Somerset Maugham Weekend 1 – Where Did Maugham’s Interest in China Come From?

I’ve been reading Selina Hasting’s excellent biography of W Somerset Maugham The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, a great read. We’re going to both be at the Adelaide Writers’ Week imminently so I thought it time for a Maugham Weekend Special. Hastings points out a few early contacts with China and the East that the young Somerset Maugham had. For instance:

• in 1890 Maugham went to Heidelberg to study at the university one of the members of his multinational class was a young Chinese, an early Chinese student in Europe;
• Maugham’s great friend the painter Gerald Kelly (1879-1972) went on a short trip to Burma in 1908 claiming he went ‘for the light’. He didn’t stay long though but at the time Maugham recalled that he started to think about ‘the East’ a little more than before;

One of Kelly’s Burmese portraits

• in 1911 Maugham wrote that his thoughts were ‘turning east’ – specifically to Bangkok, the ports of Japan and Shanghai and that he was thinking of ‘pagodas and the scents of the Orient’;
• Kelly was planning a longer sojourn back to Burma but Maugham told him that while he would consider accompanying him, China was his desired destination. In the end war and Maugham’s bad lungs intervened in their plans;

• During WW1 Maugham was, of course famously, an operative for the British Secret Service (as recalled in his spy stories Ashenden). This rather buggared up his generally weak lungs and in 1916 he was told by his doctor that he needed to seek out a warmer climate in which to recuperate – an ideal opportunity to visit the South Seas, Polynesia, Tahiti etc etc, of which he had enjoyed reading adventures about as  boy, which led to us getting The Moon and  Sixpence, Maugham’s novelistic biography of Gaugin. But he never got the Far East;
• Then in World War One he was sent to Petrograd and travelled there from San Francisco. His ship stopped at Yokohama marking his first stay in the Far East – “tantalizing” Maugham wrote;
• In 1919 with war over, lungs better and a nice bank account thanks to plays, Moon and Sixpence and his spy tales Ashenden. Maugham declared his intention to “conquer the Far East”. He finally left Liverpool in August 1919, sailed to New York, went to Chicago to collect his companion Gerald Haxley, trained across to California and then finally to the Far East.
• Finally, Maugham gets to Hong Kong, Shanghai, up the Yangtze to Chengdu, across to Peking and then Mukden before returning home via Japan and Suez. The world got On a Chinese Screen, The Painted Veil and his play (forgotten but not too bad) East of Suez.