posted on 22 May 2023

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

I don’t imagine that Somerset Maugham is very widely read nowadays. I consider myself a confirmed fan, especially of his short stories, yet The Painted Veil (1925) is the first of his full-length novels that I have read.

Somerset Maugham was in many ways remarkable figure – if not an especially likeable one. He was born in 1874, just seven years after Arnold Bennett; Disraeli had just taken over from Gladstone as Prime Minister and Victoria would be on the throne for another quarter-of-a-century. He qualified as a doctor in 1897, worked as a spy during the First World War, and subsequently as a volunteer ambulance driver. He was almost immediately successful when he turned to writing. At one time he had four plays running consecutively in West End theatres. He would eventually become extremely wealthy, devoting himself to travel and eventually to the life of the rich, mediterranean ex-pat when he moved to a villa in Cap Ferrat in the South of France in 1927. There, having finally divorced the wife with whom he had a daughter, Liza, he created a hedonistic paradise for himself and his chosen companions – he described himself as “three quarters normal, one quarter queer” – and lived in considerable splendour and sexual promiscuity. His villa had a staff of over a dozen. 

The astonishing thing I always find about Maugham is the degree to which he could write outside of his own experience, as it were. He was never a ‘gay novelist’ and never to the best of my knowledge wrote of ‘queer life’. Rather, he used his wealth, his travel, and his experiences of medical practice and intelligence work as the base materials from which fictional gold could be extracted. He was not by any stretch of the imagination a modernist writer and never sought to change the novel stylistically or to extend it through formal experimentation. What he was, above all else, was a story-teller.

The Painted Veil is the story of what nowadays we would call a toxic relationship (which Maugham was no stranger to, as it happens) but as with much of Maugham it is the extraordinary setting that makes the novel so compelling. 

Kitty and Walter Fane are a young married couple, Kitty is in her early-twenties. They are living in colonial Hong Kong in the early-1920s, where Fane’s work as a bacteriologist for the colonial administration has taken them. But Kitty is shallow and materially and socially ambitious – traits inherited from her cold and calculating mother – and feels she has married beneath her. Walter is a dull and socially inept scientist, and Kitty feels that they are condescended to by the much grander colonial officials they routinely meet in government circles.

She begins an affair with a man called Charles Townsend, a dashing, passionate lover with a bright future in Hong Kong’s colonial service, where he currently serves as Assistant Colonial Secretary in the Customs office. Kitty believes that Charles will eventually leave his wife and their three children and that they will have a wonderful and charmed life together.

Walter Fane finds out about the affair and it is what he does as a consequence that makes the novel so gripping. I won’t spoil things by revealing what this is. Suffice it to say that I read the novel in two or three sittings, desperate to find out what happened next.

I hope prospective readers will not be put off Somerset Maugham’s work by the colonial setting of much of it. Yes, it is often permeated with attitudes that reflect the times in which he wrote, but his own views are in fact often far more enlightened and humane than might be expected. While it is probably true that he will never again be a fashionable writer, his work will live on because he is a master story-teller with a wonderfully clear, uncluttered prose style and an unblinking reptilian eye (but not an unpitying one) for the complexities of human nature. The Painted Veil is likely to send me back in the first instance to the wealth of short stories he wrote, but it has also made me aware of just how wrong I have been to neglect his novels.

 

Alun Severn

May 2023