CONFIDENCE TRICK

 

During the interwar years from 1919 to 1939, Britain continued to rule over a vast global empire. Millions of non-Britons were seemingly compliant with the wishes of a relative handful of white administrators, traders and planters. That this preposterous bluff worked at all was a mystery that intrigued contemporary authors.

Of writers like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, it is probably W Somerset Maugham who came closest to describing the colonial 'type', of intuiting the 'trick' of colonist confidence. His short fiction has become associated with the Federated Malay States (FMS) and British North Borneo (BNB) in particular.

Through his stories collected in The Casuarina Tree (1926) and Ah King (1933), Maugham delivers an astute understanding of how a few Englishmen and their wives 'got away' with dominating many more Malays, Dayaks, Chinese and Tamils. 

Maugham is reminded of the Casuarina trees he observed in the otherwise luxuriant jungle. They were "grey, rugged, sad, and a little out of place in the wanton tropics". He saw in "that hardy tree, doing its best in difficult places, a symbol of their own exiled lives".

This comment in the author's preface to The Casuarina Tree alerts readers to a particular time and place, one without postcolonial pretensions. Maugham's point of view is not towards the colonised. He re-affirms this focus in his introduction to Ah King. These stories, he says, do not make "any attempt to deal with the natives of the countries" in which they occur, "except in so far as they affect the whites who live among them".

In current thinking, the writer's singular approach may feel insensitive or even offensive. However Maugham's limited perspective actually achieves something worthwhile. In their impossibly foreign setting, the author/narrator stares at his subjects dispassionately. The resulting portraits are not necessarily sympathetic or unsympathetic. They are the 'means' by which a specially binding social code is revealed.

Maugham is interested in the characters who populate the front-line of imperialism, the personalities of empire who act out their roles in obedience to an ideal of innate superiority. As an English visitor to Malaya, (6 months in 1921 and 4 months in 1925) he watches "the effect upon them of a manner of life that is not quite natural to them".

As a popular middle class writer, Maugham supplies his readers in the United Kingdom and His Majesty's (white) Dominions with all the tropes of the Far East. There are torrential monsoonal rains, dense dark jungles, and sexual scandal far from home. There is too, an attitude of exhaustion.

These white people are marooned. They do not belong here. They may be a ruling elite but they are still fundamentally out of place in the tropics. It is just too hot, wet, humid, dirty, irritating and uncomfortable.

At a surface level, the operation of the code that keeps them here can be comic. In The Outstation, the Resident insists on certain standards to be followed by his new assistant, no matter that they are posted to a distant riverbank, days away by boat from the capital.

"I always dress for dinner".

"Even when you're alone?"

"Especially when I'm alone", Mr Warburton replied with a frigid stare.

"When I lived in London I moved in circles in which it would have been just as eccentric not to dress for dinner every night as not to have a bath every morning. When I came to Borneo I saw no reason to discontinue such a good habit. For three years during the war I never saw a white man. I never omitted to dress on a single occasion on which I was well enough to come into dinner. You have not been here very long; believe me, there is no better way to maintain the proper pride which you should have in yourself. When a white man surrenders in the slightest degree to the influences surrounding him, he very soon loses his self-respect, and when he loses his self-respect you may be quite sure that the natives will soon cease to respect him".

* * * * *

At a deeper level, 'performance' assumes a deadly serious tone. In The Door of Opportunity the code is broken by a crucial failure of 'character'. The actors in this colonial theatre are required to be more than costumed buffoons. 

When a violent rebellion breaks out on an upriver plantation, the highly educated and intelligent Resident overthinks his response. Alban Torel's caution is interpreted as cowardice. The story can be sampled in three 'sketches of interview', featuring District Officer Alban Torel and his wife Anne with injured eye-witness Oakley, Dutchman Van Hasseldt who manages a neighbouring timber camp, and Torel with the provincial Governor.

(Explanatory note:  In an age before the invention of modern literary criticism it was usual to include quite large quotations from the text being reviewed. This custom had the advantage of giving prospective book purchasers something of the 'flavour' of the writing they could look forward to if they read the whole thing. The three extracts reproduced below are an attempt to transmit a sense of the 'excitement' contained in the original story.)

(i)  

'...there had been a good deal of discontent on (Prynne's Adul Estate) of late. The coolies were Chinese and infected with communist ideas. They were disorderly...

...The boatmen brought ghastly news. The Chinese coolies had risen suddenly and attacked the manager's office. Prynne was killed and the assistant, Oakley by name, had escaped only by the skin of his teeth...

...The half-caste was silent. Alban looked at him sternly.

"How many of these damned Chinese are there?"

"A hundred and fifty".

Anne wondered why he asked so many questions. It seemed a waste of time. The important thing was to collect coolies for the transport up-river, prepare the boats and issue ammunition to the police.

"How many policemen have you got, sir?" asked Oakley.

"Eight and the sergeant".

"Could I come too? That would make ten of us. I'm sure I'll be all right now I'm bandaged".

"I'm not going", said Alban.

"Alban, you must", cried Anne. She could not believe her ears.

"Nonsense. It would be madness. Oakley's obviously useless. He's sure to have a temperature in a few hours. He'd only be in the way. That leaves nine guns. There are a hundred and fifty Chinese and they've got fire-arms and all the ammunition in the world".

"How do you know?"

"It stands to reason they wouldn't have started a show like this unless they had. It would be idiotic to go".

Anne stared at him with open mouth. Oakley's eyes were puzzled.

"What are you going to do?"

"Well, fortunately we've got the launch. I'll send it to Port Wallace with a request for reinforcements".

"But they won't be here for two days at least".

"Well, what of it? Prynne's dead and the estate burned to the ground. We couldn't do any good by going up now".

(ii)

"Riot be damned. I quelled the riot. There's nothing to understand", spluttered Van Hasseldt, still fuming.

"Some coolies came to my estate and said the chinks had killed Prynne and burned the place down, so I took my assistant and my head overseer and a Dutch friend I had staying with me, and came over to see what the trouble was. Well you don't think after all the years I've been in this country I'm going to let a couple of hundred chinks put the fear of God into me? I found them all scared out of their lives. One of them had the nerve to pull a gun on me and I blew his bloody brains out. And the rest surrendered. I've got the leaders tied up. I was going to send a boat down to you this morning to come up and get them".

(iii)

'The Governor was sitting at a large desk. He nodded to Alban and motioned him to take a seat...

"Will you give me your account of the occurrences at the Alud Estate and of the steps you took to deal with them...You had a sergeant and eight policemen. Why did you not immediately go to the scene of the disturbance?"

"I thought the risk was unjustifiable".

A thin smile was outlined on the Governor's grey face.

"If the officers of this Government had hesitated to take unjustifiable risks it would never have become a province of the British Empire...Van Hasseldt, with his manager, a Dutch friend of his, and a native overseer, seems to have coped with the situation very effectively", said the Governor.

"He had a lucky break. That doesn't prevent him from being a damned fool. It was madness to do what he did".

"Do you realise that by leaving a Dutch planter to do what you should have done yourself, you have covered the Government with ridicule?"

"No, sir".

"You've made yourself a laughing-stock in the whole colony"...

"But would you have gone under the circumstances?"

"I should".

Alban shrugged his shoulders.

"Don't you believe me?" rapped out the Governor.

"...I believe you, sir".

Unthinking courage was necessary to maintain the myth of superiority. It was unforgiveable to 'blink' at confrontation. Colonists were expected to 'face down' challenges, to react swiftly and decisively, meeting defiance 'head on', before it was able to take root. Anything less was to let the side down, to expose colonial rule as an empty charade.

* * * * *

Finally, at the innermost layer, the code takes a subtly independent turn. In the stories Footprints in the Jungle and The Letter the reader is treated to a version of 'What happens in Malaya, stays in Malaya'. This quiet distinction between 'law' and 'lore' seems to strengthen the expatriate community in its sense of exceptionalism.

Club membership is a distinguishing element of identity in many of Maugham's short stories. Throughout the empire, colonists gathered together, socialising over tennis, playing bridge, and nursing stiff drinks. The club was a perfectly insulated pool of whiteness, boring, but separate from the rest of Asia (or Africa) outside. For example,

"The club faces the sea; it is a spacious but shabby building; it has an air of neglect and when you enter you feel that you intrude. It gives you the impression that it is closed, really, for alterations and repairs, and that you have taken indiscreet advantage of an open door to go where you're not wanted. In the morning you may find there a couple of planters who have come in from their estates on business and are drinking a gin-sling before starting back again, and latish in the afternoon a lady or two may perhaps be seen looking with a furtive air through old numbers of the Illustrated London News. At nightfall a few men saunter in and sit about the billiard-room watching the play and drinking 'sukus'.  But on Wednesdays there is a little more animation. On that day the gramophone is set going in the large room upstairs and people come in from the surrounding country to dance. There are sometimes no less than a dozen couples and it is even possible to make up two tables of bridge."

It is hard to imagine the appeal of such places. The membership of these small societies sought only one attribute; an equable nature. As long as you were easily amused and did not make a scene, you were acceptable. The criterion was "pleasantness".

In Footsteps in the Jungle, the narrator is surprised at the high value given to 'getting on' and 'fitting in'. His host Major Gaze tells him the hair-raising story of a planter and his wife who murdered the woman's original husband on a lonely jungle path many years before. Despite this lurid past, the policemen and this couple play bridge together. 

"Doesn't it make you feel a little uncomfortable to be with them?" I asked Gaze. "For, without being censorious, I'm bound to say that I don't think they can be very nice people."

"That's where you're wrong. They are very nice people; they're about the pleasantest people here. Mrs Cartwright is a thoroughly good sort and a very amusing woman...If you'd been a policeman as long as I have, you'd know it's not what people do that really matters, it's what they are."

The Cartwrights 'performed' as decent people. They ran a good plantation without labour troubles. They came in to socialize regularly. In other words, they conformed to the colonial code and it wasn't in anyone's interest to unearth the facts of an old 'unsolved' case. Publicly, they were without reproach. What they may have done then, was not what they now were.

A similar moral slippage occurs in The Letter when a respected Singapore solicitor conducts some 'extra-legal' business in favour of a cuckolded planter he also happens to respect. This is possibly the best-crafted story in either collection and involves a complicated quadrant of adulterous wife, bored lover, Chinese mistress, and wronged husband.

The lover is killed, shot by the wife, and the solicitor representing her gets her off with an acquittal from an all-white jury. However justice has not been served and the husband remains deeply wronged. The lawyer therefore goes on to purchase some written evidence from the dead lover's mistress which informs the husband of the truth, which in turn grants the planter time and dignity to deal with his unfaithful wife privately, without damage to his reputation.

The 'message' here is that Singapore is a long way from London, and that those who manage their appointed colonial roles competently and conscientiously should be accorded reasonable leeway by their peers. Ultimately the first loyalty of colonists is to one another, to those who share the same front-line experience, rather than 'head-office'.

In conclusion, Maugham is true to his instincts, to the patterns set by his cultural background. He admits his limitations: "The natives of the brown man and the yellow are written in a code of which the white man does not possess the key...I have confined myself to describing the effect on a number of white people of the manner of their lives in remote places."

The author does not find blatant corruption or systemic dishonesty. There are double standards, yes, (he does not shy away from alcoholism or discarded native mistresses) but then, the whole business of empire is premised on one massive double standard. Instead Maugham seems to uncover a consistent thread of half-strangled human decency, a willingness to accept human frailty as long it does not unduly interfere with maintaining the myth of imperial superiority.

The people of Maugham's Malaya and Borneo were on a tight-rope. The reality of their situation defied common sense. They were overwhelmingly outnumbered and extremely vulnerable to political, religious, or racial unrest. Their safety (and their sanity) depended on their diligent performance of an idea, their convincing acting out of an extraordinary pretence.

REFERENCES:

W Somerset Maugham, 1926, The Casuarina Tree, archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.208253

W Somerset Maugham, 1933, Ah King, archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.150084