“The Pool” is a short story by W. Somerset Maugham which was published in a 1921 short story collection titled The Trembling of a Leaf. That collection is notable for also featuring what is arguably Maugham’s most famous work of short fiction. “Rain” is the sordid tale of what may possibly be the author’s most notorious femme fatale, Miss Sadie Thompson. While not nearly as famous as that companion piece from the collection, it is easy to understand why “The Pool” fits perfectly alongside “Rain” in this collection.
Like that story and, indeed, the bulk of Maugham’s works regardless of length, “The Pool” traces its origin to a certain kernel of truth lying in a nugget of an anecdote which crossed paths with Maugham’s imagination. Maugham made a career out of turning a real life story with variable levels of “truth” attach to them into stories infused with the power of that imagination. Just as Miss Sadie Thompson’s tale of illicit sensuality colliding with judgmental religious hypocrisy is steeped in some manner of fact, so are the events related in “The Pool” traceable to a story which entered into the orbit of Maugham only to be seized by the gravitational pull of his idiosyncratic brand of world-making.
Maugham based the piece on an actual incident in which the English manager of the Central Bank of Samoa, headquartered in the capital city of Apia, fell head over heels for a sixteen-year-old native girl he saw lounging languorously at a rock pool. Maugham relocated the birthplace of the bank manager to Scotland and also demoted him to mere district officer within the bank’s hierarchy. Such was the template for Maugham: take a great story he usually came across second-hand by way of hearsay and transform it into a vital work of imagination capable of being entered as key evidence in the court of public opinion.
At more than 15,000 words, “The Pool” is a short story only according to generic conventions. As befits a story of such length, the events are complicated, characters are plentiful, and multiples all operate simultaneously to produce a captivating tale of an anti-colonialist outlier amid a literary tradition which was still for the most part embracing Rudyard Kipling’s outline of the “The White Man’s Burden” published two decades earlier.
