Among his other literary work in the genres of the novel, short story, and drama, the English author W. Somerset Maugham also distinguished himself in travel writing. His numerous travels to Spain, China, Malaya, India, and the South Pacific produced four travel books, four novels, and countless short stories. During one particular trip to British Colonial Malaya in 1921, a tidal bore caught Maugham and his companion Gerald Haxton as they were boating downstream. The sudden rush of the ten-foot wave swamped the small craft and sent Maugham, Haxton, and the native crew into the river where they all barely survived. Maugham recorded this accident soon after in a letter to his American friend Bert Alanson, later in his diary and travelogue The Writer's Notebook (1949), and he used the event as the genesis of his short story "The Yellow Streak" (1926).
Using the various literary versions of Maugham's personal experience, I examine the different strategies involved in their creative production. The letter offers the most immediate and factual account of the incident and gives an outline to the more detailed account in The Writer's Notebook, edited and published almost thirty years later. In this version, the native crew of convicts acts admirably, even heroically-enough so that Maugham asks for their pardons. The short story fictionalizes the events by making the accident a reaffirmation of white racial superiority in colonial Malaya when the half-caste Izzart deserts his white companion Campion. The transformation of Maugham's personal experience into the material for a story offers interesting insights into the creative process as well as the racial politics of empire.
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