Grove Koger

Novelist, playwright, short story writer, memoirist—W. Somerset Maugham (whom you see below in a 1927 portrait) was one of the most famous and highly paid authors of his time. And although he enjoyed traveling, his visit to the islands of the Pacific during World War I may strike us as oddly timed.

However, as Maugham explained in a letter to a friend, the trip “was forced upon [him] accidentally by the fact that during the war [he] was employed in the Intelligence department, and so visited parts of the world which otherwise [he] might not have summoned up sufficient resolution to go to.” Maugham’s orders dealt in particular with the islands of Samoa, which had been devastated by volcanic eruptions and racked by civil wars—conflicts that had been exacerbated by the intervention of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. Germany and the United States had eventually divided control of the islands, but with the opening stages of World War I, troops from the British Dominion of New Zealand had occupied the German islands. Maugham was expected to evaluate the uneasy situation.

Spurred by his long-standing interest in French painter Paul Gauguin (whom you see below in a self-portrait from 1889), Maugham went on to visit Tahiti in February 1917, staying at the Tiare Hotel in the capital city of Papeete and managing to find a few people who had known the artist, including Gauguin’s friend Louvaina Chapman. In turn, Chapman introduced Maugham to a female chieftain in a settlement near where Gauguin had lived. As a result, the writer learned that, during his ultimately fatal struggle with syphilis, Gauguin had been cared for by a farmer, and, in gratitude, had painted images on the panels of several of the farmer’s glass doors. One of the doors remained in passably good shape, and Maugham promptly paid 200 francs (twice what the farmer asked), took the door off its hinges, and carried it to his car.

In time, Maugham was able to display the door, dubbed Tahitienne debout, or Tahitian Standing, in his Villa Mauresque near Cap Ferrat on the Riviera. While palpably Gauguin’s work, it’s not among his best. The same is true of Maugham’s 1919 novel The Moon and Sixpence, whose protagonist Charles Strickland was inspired by Gauguin. It may be Maugham’s most famous work, but while Strickland’s appalling selfishness is a match for Gauguin’s own, Maugham seems to have no insight into the painter’s great talent. The stories he collected in Ashenden; or, The British Agent (1927), which were inspired by Maugham’s work in the intelligence service, are better, while The Narrow Corner (1932) and The Razor’s Edge (1944) show him at his very best.

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