Photo from moviefloss.com
I love it when a book surprises me, and W. Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil almost shocked me. Reading it was a complete 180 from my traumatic high school Maugham experience. In Brit Lit, I was assigned to write a term paper about Of Human Bondage and Existentialism. The book is 600 pages long and depressing as hell. From what I recall, a pathetic artist falls in love with a waitress who cheats on him a lot. I never finished the book, I am ashamed to say, and I used the word “existentialism” as much as possible in the paper to rack up the required number of pages.
But Maugham wrote dozens of other books and plays, many of them set in the Far East. As I read about him online, he lived quite the life. He served in the British military, spied on Russians, had homosexual affairs and illegitimate children. He was one of the highest paid and most popular authors in the 1930s, and he often landed in hot water for basing his characters on real people. Now that is some US Weekly-worthy stuff that can keep a gal like me interested, Mr. Maugham!
The Painted Veil, which was made into a movie most recently in 2006, is way shorter and more palatable than OHB. The reason it surprised me, other than being enjoyable to read, is that it’s about a woman who has an affair but doesn’t meet a tragic end the way Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina do. I’ve read too many classic novels where any woman who has sex outside of marriage is totally doomed. It gets old after awhile, right, Tess of the D’ubervilles?
At first Kitty, the main character in The Painted Veil, seems all too similar to Bovary and Karenina. She’s a spoiled, shallow socialite who is only concerned with landing a rich husband. When her little sister gets engaged before she does, she freaks out and grabs the first marriage proposal that floats her way. That’s how she ends up hitched to Walter, an introverted doctor who ships her off to Hong Kong where he’s going to aid victims of the cholera epidemic. There she meets Townsend, a handsome, charming politician. They have an affair and Townsend swears he’ll stand by Kitty if Walter finds out about the affair.
Does a married guy ever leave his wife for his mistress? You can probably guess the outcome. Kitty ends up staying married to Walter, who takes her to a Chinese province where everyone is dying of cholera. Kitty is terrified of catching it, but instead she ends up seeing what a swell guy Walter is when he cares for sick kids in an orphanage. She realizes that Townsend is a total a-hole who never cared about her. Walter’s good deeds inspire her to help some French nuns take care of the orphans. I won’t tell you the end of the story, but I was impressed that Kitty actually grows a soul and redeems herself instead of dramatically throwing herself in front of a rickshaw. Instead of whining that her life has been ruined by heartbreak, she makes a bad-ass speech at the end about how she doesn’t want her daughter to make the same mistakes she did:
“I want her to be fearless and frank. I want her to be a person, independent of others because she is possessed of herself, and I want her to take life a free man and make a better job of it than I have.”
This isn’t the typical Victorian morality tale at all. Could Maugham actually be a feminist?! Hurrah!
And while the aforementioned French nuns talk a lot about sacrifice and God, I don’t think Maugham was preaching a religious message with this book. My favorite character, Waddington, is a drunk British officer with a wicked sense of humor who befriends Kitty while everyone else is busy dying of cholera. I think he is Maugham’s mouthpiece when he goes on a rant about the meaning of life:
“I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.”
And then he goes on about Taoism and almost sounds like Obi Wan Kenobi from Star Wars:
“It is the Way and the Waygoer. It is the eternal road along which walk all beings, but no being made it, for itself is being. It is everything and nothing. From it all things spring….Gentleness brings victory to him who attacks and safety to him who defends. Mighty is he who conquers himself.”
Kitty: “Does it mean anything?”
Wadddington: “Sometimes, when I’ve had half a dozen whiskies and look at the stars, I think perhaps it does.”
Sounds about right to me, buddy. Also, the book’s title comes from a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Photo from PoetryFoundation.org
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.
A Modern Librarian Reads the Classics 