maugham, tired of being kept waiting, began eating on his own. Just as he was finishing, Gerald lurched into the dining room. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,”29 he said. “I know I’m drunk, but I’ve got a corking good story for you,” and out came the shocking sequence of events surrounding “the Cartwrights,” as they appear in the story, who on the face of it had seemed just another nice elderly couple innocently enjoying a few rubbers of bridge during their evening at the club.
It is at the end of the postscript to The Casuarina Tree, while he was still smarting from the first accusations of betrayal, that Maugham, with a bold disregard for the facts, states that of the six stories in the collection, only one, “The Yellow Streak,” was based on an actual incident, and that, he says pointedly, “was suggested by a misadventure30 of my own.” “Misadventure” is putting it mildly, for what happened very nearly cost him his life.
IN MARCH 1921, Maugham and Haxton had arrived in Singapore, where they collected their mail, explored the city, and made the most of their letters of introduction. Singapore, one of the great ports of the East and seat of the governor of the Straits Settlements, was very different in character from the rest of the country, crowded, noisy, exotic, and morally lax. The city was half Asian—largely Chinese—and half European—predominantly British. The Asian city with its bustling street life, its open-air workshops, its markets and food stalls, temples, teahouses, and opium dens, stood in close proximity to the European district of luxury hotels, including the famous Raffles, of department stores, restaurants, and nightclubs, of huge imperial buildings housing government offices, of parks and public gardens, and of the expensive residential areas inhabited by rich Westerners and by even richer Chinese, who controlled most of the more profitable businesses. It was here in Singapore that Maugham smoked his first pipe of opium, the immediate effect a feeling of great peace and clarity of mind, unfortunately followed next morning by a cracking headache and hours of noisy retching.
From Singapore, Maugham and Haxton traveled the length and breadth of the Peninsula, staying sometimes in hotels and rest houses, sometimes with a Resident or DO, or, less comfortably, on remote outstations or rubber estates: compared to the relative luxury of official residencies, planters’ houses, Maugham noted, were “a bit dreary,31 a lot of gimcrack furniture and silver ornaments and tiger skins. And the food’s uneatable.” They sailed widely about the islands of the archipelago and beyond, often taking passage on board the pearling luggers that plied their trade throughout the South Pacific, voyaging to Merauke in New Guinea, to Banda and the Kai Islands, to Mobiag and Thursday Island in the Torres Straits. Particularly memorable was their visit to Sarawak, on the north coast of Borneo. Here in the kingdom of the white rajahs, the only oriental kingdom in world history to be ruled by an English dynasty, they were entertained by the rajah himself, the very handsome, very English Vyner Brooke, whose wife, Sylvia, was the sister of the painter
Dorothy Brett, a close friend of D. H. Lawrence. Anxious to explore, Maugham and Haxton set off on an expedition up the Skrang River, traveling by canoe with a crew of Dayak boatmen. They themselves reclined comfortably beneath an awning, enjoying the peace and beauty of the scene, of white egrets flying low over the dark green water, of the sandy banks lined with feathery casuarinas, and beyond, sloping uphill, the jungle dense with acacia and coconut palms. Every evening they tied up by a Dayak village, spending the night in one of the thatched longhouses, each inhabited by several families, twenty to thirty people, all intensely, exhaustingly hospitable, with feasting and dancing every night that continued into the small hours.
One day while slowly moving upriver they suddenly saw an enormous tidal wave approaching, a bore, roaring toward them and rapidly increasing in volume until with a rush a great wall of water eight feet high burst over them, capsizing the canoe and throwing them into the water. Desperately, Maugham and Haxton tried to hang on to the side of the boat, but it was impossible to get a grip, and with the wave surging and storming around them, they were repeatedly submerged. Before long, Maugham, bruised, exhausted, and gasping for air, felt his strength go and knew he was in imminent danger of drowning. “I thought the best thing32 was to make a dash for the bank, but Gerald begged me to try to hold on…. I swallowed a good deal of water…. Gerald stayed near me and two or three times gave me a hand.” After several further minutes of struggle, they heard a shout from one of the crew, who had caught hold of a thin mattress as it floated past, and with this to support them they managed to reach land. Their feet sinking into thick mud, they pulled themselves ashore and somehow succeeded in scrambling up the bank, collapsing into the tall grass at the top. Here they lay motionless for quite a while, covered in mud and too exhausted to move, until Maugham eventually summoned the strength to get up and strip off his filthy clothes, making a loincloth out of his shirt. It was then he saw to his horror that Gerald in attempting to rise had collapsed and appeared to be in the throes of a heart attack. “I thought he was going to die,” Maugham recalled. There was no help at hand and nothing to be done. For what seemed like hours Maugham sat beside his lover, soothing him and talking to him, telling him that the pain would pass and everything would be all right. Eventually help arrived, and the two exhausted men were taken by canoe to a longhouse, where slowly they recovered. In retrospect Maugham was surprised that he had felt no fear, although he was intensely glad to find himself still alive. “Later in the evening when I was sitting in a dry sarong in the Dayak house and from it saw the yellow moon lying on her back it gave me a keen, almost a sensual pleasure.”
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 30
