SACRED COWS - Icons of travel writing

A Little Romance

I was reading a collection of Somerset Maugham’s short stories last night. Eventually they depressed me so much that I threw the book against the wall. It wasn’t Maugham’s smarmy class-consciousness that offended me, or his pompous British ethnocentrism, or even his paragraph-long sentences. It was his apparent ease at conveying a sense of romance that got my dander up. More precisely, I was enraged that my own work, which is primarily, like his, short fiction drawn from my own experiences in Asia, lacks the feeling of romance, that precious otherworldliness, that seeps through all of Maugham’s work. I spent the rest of the evening thinking up excuses.

Somerset Maugham was educated at King’s School, Canterbury and at Heidelberg University, graduating with a degree in medicine. I hold a Liberal Arts degree from the University of Iowa, which qualifies me only to cheer enthusiastically for a mediocre football teams and protest immoral wars. Maugham was steeped in the classics and a tradition of letters, as was his audience; his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, was a success thirty years before the invention of motion pictures with sound. I was raised in front of a television set; I can sing the theme songs to The Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan’s Island but my only exposure to the classics was a sign in the local tailor’s shop window: “Euripedes pants, Eumenides pants”.

After the end of World War I, Maugham traveled the East on tramp steamers. He'd stop for a night on Bora Bora and have toddies on the verandah with the District Officer's wife. She'd pour out her soul to him, because he was the first European visitor she'd seen since the beriberi outbreak of 1904, and a famous one, to boot. Then he'd go back to the boat and type out something like ‘Lady Meadowlark-Lemon confided to me that in her youth she'd murdered Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the candle-stick.’ He could do that, because he knew he'd never be back to Bora-Bora and never have to face Lady Meadowlark-Lemon again.

But I write on Phuket, a place so tiny that if you say 'boo' to an Australian on a yacht in Chalong Bay over lunch they're talking about it in the Patong Biergartens by nightfall. I’m not at all famous, and nobody is compelled to tell me the darkest secrets of their life. If I write 'the lady in the green dress laughed like a horse' I get irate phone calls from friends wondering why I'm saying such rude things about nice old Mrs. Winklepicker. And next week Mrs. Winklepicker snubs me at a Kiwanis brunch, and all the time I was really writing about Aunt Sally from Saskatoon.

The world Maugham wrote about was accessible to his readers only through books; if he made a mistake nobody knew. My sleepy island home hosts two-and-one-half million guests every year, and there isn't an in-flight magazine in the world that hasn't already run an article about the Phuket Yacht Club. If I say the monsoon rains started on the fourth of July last year, I get letters from Alaska telling me I was wrong, it was the fifth.

Maugham even had a wider vocabulary to work with. Consider this quote, from “The Fall of Edward Barnard”: “You seldom see beauty face to face. Look at it well, Mr. Hunter, for what you see now you will never see again, since the moment is transitory, but it will be an imperishable memory in your heart. You touch eternity.” When was the last time you heard anybody use the word “imperishable” in conversation? I used the word “obtuse” in a bit of dialogue in a column two years ago and received an angry letter from a reader who refused to believe that anybody on Phuket would even know the meaning of the word, let alone speak it aloud.

In Maugham's day, it was scandalous to even hint at prostitution, and when Rain was published he got advance publicity that would make Stephen King jealous simply because the protagonist was a prostitute. In Thailand, the leading English language newspaper devotes a full page every Saturday to prostitution, not presented as an expose, mind you, but like a restaurant review from the Tulsa Plain Dealer: 'They got twenty new gals down at the Bucket O' Thighs, fresh from the northeast, tender and tasty, served with slaw n' a pickle. Y'all come back now, y'hear?'"

Which leads us to the question of sexual orientation. Maugham has retained a loyal following among artistic types because of his barely concealed homosexuality and almost blatant misogyny, which were most often expressed in his descriptions of minor characters. Consider this passage from “A Woman of Fifty”: “She was a woman of about fifty with gray hair simply done and marcelled without exaggeration. She was a trifle too stout and she was dressed neatly enough, but without distinction, in a dress that I guessed had been bought ready-made at the local branch of a big store. She had rather large eyes of a pale blue and a poor complexion; she wore no rouge and had used a lipstick but sparingly. She seemed like a nice creature.”

Now compare that almost cruel portrait of a “nice creature’ to this from “Red”: “The first time you saw him his beauty just took your breath away. They called him Red on account of his flaming hair. It had a natural wave and he wore it long. It must have been of that wonderful colour that the pre-Raphaelites raved over. I don't think he was vain of it, he was much too ingenuous for that, but no one could have blamed him if he had been. He was tall, six feet and an inch or two - and he was made like a Greek god, broad in the shoulders and thin in the flanks; he was like Apollo, with just that soft roundness which Praxiteles gave him, and that suave, feminine grace which has in it something troubling and mysterious. His skin was dazzling white, milky, like satin; his skin was like a woman’s.”

Red didn’t exist. He was as much a fiction, and as much an idealization, as Praxiteles’ Apollo. But the dowdy woman so harshly caricatured was a real person, and Maugham knew when he published the story that she would undoubtedly read it and recognize herself with some pain. Maugham made no bones about his preferences; reading a collection of his stories you are introduced repeatedly to two types of man: winsome youths with noble brows and delicate hands or bloated, alcoholic whoremasters, and two types of woman: horse-faced harridans in frumpish, ill-fitting outfits or mousy and mindless young breeders.

Last year a man in Bangkok sent me a fan letter. He said in his first line “I really like your writing, and I’m not even queer.” It turns out that this fellow assumed that my audience was primarily gay because I refuse to write the standard Harlot-With-A-Heart-Of-Gold fantasy that has been the staple of English language romantic fiction in Thailand since Jack Reynolds opened the flood gates with “A Woman Of Bangkok” in 1957. Maugham’s audience, in a more repressed and unenlightened age, was more accepting of the many varieties of human relationships than my own audience, who live in a world of transsexual politicians and paedophile rock stars.

Maugham went to places where the natives fell on their knees and worshipped him like a god if he demonstrated his cigarette lighter. Here, the 'natives' listen to American music on Japanese stereos in German cars; they belong to all the best clubs. You can't go around anymore shouting 'Boy! Bring me another gin stengah!' all the time. There are no more fan wallahs or gun bearers.

Kerouac hitch-hiked his way across America, Mark Twain worked on the river boats, Jack London ran the Iditerod in a dog sled. I work in an office with four computers, two fax machines and a Mr. Coffee. Hemingway made himself a legend by running with the bulls in Pamplona, but do you know that Boy George ran with the bulls after he got out of drug rehab? There are no more Wandervogel, only grubby back-packers. There are no more men working in remote outstations, who during The War went three years without seeing another white face but never failed to dress for dinner. Everybody I know has satellite TV and talks about their kid's preschools.

In Maugham's day, it was considered heroic for a man to throw away a career in the Foreign Office and die in an Opium den in Haiphong, as long as he did it to save a duchess from scandal. These days, Europe's royalty goes topless on the covers of magazines. And look at the writers who've written about Thailand already. Anna Leonowens had breakfast with the King on a regular basis; my only window onto the upper classes was a week I once spent in the same hotel with the cast of Boonchoo 7. W.A.R. Wood was consul at Chiang Mai so long ago that he rode to work on an elephant; I couldn't even point to Thailand on a map until the Johnson administration. I speak less Thai than a Miss Thailand contestant from Sacramento and I eat at McDonald's. What chance have I got?

The only chance I possibly have is to find my material, and my sense of romance, in the private, homey details of my personal life. My wife may get angry that I told the world about her disastrous first attempts at cooking American cuisine, but she won’t leave me for it. My son won’t be able to read for a few more years, and until then his catalogue of sighs, coos and adoring glances are mine to catalogue without threat of censure. The world may rush headlong into an uncertain future, but within the walls of my house time is measured by the appearance of a new tooth, dramatic conflict is defined as an argument over whose turn it is to wash the dishes, and the love that inspires sonnets is evidenced in the whole family napping together under the ceiling fan on a hot afternoon.

Since romance resides in the heart, what better place to look for it than at home?

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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If you enjoyed this short story of Steve Rosse's  you can easily purchase his book 'Thai Vignettes' online here at Bangkok Books.com: http://www.bangkokbooks.com/php/product/product.php?product_id=000025&sub_cate_name=&sub_cate_id=

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