20th Century Classic. China in the 1920s. Expatriates in trouble. A cholera epidemic. What’s not to like?
The Painted Veil – W. Somerset Maugham
In this novel, bacteriologist Walter despises himself for falling in love with shallow Kitty. At 25 years of age, Kitty feels time growing short so she marries Walter though she finds him “physically repulsive.” Three months after their marriage and arrival in Hong Kong in the 1920s, Kitty falls in love with Charlie, a “vain, cowardly, self-seeking” diplomat. She ends up despising herself over loving Charlie. I’m suspicioning that a love that makes a person despise themselves had better be called an irrational infatuation. Call it anything but “love” which is supposed to make you feel happy, free, valiantly unconcerned about whatever fortune is going to toss in your path.
It makes the reader think that speakers of English make the word “love” work overtime. We use it to describe the positive feelings between parents and children, husbands and wives, and devoted friends. Heaven help us, we use the word “love” to describe the idolization of celebrities and the social and emotional upsides of job satisfaction. With so few words to describe different feelings about different relationships, no wonder misguided by crooked thinking we can’t help but make a hash of things.
And we use “love” to describe the heady releases of dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin when people fall into that state of mind, not sane, commonly known as romantic love. People are "made to" fall in love or they "just" fall in love. Married to a wife that belongs to the school “No Sex Please – We’re British,” Charlie says to Kitty, “You were the loveliest little thing I'd seen for years. I just fell madly in love with you. You can't blame me for that.” Passions, don’t you know, out of our control.
Charlie has made Kitty fall in love with his looks and charisma:
He gave her that charming smile of his which she had always found so irresistible. It was a slow smile which started in his clear blue eyes and travelled by perceptible degrees to his shapely mouth. He had small white even teeth. It was a very sensual smile and it made her heart melt in her body.
Yeah, there’s no feeling like that “melting heart” feeling. Kitty tells Charlie that Walter is “awfully in love” with her, which is OK with Charlie, since as, Percy Sledge sang, “loving eyes can never see.” Later Kitty blames her infidelity on Walter by throwing at him "If a man hasn't what's necessary to make a woman love him, it's his fault, not hers." Not our fault when the love tsunami carries us away to a sordid room in a curio shop on the cheating side of Olde Hong Kong.
Hurt and angry when he inevitably finds out, Walter offers Kitty an either-or. Accompany him while he doctors cholera patients in inland Kwantung province or face a divorce action that will blacken her reputation and end Charlie’s diplomatic career. Kitty assumes that Walter is taking her into an epidemic of cholera because he knows it will kill her. Maybe she’s spot-on though Maugham’s narrator is telling the story from Kitty’s point of view. We are never given to know what makes Walter tick.
Once in inland Meitanfu, Kitty goes to work in a convent which is caring for girls who were orphaned or abandoned. She feels a distaste for the Chinese children at first but with time and contact:
…And presently, taking in her arms one or other of the tiny creatures, crying because of a fall or a cutting tooth, when Kitty found that a few soft words, though in a language the child could not understand, the pressure of her arms and the softness of her cheek against the weeping yellow face, could comfort and console, she began to lose all her feeling of strangeness. The small children, without any fear of her, came to her in their childish troubles and it gave her a peculiar happiness to discern their confidence. It was the same with the older girls, those to whom she taught sewing; their bright, clever smiles and the pleasure she could give them by a word of praise, touched her. She felt that they liked her and, flattered and proud, she liked them in return.
For the first time in her life she helps other people learn and get better. Kitty uses the coping method we are all too familiar with: the daily ritual of work. In the evening she contemplates the stars, practicing in all innocence the spiritual exercise called “view from above.” These activities give Kitty a wider perspective.
Why could he not realise, what suddenly had become so clear to her, that beside all the terror of death under whose shadow they lay and beside the awe of the beauty which she had caught a glimpse of that day, their own affairs were trivial? What did it really matter if a silly woman had committed adultery and why should her husband, face to face with the sublime, give it a thought? It was strange that Walter with all his cleverness should have so little sense of proportion.
Hey, what good is clarifying our values if they can’t explain away love swamping us in a deluge of hanky-panky? A little charity and patience for human nature, please. As corny sage Rick mansplains to Ilsa, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."
Kitty has developed her capacity to distance herself from past mistakes and painful events. As she leaves inland Meitanfu she gets into the moment and puts her experience behind her both in space and time:
It seemed to have taken place a long time ago and in a far-off place. It was singular how shadowy the persons of that play seemed against the sunny background of real life. And now it seemed to Kitty like a story that she was reading; it was a little startling that it seemed to concern her so little. She found already that she could not recall with distinctness Waddington's face which had been so familiar to her.
At the end, Kitty lets herself down in Hong Kong. Some will argue Maugham is just being his icy self by making Kitty’s self-discovery and redemption a sham. But Maugham could be implying that though silly Kitty fouls up yet again, she is wiser about what values are important to her and she has developed the tools she needs to deal with failure: helping other people, view from above, and cognitive distancing.
Much is said about Maugham’s cynical view of human
nature. I think he’s just realistic about time and resiliency. Both just happen with little cultivation. They help everybody, especially loosely educated unsophisticated people, spring
back from adversity, defeat and loss. And I am old enough - tolerant, I hope - not to confuse his hard-boiled tone for his cheerful thought. He said, “But if to look truth in the
face and not resent it when it is unpalatable, and take human nature as you
find it, smiling when it is absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it is
pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I am a Cynic. Mostly human nature is
both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it
more to smile at than to weep.”
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