Jeff Meller
Compelling Opening
18 Sept 13
226 words
“The wise traveller travels only in imagination.
An old Frenchman … once wrote a book
called Voyage autour de ma chambre
[Voyage Around My Room]. I have not
read it and I do not even know what it is about, but the title stimulates my
fancy.”
Thus unconventionally compelling begins
Somerset Maugham’s travelogue to Honolulu.
The writer charms the reader with the
incongruous assertion that the best way to do what the writer has done, travel,
is to do the opposite, that is, stay at home.
Perhaps Maugham can pull off this machination
because he already is an established travel writer. The reader is only seven words into the story
when the traveller advises the reader not to travel. If the reader knows the author is a traveller,
she may suspect that her leg is being pulled, and that this particular tug of
the leg is being used to draw the reader into the story. Were this a first time travel writer, the
reader might not perceive the jest in seven words.
By the second sentence the author already is
enjoying a second laugh with the reader: he confides that the source of the
advice - not to travel, but to use one’s imagination, the approach he is not going
to take - is a source which the writer has not read.
Gentle, ironic, erudite Maugham.
-- 30 --
Sources:
W.
Somerset Maugham, “Honolulu” [1921] in Collected Short Stories, New
York, Penguin (1977).
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