Somerset Maugham’s Collection The Cauarina Tree is a Century Old This Month….It’s well worth remembering…
Posted: September 16th, 2026 | No Comments »September 1 2026 – ChinaRhyming – William Somerset Maugham’s collection of short stories set in the then Federated Malay States, The Casuarina Tree, was first published a century ago this month. The tales were all based on Maugham’s 1920s visits and his observations of the colonial society he met. Upon publication it immediately annoyed everyone he’d met and reinforced the saying (coined after his trips to Hong Kong and China) that Maugham was “welcome only once”. It’s all well worth remembering…
W. Somerset Maugham’s collection of short stories The Casuarina Tree was first published by William Heinemann in the UK on September 2 1926 . A first US edition followed shortly after on September 17, published by George H Doran, The book was soon published in many translations – in French as Le Sortilège Malais (The Malay Spell – 1926) and Spanish as Extremo Oriente (1945). Vintage Classics republished the book in a modern edition as Far Eastern Tales in 2000.
For those that haven’t read The Casuarina Tree features six stories inspired by Maugham’s travels in the British-controlled Federated Malay States (FMS) covering the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Singapore. The book was immediately notorious outraging the rather pompous British colonial community in Malaya. Among the collection the short story was The Letter, a tale of passion, betrayal and illicit affairs in remote plantation country, based on the real-life Ethel Proudlock scandal that shocked KL in April 1911 and exposed the darker side of colonial life, particularly vexed the more pompous colonial community.
Maugham’s Asian Travels…
Maugham toured the FMS in two journeys with his companion, lover, and secretary, Gerald Haxton. In 1921 they took a six-month journey through Malaya, Singapore and Penang. And then in 1925 a four-month follow-up tour exploring remoter territories, primarily Borneo. Maugham and Haxton stayed with colonial administrators and planters including a fortnights stay in Penang in 1921, as well as on remoter plantations observing the routine loneliness, alcoholism, madness, extra-marital promiscuity of plantation managers and their wives. In Sarawak they were guests of Rajah Brooke, the famous “White Rajah” of Borneo. A disastrous canoe journey led to the dramatic short story, The Yellow Streak.
The Casuarina Tree continued Maugham’s fascination with Asia. Maugham and Haxton had traveled to the South Pacific in 1916 journeying through the South Sea islands and resulting in his novelisation of the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence and his scandalous short story Rain (a tale of religious hypocrisy, sexual repression) with the memorable character of Sadie Thompson in Pago Pago.
After WW1 Maugham’s marriage had collapsed under the strain of his true sexuality while his American lover Haxton was unable to live in England. They headed East – to Hong Kong and China between autumn 1919 and spring 1920. That trip resulted in similarly scandalous works – the stage play East of Suez that dealt with miscegenation and secret mixed-heritage births in Peking; On a Chinese Screen that annoyed some of the people profiled in this collection of vignettes of China; and of course The Painted Veil that caused a massive furor and legal actions in super-stuffy Hong Kong for suggesting affairs occurred among the colonial classes!!
By the time Maugham got to the FMS it was already said in colonial expat circles that he was a man ‘welcome only once’. Certainly many rued the day they ever carelessly and casually gossiped to Maugham over gin pahits (gin and Angostura bitters) on their verandas.
The Casuarina Tree…
The book is a collection of six stories – The Letter being the best known as loosely based, as noted, on a true story and later a Bette Davies movie in 1940.
- The Letter: Leslie Crosbie shoots and kills her lover in Malaya, claiming it was self-defense against an attempted assault. Her loyal husband supports her, but a compromising letter proves she acted out of jealous rage. Her husband buys back the letter from the dead man’s Malay mistress to secure her acquittal in court.
- Before the Party: A widow named Millicent (who resembles Kitty Fane in The Painted Veil) attends a family party but it’s revealed she murdered her husband in remote Malaya after discovering he was an abusive alcoholic who drank in secret.
- P. and O.: Set on a mail boat traveling from Malaya to London, Mrs. Hamlyn deals with the emotional fallout of her husband leaving her after 24 years of marriage.
- The Outstation: Warburton is a snobbish colonial administrator who clings to English class traditions. He clashes with his working class assistant, Cooper. But Cooper is murdered by his servant, leaving Warburton alone with his memories.
- The Force of Circumstance: A young Englishwoman moves to Malaya to marry her husband, a planter. She is horrified to discover he has a local common-law native wife and mixed-race children from his past, a truth he hid (shades of the themes in East of Suez here) Unable to live with this reality, she eventually leaves him.
- The Yellow Streak: Two men on a fishing trip in Borneo face sudden danger. One panics leading his companion to suspect a hidden “yellow streak” of mixed racial ancestry (again, a major Maugham theme), unearthing deep prejudices.
Comparisons
Maugham gravitated towards flawed characters – in The Casuarina Tree that includes murderesses, PTSD-ed Great War veterans, Old Etonian Gambling addicts. His cast are escaping provincial England only to find another form of claustrophobia and the same old class jealousies and society nonsense being played out in the FMS, adventurers looking to secure a fortune by hook or by crook and those left lonely and isolated on remote plantations. He seeks out their frailties, failings, secrets and vices. He also mocks their clinging to England – the newspapers six weeks late, the obsession with golf handicaps, endless whist, and church.
But Maugham is not Orwell, though they are both men of their times. Maugham does stray into racism – Malays are ‘suspicious’, Borneo a ‘land to be opened to western civilisation’. Yet outwardly Maugham appears disinterested in the ideology of the British Empire project . To Maugham it seems Empire is a fact of life whether in the FMS, Hong Kong or Chinese treaty ports, like the humidity or approaching typhoons.
Unlike later authors like Anthony Burgess or Orwell (who was at the time Maugham was in the FMS was a young member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma), Maugham evinced little interest in local political tensions or indigenous cultures. He focused almost exclusively on the lowly passions, indiscretions and creeping madness of the British colonial expats rather than identifying the wider iniquities of imperialism, though of course they are clearly implied. So perhaps more subtle than less interested? His work is not direct in its criticisms as for instance Orwell’s Burmese Days (1934) or short stories such as A Hanging (1931) and Shooting an Elephant (1936).
Why Read The Casurina Tree?
Maugham is a great story teller with an eye for character and descriptive detail, but he also captures the 1920s FMS brilliantly in a way that still reads well a century later. If he hadn’t been so on the nose it’s unlikely the planters, their wives, colonial officials and pious vicars would have been so outraged by his stories (as they had in Hong Kong). The English literary critic Cyril Connolly wrote that Maugham’s descriptions of life in The Casuarina Tree were ‘exactly what the British were like in the Far East’ and that ‘there will remain a story-teller’s world from Singapore to the Marquesas that is exclusively and forever Maugham’ (from The Modern Movement: One Hundred Key Books from England, France and America 1880–1950, 1965). Many contemporary critics saw Maugham on the FMS as the equivalent of Kipling on the Raj.
Maugham remains the epitome of writing on colonial Malaya. There are others of course – Antony Burgess’s The Malayan Trilogy (1956-59) and Han Suyin’s And the Rain My Drink (1956) – but both deal with a later Malaya. I’d also recommend as a better equivalence Henri Fauconnier’s The Soul of Malaya (1930): A lyrical French-translated novel exploring rubber plantations, local mysticism, and the psychological impact of Empire on European planters. And more recently of course Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, a 2023 historical novel that weaves together the real-life visits to Penang of Maugham and Haxton, as well as Sun Yat-sen, at the time of a sensational local murder trial and is very good at exploring the rigid social codes and hidden prejudices of the British Empire in Malaya. We should also note Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) and the recent Miles Franklin Award winner Omar Musa’s Fierceland (2025). And finally if you want a biography of Maugham I’d definitely recommend Selina Hastings’ The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (2009).
