The Skeptical Romancer Read Free Page A

a week. He had every gift, you could say, except patience and moderation. Aldous Huxley, meanwhile, who later became one of the most open-minded explorers of the mind, nonetheless traveled around Asia in his
Jesting Pilate
like the acerbic young man of London salons that he was, finding in each place he visited an excuse for a witticism or a hasty dismissal. One of Maugham’s great gifts, by comparison, was to give us the impression that he’s always where he wants to be, unburdened by any mission or publishing contract, even if his way of taking in Burma is to play patience in his room, or to sweeten the evening with some Proust. Instead of chafing against what’s around him, he seems to give in to whatever the moment brings.
    One way of measuring any traveler is to see how deep and wide his influence runs, eighty years after his travel booksappeared. It’s hard to read Graham Greene, for example, without seeing Maugham, and his mix of worldliness and romanticism, his investigations of skepticism and faith, behind many of the scenes (they even both wrote works called
The Tenth Man
, both launched unexpected attacks on pity and both ended up on the French Riviera); and when one meets Paul Bowles’s defining stories of travelers consumed by the places they visit, one can recognize Maugham as one of the few people who’s been there before him. Pick up
Hotel Honolulu
, by Paul Theroux, and you’re reading, essentially, one of Maugham’s collections of South Sea stories, though with sexual explicitness and modern rage included; tour the world with the incomparably fluent and attentive Jan Morris and you see a distinctive English blend of tolerance and acuity that, even in its cadences often (those rich descriptive sentences that begin with adjectives), brings you back to Maugham. The most serious and searching traveler of the post-colonial world, V. S. Naipaul, managed to assist his escape from his native Trinidad by writing a schoolboy essay on Maugham – it won a competition – and, more than fifty years later, after winning the Nobel, was endowing the protagonist of two late novels with the curious name, “W. Somerset Chandran,” a tribute, clearly, to the traveler by whom he seemed haunted (and whose visits to India in 1939 he there invokes).
    Maugham’s interest was not in sights, he says repeatedly; one of his favorite devices, in every book of travels, was to warn us that he’s not very diligent about seeing the sights, sits in his room reading Jane Austen while others are busy taking in guidebook facts and, in truth, prefers less information to more. But what he was doing while he was not taking the packaged expeditions that were the stuff of other travelers was to go off “on the search for emotion,” as he put it in his book on Spain, and to investigate the human costs and complications of foreignness: when he visits China, for one, what he mostly gives us are thumbnail sketches of the priest, the diplomat, the restless wife, even the inn or the illusions that are a feature of almost any foreign place. Traveling around Southeast Asia, he collects “characters” at every turn – runaways, men of the cloth, drifters with unexpected tales of betrayal and obsession,some of them (as in Greene again) settled for life in a foreign place they know will never be home, others pining for an England they know they’ll never see again.
    Maugham’s descriptive gifts, his evergreen capacity for being swept away, mean that he does give us indelible evocations of the Taj Mahal, the Alhambra, the temples of Thailand (which he loves for both their shamelessness and dazzle – Maugham, one feels, is the rare traveler who would not have looked down on Las Vegas, but would instead have found there poignant dramas of paid love and failed resolve); but what stays in the mind from his books of travel is the people he meets, their savory stories, the detours he enjoys, the riffs he suddenly takes off on (remembering