In 1921, Somerset Maugham and his partner Gerald Haxton traveled throughout Asia, which included a sojourn in Penang. Maugham gathered personal stories from people he met in Malaya that would inspire his fictional work, The Casuarina Tree, a collection of six stories published in 1926. In “P&O”, a Mrs Hamlyn is on a ship back home to the UK after having left her husband because he had fallen in love with another woman. The story is about her encounters on the ship and how she learns to forgive. Another story, “The Letter”, centers around a woman who shoots and kills her neighbor while her husband is away. She claims it’s in self-defense after the neighbor tried to rape her. This story was based on the true account of a Mrs Ethel Proudlock, who was arrested for shooting a man on her veranda in Kuala Lumpur.
Maugham’s characters Mrs Hamlyn and Ethel Proudlock are made fictionally real best friends in Tan Twan Eng’s new novel, The House of Doors, which takes place mostly in Penang in 1910 and 1921. Tan pays homage to Maugham’s work, addressing themes like infidelity, secrecy, class divide, and racial differences, but adds what Maugham could never touch upon in his writing because of the intolerances of the times, in particular homosexual relationships. Maugham was not the only important personage to visit Penang in the early years of the century: Tan also works in Sun Yat-sen’s 1910 visit and weaves this into the main story set during Maugham and Haxton’s 1921 visit.
Despite the presence of Somerset Maugham, The House of Doors is actually the story of Lesley Hamlin and her husband Robert who live in Penang. Robert is an old friend of Maugham’s and invites the writer to stay at their home when he passes through Penang in 1921. Traveling with Maugham is his romantic partner, Gerald Haxton, who poses as his secretary. The two men met during the Great War when they volunteered for the Red Cross, but Maugham’s wife Syrie pulled strings (she had previously been married to the heir of the Wellcome pharmaceutical family) to get Gerald kicked out of the UK. The two men can only meet when Maugham can travel abroad.
Maugham takes to Penang and appreciates the different races he sees on the streets: Malays, Chinese, Javanese, Bengalis, Tamils, Siamese, among many others. He also enjoys the scenery of the town and absorbs these sights with the curiosity of someone viewing them for the first time.
The labyrinthine streets held a trove of Chinese and Hindu temples and mosques; he even saw a forlorn-looking synagogue. The shops sold a bewildering variety of goods—brassware and cloth and biscuits and sesame seed oil and nutmeg and silks and sacks of spices and dried fish hanging on hooks—but there were also mysterious stores where he saw nothing being sold, just one or two old people sitting in the dim and empty interior, gazing out into the street.
Lesley had never met Maugham before this visit, but the two get along well. She starts to confide in Maugham and tells him the story of her first meeting with Sun Yat-sen in 1910 at a reception in the stately E&O Hotel. Lesley went on to volunteer for Sun’s fundraising and publicity efforts, helping out at the Tong Meng Hui reading room in town. This was not an entirely propitious time: not only is Lesley taken aback because Sun is married to two women, something she thinks unfair to the women, but it is also around this time that she learns her husband Robert is romantically involved with another man. More fortunate, however, is her befriending of Sun’s colleague, another fictional character named Arthur Loh.
The book’s title comes from a Penang property Arthur Loh’s grandmother left him. It’s in this uninhabited home that Arthur collects and hangs old doors. It becomes Lesley and Arthur’s meeting place as they become closer.
We walked between the rows of painted doors, our shoulders and elbows setting them spinning slowly. Each door pirouetted open to reveal another set of doors, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway, and another, giving me no inkling of where I would eventually emerge.
Lesley tells Maugham about her relationship with Arthur and about his House of Doors. She also tells him about her friend, Ethel Proudlock, who shot and killed a man she wasn’t married to. While Maugham listens to Lesley’s stories, he worries about a failed investment scheme that has left him all but bankrupt. Several years later, sales of The Casuarina Tree will help him recoup these losses and go on to divorce his wife and live as he pleases. When this book comes out, it’s been several years since Lesley has seen Maugham. She understands that his recent success is due in part to the stories she told him.
He was photographed standing by a plain, stuccoed wall painted with “Villa Mauresque”, the name of his new home on the Cap Ferrat; set above its name was his Moorish symbol, as large as the top half of his body. He was as elegantly dressed as always, a cigarette in a long-stemmed ivory holder clamped between his fingers. He had found his house by the sea. I was happy for him.
Tan is known for his colorful stories set in colonial Malaya and The House of Doors is no different. Nor need one be familiar with The Casuarina Tree or any of Maugham’s other works to enjoy The House of Doors, a seamless story of real and fictional characters that doesn’t seem forced.