Under Eastern eyes: Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) were both orphaned in childhood, learned French before they learned English and left their professions, sailor and doctor, to become writers. Maugham—with his two languages, two nationalities, two professions, his marriage and his homosexual relationships—was intensely aware of his own dual character and concerned with the problem of identity and selfhood.  Like his literary master, who called himself “a Polish nobleman, cased in British tar”, Maugham could also say with Conrad, “Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning.” (In this respect, Conrad followed Montaigne, Buffon, Baudelaire and Durkheim, all of whom also wrote about the “double man”.)

Conrad and Maugham were both published by Fisher Unwin and clients of the same literary agent, James Pinker.  Though Conrad was much older, they published their first books within two years of each other in the 1890s. In a letter to Unwin, Conrad felt the need to distinguish his own more serious but less successful novels from Maugham’s entertaining popular fiction.  Urging the publisher to recognise the superiority of his own books, he rather defensively criticised Maugham’s first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897): “It is certainly worth reading—but whether it is worth talking about is another question. . . . There is any amount of good things in the story and no distinction of any kind.  It will be fairly successful I believe—for it is a “genre” picture without any atmosphere and consequently no reader can live in it.  He just looks on—and that is just what the general reader prefers.”  But Conrad underestimated Maugham’s youthful novel, which has a vivid heroine, a compelling atmosphere and a poignant theme.

Maugham included Conrad’s Typhoon in his anthology Tellers of Tales (1939). But always aiming for compression in his own work, Maugham ignored his rival’s tremendous achievement as a novelist and criticised him for being too long-winded: “Conrad rarely wrote anything but short stories, but being a writer of exuberant verbosity, he often made them as long as most novels.  He needed sea-room.  He had little sense of concision.”  Despite the fact that pioneering and appreciative books on Conrad had led to his revival in the 1940s, Maugham asserted: “Conrad is less read now and less admired than during his lifetime.”  His criticism attempted to disguise his profound indebtedness to his rival — a far greater writer.  His comment was bitterly resented by Conrad’s admirers and damaged Maugham’s reputation.

Maugham did, however, pay a half-hearted tribute to Conrad in his story “Neil MacAdam” (1932).  The eponymous hero claims (quite impossibly) to know Conrad’s 26 volumes almost by heart and had expected to find in Malaya a land of “brooding mystery”.  When a Russian woman attacks the violently anti-Russian Conrad as a showy, rhetorical, affected, superficial and commonplace mountebank, MacAdam defends him.  Alluding to the famous Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, MacAdam declares: “There’s no one who got atmosphere like Conrad.  I can smell and see and feel the East when I read him. . . . I don’t think it’s a mean achievement to have created a country, a dark, sinister, romantic and heroic country of the soul.”  Yet Maugham, who voiced some of his own criticism through the Russian woman, gives her the last word.  She calls MacAdam a sentimentalist and urges him to read the truly great Russian novelists: Turgenev, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.

Maugham’s European characters, like Conrad’s, are isolated and desperately lonely in remote tropical outposts.  Maugham described a “peculiar thrill, a strange primeval feeling”—similar to what Conrad’s Marlow felt when he pursued Kurtz up the river in the Congo—“that you get on a river in Borneo when you hear drums beating in a distant village.”  In Heart of Darkness (1899) Marlow contrasted the chaos and anarchy of the Congo with the security and order of England: “Here you all are, each moored with two good addresses, like a hulk with two anchors, a butcher round one corner, a policeman round another.”  In Of Human Bondage (1915) Maugham borrowed Conrad’s symbol and phrasing when he wrote that “Philip’s rule of life” was to “follow one’s instincts with due regard to the policeman round the corner.”

In The Explorer (1908), a mediocre but quite readable novel, Maugham openly imitated Conrad.  His description of the tropics comes straight out of Heart of Darkness: “Her eyes dazzled with the torrid African sun, and she felt the horror of the primeval forest.”  His account of the folie d’Afrique (with its allusion to Proverbs 16:31) echoes Conrad’s Kurtz, without portraying a civilised man destroyed by the Congo: “Men seemed to go mad from a sense of power, to lose all the restraints which had kept them in the way of righteousness.”  As in Conrad’s novel, Alec has to lie to the Intended about the savage behaviour of her beloved hero in Africa.

Like Conrad before him, Maugham was especially interested in “the effect of climate and surroundings on the white people who for one reason or another had drifted” into the punishing climate and alien cultures in the East.  Maugham was familiar with Malaya and Borneo from his close study of Conrad, who’d visited them during his maritime career.  Maugham’s journey to those countries in 1921 made a deep impression, and the bored, isolated and disillusioned Englishmen described by Conrad became a favorite subject in The Casuarina Tree (1926).  Some of these men, like Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence (1919), wanted to escape the constraints and obligations of European civilisation, and live a freer and more dissolute life in exotic places.  Others had banished themselves after personal failure or tragedy.

Conrad’s first novel Almayer’s Folly (1895), set in Borneo, portrays the white man in the tropical East, destroyed by his own corrupt ambition and by his beautiful but treacherous mixed-race daughter.  Maugham said that the major theme of his own The Trembling of a Leaf (1921) was “the soul-corroding effects of succumbing to the sexual proclivities of native women.”  Or, he might have added, of not succumbing to them.  Writing about his second Borneo novel, Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad told his aunt that like an Impressionist painter, “I want to describe in broad strokes, without shading or details, two human outcasts such as one finds in the lost corners of the world.”  The themes of the novel are betrayal and retribution.  Willems, like the hero of Maugham’s The Narrow Corner (1932), commits a crime and is sent to a remote tropical outpost.  Married to a mixed-race woman, overwhelmed by the hostile environment and by his sense of isolation, he becomes enslaved by his Malay mistress.

Maugham’s “Mackintosh” (1921), the story of two incompatible men who must work together on a remote Pacific island, was strongly influenced by Conrad’s early, ironically titled story “An Outpost of Progress” (1898).  In both tales two antagonistic and violent men are locked together.  In Conrad, after a trivial quarrel about a bit of sugar, the Dutchman Kayerts, maddened by isolation in the jungle, shoots his unarmed companion, Carlier.  He is found hanging, with his tongue sticking out, when the long overdue company steamer finally arrives.  In Maugham’s version, Mackintosh, a Scot, hates his vulgar Irish superior Walker.  Walker quarrels with the natives about his obsessive desire to build a road around the island, and Mackintosh allows his revolver to be stolen by an angry Samoan.  When the Samoan shoots Walker, who asks Mackintosh to forgive his murderer, Mackintosh belatedly realises that Walker was a good man.  Overwhelmed, like Kayerts, by guilt and remorse, he shoots himself.  Conrad expressed the dominant idea of both stories when he wrote, “contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble in the heart.”

In “The Outstation” (1924), Maugham once again takes up the fatal Conradian situation in “An Outpost of Progress” of two white men isolated in the tropics.  Warburton, the middle-aged Resident, needs an assistant, but he’s been isolated for so long that he dislikes company and dreads the new colleague.  Cooper, a boorish young man who’s served in the ranks during the war, offends Warburton on the first night by coming to dinner in dirty clothes.  Maugham gives a masterly account of the monotonous and hideous hatred inflamed by class consciousness.  Cooper is a competent administrator but treats the natives harshly, bullies his servants until no one will work for him and refuses to heed Warburton’s warnings about his reckless behavior.  As in Conrad’s story, the impasse ends in a trivial but crucial way when Cooper appropriates Warburton’s precious newspaper when he’s away on tour.  The older man is so outraged when he returns that he doesn’t intervene when Cooper repeatedly mistreats his servant.  He’s pleased when the servant takes revenge by stabbing the young man to death, and plans to hire him when he’s let out of prison.  The colonial service has thrown together two socially antagonistic men, a snob and a fool, with tragic results.

Conrad not only provided the literary context of Maugham’s Eastern fiction, but also invented the realistic espionage novel in The Secret Agent (1907), the model for Maugham’s Ashenden: or the British Agent (1928).  Like Conrad, Maugham believes the police and the criminals share the same mentality.  Ashenden plays a subversive role and experiences the thrill of deceit: “He was travelling with a brand new passport in his pocket, under a borrowed name, and this gave him an agreeable sense of owning a new personality.”  Like Conrad’s Assistant Commissioner, the shifty spy chief R. takes no risks and trusts no one, uses operatives for his own purposes and considers them all expendable.  In a crucial passage Maugham condemns the self-serving immorality of such men, who achieve murderous ends without taking on the responsibility of murderous means: “Though ready enough to profit by the activities of obscure agents of whom they have never heard, they shut their eyes to dirty work so that they could put their clean hands on their hearts and congratulate themselves that they never had done anything that was unbecoming to men of honour.”

Maugham took the plot of The Narrow Corner from Conrad’s Victory (1915).  In both novels three strangers suddenly arrive on a remote tropical island in the Dutch East Indies and come into violent conflict with two European lovers.  In Victory Jones, Ricardo and Pedro are gamblers and criminals on the run, vainly searching for hidden treasure.  In The Narrow Corner all three outcasts of the islands also have a shady past and secret guilt.  Fred Blake has fled Australia after murdering his mistress’ husband; Captain Nichols has lost his sailor’s certificate after trouble with an insurance company; Dr. Saunders has been removed from the medical register for unethical practices.  Most important, Maugham adopts the covert theme in Conrad’s novel.  The homosexual connection between Dr. Saunders and his Chinese servant Ah Kay, between Blake and Eric Christessen, echoes that of Jones and Ricardo, as well as Jones’ recognising the repressed homosexuality of the tragic hero, Axel Heyst.

Maugham not only imitated Conrad’s work, but also resembled a Conrad character, who revealed the defects of his own personality.  Like Heyst, Maugham distrusted human emotions and intimate relations, and believed “he who forms a tie is lost.  The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.”  Raymond Mortimer, reviewing Purely for My Pleasure (1962), emphasised Maugham’s radical flaw, his chilling aloofness: “A distrust of life, presumably the sour fruit of a most miserable childhood, seems to have made him reluctant to care deeply for anyone or anything—even for pictures, even for the words that are the material of his art.  I think that no great writer, not even Hume or Gibbon, has been so detached.”  Conrad’s passionate commitment to the deeper implications of his novels made him a much greater writer than the reserved and reticent Maugham.

Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published biographies of Joseph Conrad (1991) and Somerset Maugham (2004).

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