Collected Essays

by Graham Greene

  Even The Man Who Would Be King seems marred today, after its magnificent opening, by the description of Freemasonry (that King Charles’s head) in an Afghan tribe.

  There is almost an inability to experience truly: observation is ruined time and again by the pretence of personal emotion.

  The horror, the confusion, and the separation of the murderer from his comrades were all over before I came. There remained only on the barrack square the blood of a man calling from the ground. The hot sun had dried it to a dusky goldbeater’s-skin film, cracked lozenge-wise by the heat; and as the wind rose each lozenge, rising a little, curled up at the edges as if it were a dumb tongue.

  It is one of the most famous openings in Kipling, and how shoddy it is today, apart from the one brilliantly realized scrap of description. ‘The blood of a man calling from the ground’ apparently with ‘a dumb tongue’ – always in his prose he protests too much. He is determined to ‘make his story stand up’, like any Express reporter; he calls on emotions which are not really there.

  Then who should come to tuck him up for the night but the mother? And she sat down on the bed, and they talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is to be any future for our empire. With a simple woman’s deep guile she asked questions and suggested answers that should have waked some sign in the face on the pillow, but there was neither quiver of eyelid nor quickening of breath, neither evasion nor delay in reply. So she blessed him and kissed him on the mouth, which is not always a mother’s property . . .

  Surely Tinker Bell danced when Kipling was born. Of greatly gifted writers perhaps the two who have written with most falsity of human relations are Barrie and Kipling. We know more of Barrie’s private failure: we only get a hint of Kipling’s in that long drawn feud with his brother-in-law Balestier, the inability to realize another man’s feelings. False poeticisms, the exaggerated use of technical phrases which make some of his later stories incomprehensible to the reader who has not picked the brains of a ship’s designer or an engine-room hand, scraps of Biblical English, the overpowering shyness of the schoolboy intellectual who doesn’t want to admit to the hearties of the prefect’s room that he really takes literature seriously – as the years pass we see how the young man never grew up and how patchily in prose his promise was realized.

  To me there is only one story, The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, in which Kipling does control his enormous capacity for play, play with images, phrases, the sound of vowels. The bravado, the knowingness, the caste-prejudices, the qualities which so often made him intrude a second-rate phrase to express a second-rate mood, are absent. In this story of an Indian hermit, once the Prime Minister of his State, there is a dignity of subject which compels him to write with the simple verbal music of the master he should always have been:

  Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All round it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing floors.

  Oddly it was in poetry – and often in occasional poetry at that – that Kipling reached maturity. Even at his most popular, in such poems as ‘The Song of the Banjo’, we realize the extent of his mastery when we read his imitators. Here he has enlarged the scope of English poetry to include the outer, the un-English world. In so much of Canadian and Australian poetry of his time the exotic tree, the bird with the italicized name, the mugwump – if such exists – stuck out of the verse, less absorbed by the imagination than Carroll’s slithy toves. In Kipling’s poetry the exotic is naturalized: we only notice the stranger a long while after he has gone.

  In the desert where the dung-fed camp smoke curled.

  Day long the diamond weather,

  The high, unaltered blue,

  The smell of goats and incense . . .

  And the lisp of the split banana frond . . .

  But perhaps Kipling never wrote better than when he wrote out of hate, and poetry is a better medium for hatred than prose. In his prose – in such a crude story for example as The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat – his victims are unworthy of his obsession. For hatred is an obsession, hatred confines, hatred is monotonous – Dryden and Pope drove it as far and sometimes a little farther than it will go. Kipling was their worthy successor. Who cares now for the subject of ‘MacFlecknoe’? We read it for the accurate statement of Dryden’s own mood. So too we are no longer interested in the fact that a British Government some time in the first decade of our century contemplated a joint naval demonstration with Germany against Venezuela, but Kipling’s poem is the picture of a mind in hate and we can read it still. The Marconi Scandal, because of the distinction of the accused, may still have an interest, but what was that Declaration of London on June 29, 1911, apparently just after the Coronation, which so roused Kipling’s bitterness against Government and Parliament? It doesn’t matter: the stupid bullish victim is secondary to the sword and the cape of the slayer.

  We were all one heart and one race

  When the Abbey trumpets blew.

  For a moment’s breathing space

  We had forgotten you.

  Now you return to your honoured place

  Panting to shame us anew.

  It is the fate of a good biographer that the reviewer neglects him for random reflections on his subject. Mr Carrington’s is a very good biography – we are not left, as we so often are when we have closed an official life, with the thought, ‘At least here is a quarry where other men in the future may dig more profitably.’ Mr Carrington has dug with effect: the quarry is exhausted, and, as Kipling would have wished, future writers need concern themselves only with the work.

  1956

  SOME NOTES ON SOMERSET MAUGHAM

  1

  ‘A WRITER’, Somerset Maugham declared in these ‘variations on some Spanish themes’, ‘is not made by one book, but by a body of work. It will not be of equal value; his books will be tentative while he is learning the technique and developing his powers; and if, as most writers do, for it is a healthy occupation, he lives too long, his later work will show the decline due to advancing years, but there will be a period during which he will bring forth what he had it in him to bring forth in the perfection of which he is capable.’ To this last-mentioned period Don Fernando belongs; it is Maugham’s best book.

  It will be an unexpected book for those to whom Maugham still primarily means adultery in China, murder in Malaya, suicide in the South Seas, the coloured violent stories which have so appreciably raised the level of the popular magazine. But there is a more important Mr Maugham than that: the shrewd critical humane observer of Cakes and Ale, of the best Ashenden stories, of the preface to the collected tales. The characteristic most evident in these books and in Don Fernando is honesty. It has emerged slowly out of the cynical and romantic past; there are passages in The Trembling of a Leaf and The Painted Veil which Maugham must have found acutely embarrassing to remember, and it is interesting to learn in Don Fernando that Maugham’s extensive knowledge of Spanish literature was accumulated when he was young, to provide him with material for a romantic Juanesque novel which he never wrote. Instead of Don Juan then we have Don Fernando, the innkeeper and curio dealer who forced Maugham unwillingly to buy an old life of Ignatius Loyola, and it is with this life that his study of old Spain starts.

  The contrast is peculiarly piquant between the opulence of the material (the fierce asceticisms of Loyola and St Peter of Alcantara, the conceits of Lope de Vega, the ribaldry of the picaresque novelists, the food and the architecture and the painters of Spain, the grim bright goaty land) and Maugham’s honest unenthusiastic mind. I do not mean pedantic or unimaginative. Honesty is a form of sensitivity, and you need a very sensitive ear to detect in the verbose plays of Calderon ‘faintly audible, while this or the other is happening, the si
nister drums of unseen powers’. One may smile at the idea of Maugham doing one of Loyola’s ‘Spiritual Exercises’ and finding it extremely severe (‘I thought I was going to be sick’), but it is that quality of honest experience which gives his style such vividness.

  Tarragona has a cathedral that is grey and austere, very plain, with immense, severe pillars; it is like a fortress; a place of worship for headstrong and cruel men. The night falls early within its walls and then the columns in the aisles seem to squat down on themselves and darkness shrouds the Gothic arches. It terrifies you. It is like a dungeon. I was there last on a Monday in Holy Week, and from the pulpit a preacher was delivering a Lenten sermon. Two or three naked electric globes threw a cold light that cut the outline of the columns against the darkness as though with scissors. . . . Each angry, florid phrase was like a blow and one blow followed another with vicious insistence. From the farthest end of the majestic church, winding about the columns and curling round the groining of the arches, down the great austere nave, and along the dungeon-like aisles, the rasping, shrewish voice pursued you.

  Don Fernando may be superficially discursive; Maugham is in turns critic, tourist, biographer (to find short lives as shrewd and amusing we must go back to Anthony à Wood and Aubrey), but he is working steadily forward towards the statement of his main argument: ‘It looks as though all the energy, all the originality, of this vigorous race had been disposed to one end and one end only, the creation of man. It is not in art that they excelled, they excelled in what is greater than art – in man.’ To that man Maugham has rendered the highest kind of justice, whether he is the playwright of artificial situations or the unknown sailor who, when the Armenian bishop, Martyr, begged a passage, replied, ‘I will take him in my ship; but tell him I go to range the universal sea.’

  2

  Somerset Maugham’s short stories are so well-known that a reviewer may be forgiven for dwelling chiefly on the preface which Maugham contributed to the collected tales. It is a delightfully ‘sensible’ essay on the short story, and the more valuable because it represents a point of view not common to many English writers. English short-story writers of any merit of recent years have followed Chekov rather than Maupassant.

  Maugham is a writer of great deliberation even when his style is most careless (‘burning mouth’, ‘nakedness of soul’, ‘mouth like a scarlet wound’); he will never, one feels, lose his head; he has a steady point of view. The banality of the phrases I have noted do not indicate an emotional abandonment; they indicate a rather blasé attitude towards the details of his stories; narrative is something which has to be got through before the point of his anecdote appears, and Maugham is sometimes a little bored and off-hand in the process. The anecdote to Maugham is very nearly everything; the anecdote, and not the characters, not the ‘atmosphere’, not the style, is primarily responsible for conveying Maugham’s attitude; and it is the anecdote as contrasted with spiritual analysis, Maupassant with Chekov, that he discusses in his preface with great justice to the opposite school.

  I do not know that anyone but Chekov has so poignantly been able to represent spirit communing with spirit. It is this that makes one feel that Maupassant in comparison is obvious and vulgar. The strange, the terrible thing is that, looking at man in their different ways, these two great writers, Maupassant and Chekov, saw eye to eye. One was content to look upon flesh, while the other, more nobly and subtly, surveyed the spirit; but they agreed that life was tedious and insignificant and that men were base, unintelligent and pitiful.

  This comes very generously from a disciple of Maupassant, and Maugham’s praise of his master is never exaggerated. ‘Maupassant’s stories are good stories. The anecdote is interesting apart from the narration, so that it would secure attention if it were told over the dinner table; and that seems to me a very great merit indeed.’ The best of Maugham’s stories too are anecdotes, the best are worthy of Maupassant, and his failure really to reach Maupassant’s rank is partly his failure to stick to the anecdote. Too many of his short stories sprawl into the proper region of the novel. Take for example The Pool, where the scene changes from the South Seas to Scotland and back to the South Seas, where the action covers years, and of which the subject is the marriage of white and half-caste. Nor did Maupassant’s preference for the anecdote imply a method which Maugham finds only too necessary: the method of the ‘yarn’, of the first person singular. He defends the convention ably in his preface, but in a collected volume the monotony of the method becomes apparent. One has only to remember how this convention of the first person was transformed by Conrad, to realize a strange limitation to Maugham’s interest in his craft.

  This air of being at ease in a Sion which he so candidly and rightly despises is rather pronounced in his defence of the popular magazines. As he explains in his preface, he came to the short story late in his career, he was already known as a dramatist, and it is not surprising that his stories have always been welcomed by the magazines. His good fortune has blinded him to the demands which the popular magazine makes on less famous writers. When he remarks: ‘It has never been known yet that a good writer was unable to write his best owing to the conditions under which alone he could gain a public for his work’, he has been misled, I think, by his own success. Writers belonging to a less easily appreciated school than the anecdotal, who depend for their market on the intellectual magazine, are lucky if they can earn twenty pounds by a short story, while the writer who fits the taste of the popular magazine may well earn ten times that sum.*13 It is seldom that financial worry is a condition for the best work.

  3

  Kinglake once referred to ‘that nearly immutable law which compels a man with a pen in his hand to be uttering every now and then some sentiment not his own’, and compared an author with a French peasant under the old régime, bound to perform a certain amount of work upon the public highways. I doubt if any author has done – of recent years – less highway labour than Maugham. I say ‘of recent years’ because, as he himself admits in this summing-up of his life and work.*14 he passed like other writers through the stage of tutelage – and to the most unlikely people, the translators of the Bible and Jeremy Taylor. That stage lasted longer with Maugham than with most men of equal talent – there is at the heart of his work a humility and a self-distrust rather deadening in their effects, and his stories as late as The Painted Veil were a curious mixture of independent judgement, when he was dealing with action, and of clichés, when he was expressing emotion.

  An author of talent is his own best critic – the ability to criticize his own work is inseparably bound up with his talent: it is his talent, and Maugham defines his limitations perfectly: ‘I knew that I had no lyrical quality. I had a small vocabulary and no efforts that I could make to enlarge it much availed me. I had little gift of metaphor; the original and striking simile seldom occurred to me’, and in a passage – which is an excellent example of his hard-won style at its best, clear, colloquial, honest – he relates his limitations to his character:

  It did not seem enough merely to write. I wanted to make a pattern of my life, in which writing would be an essential element, but which would include all the other activities proper to man. . . . I had many disabilities. I was small; I had endurance but little physical strength; I stammered; I was shy; I had poor health. I had no facility for games, which play so great a part in the normal life of Englishmen; and I had, whether for any of these reasons or from nature I do not know, an instinctive shrinking from my fellow-men that has made it difficult for me to enter into any familiarity with them. . . . Though in the course of years I have learned to assume an air of heartiness when forced into contact with a stranger, I have never liked anyone at first sight. I do not think I have ever addressed someone I did not know in a railway carriage or spoken to a fellow-passenger on board ship unless he first spoke to me. . . . These are grave disadvantages both to the writer and the man. I have had to make the best of them. I think it was the best I
could hope for in the circumstances and with the very limited powers that were granted to me by nature.

  ‘It did not seem enough to me merely to write’, and even in this personal book the author is unwilling to communicate more than belongs to his authorship; he does not, like a professional autobiographer, take us with commercial promptitude into his confidence. His life has contained material for dramatization, and he has used it for fiction. There is the pattern in his writing and we are not encouraged to look for its reverse in life: the hospital career (the public pattern is in Liza of Lambeth); the secret agent in Geneva (we can turn to Ashenden); the traveller – there are many books. The sense of privacy, so rare and attractive a quality in an author, deepens in the bare references to secret service experiences in Russia, just before the Revolution, of which we find no direct trace in his stories.

  The nearest Maugham comes to a confidence is in the description of his religious belief – if you can call agnosticism a belief, and the fact that on this subject he is ready to speak to strangers makes one pause. There are signs of muddle, contradictions . . . hints of an inhibition. Otherwise one might trace here the deepest source of his limitations, for creative art seems to remain a function of the religious mind. Maugham the agnostic is forced to minimize – pain, vice, the importance of his fellowmen. He cannot believe in a God who punishes and he cannot therefore believe in the importance of a human action. ‘It is not difficult’, he writes, ‘to forgive people their sins’ – it sounds like charity, but it may be only contempt. In another passage he refers with understandable scorn to writers who are ‘grandiloquent to tell you whether or not a little trollop shall hop into bed with a commonplace young man’. That is a plot as old as Troilus and Cressida, but to the religious sixteenth-century mind there was no such thing as a commonplace young man or an unimportant sin; the creative writers of that time drew human characters with a clarity we have never regained (we had to go to Russia for it later) because they were lit with the glare and significance that war lends. Rob human beings of their heavenly and their infernal importance, and you rob your characters of their individuality. (‘What should a Socialist woman do?’) It has never been Maugham’s characters that we have remembered so much as the narrator, with his contempt for human life, his unhappy honesty.