The Skeptical Romancer

When one travelled in the East, it was astonishing how often one came across men who had modelled themselves on the creatures of his imagination
.

– W. Somerset Maugham, of Rudyard Kipling

What makes a great traveler? Those of us who spend much of our lives on the road – or on the page – often beguile an idle hour or two with the question. The ideal companion should be open to every person or encounter that comes his way, perhaps – but not too ready to be taken in by them. She should be worldly, shrewd, her feet firmly on the ground; and yet she should be ready to surrender, if only for a moment, to the magic and excitement of what she could never see or do at home. He should be curious, observant, fun, wry and kind; he should be able to spin a spell-binding tale before the Royal Geographic Society in London and then throw it all over for a crazy romance in the South Seas.

The heart of the conundrum, really, is that the people we like to spend time with on the road are often sensible, and yet aware of the limits of sense, and the virtue of being senseless every now and again. They’re rooted enough to be up for every possibility. They shouldn’t have an agenda or overwhelming prejudices, and they should be as able to see to the heart of the natives of any country as to their fellow travelers. Maybe what they really offer is a happy blend of steadiness and surprise.

I draw up such lists myself, often, and then I look across the room and realize that there’s one person I know who fits the bill ideally. Somerset Maugham was celebrated in the England of his day as one of its most successful dramatists and is cherished, even now, almost half a century after his death, as a spinner of classic tales of exploration and flight that Hollywood seems to turn into fresh movies every year.
Of Human Bondage
,
The Razor’s Edge
,
The Moon and Sixpence
all define Maugham for many as a cool, even feline observer of the human tragi-comedy who could be at once startled and amused by the stories he
picked up and set in colonial Asia or the Pacific. The person behind them, we sense, was someone always hungry for the new, and ready to follow any opening or character he met, down any alleyway, in search of a story, yes, but also in search of a sense of escape and even transcendence.

Maugham’s voice and presence have so much the feeling of Edwardian England and the silk dressing-gown, however, that it’s easy to forget sometimes that he was born in Paris, and that his early letters were all written in perfect French (for English schoolboys the secret language of romance). He studied in Heidelberg for two years as a teenager, he went to live in Seville for sixteen months in his early twenties and, having already mastered Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian and Russian, he set about learning Spanish. He served in World War I as volunteer ambulance driver and nurse, even though he had four plays on at the time in London’s West End – and then became the West’s main source of intelligence in Russia during the weeks leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. By the 1920s, before most people, even those of means, were traveling very widely, he was going to Borneo, to China, to the South Seas and Japan, and, having spent early sojourns in Paris and Capri, he passed the last thirty-nine years of his life in the south of France. There he had another memento of the larger world, a secret symbol to repel the evil eye, painted on his outside wall – the same symbol he slipped on to the cover of his books.