posted on 15 Oct 2023

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

A good friend of the Letterpress Project and regular contributor to its reviews has said to me on a number of occasions that the short stories of Somerset Maugham are underrated and deserve to be more widely read. I’m not a huge fan of short stories and, I confess, I’ve always thought of Maugham as comfortably in the second division of literary talent and, as a result, I’ve never got around to reading anything by him. However, when I picked up this early Penguin edition of one of his shorter novels, The Painted Veil, I thought it might be a way into his work that would sit better with me than the short story format.

The Painted Veil, published in full in 1925, was originally released in magazine instalments over the previous year. It’s a fairly simple story in terms of action but something more complex emotionally and psychologically. At the heart of the story is Kitty Garstin, an upper-crust young woman who fritters away her youth on the social circuit only to discover that by the age of 25 she is still unmarried and facing an uncertain future.

With her, far less good-looking, younger sister about to arrange a flamboyant marriage, Kitty panics and accepts a proposal of marriage from the seemingly colourless and dull, Walter Fane. Fane is a bacteriologist and has a posting in Hong Kong, where the newly wed couple head off to. Within weeks, Kitty is embroiled in an intense affair with the handsome philanderer, Charlie Townsend who is an assistant colonial secretary and married himself.

When Walter discovers the affair, fear of scandal at the prospect of a divorce uncovers Townsend as a cad and Kitty – still infatuated but in despair – is forced to accompany her husband to the China mainland to attend to a desperate outbreak of cholera. She travels expecting that she, and probably Walter, will themselves become victims of the outbreak.

But salvation and enlightenment of a kind awaits Kitty. Through contact with Waddington, the deputy British Commissioner she discovers the real and horrible truth about Charlie’s real character and motives and her time spent with a small group of self-sacrificing French nuns brings her some self-awareness and wider human enlightenment.

When she discovers she is pregnant, she has to admit to Walter that she doesn’t know whether he or Charlie is the father. It’s a revelation that Walter has to take to his grave because he soon contracts cholera and dies – probably from experimenting on himself to find a cure.

Kitty returns to Hong Kong and finds herself hailed as something of a hero – but, to her own despair, succumbs again to Charlie’s blandishments. Disgusted with herself she returns to the UK and pleads to accompany her father to his posting abroad and resolves to raise her child to avoid the dreadful mistakes she has made in her own life.

There’s no doubt that Maugham is a skilled story-teller but I found it very difficult to really care about any of the characters – somehow, they remained ideas of people rather than real, flesh and blood characters. A hundred years on from its original publication date, it’s hard for us to understand the terrible social stigma of divorce but I still don’t really believe that the self-regarding Kitty would ultimately have conceded to her husband’s demands and take the life-threatening trip to a cholera zone.

For so much of this novel I couldn’t shake the feeling that Maugham had stepped firmly into the kind of territory that a much better novelist – E.M. Forster, for example – would have handled with much more elan. 

Ultimately, I think, top of the second division.

Paperback copies of the book are readily available for well under £10.

 

Terry Potter

October 2023