A Planter’s Chair

A planter’s chair is redolent of Somerset Maugham and sundowners.

“Afternoon in the tropics. You have tried to sleep, but you give it up as hopeless and come out, heavy and drowsy, on to your veranda. It is hot, airless, stifling. Your mind is restless, but to no purpose. The hours are leaden-footed. The day before you is unending.  … the cool of the evening. The air is soft and limpid. You have an extreme sense of well-being. Your imagination is pleasantly but not exhaustingly occupied with image after image. You have the sense of freedom of a disembodied spirit.” (A Writer’s Notebook, Somerset Maugham)

This is the moment to sink onto a planter’s chair, perhaps extending the flaps, putting feet upon them while a servant removes one’s boots. In that posture air may be channelled up one’s shorts while the rattan also provides ventilation. Books and drinks may be placed upon the broad arm rests. It is an excellent piece of furniture as useful in Barons Court as Bangkok.

Somerset Maugham recalls staying at the Bangkok Oriental in 1923 where he came down with a bout of malaria. He was reduced to lolling on the riverside terrace on a planter’s chair watching the river traffic, as he recounts in The Gentleman in the Parlour: a Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong. (Rangoon is called Yangon today. It is the largest city in Myanmar and the industrial and commercial centre of the country. Haiphong is a port and the third largest city in Vietnam.)

“Sherry, the civilised drink” is a Maugham quote but he also favoured Singapore Slings at Raffles and this variation on a Dry Martini.

“Antoine, the manservant, brought in a tray with an array of bottles and Isabel, always tactful, knowing that nine men out of ten are convinced they can mix a better cocktail than any woman (and they’re right), asked me to shake a couple. I poured out the gin and the Noilly-Prat and added the dash of absinthe that transforms a dry Martini from a nondescript drink to one for which the gods of Olympus would undoubtedly have abandoned their home-brewed nectar, a beverage that I have always thought must have been rather like Coca-Cola. (The Razor’s Edge, Somerset Maugham)

In fact there’s probably nothing alcoholic Maugham would turn down.

“They ordered punch. They drank it. It was hot rum punch. The pen falters when it attempts to treat of the excellence thereof; the sober vocabulary, the sparse epithet of this narrative, are inadequate to the task; and pompous term, jewelled, exotic phrases rise to the excited fancy. It warmed the blood and cleared the head; it filled the soul with well-being; it disposed the mind at once to utter wit, and to appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else; it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words.” (Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham)