‘On A Chinese Screen’, by W. Somerset Maugham
Maugham’s travels around China in 1919 are here related in sketch form, varying wildly in quality from the transcendent to the execrable.
I recently found myself searching for travel quotes to use as dividers in a video I was making about my holiday to Vietnam. My favourite was one of Paul Theroux’s: ‘Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.’ Short, punchy, and insightful, it was everything I was looking for.
I also came across one of Maugham’s:
“I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from the journey quite the same self that I took.”
As with the Theroux quote, it’s one that works, but not half as well. It requires a much greater effort on the part of the reader to parse, and you begin to expect that, were Maugham a greater editor of his own work, he might have found a more succinct expression for the sentiment.
‘On a Chinese Screen,’ Maugham’s account of an adventure in China in 1919, runs very much along similar lines. In places it is fascinating, in others verbose, and in one choice passage it is excremental.
This collection of vignettes — edited down to its barest bones — is still highly readable; for those of us patient enough to battle through the text in the original, it offers a vivid look inside Maugham as a writer. In fact, by reading this book you will come to know precisely where Maugham is strong, and where he is so weak that no amount of subordinate clauses can save him.
Where Maugham is successful, then, he is successful because his subjects are human, and, crucially, they are the kind of people he knew how to associate with. China at that time was cosmopolitan only around the fringes; in the major trading areas there was a thriving ex-pat community, and it is here that we find Maugham most at home, and at his most penetrative. Beyond the domain of the European he struggles, and it is rare for a Chinese character to get his own story. The rest of the time we see them as coolies lurking in the background, machines who carry him from place to place in his chair, or they are talked of dismissively by their masters. China serves more as a backdrop to the stories: almost any other country, sufficiently exotic, would have done.
Maugham is often criticised for the cruelty that lay behind his words, but I’ve always thought of this aspect being his strongest. It certainly makes him readable. Take, for instance, the story ‘The Cabinet Minister.’ Maugham visits an official who talks “with melancholy of the state of China.” He is saddened by how history has been so unceremoniously overturned by the students in their revolt. He cares more for art and history, and leads Maugham on a long tour through his private collection.
But Maugham is not fooled by the man’s gentleness, by his appreciation of the finer things. The story concludes with a twist like a knife in the minister’s back:
“[…] I knew all the time that he was a rascal. Corrupt, inefficient, and unscrupulous, he let nothing stand in his way. He was a master of the squeeze. He had acquired a large fortune by the most abominable methods. He was dishonest, cruel, vindictive, and venal. He had certainly a share in reducing China to the desperate plight which he so sincerely lamented.”
Maugham had a fine nose for hypocrisy, and many is the occasion when he meets a European guilty of just such a pose. In most cases this is relayed to us by the fact that, although resident over the long term, the majority of the Europeans he meets have not learned a word of the language, thinking it beneath them, and, worse still, tend towards a hatred of the land and its people. To take one example, the ‘Tai Pan’ of one of the last stories in the book has been in the country for thirty years and yet is unable to communicate in anything other than English.
The hypocrisy of the ex-pats is galling but typical. ‘Henderson’, a particularly strong piece, delicately shows us the transformation of the eponymous banker from ‘socialist’ to hypocrite. To illustrate his point Maugham draws for us a short history of Henderson’s relationship with the rickshaw. From this: “It revolted his sense of personal dignity that a man, a human being no different from himself, should drag him hither and thither,” we pass on to this: “But Shanghai is very hot and sometimes he was in a hurry so now and again he was obliged to use the degrading vehicle,” and from there we soon find ourselves at our destination:
“[T]he rickshaw boy passed the turning he should have taken.
‘Round the corner, you bloody fool,’ cried Henderson, and to emphasize his meaning he gave the man a smart kick on the bottom.”
It requires from a writer a light touch and a fine sensitivity to accomplish such a dramatic shift in the space of two pages, and yet this is just what Maugham manages. At times his writing can be exhilarating.
Few writers manage to gauge a person’s character as readily as Maugham, and in the case of ‘Dinner Parties’ he carries off the trick of reading a whole group at once. It is the only vignette split into a series of chapters, each showing the same story but from the perspective of ever-shrinking groups in ever-shrinking stations. In the Legation Quarter he dines with a group of embassy officials and their wives:
“Dinner was served. The conversation varied from a resonant, rolling French to a somewhat halting English. They talked of this Minister who had just written from Bucharest or Lima, and that Counsellor’s wife who found it so dull in Christiania or so expensive in Washington. On the whole it made little difference to them in what capital they found themselves, for they did precisely the same things in Constantinople, Berne, Stockholm and Peking. Entrenched within their diplomatic privileges and supported by a lively sense of their social consequence, they dwelt in a world in which Copernicus had never existed, for to them sun and stars circled obsequiously round this earth of ours, and they were its centre.”
When Maugham bit, he did so with the strength of piercing canines.
But when he tried to chew, it was as if his molars had been replaced with plastic teeth. On those occasions when Maugham left behind his people and instead turned his attentions to the Chinese or to the landscape — and really there is nothing to divide them — he was far less successful.
His descriptions of the landscape and the atmosphere of the country are rarely raised higher than the mundane, and there is an abundance of sentences like this one: “The air was keen and clear, the sky was blue.”
Describing the locals in one of the towns he passes through, he writes simply: “Their faces are impassive and their dark eyes stare mysteriously.”
This tells me nothing of the Chinese; it’s the laziest resort to cliché. What does it even mean to stare mysteriously?
Almost without being able to help himself Maugham slips into a casual kind of racism when he talks about the Chinese. It’s not really that he means to, but when he talks of a man who “has a little yellow wife and four children” you wonder why he might not just say a wife and children and leave it at that.
When Maugham properly threw himself at the challenge of describing for effect, he was terrible. Here he works through every adverb he can come up with in a piece called ‘Arabesque’, wherein he describes The Great Wall:
“There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley. Menacingly, the grim watch towers, stark and foursquare, at due intervals stood at their posts. Ruthlessly, for it was built at the cost of a million lives and each one of those great grey stones has been stained with the bloody tears of the captive and the outcast, it forged its dark way through a sea of rugged mountains. Fearlessly, it went on its endless journey, league upon league to the furthermost regions of Asia, in utter solitude, mysterious like the great empire it guarded. There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China.”
Maugham should have stuck to what he did best, because purple prose like this is almost upsettingly bad. Putting aside the symmetrical refrain of ‘There in the mist…’, there is enough here that is turgid to have suggested to a wise editor that the piece — which I have reproduced in its entirety — should have been cut. It ‘crept’ up the mountain. Inevitably, the mountains are ‘rugged’. Where does ‘Ruthlessly’ fit into the description of the wall itself? As well as creeping ‘solitarily’ it also does so ‘in utter solitude’. Why was the great empire it guarded ‘mysterious’? To anyone who studied China it would seem less so, and I very much doubt the Chinese thought of their country that way.
As bad as ‘Arabesque’ is, it is nothing next to the sheer wantonness of ‘Democracy’, one of Maugham’s brief forays into the world of philosophy. Here he is in his most reflective mood yet. He has stopped for the night in a crowded inn, when, from a sedan chair noisily arriving in the courtyard, there “stepped out a stout Chinese of imposing aspect.” Though Maugham cannot follow the argument that follows between the stranger and the proprietor of the inn, the gist is that there is no space save that reserved for the coolies; the stranger is irate, and makes it clear that he could never demean himself by taking such a room; in the end, he is granted a room somewhere in the inn; satisfied of having saved ‘face’ he now relaxes and is able to converse “on equal terms” with those self-same coolies he previously felt so superior too.
This rapid train of events inspires something in Maugham. He senses that here in this inn lies the secret to social relations between men, not just in China but on a universal scale.
“In the East man is man’s equal in a sense you find neither in Europe nor in America. Position and wealth put a man in a relation of superiority to another that is purely adventitious, and they are no bar to sociability.
When I lay in my bed I asked myself why in the despotic East there should be between men an equality so much greater than in the free and democratic West, and was forced to the conclusion that the explanation must be sought in the cess-pool. For in the West we are divided from our fellows by our sense of smell. The working man is our master, inclined to rule us with an iron hand, but it cannot be denied that he stinks: none can wonder at it, for a bath in the dawn when you have to hurry to your work before the factory bell rings is no pleasant thing, nor does heavy labour tend to sweetness; and you do not change your linen more than you can help when the week’s washing must be done by a sharp-tongued wife. I do not blame the working man because he stinks, but stink he does. It makes social intercourse difficult to persons of a sensitive nostril. The matutinal tub divides the classes more effectually than birth, wealth, or education. […] Now, the Chinese live all their lives in the proximity of very nasty smells. They do not notice them. Their nostrils are blunted to the odours that assail the Europeans and so they can move on an equal footing with the tiller of the soil, the coolie, and the artisan. I venture to think that the cess-pool is more necessary to democracy than parliamentary institutions. The invention of the ‘sanitary convenience’ has destroyed the sense of equality in men. It is responsible for class hatred much more than the monopoly of capital in the hands of the few.”
As somebody with only a very rough idea of what Marx wrote and stood for, I still feel confident in saying that Maugham’s tracing of the roots of class hatred to the toilet is misplaced. Notice also how he has fallen into that most common trap of the casual observer who thinks, from a poorly understood event, that they have uncovered some previously hidden truth. It is easy to generalise when you don’t know any better. There was little in China at the time of his visit to suggest that the people there stood on such an equal footing with one another, and it takes a greater degree of naïveté and simplicity than I thought Maugham possessed to have thought so strongly that the Chinese were oblivious to such odours as they must have encountered.
It is such a shame that Maugham did not later choose to excise this oddity from his collection, as he did with, for example, ‘The Making of a Saint,’ a book that is absent from his complete works. It does not do him justice, and it makes you almost forget those times when he is truly profound. In the course of ‘On a Chinese Screen’ it becomes clear that Maugham knows what it means to be a traveller, and he shares a few episodes that any other journeyman will know to be familiar, as I do myself. On one occasion, when it begins to rain heavily and Maugham is stuck for things to do, he reflects on how strongly thoughts of home were coming to him just then. I’ve known the same to happen.
It is in these moments that the sense of a travelogue emerge, but the sense is too ethereal and vanishes moments later, or is crushed under the weight of the next rolling cliché.
[Images all from: http://www.vintag.es/2013/05/photos-of-china-from-19171919.html]
