The Painted Veil

I made it only 34 pages into Cakes and Ale before giving up, but The Painted Veil was a different story (the kind that's difficult to put down). Annie, a friend of mine from high school who is now a social worker in LA, recommended it.

In the preface, Maugham writes about his experience in Italy, where he read the passage from the Purgatorio on which the story's plot is based: "I lived laborious days. I started each one by translating a few pages of one of Ibsen's plays so that I might acquire mastery of technique and ease in writing dialogue; then, with Ruskin in my hand, I examined the sights of Florence. I admired according to instructions the tower of Giotto and the bronze doors of Ghiberti. I was properly enthusiastic over the Botticellis in the Uffizi and I turned the scornful shoulder of extreme youth on what the master disapproved of. After luncheon I had my Italian lesson and then going out once more I visited the churches and wandered day-dreaming along the Arno. When dinner was done I went out to look for adventure, but such was my innocence, or at least my shyness, I always came home as virtuous as I had gone out. ... I was bitterly conscious that not thus behaved the writers of the romantic era, though I doubt whether any of them managed to spend six weeks in Italy on twenty pounds, and I much enjoyed my sober and industrious life." How well this captures youth, naivete and wonder (and reminds me a little of my visit to Florence with Stearns half a dozen years ago [incidentally, after that trip we swore we would read our journals together each anniversary of our trip to remember it all; that was before we found out that taking more trips was more fun).

But back to The Painted Veil: It was a smart book without being heavy handed about its intelligence: One of the key scenes hangs on the last line of Oliver Goldsmith's "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog": "The dog it was that died." The meaning of the whole novel hangs on reading this poem. I really don't know what people did before the internet. In addition, as Maugham explains in the preface, the novel is a modern setting of a small story in Dante.

The Painted Veil is told from the perspective of Kitty, who, at the beginning of the novel, is a shallow, vulgar girl, who marries just to beat her younger sister to it and is infinitely bored with the man she chose. Kitty changes significantly in the course of the novel, and with her, we the readers question our previous perceptions (but not in the way that you might think: at the beginning of the novel, I had an idea that Kitty was silly and stupid, and so I exalted her husband as quite a good man, which turns out to not exactly be the case).

My Catholic readers would like this novel, I think: an important part of Kitty's transformation is effected through her encounter with a small community of nuns in a cholera-ridden part of China. I haven't had a ton of interactions with nuns, but the ones that I have had have been wonderful in just the way that Maugham portrays the nuns--as really joyful (although complicated) people who are thrilled to embrace their particular calling. This is really beautiful, and reading Maugham's description reminded me of the cloistered Dominicans that I spoke to somewhere in Poland).

On the other hand, Catholicism doesn't at all win the day in the novel: it seems to me that Maugham affirms some combination of beauty and the Tao and Western religion as all leading us to a place of acceptance; that acceptance of our situation is the key to peace. I say this primarily because we are steered away from thinking too much about the afterlife in the novel (and, as you might imagine in a novel set in a cholera epidemic, the afterlife is something that wants to jump into the discussion; perhaps even more so since the story is rooted in purgatory originally).

All that said, I really enjoyed the depiction of Kitty at the beginning--light and frivolous and energetic. For instance, she narrates (about her husband) at one point: "It showed that he had not meant to be offensive. He did not speak because he had nothing to say. But if nobody spoke unless he had something to say, Kitty reflected, with a smile, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech." At the end, we see that the human race is quite a concern of the novel, at least through the relationships of the family (which are also a way to have immortality without having eternal life).


(picture, picture, picture)