The Moon, and Sixpence, in Tahiti
SOMERSET
MAUGHAM
AND
PAUL GAUGUIN
By WILMON MENARD
W ILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM'S published account of his long visit in
Tahiti-where he had gone in 1917
to accumulate material for his The Moon and
Sixpence, based on the life of Paul Gauguin
-is so brief as to throw little light on what
undoubtedly was his most interesting period
of travel, research, and writing.
His A Writer's Notebook (1949), containing miscellaneous notations from 1892 to
1944, has only three-and-a-quarter pages of
reflective, random notes on scenes and persons in Tahiti. In his Looking Back (1962),
he makes just a short mention of his ultimate
destination when he embarked in 1916 on a
voyage of convalescence following a lung
affliction: "I wanted to go there because I
had long had the idea of writing a novel
based on the life of Gauguin... and I hoped
to find in Tahiti matter that would be useful
to me." That he had never written a Gauguinrelated essay on his Tahitian idyll is astonishing, since his conversations and the jottings
in his Notebook clearly show that he had
been enchanted with Tahiti and the purpose
of his visit there.
When I met Maugham for the first time
on the Riviera in the early 1950's, he explained his cursory treatment of Tahiti:
"When I travelled to Tahiti, I was actually
on leave of absence, because of illness from
my First World War duties as an intelligence
agent1 with the British War Office. It was
agreed, upon my return, that I would undertake a secret mission to Russia for my gov1 His experiences in intelligence work form the
basis for his Ashenden, or British Agent series.
MR. MENARD, a free lance who lives in Honolulu,
has recently returned from a cruise around the
world, which included covering for a New York
press syndicate, the student-riots in Paris, complete with a paving block whistling past the head
and a whiff of tear gas. He has written for MGM
and Universal Pictures. His The Two Worlds of
Somerset Maughan appeared in 1965; his "Somerset Maugham and Hollywood" appeared in the
last issue of The Michigan Quarterly Review.
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