Melville and Maugham: Colonial Desires in the South Seas

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. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 43 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...