Tanah Merah and Tanjong Katong Seen by Maugham and Kaneko + The Summing Up

There is no place in Malaya that has more charm than Tanah Merah. It lies on the sea, and the sandy shore is fringed with casuarinas. The government offices are still in the old Raad Huis that the Dutch built when they owned the land, and on the hill stand the grey ruins of the fort by aid of which the Portuguese maintained their hold over the unruly natives. Tanah Merah has a history and in the vast labyrinthine houses of the Chinese merchants, backing on the sea so that in the cool of the evening they may sit in their loggias and enjoy the salt breeze, families dwell that have been settled in the country for three centuries. Many have forgotten their native language and hold intercourse with one another in Malay and pidgin English. The imagination lingers here gracefully, for in the Federated Malay States the only past is within the memory of the most part of the fathers of living men. (Footprints in the Jungle, W.  Somerset Maugham)

タンジョン・カトン（タンジョンは崎、カトンは亀、亀ヶ崎とでも称ぶのだろう。）の風景は、シンガポール名所絵葉書のおさだまりだ。椰子の葉越しの月、水上家屋、刳木舟、誰しもすぐセンチメンタルになれる、恋愛舞台の書割のような風景である。

カトンは、シンガポールの東郊で、海沿いのしずかなバルコニーをなしている。シンガポールに立ち寄る客たちは、第一の夕の歓待を、日本庭園を模したアルカフ・ガーデンの料亭か、このカトンでうけるのである。（マレー蘭印紀行「シンガポール」、金子光晴）

From The Summing Up by W. Somerset Maugham

I wanted write without any frills of language, in as bare and unaffected a manner as I could. I had so much to say that I could afford to waste no words. I wanted merely to set down the facts. I began with impossible aim of using no adjectives at all. I thought that if you could find the exact term a qualifying epithet could be dispensed with. (p. 28)

There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to willfulness. People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, im men of science, and even in literary critics. Here indeed strange. You would have thought that men who passed their lives in the study of the great masters of literature would be sufficiently sensitive to the beauty of language to write, if not beautifully, at least with perspicuity. Yet you will find in their works sentence after sentence that you must read twice in order to discover the sense. Often you can only guess at it, for the writers have evidently not said what they intended.

Another cause of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not, either from lack of mental power or from laziness, exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea. This is due largely to the fact that many writers think, not before, but as they write. The pen originates the thought. The disadvantage of this, and indeed it is a danger against which the author must be always on the guard, is that there is a sort of magic in the written word. The idea acquires substance by taking on a visible nature, and then stands in the way of its own clarification. Nut this sort of obscurity merges very easily into the willful. Some writers who do not think clearly are inclined to suppose that their thoughts have a greater than at first sight appears. It is flattering to believe that they are too profound to be expressed so clearly that all who run may read, and very naturally it does not occur to such writers that the fault is with their own mind. Here again the magic of the written words obtains. It is very easy to persuade oneself that a phrase that one does not quite understand may mean a great deal more than one realizes. From this there is only a little way to go to fall into the habit of setting down one’s impressions in all their original vagueness. Fools can always be found to discover a hidden sense in them. There is another form of wilful obscurity that masquerades as aristocratic exclusiveness. The author wraps his meaning in mystery so that the vulgar shall not participate in it. His soul is a secret garden into which the elect may penetrate only after overcoming a number of perilous obstacles. But this kind of obscurity is not only pretentious; it is shortsighted. Fro time plays it an odd trick. If the sense is meagre time reduces it to a meaningless verbiage that no one thinks of reading. (pp. 30-32)

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to. (p. 39)

English grammar is very difficult and few writers have avoided making mistakes in it. So heedful a writer as Henry James, for instance, on occasion wrote so ungrammatically that a schoolmaster, finding such errors in a schoolboy’s essay, would be justly indignant. It is necessary to know grammar, and it is better to write grammatically than not, but it is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated. Usage is the only test. I prefer a phrase that is easy and unaffected to a phrase that is grammatical. (pp. 39-40)