This is by W. Somerset Maugham. Its subtitle is A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong, and it was published in 1930, although the actual journey was undertaken seven years earlier, in 1923.

The rather strange title comes from a line in an essay by William Hazlitt (On Going a Journey). Hazlitt is extolling the anonymous, present-moment nature of travel, saying that it's wonderful "to be known by no other title than The Gentleman in the Parlour". Maugham objects to the number of dashes in Hazlitt's paragraph ("there is in the dash something rough, ready and haphazard that goes against my grain") but he decides it's a great name for a travel book, and this is it.

So how did it get on the reading list...? Partly in response to the note to self I made after Reading Tan Twan Eng's The House of Doors: "Revisit Maugham..." I started with Ashenden. But then there was a bit of a hiatus.

Sitting around in my Book notes box, meanwhile, was a little article by Connla Stokes. She tells us about a luxurious room in a luxurious hotel in Hanoi. It features all manner of desirable things such as "tufted carpets", and it's called the Somerset Maugham Suite. For one night you'll pay quite a lot of money, but you'll have an experience of Hanoi that leaves out the heat, the traffic, the noise, and pretty much anything that's interesting.

And that, says Stokes, would be entirely appropriate because Maugham didn't bother to explore Hanoi either... "Although the hotel’s website proudly states that Maugham stayed there in 1923, when writing a 'part' of The Gentleman in the Parlour, the city only inspired three and a half lines (in a 300-page book), which I might as well quote for you in full: 'Here I had the intention of finishing this book, for at Hanoi I found nothing much to interest me. It is the capital of Tonkin and the French tell you it is the most attractive town in the East, but when you ask them why, answer that it is exactly like a town, Montpellier or Grenoble, in France.'"


The article reproduces an illustration by C.W. Bacon (Radio Times, 1950s)

Stokes is NOT a fan of this book... Maugham admits he's not really a travel writer ("so that the reader of these pages may be under no misapprehension," he says, "I hasten to tell him that he will find in them little information"); in fact, he says he's not even a good traveller, apt to tire of sight-seeing, and quickly taking things for granted (actually, I think they're both good characteristics, and when he says, "I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took," I'm definitely convinced that he IS a travel writer).

And of course he's a man of his time, prone to essentializing ("the Burmese... are happy, cheerful and amiable"; "an oriental crowd is like a bed of daffodils at a market gardener's, brilliant but monotonous"; etc). He claims to be politically disinterested, but Christine Doran argues that "the discourse of Western imperialism... runs consistently through Maugham’s book". Certainly, when he compares French and British colonizers (the French treat people more equally, he maintains, and are therefore more admired by their subjects than the British), you feel he's not only probably wrong but is also participating in the kind of speculation a fox would indulge in with regard to the administration of rival henhouses.

Last in her list of criticisms, Stokes notes that Maugham is interested not so much in destinations as in "the tragic cases along the way that he wishes to examine". And, from past experience, we know that the people whose stories he retells may well be real people, and if they are, we wonder if they actually wanted their confessions to be included in a book...


Myanmar, 2012

***

So there's plenty to take issue with. But I was sufficiently interested in Stokes's comments to read the book. And I concluded by feeling she goes a bit overboard with her sarcasm, because there is much in here that's thought-provoking and interesting.

I'll get his itinerary out of the way first (with all the names rendered as they were in his day). It's worth noting, by the by, that Maugham was accompanied on this journey by his long-term secretary-cum-partner, Frederick Haxton, who would have been the one making all the arrangements, and "approaching and befriending people of all classes throughout the journey, something Maugham was very bad at because of his stammer and his shyness". Haxton is never mentioned, in any capacity.

So, Maugham sails from Colombo to Rangoon. His recollections of that initial part of the Burma journey become -- for us, reading so much later -- an incredible evocation of the era: "A spacious, shady house in a garden; an agreeable life, luncheon at this club or that, drives along trim, wide roads, bridge after dark at that club or this, gin pahits, a great many men in white drill or pongee silk, laughter, pleasant conversation; and then back through the night to dress for dinner and out again to dine with this hospitable host or the other, cocktails, a substantial meal, dancing to a gramophone, or a game of billiards and then back once more to the large cool silent house." It's all so easy, he thinks, "but was this Rangoon?" We've all that kind of feeling as travellers, I think. However, the "fantastic richness" of the Shwe Dagon has also imprinted itself on his memory.

Then Pagan: "I do not know how many pagodas there are at Pagan... They are almost as thickly strewn as the tombstones in a cemetery."


"Lacquer: ...This is the industry on which Pagan, forgetful of its ancient greatness, now modestly thrives"

From there by steamer to Mandalay. He's a little coy about the "despoiled" palace... (There's information on the Third Burma War here, or better still, read The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh.) He does meet a woman who had been maid of honour to Queen Supalayat, but makes no comment on her dismissal of the "massacres" her former boss was said to have instigated.

Then he traverses the Shan States on the back of a mule (a pretty adventurous thing to do). This is also perhaps the funniest part of the account. For example, there's the story of the mules' insistence on following each other, so he can never get away to be alone with his thoughts. "There were a number of subjects, error and evil, space, time, chance and mutability, which I felt I should really come to some conclusion about... But the [mule] pack-leader had round his neck a raucous bell and it clanged so loudly that my reflections were very much disturbed." However fast he goes, the rest of the pack keeps up with him, and the "muffin bell rattled madly at my heels as though it were knelling the death agonies of all the muffin-makers in London". He is required to make speeches of thanks in all the different villages he visits, and does his best to craft them individually. Then he finds out that his interpreter always repeats the same thing anyway...

From there to Siam. Here he transitions from the temperate to the tropical, and from mule to car and train. And so to Bangkok, via Lopburi and Ayudya.

Bangkok comes in for one of those descriptions that annoy Stokes: "It is impossible to consider these populous modern cities of the East without a certain malaise. They are all alike... They have no history and no traditions... They are hard and glittering and as unreal as a backcloth in a musical comedy. They give you nothing."

So far, so essentializing and patronizing. He doesn't stop there, though, adding: "But when you leave them it is with a feeling that you have missed something and you cannot help thinking that they have some secret that they have kept from you. And though you have been a trifle bored you look back upon them wistfully; you are certain that they have after all something to give you which, had you stayed longer or under other conditions, you would have been capable of receiving... But if you go back the secret still evades you and you ask yourself whether after all their only secret is not that the glamour of the East enwraps them... A hundred travellers may seek in them the answers to a question they cannot put and that yet torments them, only to be disappointed, a hundred travellers more will continue to press." He says he's not a travel writer. But that's a frequently experienced but little acknowledged aspect of travel that he's portraying here...


Wat Suthat, 2012. Maugham reckoned there were 390 wat in Bangkok. This is the one he particularly likes

Next he takes the boat to Kep on the Cambodian coast. And from there he goes up to Angkor, which he finds hugely impressive, but feels he lacks the skills to describe: "I have never seen anything in the world more wonderful than the temples of Angkor, but I do not know how on earth I am going to set down in black and white such an account of them as will give even the most sensitive reader more than a confused and shadowy impression of their grandeur." He admires some aspects of the ruins, but not others, and also registers "so much that was dull". Still, he finds it a wrench to leave.


Angkor Wat, 2003. For a fascinating account of Angkor in the very early years of the 20th century, see Pierre Loti's Angkor Pilgrim

From there down to Saigon (the name still rendered with a diaeresis at that time). He finds it "a blithe and smiling little place". And he stays at the Hotel Continental (the one that's featured in Graham Greene's The Quiet American).

Travelling via Tourane (that's today's Da Nang, and he visits the museum, just as we did), he reaches Hue (with another diaeresis), which he finds "a pleasant little town with something of the leisurely air of a cathedral city in the West of England".

Hanoi is tossed off in the way that Stokes has described. His next objective is Haiphong ("a commercial town and dull"). He could have visited the "Bay of Along", but he was "tired of sights", and we leave him setting out for Hong Kong.


Back in "Burmah": "River travelling is monotonous and soothing. In whatever part of the world you are it is the same"

***

What The Gentleman in the Parlour does supremely well is give us a vignette of the era. When Maugham arrives in Pagan, his servant goes off to find him an "ox-waggon"; he stays at Public Works Department bungalows, which are all built according to the same pattern, and are placed about 12-15 miles apart (about the distance a mule can comfortably do in a day); the Resident at Taunggyi wires to say he has made arrangements for mules and ponies to be ready on his arrival; the Sawbwa (as the prince of a Shan principality is known) is "good enough to order houses to be built for me on the way".

And here are his experiences when he takes a quick shore break from the boat to Mandalay: "The skipper told me that there was there a pleasant little club in which I had only to make myself at home; they were quite used to having strangers drop off like that from the steamer, and the secretary was a very decent chap; I might even get a game of bridge... There was a man sitting on the verandah and as I walked up he nodded to me and asked whether I would have a whisky and soda or a gin and bitters. The possibility that I would have nothing at all did not even occur to him."

A different world...



But, of course, a lot of that ease and familiarity is predicated on the backdrop of imperial uniformity. Maugham, as we've seen, was inescapably a man of colonial times. And yet the picture is more complex than many make it.

The stories of individuals that Maugham offers us in this book often reveal -- without comment -- the colonial reality.

Masterson, for example, is terribly upset because his Burmese "girl" has left him. She has left him because he won't marry her. And he won't marry her because he knows he can't take her home...: "If I married her I'd have to stay in Burma for the rest of my life... I don't want to be buried out here, I want to be buried in an English churchyard. I'm happy enough here, but I don't want to live here always. I couldn't. I want England. Sometimes I get sick of this hot sunshine and these garish colours... I know I shall be out of it, we fellows who've spent our lives out here always are, but I can potter about the local club and talk to retired Anglo-Indians... Sometimes I'm awfully inclined to give way [to the "girl"]... I think, perhaps, if I thought she loved me I would. But of course, she doesn't; they never do, these girls who go and live with white men."

We could also cite the Italian priest. He has been in Burma for 12 years. He's afraid to go back to Italy because he might not have the courage to return... But he keeps up with everything: "In this kind of life one must never let go of oneself for a minute." He seems a compassionate man. Then he shoots a kingfisher -- "a little quivering, beautiful thing, poised there for a moment like a living gem" -- because it "will help to make my rice tasty"... That seems to me such an apt allegory of colonialism, but I'm not sure if it was intended to be so.

Then there's the aptly named Grosely. He dropped out of his medical training at St Thomas's Hospital in some disgrace, went to China, and made a fortune. When he returns to Britain, however, he finds it is no longer the way it was in his mind ("he began to think that London was no place for a white man... Europe was finished"). He heads off back to China, but doesn't get that far, and stops in Haiphong, where he marries a local woman. He lives in a "cheerless and sordid" little house, but proclaims himself perfectly happy with it. He has his woman, his food, his opium...

Anthony Daniels, discussing Rain, one of Maugham's most famous stories (written after an earlier journey), remarks that it is anticolonial, "though not stridently so". If you unpack the story, you find the subtext: "Colonialism harms the natives by depriving them of their culture and traps the colonialist in the amber of self-importance and priggishness. It is well to remember that these were not views that were universal in 1916 when Maugham voyaged, or even in 1920 when he wrote the story."



The Gentleman in the Parlour also contains a really interesting passage about British power, in which Maugham skewers the paradox at the heart of imperialism, and the beginnings of its decay. He imagines a historian of "the Decline and Fall of the British Empire" wondering why a normally observant author hadn't noticed "with what a nerveless hand the British held the power that their fathers had conquered", and hadn't derided "the spectacle of a horde of officials who held their positions only by force of the guns behind them trying to persuade the races they ruled that they were there only on sufferance. They offered efficiency to people to whom a hundred other things were of more consequence and sought to justify themselves by the benefits they conferred on people who did not want them." The hypothetical historian might continue to wonder about this author: "Did he go through Burmah and not see how the British power was tottering because the masters were afraid to rule... What had happened to the race that had produced Clive, Warren Hastings and Stanford Raffles that it must send out to govern its colonies men who were afraid of the authority entrusted to them...? They prated of efficiency and they did not rule efficiently, for they were filled with an uneasy feeling that they were unfit to rule."

Maugham, in this imaginary dialogue, ripostes that he hopes the historians will write "with sympathy, justice and magnanimity", and with dignity, because "the British Empire will have been in the world's history a moment not without grandeur". That's a clever sentence... "Will have been... a moment... not without grandeur." As this blogger says of that section, "Though only a page long, it is a fascinating and powerful indictment."



***

Maugham's reputation as a writer has fluctuated quite dramatically. Anthony Daniels, writing in 2000, comments: "Admitting to an admiration for Maugham is to an intellectual what voyaging overseas once was to an orthodox Brahmin: it leads automatically to a loss of caste... I have met this extreme disdain for Maugham many times..." I've met it too, actually -- in approximately the same era. A friend asked me what I had been reading, and I mentioned the title of a book by Maugham. She almost snorted in contempt...

Daniels pushes back at the disparagement. So does Leigh Turner.

And Pico Iyer is also a defender, preferring Maugham's "quietly subversive prose" to the modernist ambitions of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, or Virginia Woolf: "I think, in some ways, he was more effectively fearless than any of them because his subject matter was just as way out as theirs were, and yet he placed it in a frame that anybody could read. That ability both to shock you and to put you at ease at the same time is what most of us aspire to, and almost nobody has, but he had instinctively." Maugham, says Iyer elsewhere, was praised by George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh. And Iyer also includes The Gentleman in the Parlour on his list of five books that any traveller should own, "for its wisdom about the human heart, and its reminder of how little the world changes, deep down".

For my part, I'll be looking out for more...