The Skeptical Romancer Read Free

somehow Maugham has caught what is really going on better than that foreign correspondent (or roaming moralist) living in Shanghai in the twenty-firstcentury, and so eagerly reporting on “what’s new.” Places have characters as much as people do, and it is the rare – the invaluable – traveler who, in wandering around China in the 1920s, can not only give you China of the year 2010, but the societies of Hong Kong, Paris, Buenos Aires, and the expat circles you will find in them even now. Maugham was never just a neutral observer, and some readers today may object to the fact he’d never heard of “political correctness”; he makes free with his opinions, writes off whole cultures in a sentence, calls a Chinaman a Chinaman and a thief a thief. Like any good companion he keeps you alive with the very energy and fullness of his judgments. I relish his writing even when – sometimes especially when – I’m sure that he’s wrong, and his finding “insipid” food in Thailand and calling the Thais “not a comely race” prompts me to try to formulate an answer.
    The point, really, is that Maugham was not interested in the exotic as such – though he responded to its magnetism and always gravitated to the unknown; in every place he went, he was digging up the familiar, and recalling the anatomy teacher who had taught him, dissecting bodies, that “the normal is the rarest thing in the world.” Over and over he shows us how “ordinary”-seeming men hide the most extraordinary lives, while extraordinary men cannot hold our interest for long. His interest in people was so consuming, in fact, and agile that he asks us to deepen what we understand by the word “extraordinary.” And abroad, freed of the clutter and distraction of home, we see many things – especially our own people – more clearly and more tellingly than we would at home. For Maugham, always pragmatic, travel was a great way of claiming the freedom he craved (from society and from habit) and of getting away from everything that he knew much too well (or that knew him much too well). It also allowed him to collect more types and tales in a week than he could find in a year in London.
    For many there was something of the Chinese sage in Maugham, sitting at a little distance from the human drama, taking it all in with a smile and committed to a creed of detachment and a sense of the impermanence of the world. “A mysterious Asiatic influence pervades the face of this Anglo-Saxon grand seigneur,” the French painter Edouard MacAvoyrecorded. “Today he wears a pure Buddhist mask. He has wisdom, renunciation, profound peace born of complete disillusionment, a skeptical gaiety.” And yet what gives his writing its life and charm is that he always knew that succumbing to illusions, in love or travel, is one of the greatest pleasures that life affords (and he gave himself up to what went against his better judgment constantly). His voice is never more British than when he went to China, dining with the lords of the foreign community and remarking on the occasional local as if that person were an exotic creature observed in its native habitat; and yet his Olympian view of things, his remaining unfazed – in fact tickled – by the constant changes in the world make him seem more of a Confucian than many of the Confucians he meets. He could understand and give unusually deep and sympathetic accounts of Confucianism or Buddhism – of mysticism or hedonism – because he could find, when he needed to, those elements in himself.
    These are all rarer qualities than one might suppose: D. H. Lawrence, for example, traveled everywhere at the same time as Maugham did, and caught Ceylon, Australia, New Mexico with a vividness and immediacy that few travelers have matched in the eighty years since. Without even trying to, Lawrence could pick up the smells, shapes, instincts of a place, grow bewitched by them and then become violently disenchanted – all inside