Do you think Somerset maugham shares the view that there is only one caste the caste of humanity
Answers
1William Somerset Maugham was born on 25th January 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris. Author of numerous plays, novels, essays and travel literature, Maugham is probably best remembered for his short stories, particularly ‘The Out Station’, ‘P & O’, ‘The Colonel’s Lady’, and many others. Although Maugham’s literary conservativism led many critics to castigate him (’Class Two. Division One’, wrote Lytton Strachey), and to dismiss his writings as either too journalistic, or too commercially successful to be seriously considered, many of his stories, particularly in their attention to ethnic and racial tension, provide a significantly graphic portrait of the ideology of empire. Whether in Tahiti or Honolulu, or indeed aboard the vessels that carried his characters from one location to another, Maugham consistently flavoured and peopled his stories with ’imperial’ characters: plantation owners, petty officials, dissident adventurers, and the sort of determined missionaries that seemed to hold such interest for Maugham.
2In this paper I want to examine the stories of a writer who appeared to many as a quintessentially ‘English’ figure, but one who was born in France, albeit technically on British soil. A cosmopolitan writer, at ease within many cultures, Maugham married what he understood best to those themes which he knew would be of the utmost interest to his readers: exotic locations, stories of adventure and, frequently loss, among the ’high seas’, and of lives that were filled with intense desires and animosities. While some of the stories gathered in collections such as Cosmopolitans are quite short, others stretch our idea of what constitutes a short story considerably; and although the subject matter for many of the stories varies - complete with a Maupassant-Poe formulation not suited to all tastes - the tales have a very topical flavour. It is this topicality - the representationalism, the pseudo-anthropological charge that Maugham gives to his writing, and the very relevence that he has for students of empire - that I wish to discuss. Fallen from critical favour in recent years, I will argue that Maugham’s writing needs to be re-examined within the context of colonial and postcolonial writing, and that his short stories, in particular, present one of the most detailed and evocative studies of end-of-era imperialism.
3Maugham, as a French as well as an English speaking audience will be aware, was a prolific writer. He wrote forty-two books; which included travelogues, collections of essays, and autobiographical sketches, in addition to his twenty-seven plays, many of which were successful enough to have been turned into movies or else adapted for television. In terms of historical significance - when he wrote, the subjects he covered, the personal involvement he had with world events - Maugham was also impressive. A member of the British Intelligence, an inveterate traveller, an astute observer of artistic movements and personalities, he saw the Boer War, two World Wars and, in British terms at least, six monarchies come and go. Maugham died a few months short of ninety-two.
4When I first saw details of the Angers 1997 Symposium, with its themes of Self and Other, as well as the whole battery of complex alliances and transgressions that frequently accompany movement of the sort implied by ‘Other Places’, I thought that Maugham would make an ideal choice. ’Other Places’ were precisely the sorts of venues Maugham - and frequently Gerald Haxton, his secretary and lover - continually visited. Tahiti and Honolulu, Samoa, Wellington and Tonga, were on the Maugham-Haxton itinerary several times. Of course Maugham travelled much more extensively than this, travels that apparently furnished him with suitable subject matter for the novels, sketches and short stories that he was to continue to produce over the years. In addition, he inherited a personal as well as a cultural environment that had established, or was establishing, travel and migration as an almost natural course in the life of a writer. In Paul Fussell’s Abroad: British Literary Travelling between the Wars, especially where he writes of “the vanguard of the British Literary diaspora, the great flight of writers from England in the 20’s and 30’s”, the extent to which travel was a common experience, at least for a certain class and profession, is manifest (11).