Melville and Maugham:

Colonial Desires in the South Seas

HANK GALMISH
Green River Community College

A
n obituary for Herman Melville in the New York Mail and Express
of October 8, 1891, notes that for his last twenty years Melville
had been nearly forgotten in his own country while his reputation
was flourishing in England. English critics and the reading public were still
moved by Melville’s unusually explosive prose, and were also fascinated by his
exotic voyages into “forbidden seas” and his landings on “barbarous coasts”
as striking reflections of England’s own colonial adventures by the end of the
Victorian era. W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of a number of
English writers influenced by Melville. Maugham entered into early manhood
longing to be a writer like Melville. Through his alter ego Philip Carey in Of
Human Bondage, he describes his struggle to free himself from the limits of
the Edwardian world: “He wanted to go to the East. . . . He pictured to himself
palm-trees and skies blue and hot, dark-skinned people. . . . His heart beat with
passionate desire for the beauty and strangeness of the world.”1 Maugham
went to the South Seas in 1916 and much later stated that his early reading
of Melville and the French author Pierre Loti (1850-1923) prepared him for
what he saw. In The Summing Up (1938), Maugham writes:
I went, looking for beauty and romance and glad to put a great ocean between
me and the trouble that harassed me. I found beauty and romance, but I
found also something I had never expected. . . . I entered a new world, and
all the instinct in me of a novelist went out with exhilaration to absorb the
novelty. It was not only the beauty of the islands that took me, Herman
Melville and Pierre Loti had prepared me for that . . . what excited me was
to meet one person after another who was new to me.2
Maugham describes his life up to that point as being narrow. When he traveled
to Tahiti and lived, for a time, “on a different plane” he found that “Culture
C 2009 The Authors

Journal compilation 
C 2009 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

1 Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), 481.
2 Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 131. We do not know
exactly when Maugham read Melville’s early novels, but Jeffery Meyers points out that Maugham
always brought “a large sack of books to fit every occasion and mood” and surmises that Maugham
must have reread Typee and Omoo on his journey; see Somerset Maugham: A Life (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2004), 116.

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 H A N K G A L M I S H

is a mask that hides [civilized] faces. Here people showed themselves bare”
(Summing Up 131). Needless to say, Melville could have written the same about
his experience in the South Seas. His sailing years (1841-1845) allowed him
to see Pacific peoples without, in his mind anyway, the deceptive masks of
Western society, giving him both the impetus and material for a lifetime of
writing.
With French as his first language, Maugham would have known the
works of the popular Loti, who had traveled widely in the nineteenth century
and written many books about his adventures and romances, including those
in Tahiti, related in his popular The Marriage of Loti (1880). But, among
Maugham’s contemporaries, the difference between Melville and Loti was
significant. As early as 1921, Carl Van Doren noted that “Melville, though
thoroughly sensitive to the felicities of the exotic life, never loses himself in
it entirely as did later men, like Lafcadio Hearn and Pierre Loti, but remains
always the shrewd and smiling Yankee.”3 And in a late critical study, Points of
View (1958), Maugham refers to a time in India when the Hindus came to see
him “as the man who was by the special grace of the Maharshi rapt into the
Infinite,” just as Melville’s neighbors came “to see Herman Melville as the man
who lived among the cannibals.”4 Maugham identified with Loti and Melville,
and responded naturally to the descriptions of beauty found in both writers,
but he resonated on a far deeper level with the more disturbing tensions and
psychological dislocations so prevalent in Melville’s fiction.
Writing seventy-five years after Melville first published, Maugham de-
scribes characters whose desire to escape from civilization is hopelessly frus-
trated, and whose lives end in catastrophe, alienation, and death. Though
happy to have “a great ocean” between him and Europe, he discovered in the
South Seas the sobering truths of the uprooted westerner, unable to thrive in
a culture he seeks to dominate but does not understand. For Maugham, as
with Melville, the artistic enterprise provides the only possibility of resolving
the difficulties that arise when incommensurate cultures such as Polynesia and
the West collide. Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919) and three stories
in The Trembling of the Leaf (1921), all of which grew directly out of his
time in the South Seas, demonstrate patterns in Maugham’s confrontation with
colonial desire consistent with the literary heritage made famous by Melville
in his early novels.

3Carl Van Doren, The American Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1921); www.bartleby.com/
187/5.html.
4 Somerset Maugham, Points of View, (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 51.

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I
n his short story collection, The Trembling of the Leaf , Maugham explores
the social and psychological problems he confronted during his wan-
derings in the South Seas as a secret agent for the British government,
problems rooted in over a hundred years of colonial intervention and the
imposing of western “civilization,” its norms and culture, upon these islands.
Although Melville had romanticized these islands as paradise, he had also
indicated the inner tensions at work in Polynesia and the early corrosive effects
of commerce, colonial governments, and the missionaries. By Maugham’s day,
however, the work of “civilization” was nearly completed. As Klaus Jonas
points out in “Maugham and the East,” Maugham’s first attraction to the
East had come from his reading of romances.5 But, once on the islands, he
discovered that civilization had already arrived, and that the pictured worlds
of books can be far different from reality. Whereas Melville arrived in the
Marquesas and Tahiti just as the French colonialism was beginning to establish
its disastrous hegemony, the “primitive” had already long been eliminated by
1916 when Maugham landed in Tahiti. Paul Gauguin whose life-story would be
so important to Maugham later, saw the loss as early as 1900 when he described
this phenomenon in his journal, Noa Noa:
Life at Papeete soon became a burden. It was Europe—the Europe which
I had thought to shake off—and that under the aggravating circumstances
of colonial snobbishness, and the imitation, grotesque even to the point of
caricature, of our customs, fashions, vices, and absurdities of civilization. Was
I to have made this far journey, only to find the very thing which I had fled?6

If what Maugham had hoped for was not found, what he did find became the
subjects for stories and novels for the next thirty years. As Maugham states in
a letter to Leslie Marchand in 1928,
When I went down to the South Seas I came across a great many types that
were entirely new to me, and situations that appealed to my imagination. I
was very much struck by the effect of the climate and surroundings on the
white people who for one reason or another had drifted there. So far as I was
concerned I seemed to be entering upon an entirely new literary life. . . . (as
qtd. in Jonas 97)

Three stories in The Trembling of the Leaf in particular reveal Maugham’s

recognition that his “passionate desire for the beauty and strangeness of the
world” had already been frustrated, and that what remained was the literary
scrutinizing of the effects upon character in such unique settings. In “Rain,”
5 Klaus W. Jonas, “Maugham and the East: The Human Condition; Freedom” in The World of
Somerset Maugham, ed. Klaus W. Jonas (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1959), 97.
6 Paul Gauguin, Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal (New York: Dover Publications, 1985), 2.

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the reader sees the tragic effects of a repressive Christianity unable to sustain
control over the lush fertile worlds it seeks to dominate; in “Mackintosh,” the
free-roving spirits of Typee and Omoo are overwhelmed by a harsh, mid-level
manager, an obsessive engineer who bullies others in his efforts to encircle his
island with a highway. (It is as if Ahab has taken his command to land in the
role of a territorial governor.) And most tellingly, in “The Pool,” the Edenic
scenes so evocative of Tommo’s romance with his pipe-smoking Fayaway
on their hidden lake are extended logically to result in a catastrophic and
suicidal clash of cultures. As the collection’s title indicates, Maugham offers
a vision of the South Seas as a world balanced precipitously, like a trembling
leaf, between its older, putative identity of paradise (what Kipling calls “a
greener, cleaner world”) with all its allures for freedom and regeneration, and
the provincialism of the colonial world hungrily engaged in reduplicating its
own restrictive structures upon a non-receptive people in ways inappropriate
geographically as well as culturally.7 The bitter disjunction between what the
characters in the stories hoped for and what they actually find provides the
conflict; this disjunction also leaves a sad sense of recognition for the reader
that the characters who sought escape remain “damned even in the midst
of paradise” (to recall Ahab’s lament). As with many perceptive writers of
his time, Maugham recognizes the sterility of the colonizing enterprise and
even predicts its ultimate failure; he describes, with poignant accuracy, the
deleterious effects upon the characters who find themselves caught between
conflicting cultures.
One similarity to Melville is the form in which so many of Maugham’s
stories and novels are told. Maugham uses a presumably objective, outside
narrator (often a doctor, at times clearly identified as Maugham) who knows
intimately the key character(s) involved in the story and can offer insight
and awareness that is beyond that of the protagonist. Maugham comments
generally upon the art of writing fiction in Ten Novels and Their Authors:
There is, however, a variety of the novel written in the first person which, to
my mind, avoids the defects of the method and yet makes handsome use of its
merits. . . . To what good use it can be put may be seen in Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick. In this variety, the author tells the story himself, but he is not the
hero and it is not his story he tells. He is a character in it, and is more or
less closely connected with the persons who take part in it. His role is not to
determine the action, but to be the confidant, the mediator, the observer of

7 Maugham borrowed his title from the French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte Beuve: “In life
happiness and misery are separated by so small a division or so small an event that this may
well be compared to the trembling of a leaf.” A. Grove Day, ed., “Aliens Adrift Among the Islands”
(Introduction), The Trembling of a Leaf (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 2002), xi; hereafter cited
as Trembling.

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those who do take part in it. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, he reflects
on the circumstances which he witnesses; he may lament, he may advise, he
ha[s] no power to influence the course of events. He takes the reader into
his confidence, tells him what he knows, hopes, or fears, and when he is
non-plussed frankly tells him so. . . . He can so build up the protagonist as
to arouse your sympathy and show him in an heroic light, which the hero-
narrator cannot do without somewhat exciting your antagonism. A method of
writing . . . which conduces to the reader’s intimacy with the characters, and
adds to its verisimilitude, has obviously much to recommend it.8

In his stories and novels, this “method of writing” is frequently the framework
Maugham adopts: an objective, even emotionally detached yet perceptive nar-
rator who tells the reader both the story and the significance of that story.
He adopts the Ishmael-Ahab method, although in a colonized world with
much of Ahab’s titanic stature reduced under the leveling power of colonial
bureaucracy.
One of the key differences in Maugham’s approach is to use ironically
distant narrators who are worldly-wise, sympathetic, but generally detached
from the tragedies that unfold. These characters have already lived through the
shock brought by colonialism and so, unperturbed, they are able to see and to
comment upon the misunderstandings caused by the narcissistic misreading
of a foreign culture. These characters embody a consciousness that parallels
Maugham’s mindset. In some stories, like “The Pool” where the narrator
remains unnamed, the inference is that it is Maugham himself who narrates
the story.
In “Rain” (made famous by multiple Hollywood film versions), the
Ishmaelean Dr. Macphail presents us with the Ahabian, earnestly demanding
missionary Davidson who is traveling with his wife on his way to a new mission
north of Samoa. A malaria outbreak forces the travelers into quarantine at a
hotel along with others, including the colorful prostitute, Sadie Thompson,
who is on her way to Honolulu. The outraged missionary begins his battle to
defeat the “sin” and “evil” that has come seemingly to infect his missionary
work. Davidson brags of his successes in pressuring local magistrates to inflict
clothing laws upon the easy-living natives; therefore, he is not about to allow
his work to be jeopardized by this Jezebel. In an oddly self-revelatory passage,
Davidson describes to Dr. Macphail his efforts at evangelizing the natives:
We had no one to help us. We were alone, thousands of miles from any
of our people, surrounded by darkness. When I was broken and weary she
[Mrs. Davidson] would put her work aside and take the Bible and read to me
till peace came and settled upon me like sleep upon the eyelids of a child,

8 Somerset Maugham, Ten Novels and Their Authors (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), 17.

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and when at last she closed the book she’d say: “We’ll save them in spite of
themselves.” And I felt strong again in the Lord, and I answered: “Yes, with
God’s help I’ll save them. I must save them.” (Trembling 19)

And so he sets about “saving” Miss Thompson with the cold fury of a stalking
lover. Maugham describes the missionary as being driven by a dark relentless
fury that seems to be motivated by an unconscious energy. Davidson states,
“I’ve given her every chance. I have exhorted her to repent. She is an evil
woman.”. . . Dr. Macphail saw his eyes darken and his pale face grow hard
and stern. . . . He walked up and down the room. His mouth was close set,
and his black brows were frowning. “If she fled to the uttermost parts of the
world I should pursue her.” (27)

The description is similar to the initial appearance of Ahab on the quarter-

deck in Chapter 36 of Moby-Dick: the dark eyes, the incessant pacing, the
hard face, the frowning brows, but most significantly, the fanatical pledge to
“chase him [the white whale] round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and
round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition’s flames before I give him
up . . . to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of the
earth. . . .”9 Davidson operates on a smaller scale rhetorically, but he is driven
by self-destructive furies similar to Ahab’s; Macphail, on the other hand, is an
older and more observing Ishmael who understands but says little.
Throughout the story, Sadie is confronted, rebuffed, defeated, cowed,
humiliated, and finally “converted”; she acknowledges her own sense of shame.
The intensity of the minister grows—the true infectious “outbreak” in the story
resides here—as he spends more night hours catechizing his repentant Mag-
dalene as the incessant and maddening rains continue to fall. The perceptive
Macphail senses the impending disaster when the troubled minister reveals to
his wife his dreams of the mountains in the Nebraska panhandle. Macphail’s
association with these mountains conveys their significance:
He had strange dreams. . . . he’s been dreaming about the mountains of Ne-
braska. . . . [Macphail] remembered seeing them when he crossed America.
They were like huge mole-hills, rounded and smooth, and they rose from the
plains abruptly. Dr. Macphail remembered how it struck him that they were
like women’s breasts. (Trembling 40)

The world of the minister implodes one night when Davidson faces repressed
sexual urges he can no longer control. He flees to the sea where he cuts his
throat in a futile attempt to escape from himself, while Sadie returns to the
“oldest business of all” now more firmly convinced than ever that all men are
9 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1988), 163.

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the same under the surface: “You men! You filthy, dirty pigs! You’re all the
same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!” (45).
The missionaries satirized in Typee and Omoo fought the easy-going
sexual attitudes of the islands; now seventy-five years later, in the person of
Davidson, those repressed and repressing personas are unable to resist their
libidinal urges; the missionaries have been changed as much, if not more, than
the islanders in the encounter. Within fifty years after the pioneering work of
England’s most celebrated missionary, William Ellis, the legal system of Tahiti
had outlawed dancing, the singing of sexually suggestive songs, the wearing
of flowers in the hair, the ancient ritual of tattooing, and indiscriminate sexual
encounters. Silence was to be the rule on Sundays, and full clothing mandatory.
A hundred years later, the English writer Robert Keable, a former Vicar of
the Church of England, noted wryly “that it was a thousand pities that the
Tahitians did not convert Mr. Ellis”10 Maugham gives us the portrait of a
missionary who is converted to his own repressed nature, but the encounter
shatters his sense of identity and leads him to suicide. Macphail, an Ishmael of
sorts in the story, alone survives to tell us the story.
In “Mackintosh,” Maugham explores the institutions of local colonial
rule: misfit ministers appointed from home offices exercising power and com-
mand with little external or internal controls, who in their solitary positions
slowly decay and corrupt. Wilson is a sort of mediocre Kurtz from Conrad’s
grimmer, more famous Heart of Darkness. For him, the “ivory” to be won is the
making of roads. He is obsessed with encircling and crisscrossing the island
he governs with roads to connect village to village. His conflicting motives are
mixed together, inseparable even to himself: the engineer’s pleasure of domina-
tion; his commercial greed; his genuine desire to benefit “his children,” the na-
tive peoples. Like Macphail, Mackintosh (Wilson’s long repressed, tormented
assistant) is the story’s central consciousness. Like Maugham, Mackintosh is
bookish and came to the South Seas years before in a spirit of romance, looking
for an escape promised in literature. Instead he finds himself bullied. With
subtle cleverness, Mackintosh harnesses the resentment of an islander who
kills Wilson. However, the engineer and his bureaucrat remain the controlling
forces of these islands, and Wilson dies encouraging and exhorting Mackin-
tosh: “The road’s the great thing. Get the road finished.”11 Unable to fulfill an

10 As qtd. in Jean-Bernard Carillet and Tony Wheeler, Tahiti and French Polynesia (Melbourne:
Lonely Planet Publications, 2001), 23.
11 The significance of roads to the islands is a feature Maugham would have found in Omoo, in
which Melville describes the “beautiful” Broom Road: “by far the best thing which civilization has
done for the island.” Melville goes on to state that the roads were first made for the convenience
of the missionaries, but later became vehicles for commerce and colonial organization.

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imposed responsibility, and in a suicidal revolt against authority, Mackintosh

wades into the surf and puts a bullet into his head. The free spirit of the rover,
the Edenic dream of living effortlessly off the land, is over. Although the frame
of reference is different from “Rain,” the underlying tone in “Mackintosh” is
effectively represented by Davidson’s “I must save them.” A monomaniacal
will, enthralled by a vision of perfection and a dream of order, seeks at all costs
to impose its will upon “primitive” life. Again we hear echoes in a lower key of
monomaniacal Ahab come ashore to assume the role of a colonial bureaucrat.
But in “The Pool” Maugham alludes most directly to the lost Eden
Melville fictionalized in Typee. The story told through the consciousness of an
unnamed narrator (perhaps Maugham) relates the life of a young man named
Lawson, who travels to Samoa in search of adventure, freedom, and romance.
He finds a job as a manager in an English bank. From his first days on the
island, Lawson drinks in the lush flora and fauna:
He had never before known freedom or leisure. And he was intoxicated by
the sunshine. When he rode through the bush his head reeled a little at the
beauty that surrounded him. The country was indescribably fertile. In parts
the forest was still virgin, a tangle of strange trees, luxuriant undergrowth
and vine; it gave an impression that was mysterious and troubling. (Trembling
115)

Lost in the newness of the fertile world, Lawson spends his days wandering
deeper into Samoa and frequents a lovely, silent pool:
There was a little river that bubbled over the rocks in a swift stream, and
then, after forming the deep pool, ran on, shallow and crystalline, past a ford
made by great stones where the natives came sometimes to bathe. . . . It had
a tropical richness, a passion, a scented languor which seemed to melt the
heart. The water was fresh, but not cold; and it was delicious after the heat of
the day. To bathe there refreshed not only the body but the soul. (115)

And it is at the pool that he meets Ethel, the daughter of a tough old Norwegian
and an island woman. Just as Tommo takes to Fayaway, Lawson is smitten by
Ethel’s pristine natural beauty magnified by the hidden setting:
he went again to the pool. Ethel was there; and the mystery of the sunset, the
deep silence of the water, the lithe grace of the coconut trees, added to her
beauty, giving it a profundity, a magic which stirred the heart to unknown
emotions. . . . She swam about the green pool, she dived, she rested on the
bank, as though she were quite alone; he had a queer feeling that he was
invisible. Scraps of poetry, half-forgotten, floated across his memory. . . . He
felt at peace with the world . . . he loved Ethel as a poet might love the moon.
He thought of her not as a woman but as something not of this earth. She
was the spirit of the pool. (117-18)

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The narrator helps the reader to remain more aware of the unreality of the
phenomena being described than Lawson, whose soul is blinded by “scraps
of poetry” and “unknown emotions. Again, the reader is given information
mediated through the more detached and worldly-wise consciousness of the
older man. The reader is never allowed to surrender to the lush beauty of “the
pool” as Lawson does because the details of the narrative are always mediated
through a more mature and even ironic consciousness.
Nevertheless, the description is reminiscent of the famous bathing
and pool scenes that began in Chapter 12 of Typee and continue through
Chapter 18 where Tommo describes spending idyllic hours at an exotic pool
with island women and finally with the native beauty, Fayaway. Tommo
describes watching the young native women, naked to the waist, frolicking in
the pristine pool in an idyllic scene.12 This daily ritual bathing and massaging
(scenes suffused with sexual energies) provide intense pleasure for Tomoo.
But there is an unreality to it all. Tommo later describes lying on a couch-
shaped rock and watching while covered “with a gauze-like veil of tappa . . . the
half-immersed figure of a beautiful girl, standing in the transparent water, and
catching in a little net a species of diminutive shell-fish. . . .” For Tommo, the
beauty at the pool offers “tranquilizing influences” which help him to forget all
his troubles and bury “for the time every feeling of sorrow.” (NN Typee 110)
Later, he and Fayaway spend hours together in idyllic scenes at the pool.
Tommo states,
We sometimes enjoyed the recreation in the waters of a miniature lake. . . .
This lovely sheet of water was almost circular in figure, and about three
hundred yards across. Its beauty was indescribable. All around its banks
waved masses of tropical foliage, soaring high above which were to be seen,
here and there, the symmetrical shaft of the cocoa-nut tree, surmounted its
tuft of graceful branches, drooping in the air like so many waving ostrich
plumes. (NN Typee 131)

Later, Tommo is allowed to break a native taboo and bring Fayaway into his
canoe, and together they drift in careless lassitude on cool waters—he admiring
her disrobed beauty and she sweetly smoking her pipe:
We floated about thus for several hours, when I looked up to the warm,
glowing tropical sky, and then down into the transparent depths below;
and when my eye, wandering from the bewitching scenery around . . . finally
encountered the pensive gaze of Fayaway, I thought I had been transported
to some fairy region, so unreal did everything appear. (134)

12 Herman Melville, Typee, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle
(Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1968), 90;
hereafter cited as NN Typee.

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The continuous fear of cannibalism and the longing for home keep Tommo
from the fate of Lawson.
Maugham, also, emphasizes the unreality of the magical pool experience
in his story, but unlike Tommo, Lawson has little with which to resist total
immersion in the illusion. Love of his water nymph offers him union and peace
with the world, and so Lawson plunges madly into his “unknown emotions.”
Mesmerized by this “spirit of the pool,” he courts Ethel, and, bound by his
western code of honor, he marries her, planning to settle down into a “happily
ever after” idyll. But as in Typee, homesickness intrudes; Lawson decides to
take his wife (now with their young child) home to England. But just as he
cannot wholly abandon his western world, she is unhappy without hers and
longs to return to Samoa. Mother and child escape home. In desperation,
Lawson abandons career, house, money, respectability to follow her. Back
in Samoa, living with Ethel’s family but still an outsider, Lawson inexorably
degenerates.13 After Ethel takes a native lover, the now alcoholic Lawson
returns to the “magic” pool where the story began, ties heavy weights to his
legs, and drowns himself. Lawson has come to realize that his attempt to bridge
the two cultures has left him a wreck of a man; it has destroyed his ability to
love another, and more importantly to love himself. The narrator, just before
the end, asks Lawson if he still loves his wife, to which he replies,
“But I did love her so.”. . .

“Is it too late for you to start fresh? Couldn’t you make a dash for it and leave
the place?”

“I haven’t the strength. I’m done for.”

“Are you still in love with your wife?”

“Not now. Not Now.” He repeated the two words with a kind of horror in his
voice. “I haven’t even got that now. I’m down and out.” (Trembling 141)

Maugham’s phrase, “A kind of horror in his voice,” clearly echoes Kurtz’s

“The horror, the horror” in his own tortured moment of self-realization as
he faces death. “The Pool,” more than any story in Maugham’s collection, puts
a period to the dreams of romantic escape first touched upon in Melville’s
13 Lawson lacks any anthropological understanding of the marriage rituals of the South Seas
islanders. In his classic study Melville in the South Seas (1939), Charles Roberts Anderson notes the
fluidity of the Polynesian marriage described by C. S. Stewart in 1831, and later by Melville in Typee
(NN Typee 191). The inability to accept or anticipate such a different matrimonial arrangement
is, Lawson’s doom. Pierre Loti’s The Marriage of Loti also begins when he sees his beautiful island
nymph swimming in a pool. His romance, however, ends happily, unlike the suicide Lawson or
the guilt-ridden Tommo who flees to home and mother.

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early novels; it goes a step further by pointing out, as A. Grove Day notes, that
any attempt to mingle two such different cultures by the unifying power of
romantic love with all its fantasies brings only anguish to all involved (“Aliens”
Trembling 6).
But there is another side to Maugham’s “trembling leaf.” Certain charac-
ters, like Edward Barnard in the story by the same name, simply “go native” as
best they can, and are able to find a modicum of peace and happiness. However,
this narrative possibility is most pointedly explored through Charles Strickland
in The Moon and Sixpence.14 Loosely based on French artist Paul Gauguin,
Maugham’s harrowing story depicts a middle-class, middle-aged businessman
who is overcome by an unrelenting and even cruel desire to paint; he ends
up abandoning wife, family, career, religion, respectability, to plunge into
the native world of Tahiti in an attempt to put to peace some inscrutable
restlessness in his soul. The dream of the South Seas had been a powerful
symbolic phenomenon that ached in his soul. While in Paris, Strickland tells
the narrator Ashenden,
Sometimes I’ve thought of an island lost in a boundless sea, where I could
live in some hidden valley, among strange trees, in silence. There I think I
could find what I want. (Moon 79)

In the end he finds that “island lost in a boundless sea,” where somehow art
and Tahiti redeem him, even as his body is being devoured by leprosy.
After his death, the narrator views Strickland’s superb masterpiece
painted all over the walls of his house when he was nearly blind. Ashenden
describes them as the fulfillment of his life’s purpose:
And I fancied that perhaps here he had at last found peace. The demon that
possessed him was exorcized at last, and with the completion of his work, for
which all his life had been a painful preparation, rest descended on his remote
and tortured soul. He was willing to die, for he had fulfilled his purpose.
(Moon 209)

Ashenden goes on to describe the subject matter of the final paintings that
seems to express the mysterious struggles of Strickland’s soul.
It was strange and fantastic. It was a vision of the beginnings of the world,
the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve—que sais-je?—it was a hymn to
the beauty of the human form, male and female, and the praise of Nature,
sublime, indifferent, lovely, and cruel. It gave you an awful sense of the
infinity of space and of the endlessness of time. Because he painted the trees
I see about me everyday, the coconuts, the banyans, the flamboyants, the

14 Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin Books, 1944); hereafter cited
as Moon. The novel was first published in 1919 on the hundredth anniversary of Melville’s birth.

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alligator pears, I have seen them ever since differently, as though there were
in them a spirit and a mystery which I am ever on the point of seizing and
which forever escape me. The colours were the colours familiar to me, and
yet they were different. They had a significance that was all their own.
And those nude men and women. They were of the earth, the clay of which
they were created, and at the same time something divine. You saw man in
the nakedness of his primeval instincts, and you were afraid, for you saw
yourself. (209)15

But the strange masterpieces are destroyed, when the house is burned to the
ground at the wishes of the leprous Strickland and by order of the health
department. Even so, we feel a deep reconciliation has been won through the
artistic struggle. In this strangely secretive man, through the medium of his
art, conflicting cultures seem integrated into a whole. However, the dynamics
of the plot make this integration questionable. Ashenden discovers that one
painting remains, a still life of strangely colored, exotic fruit. He tries, in his
purple prose, to capture the spirit of the painting but knows that words can
hardly tell what a troubling emotion they gave.
. . . Who can tell what anguished fancy made these fruits? They belonged to a
Polynesian garden of the Hesperides. There was something strangely alive in
them, as though they were created in a stage of the earth’s dark history when
things were not irrevocably fixed to their forms. They were extravagantly
luxurious. They were heavy with tropical odors. They seemed to possess a
somber passion of their own. It was enchanted fruit, to taste which might
open the gateway to God knows what secrets of the soul and to mysterious
places of the imagination. They were sullen with unawaited dangers, and to
eat them might turn a man into beast or god. . . . A fearful attraction was in
them, and, like the fruit on the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they
were terrible with the possibilities of the Unknown. (Moon 212)

The narrator turns away, mystified by the painting and by the man, convinced
“that Strickland had kept his secret to the grave” (211). From the days of
Of Human Bondage, Maugham had come to believe, like Schopenhauer, that
art in its multiple forms is the one possibility humans have to escape from the
anguish and suffering of human existence. Flight to the South Seas was not
a panacea, but for Strickland, as for Gauguin, it offered a place of difference
where the torments of the civilized soul might be able to work out an artistic
15 Maugham is probably describing Gauguin’s strange, haunting masterpiece “Where Do We Come
From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” completed in 1897. It was Gauguin’s most serious
attempt to make a complete statement of his grapplings with the meaning of life. Using a image
of a baby as the entrance into the world of the painting, Gauguin portrays in subdued blues and
vivid greens the retelling of the Eden story, the plucking of the forbidden fruit, the lost world of
paradise, and the final alienation we must all face, symbolized in the image of a sullen old crone
seated upon the ground in the left section of the spectacular canvas.

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answer to the dilemma of life. Or, at least, we are offered the possibility that
“the primitive” is a place where the question itself might be reformulated and
bypassed in an entirely new manner.

I
n mid-life at the age of 40, Somerset Maugham went to the South Seas.
He wrote in Summing Up that having read Melville, he was prepared for
the beauty that he was to see in Polynesia. Beneath that beauty, he also
understood the latent tensions already present yet not fully realized by the
colonizing powers in the Melvillean worlds of Typee, Omoo, Mardi, and Moby-
Dick.
One connection seldom mentioned—though Maugham was clearly
aware of it—was what he perceived as Melville’s closeted homosexuality. In
an introduction to the life of Herman Melville in Ten Novels and Their Author
(1954), Maugham writes,

It seems fairly evident that Melville was a repressed homosexual. . . . The

sexual proclivities of an author are no business of his readers, except in
so far as they influence his work . . . when they do, and the facts are put
before you, much that was obscure or even incredible may be made plain.
If I have dwelt on this idiosyncrasy of Melville’s, it is because it may ac-
count for his dissatisfaction with married life; and it may be that a sexual
frustration occasioned the change in him which has puzzled all those who
have interested themselves in them. The probabilities are great that his moral
sense prevailed; but who can tell what instincts, perhaps even unrecognized
and, even if recognized, angrily repressed and never, except perhaps in
imagination, indulged in—who can tell, I say, what instincts may dwell in a
man’s being which, though never yielded to, may yet have an overwhelming
effect on his disposition. (192-93)

Maugham, of course, did “indulge” in his instincts, but in keeping with his
own writer’s prescription he made it clear that his sexual activities were to
be no business of his readers. Meyers, in his biography of Maugham, argues
that Maugham displayed a great sensitivity and insight towards Melville’s
secret struggle with his own sexuality. Maugham, Meyers points out, res-
onated with Melville’s attraction to the beauty of the male character as
seen in his descriptions of Harry Bolton in Redburn and of Billy Budd the
“Handsome Sailor” plagued with the curse of stammering—an affliction that
Maugham himself struggled with all his life. Maugham and Melville, both
isolatos (Melville’s word) and “alienated outsiders” (Meyer’s phrase), cut off
from their identities by social and moral disapprobation, forced to become
secretive and to deny an essential part of their lives, were thus able to
see into the false aspirations promised by the romantic dream that lulled

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many a reader into Kipling’s “neater, sweeter maidens in a greener, cleaner

land.”16
Maugham in his brilliant short stories and in The Moon and Sixpence
revealed to his generation just how incommensurate western attitudes towards
commerce, religion, authority, family, and sexuality were with Polynesia as
western nations sought to impose themselves upon that “strange and beautiful
world” of the South Seas. Melville’s early novels offered a crucial paradigmatic
seed that Maugham would cultivate into maturity in his novels, including the
autobiographical Of Human Bondage. Melville provided Maugham with the
model for stories like “Rain,” “The Pool,” and “Mackintosh” that deal with
the marginalized man trapped in a narrow, sterile society who seeks life and
vitality through a wild, even suicidal, plunge into the distant and the exotic.
These futile but fertile attempts at escape provide a rich field for the artist
to investigate the ambiguities involved in differing attitudes towards society,
sexuality, and human identity. He filters this struggle through an Ishmael-
like consciousness who survives to utter “I alone remain.” The survivor is not
the actor who seeks to impose a foreign way of thinking and living upon an
incommensurate world, but the detached, older observer who lives in the midst
of social ties; and, of course, he remains primarily as the artist, entrusted to tell
us the story and so to reveal its inner meanings. In that process, he reaffirms
the value of art and of human consciousness. Maugham’s deepest sensitivities
resonated with Melville’s, despite their seeming differences in style and back-
ground. Melville’s characters flee to “paradise,” but bring their “knowledge of
damnation” within them; Maugham’s characters two generations later embody
the complexities of a colonial desire living out the pervasive effects of that
imported damnation.

16 Maugham claims in Ten Novels and Their Authors that much of Melville’s later misogyny and
general crankiness comes from his repressed sexual desires frustrated by the demands of marriage
and family that were incapable of meeting his basic human needs. The traditional religious or
philosophical “problem of evil” that haunted Melville throughout his life with his Dutch Calvinist
underpinnings, was also a preoccupation of Maugham’s. In The Summing Up, he states that the
unexplainable reality of the suffering of the innocent in the world was the fundamental reason
why he had given up his religious faith and had accepted atheism. Like Melville, Maugham could
never totally give up on religion and until the end wandered in his writings—as did Melville,
according to Hawthorne in 1856—”to and fro over these deserts [of thought]. . . . He can neither
believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do
one or the other.”

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