When Somerset Maugham cruised through Vietnam and never came back
At the peak of his literary fame, Somerset Maugham travelled (very swiftly) through Vietnam. Fair to say, he wasn't too impressed. So why would anyone bother to celebrate his presence here at all?
IN HANOI, THERE’S A MOST LUXURIOUS ROOM IN A MOST LUXURIOUS FIVE-STAR HOTEL.
It’s called the Somerset Maugham Suite.
This 70-sqm lodging features ‘tufted carpets’, ‘French colonial décor with Vietnamese influence’ and a ‘bespoke Parisian café inspired breakfast’, which is open to interpretation but perhaps means the coffee (no matter what you order) is surprisingly bad considering the splendour of your surroundings (yeah, eat that Paris)…
One night in this room can cost up to a cool 179 million Vietnamese ₫ – about 7,000 dollars - and I suppose it would be a pretty pleasant place for anyone who doesn’t actually want to experience Hanoi – you know, the heat and humidity, the wayward traffic and incessant din, all that rot. Indeed, if the guest remained within the confines of this plush hotel for the duration of a one-night visit it would be most appropriate because Somerset Maugham, wasn't arsed to explore Hanoi either…
For although the hotel’s website proudly states that Maugham stayed there in 1923, when writing a ‘part’ of ‘The Gentleman in the Parlour’, the city only inspired three and a half lines (in a 300-page book), which I might as well quote for you in full:
‘Here I had the intention of finishing this book, for at Hanoi I found nothing much to interest me. It is the capital of Tonkin and the French tell you it is the most attractive town in the East, but when you ask them why, [they] answer that it is exactly like a town, Montpellier or Grenoble, in France.’
ORIGINALLY, I HAD A SILLY IDEA, sort of a follow up to ‘Graham Greene’s Trip Advisor review of La Croix de Sud in Saigon’. It would be titled: ‘Why I am never going back to Vietnam’ - A 100-year old travel blog by Somerset Maugham. But reading ‘The Gentleman in the Parlour’ left me with a fine pickle of a conundrum as read, in the here and now, it’s already an exquisite piece of satire.
Here’s Maugham waxing lyrical when describing a river in Asia: “You could never have mistaken it for an English river, it had none of the sunny calm of our English streams, nor their smiling nonchalance; it was dark and tragic, and its flow had the sinister intensity of the unbridled lusts of man.” Which makes me wish someone (a ‘native’ naturally) presented him with a freshly opened durian, so he could have compared it to a bowl of strawberries and cream. But then the gentleman would have to have left the parlour for that to happen…
There are also some look-away-in-horror moments for the modern-day reader – Exhibit A: After finally escaping Southeast Asia on a shabby steamer bound for Hong Kong, Maugham meets an ‘odious’ but ‘entertaining’ Jewish American, who he recalls as being ‘the kind of Jew who made you understand the pogroms.’
IT’S CURIOUS TO ME THAT THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR continues to be lauded by the likes of Pico Iyer as a masterpiece of travel writing, especially when Maugham even admits (within the book itself) that he isn’t cut out to be a travel writer. After arriving in Angkor, he briefly imagines being inspired to write something that can capture the ‘confused’ and ‘shadowy’ splendour of the temples: ‘Alas, I have not the smallest talent for this sort of thing and – doubtless because I cannot do it myself – I do not like it very much in others.’
At this stage of the book, he has already proven his own point many times over. Here he is on Bangkok and, while he’s at it, all Asian cities: ‘It’s impossible to consider these populous modern cities of the East without a certain kind of malaise. They are all alike… [….] their dust, their blinding sun, their teeming Chinese, their dense traffic, their ceaseless din. They have no history, no tradition. Painters have not painted them. No poets [….] have given them a tremulous melancholy of their own […] They live their own lives, without association, like a man without an imagination. […] They give you nothing.’
When he does tentatively venture outside the hotel, he spies something – ‘squalid streets’, ‘tortuous alleys’, ‘numberless shops’ – and concludes: ‘The sun beats down and the road is white, the houses are white, and the sky is white; there is no colour but the colour of dust and heat.’ Which actually does remind me of a Sang Som (Thai whiskey)-infused hangover I once had in Bangkok back in 2002AD, but that’s another story…
IF ANYTHING SAÏGON (WHEN IT STILL HAD AN UMLAUT) fares a little better than its Indochinese peers in The Gentleman in the Parlour. Arriving there, just before Lunar New Year in 1923, Maugham declares it to be a blithe and smiling little place, noting all of the reassuring French-built landmarks and tree-lined avenues (Maugham was born in Paris), and ‘gesticulating, bearded Frenchmen’ drinking sweet and sickly beverages’ (Vermouth cassis, Quinquina Dubonnet, et cetera). He even acknowledges that Saigon might be a pleasant enough place to sojourn for a few days, especially if one is content to sit under the awning of the Hotel Continental with an electric fan on his back. But… Maugham isn’t staying for a few days. Merely a few hours. He quickly departs on board the Messageries (a vessel worthy of Maugham’s praise). His destination? Hue. However, first he must ‘dock’ at Tourane (modern-day Danang), a port city without a pier, which means he must clamber into a small sampan that two brown-faced women manfully row to land. When the sampan can’t quite reach the shoreline, Maugham suffers the indignity of having to strap himself to the back of a ‘coolie’, who wades him to safety – Oh Maugham, how positively mortifying!
After checking into a ‘shoddy’ hotel, which allocates him a’ ‘dark and dingy room, Maugham, who whilst travelling is simultaneously unhappily apart from his boyfriend, and happily avoiding his wife, tries to see the romance of it all before concluding Tourane doesn’t deserve it: “I had never arrived anywhere in such a romantic style and I could not but think this must be the preface to an experience that would be memorable. But there are places of which the only point is the arrival. They promise the most fantastic adventures [….] they are like a face, full of character that intrigues and excites you, but on closer acquaintance you discover is merely the mask of a vulgar soul. Such is Tourane.”
From Tourane, Maugham then hastily continues (without noting any of the coastal magnificence to his right — no comparison to the Cliffs of Dover, I suppose) by road to Hue, which at first appears ‘pleasant enough [….] like a cathedral city in the west of England.’ Unfortunately the hotel is one of ‘the worst in the world’ although ‘colonists’ seem quite content with culinary offerings of sardines, pate de foie gras and Worcester sauce. When he perambulates around, he notes that the French emigres live in houses which ‘they have built without regard for the climate’ and ‘look like the villas of retired grocers in the suburbs of Paris.’ How gauche! Maugham then muses on the differences between being an (inherently racist) English colonist and being a (inherently racist) French colonist, which is a most entertaining digression…
Later on that day, as it is Tet (Lunar New Year), Maugham accompanies the French Resident Superior and some other French bigwigs to watch a special performance at the Imperial Palace in the Citadel, at that time still home to the Vietnamese royal family (the Nguyen dynasty). He notes the palace is rather ‘Chinese in inspiration’ but in a ‘shoddy and second hand’ kind of way. The gardens are ragged and rank. The trees stunted. He is somewhat surprised that somewhere in this place there’s an actual emperor who is surrounded by women, eunuchs, and mandarins and ‘ruling shadowy under the power of France’. Maugham can only conclude that even the emperor is aware of the pretence involved, which is, to be fair, probably bang on the money.
From there, Maugham travels north – not curiouser and curiouser; just hastier and hastier – and after his swift dismissal of ‘Grenoble/ Montpellier of the East’, he continues to Haiphong, a ‘commercial town and dull’ with one definite attraction: it’s where he will exit Southeast Asia on a boat bound for Hong Kong …
With nothing to do for the evening in Haiphong, Maugham buys a paper and kills time with a tincture of Dubonnet (When in Rome, old boy….) until luncheon at his hotel bar, where he meets an Englishman with a mottled face and decaying teeth. At first Maugham imagines this strange chap must be a ‘stranded beachcomber’ that is hard up for cash. But no, it’s a man called Grosely, who had briefly been a medical student at St. Thomas’s Hospital alongside Maugham nearly 30 years previously. It’s here where Maugham demonstrates his real passion when travelling – it’s not the destination but the tragic cases along the way that he wishes to examine. Grosely, who was once upon a time a flash and fresh-faced womaniser, but who fell from grace, tells Maugham (over a bottle of brandy) that he came to Haiphong for ‘48 hours’ and that was five years ago. You see, after 20 years in China, where he had made half-decent money as a tide-waiter (customs inspector), Grosely had attempted to repatriate only to discover London had moved on without him. More distressingly, young women in England weren’t attracted to his 40-year old, weather-worn, drink-addled head: “[Grosely] began to think that London was no place for a white man. It had just gone to the dogs, that was the long and short of it, and one day the thought came to him that perhaps it would be a good thing if he went back to China.”
So he sailed all the way back to Asia with the intention of starting over in Shanghai, only to disembark in Haiphong, where he was now shacked up in the ‘native quarter’ with a woman, a woman that he’d paid to sleep with him on his first night, and a woman who was now his wife: ‘Somehow I stayed on. You know, you’d be surprised how quickly the days pass. I don’t seem to have time to do half the things I want to. After all, I’m comfortable here. The old woman makes a damned good pipe [of opium], and she’s a jolly little girl, my girl, and then there’s the kid. A lively young beggar. If you’re happy somewhere what’s the good of going somewhere else?’
It’s a question to which he did not expect an answer. Not that Somerset Maugham had one. The jaded gentleman traveller would soon take his leave of Grosely’s squalid little parlour and sail for Hong Kong, although he would depart believing that his host really was happy, if somewhat deluded in Haiphong. And perhaps that confounded Maugham, who, when trying to explain why he travelled so frequently, wrote: “I am often tired of myself and have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little.”
Alas, as the old adage reminds us all, wherever you go (and no matter how much you’re paying for the room), well, there you are, old boy, there you are.
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thank you
Interesting. In 2024 I consider Asia being more civilized than Europe.