W. Somerset Maugham's China and Far East II

It has been a long time ago since I started reading and admiring Maugham's works, beginning from Far Eastern short stories, like P & O and Mr. Know-all, to his HK-and-China-based novel, The Painted Veil. I love it. My wife, Joyce, shares the same feeling with me, which has proven that we have so much in common.

Maugham was one of the most notable and influential English authors in the first half of the 20th century. After the triumph of his semi-autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage (1915) and successful theatre productions, his popularity quickly spanned from Britain to America, later to France and China.

During the heyday of British Empire, armed with gunboats and outposts, Maugham was frequently introduced to China with the help of the ubiquitous presence of modern book-selling enterprises, such as Kelly & Walsh and Max Nossler in a number of treaty port cities. (to put this into a larger historical context, what kinds of literature / knowledge were brought to China by foreign and / or local book-selling enterprises? why and when? how and how many? To what extent it influenced the Chinese people? These are the essential questions to ask to cope with the lack of research on the first wave of knowledge dissemination and formation, translation being second, in Late Qing and Early Republican China.)

No wonder that Maugham was very popular among Anglophone Chinese intellectuals in Republican China during the 1930s and 1940s. His sharply exquisite depiction of human nature enchanted several generations of Chinese writers, including a young writer in the cosmopolitain Shanghai, Eileen Chang, who had been one of his avid readers at the time. 

1943年，張愛玲捧著〈沉香屑〉兩篇稿子（

"Aloeswood Ashes: The First Burning" and "Aloeswood Ashes: The Second Burning,"）謁見紫羅蘭庵主周瘦鵑以後，周瘦鵑“覺得它的風格很像英國名作家William Somerset Maugham的作品＂“她表示心悅神服，因為她正是S. Maugham作品的愛好者＂。（蘇偉貞：《孤島張愛玲：追蹤張愛玲香港時期（1952-1955）小說》（台北：三民書局，2002））

'Chang later repeated this statement in a more public setting. Invited to the Women Writer's Group Discussion held by Magazine Monthly (Cha Chih Yuan K'an) in 1944, she again mentioned that "Maugham was one of her favorite authors." See Yu Ching's The Biography of Eileen Chang (Taipei: World Publisher, 1995), 113. Later commenting on the influence of British writers on her work in a personal letter (1977), Chang reconfirmed how much she "liked Maugham's short stories." See Edward Gunn's endnote in "Antiromanticism," The Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking 1937-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 292.' (Hsiu-Chuang Deppman, “Rewriting Colonial Encounters: Eileen Chang and Somerset Maugham” Jouvert: a Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2001), one of the few early papers on Maugham and Eileen)

Some quotes from The Painted Veil (Vintage Classics).

"His shyness is a disease." (p. 47)

"it's a damned soft job to be a Colonial Governor." (p. 63) read this with the preface would make more sense to how hilarious Colonial HK was.

"it's rather hard to take quite literally the things a man says when he's in love with you." (p. 63)

to be continued...