In 1929, an American graduate student who was writing her master’s thesis on Somerset Maugham wrote to the eminent English author to ask, among other things, why he chose to depict the “most depraved and abominable individuals” in his fiction.
To this question, Maugham replied: “I think I have described people as I have found them … you say the characters I create are abominable: they are not to me; I am not shocked by many things that shock other people. What fills you with horror only makes me shrug my shoulders or smile. I do not see people all of a piece … I see them capable of every meanness and every heroism: that indeed is why I find them so interesting, sympathetic, and amusing … Remember that I had a very useful training in a large London hospital. It taught me lessons I have never forgotten, and for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. There I saw human nature in the raw.”
This reply is quintessential Maugham. Throughout his fiction, admirable characters do disreputable things and disreputable characters do admirable things. And Maugham -– the cold, detached vivisectionist –- records these aberrations clinically and precisely, expressing neither approval, censure nor surprise. I show you life as it is, he seems to say. If you don’t like what you see, don’t look. What keeps us from turning away is Maugham’s mastery of story-telling. His readers can’t help themselves. Pick up any one of Maugham’s stories, and you’re likely to read it through to the end.
Filmmakers were more squeamish in adapting Maugham’s work for the screen. Often, they tacked on endings that were either happier than the original, or at least had the virtue of being morally satisfying. In the 1940 film version of “The Letter”, for example, Bette Davis’ character does not commit murder and go scot-free, as she does in Maugham’s short story.
So it was with great anticipation that I went to see the latest screen version of Maugham’s 1925 novel, The Painted Veil, which opened a few weeks ago. I had enjoyed the novel, and wondered how closely the film would track the book.
To my disappointment, if not entirely to my surprise, Maugham was given the Hollywood treatment once again. His dark tale of a wronged husband’s brutal revenge on his erring wife was reduced to a period romance, while crowd scenes and political intrigue were added to the mix to inflate a simple story to near-epic proportions.
The Painted Veil deals with an English couple named Walter and Kitty Fane. Walter is a shy, introverted government bacteriologist posted to China, and Kitty is the spoiled, shallow daughter of a London barrister. Walter is home on leave in London when he meets and falls headlong in love with Kitty. Yielding to his entreaties, Kitty –- still single at 25 –- marries Walter for no better reason than to escape the humiliation of seeing her younger sister march down the aisle before she does.
The couple settles in British Hong Kong, where Kitty quickly becomes bored with her reclusive husband and his everlasting microscopes. Recklessly, she embarks on an affair with a dashing colonial officer named Charlie Townsend. Walter learns of her infidelity and, to Kitty’s horror, reveals that he’s not the detached, bloodless creature she had supposed. He’s furious at her betrayal, and confronts her with a pitiless ultimatum: Either she follows him to a remote Chinese village where he’s volunteered to help combat a cholera epidemic, or he will publicly divorce her, causing a scandal that will ruin her lover’s career and make her a social outcast.
Cowed by the threat, Kitty follows Walter to the village of Mei-tan-fu, even though she fears she’s going to certain death. This might be poetic justice, but Maugham recognizes that real life is never that simple. Neither Walter nor Kitty is “all of a piece.” Rather, each is capable of heroism and meanness.
Walter, the “moral” character, courageously battles the epidemic, but he’s not big enough to forgive his wife. Kitty, the "sinner,” discovers a small convent of French nuns in the village, and devotes herself to helping the sisters care for the many children orphaned by the plague. The movie lets Walter and Kitty discover each other’s redeeming qualities and fall in love again. Maugham leaves them lost to each other forever because of their respective flaws.
While the purist in me was offended by this mutilation of Maugham, the movie is entertaining, with gorgeous cinematography and fine performances by Edward Norton and Naomi Watts as the doomed couple. (Don’t miss Diana Rigg as the mother superior of the French nuns, even though she’s rendered nearly invisible by her voluminous habit.)
I came away from the theatre with a question: If Maugham is a second-rate writer, as highbrow critics insist that he is, why is it that even after more than eighty years, so many people can’t look on his view of reality unless it’s through the soft focus of the Hollywood lens?
“It seemed to me that I could see a great many things that other people miss,” Maugham wrote in his autobiography, The Summing Up. The better I know Maugham, the more I am inclined to agree.
