The Gentleman In the Parlour (2 page)

But Maugham did not do a lot of sitting alone over whisky with a stranger. Maugham was by nature reticent – because of his stammer, not much of a raconteur; because of his homosexuality, unforthcoming about his personal life and his loves. One of the important facts he withholds in this book is that he was not alone on the trip. He traveled with his lover and companion Gerald Haxton, who was eighteen years younger and although a drunkard and something of a rogue, was helpful in ice-breaking and meeting locals, as well as making arrangements en route, in many respects Maugham's common law husband. In
The Summing Up,
Maugham explained. ‘I am shy of making acquaintance with strangers, but I was fortunate enough to have on my journeys a companion [Haxton] who had an estimable social gift. He had an amiability of disposition that enabled him in a very short time to make friends with people in ships, clubs, barrooms, and hotels, so that through him I was able to get into easy contact with an immense number of persons whom otherwise I should have known only at a distance.'

But you get the impression in this book that Maugham was alone, encouraging strangers in their disclosures, battling the uncertainties, struggling against the difficulties, solving the problems of transport and tickets, and all the rest of the hassles that make travel at times such a colorless bore. The first time I read this book I admired Maugham's stamina and capacity to deal with solitude. And then I read a few biographies and I realized that Maugham was not alone and was often traveling in style.

The revelation that the traveler presented in his or her book as a solitary wanderer is not that unusual. Bruce Chatwin never said that he invariably traveled with a friend, V. S. Naipaul did not reveal that he was never alone in his travels, but always (as his biographer showed) with his wife or his
long-time mistress Margaret; Graham Greene was very nearly helpless without a constant companion, since he was unable to drive a car or use a typewriter, and the same can be said for Wilfred Thesiger, who never traveled alone. There are many other examples of the gregarious traveler presenting himself, of herself, as a solitary wanderer. There is no shame in this, though it makes the actual solitary wanderers, such as Doughty on camel back in the Empty Quarter of Arabia Deserta, seem almost heroic.

So Maugham was traveling with his friend and lover. And he said that he dictated the larger part of the book to him en route. He omitted the last part of the trip (Hong Kong to London). He included previously written material. And some of what he wrote appeared as non-fiction in this book and fiction elsewhere. And yet, for this manipulation, the book is perhaps his most satisfying narrative of travel.

In the Preface to the collected edition of
On a Chinese Screen
Maugham wrote that
The Gentleman in the Parlour
was not, like
On a Chinese Screen,
the result of an accident … ‘I wanted to try my hand again at the same sort of subject, but on a more elaborate scale and in a form on which I could impose a definite pattern. It was an exercise in style.' This ‘style' is not discernible; structurally. It is a conventional travel book though the itinerary is Maugham's own, and even if they have been manipulated, the stories of the expatriates are wonderful.

Although he seems to be writing about himself the whole time, he discloses little about himself. He loses his temper at one point (his room wasn't ready), but he soon deflates himself. He talks a little about his drinking habits; he reveals that he once took opium. Like many writers who insist that they are not very interesting, he is highly observant. His description of Angkor is one of the best I have ever read, and his account of the Thai court is subtle – an insider's glimpse at Asiatic royalty; and (though he claims to be unimpressed)
he does justice to the French-looking city of Hanoi. Maugham the narrator has no passion, though passion throbs in the people he encounters and in their tumultuous lives. Maugham's voice is that of the man who narrates his fiction, the watchful writer, humorless but reliable. There is hardly any difference between the man telling this story and the third-person narration of his fiction. Only now and then there is the flicker of a bias, as with the hosiery salesman Elfenbein, about whom he writes, ‘He was the kind of Jew who made you understand the pogrom,' which is vicious. But Elfenbein was the occasion for a Maugham first, perhaps one of the earliest recorded instance of the expression ‘a chip on his shoulder', as when he says of Elfenbein, ‘He was a man with a chip on his shoulder. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to slight or injure him.'

Maugham himself had a chip – perhaps more than one. But in general, he was stoical, even intrepid, in his travels. His traveling off the beaten track makes this book not just unusual but (to me the greatest attribute of the travel narrative) a valuable historical document.

In this curious, active, even hearty period of his life, traveling in the Far East and the Pacific, eavesdropping, note-taking, he was at his best, and was perhaps his happiest. A person only sets out on such a trip if he is confident, hopeful that he will discover something new. Maugham, a lonely man, was sensitive to the loneliness of others and keenly aware of his own limitations. Travel was a way of isolating himself, and after traveling became too much trouble, he found relief if not happiness himself in his own splendid isolation at the Villa Mauresque, where he wrote this book, recalling his happier moments, on the road.

Paul Theroux, 2009

I think it is very well for a novelist to give himself a rest now and then from writing fiction. It is a dreary business, to write a novel once a year, as many authors must do, to earn their year's keep or for fear that if they remain silent they will be forgotten. It is unlikely, however fertile their imagination, that they will always have in mind a theme that so urgently demands expression that they cannot help but write; it is unlikely too that they can create characters, fresh and vivid, that they have not themselves used before. If they have the story-teller's gift and know their craft, they will probably turn out an acceptable piece of fiction, but it is only by good luck that it will be anything more. Every work an author produces should be the record of a spiritual adventure of his own. This is a counsel of perfection. The professional author cannot hope always to follow it, he must often content himself with the smaller merit of producing a workmanlike piece; but it is one that it is well for him to bear in mind. Though the variety of human nature is infinite, so that it might seem that the writer need never want for models on which to create his characters, he can only deal with that part of it which is in accordance with his own temperament. He puts himself into the shoes of his characters; but there are shoes he cannot get into. There are people so alien to him that he can get no hold on them. When he describes them he will describe them from the outside, and observation divorced from sympathy can seldom create a living being. That is why the writers of fiction tend to reproduce the same types; they astutely change the sex, the station, the age, the appearance of their characters; but if you look at them
closely you will find that they are the same persons reappearing in different guise. No doubt the greater the novelist the larger the number of persons he is capable of creating, but even with the greatest, the number is determined by his own limitations. There is only one way in which he can cope to some extent with the difficult situation: he can change himself. Here time is the prime agent. The writer is fortunate who can wait till this has effected such a change in him that he can see what is before him with fresh and different eyes. He is the variable, and the changing quantity gives an altered value to the symbols with which he is equated. But change of scene also, on one condition, can do much. I have known writers who made adventurous journeys, but took along with them their house in London, their circle of friends, their English interests and their reputation; and were surprised on getting home to find that they were exactly as when they went. Not thus can a writer profit by a journey. When he sets out on his travels the one person he must leave behind is himself.

This book is not like
On a Chinese Screen
, the result of an accident. I took the journey it describes because I wanted to; but I had from the beginning the intention of writing a book about it. I had enjoyed writing
On a Chinese Screen.
I wanted to try my hand again on the same sort of subject, but on a more elaborate scale and in a form on which I could impose a definite pattern. It was an excercise in style. In a novel the style is necessarily influenced by the matter and a homogenous manner of writing is hardly practical. The description of a state of mind demands a different mode of expression from the recital of incident; and dialogue, which should at least give a reasonable impression of current speech, cannot but preclude a uniformity of effect. A tragic passage needs a different manner again from a comic one. Sometimes your narration needs a conversational mode, with free use of slang and even of language that is deliberately
careless; at other times it asks for periods as stately as you can make them. The result must be a hodge-podge. There are writers who attach so much importance to beauty of language, by which, alas, they generally mean the florid vocabulary and the purple patch, that they force their material, regardless of its nature, into a uniform mould. Sometimes they go so far as to make even their dialogue conform to it and ask you to read conversations in which the speakers address one another in balanced and carefully composed sentences. So life eludes them. There is no air and you gasp for breath. It is of course out of the question to be funny in this way, but this disturbs them little, for they seldom possess a sense of humour. It is a trait, indeed, that they regard with impatience. The better plan in a novel is to let the matter dictate the manner. The style of a novel is best when like the clothes of a well-dressed man it is unnoticed. But if you like language for its own sake, if it amuses you to string words together in the order that most pleases you, so as to produce an effect of beauty, the essay or the book of travel gives you an opportunity. Here prose may be cultivated for its own sake. You can manipulate your material so that the harmony you seek is plausible. Your style can flow like a broad, placid river and the reader is borne along on its bosom with security; he need fear no shoals, no adverse currents, rapids, or rock-strewn gorges. The danger, of course, is that he will be lulled to sleep and so not observe the pleasant sights along the bank with which you have sought to divert him. The reader must judge for himself whether in this book I have avoided it. I beg him only to remember that there is no language more difficult to write than English. No one ever learns all that there is to be known about it. In the long history of our literature it would be difficult to find more than six persons who have written it faultlessly.

1935.

I have never been able to feel for Charles Lamb the affection that he inspires in most of his readers. There is a cross grain in my nature that makes me resent the transports of others and gush will dry up in me (against my will, for heaven knows I have no wish to chill by my coldness the enthusiasm of my neighbours) the capacity of admiration. Too many critics have written of Charles Lamb with insipidity for me ever to have been able to read him without uneasiness. He is like one of those persons of overflowing heart who seem to lie in wait for disaster to befall you so that they may envelop you with their sympathy. Their arms are so quickly outstretched to raise you when you fall that you cannot help asking yourself, as you rub your barked shin, whether by any chance they did not put in your path the stone that tripped you up. I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity. Nor do I much care for writers whose charm is their chief asset. It is not enough. I want something to get my teeth into, and when I ask for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding I am dissatisfied to be given bread and milk. I am put out of countenance by the sensibility of the Gentle Elia. For a generation Rousseau had pinned every writer's heart to his sleeve and it was in his day still the fashion to write with a lump in the throat, but Lamb's emotion, to my mind, too often suggests the facile lachrymosity of the alcoholic. I cannot but think his tenderness would have been advantageously tempered by abstinence, a blue pill and a black draught. Of course when you read the references made to him by
his contemporaries, you discover that the Gentle Elia is an invention of the sentimentalists. He was a more robust, irascible and intemperate fellow than they have made him out, and he would have laughed (and with justice) at the portrait they have painted of him. If you had met him one evening at Benjamin Haydon's, you would have seen a grubby little person, somewhat the worse for liquor, who could be very dull, and if he made a joke it might as easily have been a bad as a good one. In fact, you would have met Charles Lamb and not the Gentle Elia. And if you had read that morning one of his essays in
The London Magazine
you would have thought it an agreeable trifle. It would never have occurred to you that this pleasant piece would serve one day as a pretext for the lucubrations of the learned. You would have read it in the right spirit; for to you it would have been a living thing. It is one of the misfortunes to which the writer is subject that he is too little praised when he is alive and too much when he is dead. The critics force us to read the classics as Machiavelli wrote, in Court dress; whereas we should do much better to read them, as though they were our contemporaries, in a dressing-gown.

And because I had read Lamb in deference to common opinion rather than from inclination I had forborne to read Hazlitt at all. What with the innumerable books it urgently imported me to read, I came to the conclusion that I could afford to neglect a writer who had but done mediocrely (I understood) what another had done with excellence. And the Gentle Elia bored me. It was seldom I had read anything about Lamb without coming across a fling and a sneer at Hazlitt. I knew that FitzGerald had once intended to write a life of him, but had given up the project in disgust of his character. He was a mean, savage, nasty little man and an unworthy hanger-on of the circle in which Lamb, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth shone with so bright a lustre. There seemed no need to waste any time on a writer of so little talent
and of so unpleasant a nature. But one day, about to start on a long journey, I was wandering round Bumpus's looking for books to take with me when I came across a selection of Hazlitt's Essays. It was an agreeable little volume in a green cover, and nicely printed, cheap in price and light to hold, and out of curiosity to know the truth about an author of whom I had read so much ill, I put it on the pile that I had already collected.