Maugham died a few months short of ninety-two.Ĥ When I first saw details of the Angers 1997 Symposium, with its themes of Self and Other, as well as the whole battery of complex alliances and transgressions that frequently accompany movement of the sort implied by ‘Other Places’, I thought that Maugham would make an ideal choice. A member of the British Intelligence, an inveterate traveller, an astute observer of artistic movements and personalities, he saw the Boer War, two World Wars and, in British terms at least, six monarchies come and go. In terms of historical significance - when he wrote, the subjects he covered, the personal involvement he had with world events - Maugham was also impressive. He wrote forty-two books which included travelogues, collections of essays, and autobiographical sketches, in addition to his twenty-seven plays, many of which were successful enough to have been turned into movies or else adapted for television. Fallen from critical favour in recent years, I will argue that Maugham’s writing needs to be re-examined within the context of colonial and postcolonial writing, and that his short stories, in particular, present one of the most detailed and evocative studies of end-of-era imperialism.ģ Maugham, as a French as well as an English speaking audience will be aware, was a prolific writer. It is this topicality - the representationalism, the pseudo-anthropological charge that Maugham gives to his writing, and the very relevence that he has for students of empire - that I wish to discuss. While some of the stories gathered in collections such as Cosmopolitans are quite short, others stretch our idea of what constitutes a short story considerably and although the subject matter for many of the stories varies - complete with a Maupassant-Poe formulation not suited to all tastes - the tales have a very topical flavour. A cosmopolitan writer, at ease within many cultures, Maugham married what he understood best to those themes which he knew would be of the utmost interest to his readers: exotic locations, stories of adventure and, frequently loss, among the ’high seas’, and of lives that were filled with intense desires and animosities. Whether in Tahiti or Honolulu, or indeed aboard the vessels that carried his characters from one location to another, Maugham consistently flavoured and peopled his stories with ’imperial’ characters: plantation owners, petty officials, dissident adventurers, and the sort of determined missionaries that seemed to hold such interest for Maugham.Ģ In this paper I want to examine the stories of a writer who appeared to many as a quintessentially ‘English’ figure, but one who was born in France, albeit technically on British soil. Division One’, wrote Lytton Strachey), and to dismiss his writings as either too journalistic, or too commercially successful to be seriously considered, many of his stories, particularly in their attention to ethnic and racial tension, provide a significantly graphic portrait of the ideology of empire. Although Maugham’s literary conservativism led many critics to castigate him (’Class Two. Author of numerous plays, novels, essays and travel literature, Maugham is probably best remembered for his short stories, particularly ‘The Out Station’, ‘P & O’, ‘The Colonel’s Lady’, and many others. 1 William Somerset Maugham was born on 25th January 1874 at the British Embassy in Paris.
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