THE LETTER
by Somerset Maugham, 1926

So tightly plotted and richly characterized are Somerset Maugham's 90-odd short stories that quite a few have transferred very successfully to stage and screen. "Rain," which eventually was to earn its author a million dollars one way and another, has been dramatized, filmed three times, turned into a musical, and even made the basis of a ballet. "The Letter" has done almost as well, both as a long-running play featuring Gladys Cooper and as a classic Hollywood film starring Bette Davis.

"Fact is a poor story teller," Maugham once observed. It rambles, is haphazard, and tails off untidily. The writer, he claimed, needs to impose the discipline of a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the case of "The Letter," however, he used material taken direct from real life and, except for one element, remained faithful to the facts. On his travels around British Malaya he had been told by a lawyer in Singapore about a notorious murder trial of 1911. A headmaster's wife in Kuala Lumpur had shot the manager of a local tin mine when he called on her one evening in her husband's absence. He attempted to kiss her, she said, and after he turned out the light, she groped for the switch, somehow touched a revolver, and fired, not once but six times. The prosecutor established that she had previously been on intimate terms with the man and that since then he had acquired a Chinese mistress. Public opinion sympathized with her and saw her as a heroine defending her honor. She was found guilty but received a pardon after a petition on her behalf. The one element Maugham added to this ready-made plot was a letter in which she had begged the man to come and see her on the evening her husband was away. According to Maugham's version the letter is in the hands of the jealous Chinese mistress, who only agrees to release the incriminating document in return for a large sum of money raised by the husband.

Maugham, a successful and experienced playwright, dramatized "The Letter" himself. The play opened with the stage in darkness and the sound of six shots fired rapidly one after another. By that time, fortunately for the author, the woman who had inspired his story was dead. While another of his works set in Malaya, The Painted Veil, evoked the threat of a libel action he was obliged to settle out of court, "The Letter" escaped any hint of legal problems. Even so, his habit of putting people and places into his Malayan stories with only a slight change of name caused much indignation in the colony among those who had spoken freely and shown him hospitality. It was as well that he never went back after the 1920s.

"The Letter" was published along with other Malayan stories in a 1926 collection entitled The Casuarina Tree. The characters are firmly drawn with Maugham's usual economy: the husband Robert Crosbie, a big fellow, gentle but stupid; the wife Leslie Crosbie, outwardly graceful and fragile, inwardly made of steel; the lover Geoff Hammond, a handsome and dashing ex-soldier; and the Crosbies' lawyer, the discreet and worldly-wise Mr. Joyce, through whose eyes the action is described. Another character, one of the few Chinese depicted in any detail by Maugham, is the clerk Ong Chi Seng, a Cantonese. After studying at Gray's Inn, Ong is working in Mr. Joyce's office to gain further experience. He is the go-between who alerts Joyce to the letter, arranges the negotiations—with a satisfactory commission for himself—and ensures that the letter and its revelation about Mrs. Crosbie's affair with Hammond is suppressed. Interestingly enough, the device of the crucial letter was a favorite of the Edwardian theater (Lonsdale was to use it in his play The Last of Mrs. Cheyney) when Maugham wrote his first plays. The invention of the telephone put paid to that.

Why did Mrs. Crosbie shoot her attempted seducer six times? This is the only point that worries the cool, analytical Mr. Joyce. It is also the factor that sustains interest in what would otherwise be a straightforward case. Each time Mrs. Crosbie gives her account of the incident she remains composed and does not vary the smallest detail. The man tried to rape her, she repeats, and, as for the six shots, well, her memory must have failed her at this juncture. Joyce reflects to himself, in typical Maugham style, "The fact is, I suppose, that you can never tell what hidden possibilities of savagery there are in the most respectable of women." Then, when the existence of the letter is revealed through the agency of Ong, he realizes that Hammond, as she later confesses to him, had been her lover for years. Her anger at his deserting her for a Chinese mistress was uncontrollable, which was why she fired at his corpse until there were no more bullets left in her revolver.

Since Mr. Joyce and his wife are close friends of the Crosbies, the lawyer is ready to commit an unprofessional act. The letter is duly bought at a price that nearly bankrupts Crosbie, the damning evidence is destroyed, and Mrs. Crosbie is acquitted amid public acclamation on grounds of justifiable self-defense. The story does not have a happy ending, however, for the dull-witted husband at last sees that his marriage is ruined, and his wife continues to be tortured by her lover's rejection of her. A frequent theme with Maugham is the unexpected depths a human being can reveal under stress, and here it is Mrs. Crosbie who proves his point. She is racked by pain and rage, and her normally placid face turns into "a gibbering, hideous mask." One "would never have thought that this quiet, refined woman was capable of such fiendish passion." To a certain extent the lawyer, who plays the part of raisonneur, is Maugham himself—urbane, unshockable, studying human emotion with the clinical remoteness of the doctor he once was. Although the content of "The Letter" is melodramatic—as a play it was highly sensational—its luridness is contained by Maugham's deliberately matter-of-fact style. He often used a professional man as the medium for telling a story, thus adding to the authority and credibility of the narrative. After all, one does not lightly challenge the opinions of one's lawyer or medical adviser.

—James Harding