![]() The pettiness of his views and his intolerance unfailingly pit him against the rare white visitor who comes his way, as in “The Outstation,” in which one settler’s snobbishness antagonizes another’s caddishness till death puts an end to their strife.ĦBut contrary to what almost all characters unconvincingly assert, it is not the tropical climate which makes them lose their minds, take to drinking or commit murders, but a series of destructive feelings brought on by their personal shortcomings, the temptation to discard the iron corset of British conventions, not to mention the guilt and strain that “it puts upon a man to be an empire builder,” as Harold remarks in “Before the Party” (163). ![]() He suffers from the “Lord Jim” syndrome, and fears nothing more than acting as a coward or shamefully breaking down in front of the natives in whom his alleged white man’s superiority should only inspire respect. His prejudices make him incapable of loving his native “wife” or the children she gives him. He lives on his own or in a little white community which mistrusts the natives. True, the settler’s life is pictured as a hard one in this collection. ( A Writer’s Notebook, 206-7)ĥSomething liberating about the natural environment allows, or forces, the European mind to shift its paradigm and envisage new ways of apprehending and representing reality. You have the sense of freedom of a disembodied spirit. Your imagination is pleasantly but not exhaustingly occupied with image after image. Your mind is restless, but to no purpose. You have tried to sleep, but you give it up as hopeless and come out, heavy and drowsy, on to your veranda. 3 But as I will try to show here, some of Maugham’s idiosyncrasies, his source of inspiration, and the art of the short story he developed over the years tended to work against his uniformly conveying a satisfactory literary image of colonial experience in Malaya.ĤAs shown by the notes which he took when he visited the F.M.S., a mere stay in that Eastern part of the globe sufficed to unleash Maugham’s creative powers, with its press of variegated populations, its dense tropical vegetation and the strong daily alternations of sweltering heat and ethereal cool:Īfternoon in the tropics. #W. somerset maugham short stories professionalIndeed, to take but one example, one can only be struck by Maugham’s laying no store whatsoever by the country’s cultural and historical heritage, nor by the native populations, the local customs or even the settlers’ professional activities, and by his choosing to solely illustrate the stress situations or innate failings which made the expatriate’s experience a litmus test of human resilience. 3 In these stories, a contemporary critic heard a “droning symphony of fatalism that beats on the em (.)ģIn other words, Maugham’s personal detachment and set agenda, together with his dual background, at once English and French, seemed to warrant a fresh look at things Malayan and an original way of picturing them.Moreover it is precisely the British experience overseas that Maugham sets out to capture in these six stories, likened to “a fine Oriental tapestry” by a contemporary reviewer 1 and which Maugham himself would call exotic, his definition being that such tales are “set in some country little known to the majority of readers, and with the reactions upon the white man of his sojourn in an alien land and the effect which contact with peoples of another race has upon him. 2 See Maugham’s introduction to an anthology entitled Tellers of Tales (1939), quoted in Selected Pr (.)ĢMaugham affords a unique perspective on life in a British colony in the 1920s, in the sense that he was neither a settler, nor a British official, nor a “colonial” born of British parents in a Crown territory, nor a private individual with a sentimental stake in the country, like Kipling or Forster for instance, but rather an avid globe-trotter and keen observer of human nature. ![]() 1 Henry Albert Phillips’s review of The Casuarina Tree, published in The New York Evening Post on 2 (.).
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