The Skeptical Romancer Read Free Page B

Heidelberg and the promise of youth while he’s bumping around Spain, or suddenly offering us a fairy-tale in the middle of his stay in Thailand). Indeed, he is, in his unrepentant waywardness, a forerunner to those counter-culture travelers of today who say that it’s always in the digression, the getting lost, the unexpected diversion that the joy of travel comes. Trains of thought can take you places that no other trains reach at all.
    Again, the image many of us have of an elegantly bespoke man living near Nice and consorting with Winston Churchill, Noël Coward, Cecil Beaton obscures the central fact about Maugham, which is that he was a stowaway at heart, and the hunger for rebellion, the fondness for the wastrel, his lifelong wish to get away from the small-world circles he knew and out into the wild (or at least the unknown) was what drove his writing; in that regard, travel was both a vehicle and a metaphor. One of the works of his that many probably recognize even now is
The Moon and Sixpence
, about a thriving London stockbroker who throws it all over to go to live in Paris and Tahiti – like Gauguin – and just paint. Yet that impulse is everywhere in Maugham, playing at the edges of most of his stories: some of them concern men who have made just that flight, and cannot imagine, in Hawaii or Vietnam, how they ever could have survived the years in rainy Europe; and some of them enact the same process themselves, as you can feel Maugham stretching his limbs and (to some degree) letting down his hair, as travelers have always done, and asking, inThoreauvian cadences, at the end of his first book of travel, “What is the use of hurrying to pile up money when one can live on so little?”
    To this day, the first hippie novel ever written – in 1944 – might be said to be
The Razor’s Edge
(or at least it shares that distinction with some of Hesse’s work, perhaps, a little of Henry Miller, maybe some Novalis): at sixty-nine Maugham was turning himself into an idealistic young man who was leaving the comforts of Chicago behind to seek out truth in the Himalayas. In life Maugham himself embarked on a three-month (and characteristically difficult) trip around India when he was sixty-three, seeking out swamis and yogis; and he told his friend Christopher Isherwood, a few years later, that his greatest wish, when he turned seventy, was to return to India and study Shankara.
    This was not, ever, part of the popular image of the brittle, Wildean playwright and habitué of grandes dames’ lounges, but it is what makes Maugham feel so fresh and even liberating today (and it is what made him so famously impatient with one of the other great observers of expatriation, Henry James, who, coming from America, was transfixed by those grandes dames’ lounges). He kept a young man’s eagerness for knowledge – and therefore adventure – about him always. Every morning, he said, he read some philosophy, the way others might do yoga, and he could not encounter a doctrine or vision of life, it often seems, without wanting to explore or engage it. Read his grand apologia,
The Summing Up
, and you find him as metaphysically alive and excited as that German who just spun out his creed to you over dinner in a little candlelit restaurant in Ladakh last night, or that Canadian who’s traveling the East to find the heart of transcendental existence. The last words of this most flexible of souls, always open to experiment and journey, concluding
The Partial View
as he turns eighty, were “I am on the wing.”
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    When I began to set about making a collection of Maugham’s travels, my first – and second – instinct was just to find a way to reprint
The Gentleman in the Parlour
in its entirety; for twentyyears it had led me around Asia, and whenever anyone asked me what he or she should read before coming to the continent where I have lived for almost half my life, I referred them to Maugham, whose book seemed to me as