I think of Somerset Maugham as the consummate story teller. You are brought in to a well lighted place shown the furniture which reflects the characters who go on their way as dumb as falling stones beset by their constitutional gravity. He doesn’t often love his personae but anyone with knowledge by acquaintance, as Bertie Russell said, knows that distaste is a standard correct response. His Malay stories are often a vision of humid hell.
In the story entitled ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ from the collection called ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Skelton,a youngish anthropologist on his way to the Borneo coast, a three week trip, is struck down by malaria. A rubber planter Grange and his wife who live nearby take him in while he recuperates. Aha I thought anthropologist now gets to study OP (orang putay/white man) in his native habitat. I won’t go into the story which is classic Maughamish operative secret. During the day while the anthropologist is recovering he talks to the wife who at one point seems to be about to reveal the source of the extreme nervous ticks that oppress her. She tells a lot but holds that back.
When the sick man recovers he departs:
“He was glad now that Mrs. Grange had not told him the story that was on the tip of her tongue to tell. He did not want some tragic tale of sin or folly to connect him with them in a recollection that he could not escape. He wanted to forget them as one forgets a bad dream.
It is left to Mrs. Grange to tell us the story talking to herself in the mirror as if in her past as an actress she was delivering a soliloquy. A secret that is untold retains its power to trap one in that continually recurring scene of horror. Skelton does not want this unloaded on to him even if this might free the teller of the secret. Anthropology has its limits.
Is that direct address to the reader a weak ending, though I will grant screen playable? Has Maugham slipped? I’m not entirely happy that an observer has been removed from the scene but yes the response to incontinent sharing of ‘please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’ is a real one.
The next story in the collection is called ‘Appearance and Reality’ which sent me to F.H. Bradley’s book. Maugham was a reader of philosophy and he liked the book.. The title of his novel ‘Of Human Bondage’ is taken from Spinoza’s ‘The Ethics’.
I’ve just started that and I have the distinct feeling that there may be more of appearance than reality in this tale.
