My one liner: Maugham is one of the 20th Century’s great authors, and this book touches so many sides of human emotion, development and  self-realisation

‘Deb quando tu sarai tornato al mondo,
E riposato della lunga via,
Seguito il terzo spirito al secondo,
Recorditi di me, che son la Pia:
Siena me fè, disfecemi Maremma:
Salsi colui, che, innanellata pria
Disposando m’avea con la sua gemma’
 
‘Pray, when you are returned to the world, and rested from the long journey,’ ollowed the third spirit on the second, ‘remember me who am Pia. Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: this he knows who after betrothal espoused me with this ring.’

In his introduction to The Painted Veil, W. Somerset Maugham quotes from Dante to let us know  what was the inspiration of the story. The passage is from “Purgatorio” which is the 2nd volume of La Commedia Divina (The Divine Comedy). Pia de’ Tolomei was a gentlewoman of Siena. Her husband suspected her of adultery.  He was too afraid of her family and station to put her to death, so instead he took her to his castle at Maremma and left her there, with the plan that the noxious vapours there would kill her off.  However, she took too long to die and in the end he had her thrown out of the window.

Similarly in The Painted Veil, Walter Fane, a bacteriologist based in Hong Kong  in the early 20th century marries Kitty, a frivolous young girl who, upon
arrival in Hong Kong falls for the charms of the local cad, Charles Townsend.  Upon discovering the affair, Walter volunteers a secondment for both himself and Kitty to Mei-Tan-Fu, a fictitious colony deep inside mainland China, which is infested by cholera, in order that Walter can assist in containing the disease.  In all probability he is leading one or both of them to death.

Many of Maugham’s works deal with the constant conflict in humanity between the transient or frivolous on the one hand, and the more stoical values of constancy, substance and true knowledge on the other.  Take for example one of his other novels, The Razor’s Edge. The main character of the book is Larry Darrell, an American former-WW1 pilot who decides to go on a spiritual journey of enlightenment that eventually takes him to the East, while his wealthy socialite friends mostly suffer reversals of fortune and continue to be mired in the demands placed on them by the high society in which they operate.

In The Painted Veil it is Kitty’s journey from wannabe socialite to a state of knowing, understanding and world-weariness that comes through experiences of sadness, betrayal and human suffering.  Her husband Walter himself is considered a nobody in the social whirl of Hong Kong.  

“She had discovered very soon that he had an unhappy disability to lose himself.  He was self-conscious.  When there was a party and everyone
started singing Walter could never bring himself to join in.  He sat there smiling to show that he was pleased and amused, but his smile was forced, it was more like a sarcastic smirk, and you could not help feeling that he thought all of those people enjoying themselves a pack of fools.”

A recurrent theme throughout the novel, and one which leads the reader to consistently reflect on the title, taken from a sonnet by the English Romantic
poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

"Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life"

Even Walter’s wife hates him:

“It was laughable; he had no sense of humour; she hated his supercilious air, his coldness and his self-control.  It was easy to be self-controlled when you were interested in nothing but yourself.  He was repulsive to her.  She hated to let him kiss her.  What had he to be so conceited about?”  He danced rottenly, he was a wet blanket at a party, he couldn’t play or sing, he couldn’t play polo and his tennis was no better than anybody else’s.  Bridge ? Who cared about bridge ?”

And yet, on the cholera-infested colony of Mei-TanFu, which is where Kitty pays the price of her infidelity, none of these skills are useful.  The only Western inhabitants are the Deputy Commissioner Mr Waddington, and the French nuns in a local convent, which also serves as an orphanage for children whose parents have succumbed to the disease.

Here, Walter is in his element:

“He’s doctoring the sick, cleaning the city up, trying to get the drinking water pure.  He doesn’t mind where he goes, nor what he does.  He’s risking his life twenty times a day.  He’s got Colonel Yu in his pocket and he’s induced him to put the troops at his disposal.  He’s even put a little pluck into the magistrate and the old man is really trying to do something.  And the nuns at the convent swear by him.  They think he is a hero.”

The landscapes painted by Maugham take you to the location.  As and aside, if you are interested in fin de siècle South East Asia as seen through colonial eyes, I would also highly recommend one of Maugham’s travel books, The Gentleman in the Parlour.

But Maugham’s speciality is conveying Eastern mysticism, and its impenetrability to Western eyes.  In The Painted Veil, this mystique is embodied in the Chinese wife of Waddington  An aristocratic lady who left her newly impoverished family after the Revolution to devote her life to the
Englishman.  And Kitty starts to appreciate the depth and intensity of her
surroundings and their inhabitants:

“Kitty had never paid anything but passing and somewhat contemptuous attention to the China in which fate had thrown her.  Now she seemed on a sudden to have an inkling of something more remote and sterious.  Here was the East, immemorial, dark and inscrutable.  The beliefs and ideals of the West seem crude beside ideas and beliefs of which in this exquisite country she seemed to catch a fugitive glimpse.”

Not that Maugham lets Walter get away with it either.  Walter had ‘courted’ Kitty, somewhat ineptly for many months before proposing to her. Indeed such had been his ineptitude that Kitty had not even been sure of his love interest at the moment of proposal.  But, she had been on the social scene for several seasons without any (in her mother’s eyes) ‘appropriate’ proposals, and she had accepted more of a desire not to disappoint her mother by not being left on the shelf.  It comes back to bite Walter, through Kitty’s infidelity.  And Maugham wastes no time in telling us that he was as much at fault as Kitty for marrying her in the first place, and he ultimately pays the price:

“What did it really matter if a silly woman committed adultery, and why should her husband, face to face with the sublime, give it a thought? It was strange that Walter with all his cleverness should have so little sense of proportion.  Because he had dressed a doll in gorgeous robes and then discovered that the doll was filled with sawdust he could neither forgive himself nor her.  His soul was lacerated.”

Maugham’s language is rarely flowery or sophisticated, and most of his novels are brief.  Yet, when you look back on his novels you see that you have gone on a journey with his characters, you have taken on their learning, you have wrestled with their dilemmas, you have lived in their physical space, and you have learnt about their cultural influences. 

That is Maugham’s true genius: that you don’t notice all of this until you reach the end of the journey.

The Wikipedia link to the book is here.

There was also a 2006 film which you can read about on Wikipedia here.

My one liner: Such a short book, and so much inspiration to be drawn. A master class in brevity.  

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature on the back of the publication of this book in 1951.  If you have read this book, re-read it: you will get 100 times more from it than the first time round, especially if it was in your younger days.  If you have never read it, do so: it will not take much time.

The story of an old man’s fight, no, change that, relationship, with the immutable laws of nature; his own old age and physical decline; the experience and intuition that come from his years at sea; the challenge that he takes on to lead a large fish that he has hooked; shifting elements of the sea, the stars, the moon and the sun; man’s futile attempts to master that which cannot be mastered.

 The Old Man is a Havana fisherman, who has come out of an eight-four day barren period when he did not make a single catch.  But he continues to believe in the art and skill of his profession:

“He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water.  He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level of darkness there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there.  Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.  But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more.  But who knows ? Maybe today. Every day is a new day.  It is better to be lucky.  But I would rather be exact.  Then when the luck comes you are ready.”

And the big fish does eventually arrive.  And it takes the bait. And the hook sticks.  But, it is so big that it can last for days.  It swims further and further out to sea, dragging the boat with it. So it is now Man against Fish, a battle of wills between two worthy adversaries.

‘Fish,’ he said softly, ‘I’ll stay with you until I am dead’. He’ll stay with me too, I suppose, the old man thought, and he wished it to be light.  It was now in the time before daylight, and he pushed against the wood to be warm.  I can do it as long as he can, he thought.

 By the way, here is an outstanding animated movie of the book. Animation done in the old style without CGI.

What is it that drives the Old Man to pursue his adversary, when experience tells him that he is taking a big risk ? Perhaps it is his Ego.  I certainly think so.  The Old Man claims to have “attained humility”:

 “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility.  But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of pride.”  I think that Hemingway is showing us that total mastery of Ego and attainment of Humility is much much harder than we think.

 As is mastery of the elements and the natural world.

 But whatever his faults and ultimate lack of judgment, we cannot but help
feel admiration for the Old Man.  For he has reached a level of self-control and discipline which most of us can only dream of achieving. I have addressed this type of discipline in previous posts on Stoicism (here) and Shibumi (here and here).

 In the case of the Old Man, it is his resilience and mental strength to move
on from setbacks which marks him out:

 “ Now, he said to himself, look at the lashing on the knife and see if it has been cut.  Then get your hand in order because there is still more to come. ‘I wish I had a stone for the knife,’ the old man said after he had elevated the lashing on the oar butt.  ‘I should have brought a stone.’  You should have brought many things, he thought. But you did not bring them old man. Now is not the time to think of what you did not have.  Think of what you can do with what there is."

So much intensity and so many directions of reflection packed into such a short novel. On who Man worships, we have our Deities, but we also have our Mortal Heroes and we worship both.  The Old Man does not seem particularly religious, but he invokes God to give him strength and luck.  Yet he is also a baseball fan from the DiMaggio era of the New York Yankees.  So, we wonder whom he truly worships.

“There are enough problems without sin.  Also I have no understanding of it.  I have not understanding of it, and I’m not sure I believe in it.  Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish, I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people.  But then everything is a sin.  Do not think about sin.  It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it, let them think about it.  You were born to be a fisherman, and the fish was born to be a fish.  San Pedro was a fisherman, as was the father of the great Di Maggio.”

Ultimately this is a book which leaves as many questions unanswered as it actually closes.  It is as paradoxical as an Impressionist painting. At a distance it covers a landscape or scene of astonishing breadth with extreme clarity.  But at a close up you see the artists brush strokes which are more like pointers and clues to a deeper world beyond the canvas.

 And that, I suppose, is the genius of Hemingway.

The Wikipedia link for the book is here.