GLR November-December 2023

BOOKS

Somerset Maugham Does Penang

W ORKS OF FICTION that feature characters who are historical figures, espe cially ones that feature a writer whose work we know better than their biography, can sometimes lead read ers to a greater appreciation of, and affec tion for, the fictionalized writer. One thinks of Michael Cunningham’s The

that collection, The House of Doors ex plores themes of race and caste, gender, sexuality, marriage, infidelity, duty, and the crumbling British empire. Maugham has arranged for a two-week stay in Penang with an old friend, Robert Hamlyn, an attorney that Maugham met during World War I, and his wife Lesley (along with Maugham, one of the book’s

H ANK T ROUT

THE HOUSE OF DOORS by Tan Twan Eng Bloomsbury Publishing 320 pages, $28.99

Hours , which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an ex quisitely rendered novel that fictionalizes Virginia Woolf and borrows from her style in Mrs. Dalloway . Similarly, Colm Tóibín’s The Master (2004) and The Magician (2021) bril liantly bring Henry James and Thomas Mann to fictionalized life, providing clear links between the lives they lived and the fiction they produced. Among these novels that fictionalize a part of another writer’s life, we now have The House of Doors , an elegantly written new novel by celebrated Malaysian novelist Tan Twan Eng. The book draws upon real events to reimagine the details of one of W. Som erset Maugham’s visits to Penang, formerly a state in British Malaya, in the 1920s. In both subject matter and style, Tan’s novel echoes some of Maugham’s life and his own works. During his life, Maugham relied upon his exotic travels to replenish his well of subject matter with other people’s personal stories. “A man is more willing to open up to you once you’ve revealed something personal, something shameful about your self,” Maugham (the character) explains to a local Penang news paper reporter. He freely took and adapted other people’s often salacious, often tragic secrets and stories and put them in his fiction, peering into the gap between public morality and pri vate truths while scrupulously keeping his own secrets from public view. Maugham was vividly aware of post-Victorian England’s harsh treatment of homosexual men in the wake of the Oscar Wilde debacle. Gerald Haxton, Maugham’s hard drinking “secretary” and long-time lover, had been exiled from England in November 1915 for soliciting sex in a Covent Gar den hotel and was banned from returning. Thus, in order for Willie (as Maugham was called) and Gerald to carry on their affair, they had to travel—and did so extensively, including a 1919–20 trip to the Far East, which is what The House of Doors is based upon. In the novel, the fictional Maugham is near bankruptcy after a disastrous investment failure, and he needs material for a new book to refill his coffers. Dissatisfied with his contentious, ex pensive wife Syrie Wellcome, he travels (with Gerald in tow) to Penang in search of inspiration. The trip provides him with enough material—unhappy marriages, infidelities, a Chinese revolutionary, and a murder and trial—to inform the six stories in his 1926 collection The Casuarina Tree . Like the stories in Hank Trout has served as editor at a number of publications, most re cently as senior editor for A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.

narrators). Maugham senses that all is not right in the Ham lyns’ marriage, and with a little prodding he convinces her to share her stories. He finds that he’s right about the Hamlyns. Both Robert and Lesley have had affairs—Lesley with Arthur, an associate of the real-life Chinese revolutionary Dr. Sun Yat Sen; Robert with a subordinate in his law office with whom he often traveled. Seeing a plot thickening, Maugham adjures Les ley and other acquaintances to tell more stories about their lives. Once she warms to Maugham and learns to trust him,

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