the twenty best novels of thailand
An anthology by Marcel Barang
To Khun Khroo Buaphan,
who tutored my stuttering totter into Thai,
and to Mary R Haas, S Seitthabut [So Sethaputra],
Damnern–Sathianphong [Domnern–Sathienpong]
and Wit Thiangbooranatham [Thiengburanathum],
authors of the best Thai-English dictionaries,
for services rendered day after day.
This book, and
the whole programme of literary rebirth it heralds, would not exist without the
foresight and generosity of Sonthi Limthongkun [Sondhi Limthongkul], head
of The M Group in Bangkok and sole sponsor of Thai
Modern Classics. We both hope that this long-term undertaking will
benefit not merely a group of outstanding Thai novelists but the whole nation.
To Sonthi, my employer, nemesis and friend, my most heartfelt thanks for his
unstinting support and complete lack of interference.
In finding my way through the maze of Thai novels, I received
precious assistance from ten experts who were kind enough to handpick the best
Thai novels for me to assess: Chaisiri Samutawa-nit, Chamaiphorn
Saengkrajang, Chananao Waranyoo [Varanyou], Darranee Mueangma [Daranee
Muangma], Khamnoon Sitthisamarn, Seiksan Prasertkun [Seksan Prasertkul],
Suchart Sawatsee, Thaneit Weitpharda, Tharnthip Kaeothip [Dharntipaya
Kaotipa-ya] and Treesin Bunkhajorn. To all I feel deeply indebted.
Chamaiphorn, Seiksan, Thaneit and Treesin, as well as Nopphorn Suwanapharnit
and Witsanu Cholitkun, lent us rare books and deserve special thanks.
I am thankful as well to the eighteen authors or their legal beneficiaries
for allowing me to translate excerpts of their works for this anthology, as a
prelude to a complete rendering of the novels in English. Their kind words of
encouragement have made me feel we are on the right track. Regrettably,
however, Khuekrit Prarmoat [Kukrit Pramoj] has forbidden us to translate his
novel See Phaendin.
Throughout the writing of this book, I received invaluable advice
from Phongdeit Jiangphatthana-kit, who corrected my countless mistakes in
translation, assisted in the writing of some chapters and generally acted as
an able and caring interpreter of his culture. He and Montree Phoome, the
project’s logistics manager and a short-story writer in his own right, were my
first sounding boards.
Thomas A Wingfield and Clare L Griffiths in London gave the text its
final polish, and their corrections and suggestions were priceless. Be they all
thanked here and share in whatever praise this book may earn. Of course, I am
the only one responsible for the book’s shortcomings.
Finally, I would like to thank my life companion, Orn-anong Sa-artphak,
and our daughter, Orramart Aurore, for putting up for so many long months with
an absentee lover and dad.
MBg
Thai, a language
with five tones, has no generally accepted system of transliteration. Most
systems in use follow the conventions of written Thai, which leads to mispronunciation
of a great many words – a most deplorable state of affairs when it comes
to names of places and people. To give non-Thai readers a chance to pronounce
Thai words almost correctly, Thai Modern
Classics has adopted a transcription code based solely on
pronunciation, ignoring, however, the all-important tones – only an adaptation
of the international phonetics system, which itself is too complicated for
the average reader, would take care of tones satisfactorily.
Pali or Sanskrit words such as ‘Dharma’ or ‘Buddha’ will not be
transliterated, unless they are part of a Thai phrase. The words ‘Siam’,
‘Bangkok’ and ‘Baht’ (the Thai monetary unit), of current use in English, will
be transliterated as Sayarm, Bangkork and bart in Thai
phrases.
Whenever we are aware of it, the official spelling of place names and
preferred spelling of people’s names will follow our transcription in square
brackets on first appearance: for example, Theiweit [Dheves] and Khuekrit
Prarmoat [Kukrit Pramoj].
The basic elements of transcription are as follows:
• all consonants
are the same as in English, except k, p and t, to which h is added to
distinguish the hard sound (the standard English k, p and t sounds) from the
soft sound (the standard k, p and t sounds of most other European and Romanised
Asian languages); Thai has no v sound: we use w (ie, Sukhumwit);
• vowel sounds
are as follows: a as in pat; ar as in far; e as in the or
as in bed or as in the French word et; eu as in the French word peu;
eur as in fir; ei as in grey; ae as in bear; i as in hit;
ee as in heat; o as in hot or as in the French word haut;
oa or o- as in own; or as in or; u as in pudding; oo as in
good;
• ai as in bite
or fly [short and long]; ao as in pout or now [short and
long]; eui as in the French word œil; ia as in fear; oi as in boy;
ua as in tour; uay as in gooey;
• the Thai
sounds ue (a short, strangled ugh!), uer (same, but longer), uey and uea have
no equivalent in European languages;
• to lengthen a,
o and e sounds, r is added to the vowel, except when the vowel is at the end of
a word: narna but sapharn;
• r is replaced
by a hyphen in the case of wa- to avoid the ‘o’ sound of ‘war’ (and by h
in the name Waht for the same reason); r is left out when there is a
double consonant at the end of a syllable (hence, bang, not barng);
• finally, in
rare cases of words ending with a short, open ‘o’ sound (hot), h is used after
a vowel to distinguish it from the other ‘o’ sound (memo): for example, phroh.
thai titles of royalty and nobility
part one
sunthorn phoo, the people’s poet
in the darkness before dawn...
part two
To present “the twenty best novels” of any
European country or even of a relatively young nation such as the United States
would be preposterous. To select “the twenty best novels of Thailand” arguably
is not. The novel in Thailand is a recent western import; the first truly Thai
novels were written only seventy years ago. The body of available work is
relatively small, a few thousand volumes, the bulk of which were scribbled to
offer (very) light entertainment* and can
be dismissed outright. Sorry to say, Thai novels of high literary octane number
only in the hundreds.
I have
endeavoured to select the best twenty, out of a first selection of a hundred
provided to me by ten “professional readers” (professors of literature,
literary critics, writers) and from my own reading, which was guided by the
novels featured in various manuals of literature and literary criticism written
in Thai, English or French. I also read most of the novels written by each of
the eighteen authors selected, to check the validity of the selection and
understand the evolution of each writer, as well as most of the novels published
since our project started in January 1993.
The
choice of Thai literary experts was both deliberate and happenstance. I asked
for and received the help of several recognised authorities in the field of
literature – and I do apologise to those I failed to identify due to ignorance
on my part at the time. A few university professors of literature attending a
seminar on translation of Thai short stories organised by linguistic activists
from the cultural team of the French embassy were also kind enough to forward
their own contributions. The eclectic choice of these women was substantially
different from that of the acknowledged experts in that it strongly favoured
female romance writers of popular appeal, whose novels came to account for a
good third of the hundred titles first selected.
I
assessed all the novels which were recommended, as well as about another
hundred novels. By assessing the novels, I mean that I read them as
discriminatingly as I could, with the rule that, no matter how dull or lame
they would turn out to be, I would read a minimum of one hundred pages. If,
within one hundred pages, a novel is unable to show its mettle, capture and
hold the reader’s attention, then why bother with it. And so it was that I read
about two thirds of all the novels from start to finish, even though in too
many cases it was merely to see how the disaster would end.
To my
distress, I found it easy to discard a great many works, even among those
recommended by more than one expert. The reasons, I believe, had less to do
with personal talent than with the lack of a proper literary environment. Too
many seasoned Thai novelists make beginner’s mistakes. Put bluntly, from a
literary-minded foreigner’s point of view, no more than fifty Thai novels of
any genre or period qualify as flawless classics to be read by this and future
generations for pleasure and intellectual profit, as distinct from yarns that
are leafed through to kill time or perused out of academic or otherwise specialised
interest.
With the
aim of selecting the very best Thai novels, not merely the good ones, in order
to translate them into English over the next few years – the raison d’être of
the Thai Modern Classics
programme – I trimmed the list down to twenty titles. Why twenty rather than
ten or thirty? Because I decided to make the selection broad but to keep it of
manageable size – and also because I am not sure I could find an extra
ten titles I would care to translate.
I have
tried to choose independently of my own tastes. Among the novels selected, I
have a few favourites, and a few others are not entirely to my liking.
Nevertheless, the critic in me believes that all are outstanding and definitely
worth translating for the world to read. I am not naive or cocky enough,
though, to profess that mine is the definitive choice, because, in the final
analysis, there is no such thing: objectivity, like perfection, is an aim man
tries to approach but never reaches. Personal taste aside, one’s choice is
valid only to the extent of one’s own knowledge and sensibilities. Discriminate
reading, like literary criticism, is an exercise at once objective – observing
the various elements of a tale like a mechanic takes apart a car engine – and
subjective: keeping attuned to feelings, musings and undercurrents as imponderable
as the music of the spheres. To the extent that subjectivity is involved,
these are indeed “the twenty best novels of Thailand” according to Marcel
Barang.
The basic
literary criteria that guided my choice are familiar to most western readers
but still appear to elude many Thai readers, writers and even critics. These
criteria are strictly literary, not political or moral. Politics and morals
have their own media. Propaganda and zealotry are the death of fiction. A novel
may well preach social revolution or salvation of the soul (or damnation or
conservatism, for that matter) but it is neither a poster nor a pulpit and
should not be assessed as such. To measure literature with moral or political
yardsticks is more than irrelevant – it is misguided and harmful.
The first criterion is quality of language, by
which I mean not merely correct syntax and precise semantics (you’d be surprised,
even by some of the best pens!), but more importantly style, a certain way
with words that enchants, tickles or stuns and creates by its very magic a
world of its own, complete and unique.
A novel
is a work of art crafted with words only, to which sloppy syntax or pedestrian
prose are terminal diseases; prosaic language, pest; euphuism, cholera. Style
is a rare gift that knows neither sex nor social origin. Some of the best
stylists in the kingdom are women writers, who, alas, waste their talent in
otherwise insipid yarns that tabulate heartbeats and propound lofty views about
dripping faucets. Elegance of the pen is neither a prerogative of the aristocracy
(indeed the best Thai writers these days belong to the middle class) nor a
matter of high-sounding phrases and big words. If the tone and context are
right, there is nothing wrong with slang terms or swearwords – the froth of the
language broth – and nothing wrong either with newly coined words that
make sense, if used sparingly. In any case, good style of whatever grace –
smooth or crunchy, spicy or fragrant, earthy or ethereal, baroque or terse,
jazzy, funky, racy or classic – is a sine qua non for good fiction.
With one
of the most musical and subtle languages on earth, and centuries of popular and
courtly juggling with words, Thai writers have an innate feel for the phrase
that flows (too much or too fast sometimes), and hundreds of Thai novels would
qualify in terms of style, but the trouble is, too many qualify on that count
only.
The second criterion is internal coherence, the
difficult balance between form and content and between the various components
of the work. A novel is a story (plot) told by means of description (of things,
places, people), narration and dialogue (or monologue). In mixing these
elements, there is no set recipe, and creative writing consists precisely in
coming up with new organic blends, in which the total is more than the sum of
its parts. That “more” is the literary charge; the greater the charge, the
greater the novel. If the total is equal or nearly equal to the sum of its
parts, then forget it, the novel is a waste of time.
Plots
provide plenty of occasions to flounder. A plot can be strong and gripping or
weak and potentially boring, but it must be coherent: you cannot launch a story
in one direction only to change course and start all over again (unless this
keeps recurring as part of a clear pattern which eventually tells a different
tale altogether); or ditch the hero or heroin way before the end (unless it
happens to be a family saga in which new heroes take over as a matter of course);
or build one half in a smooth blend of fictitious elements only to cram the
other half with official documents, newspaper clippings and the like, stalling
the action and smothering the characters. Authors can get away with the most
outrageous views if they manage to blend them with the narrative, but to
interrupt the action with solid chapters expounding even the most cogent
thoughts or with side plots of little or no relevance to the main course are
sure ways to kill the balance of a novel: these adjuncts stick out like sore
thumbs, and do indeed rate thumbs down.
In
telling a story, the pace, whether slow or fast, must be sustained – although
the slower the pace, the more likely the reader will be bored, which definitely
happens every time a plot gets sluggish or stalls.
Settings
and characters also must be coherent, both within the story – how consistent
are they? how indispensable to the plot? – and by comparison to the real world:
are they lifelike? are they believable? Only a mad character may behave in an
erratic manner: it is expected of him; when a sane one does, the reader is
shocked unless he is told why, or at least forewarned. That people in real life
do behave erratically all the time is no excuse: verisimilitude, the stuff of
fiction, is not truth, merely its appearance; happenstance is part of real
life, yet artificial in fiction if unannounced. It is the author’s job to make
the erratic, the fortuitous, the incongruous plausible. A man who does not
believe in spirits yet wakes up one morning as a medium is not credible
without some sort of explanation or warning. Endings sometimes ruin very good
yarns, when for the sake of a final fillip, the hero is made to do the opposite
of what, on the evidence of the rest of the story, he must do.
A novel
is an exercise in make believe which presents not the real world but a world
that could be real – complex, lively, three-dimensional. Not all novels are
realistic in treatment but all, even the most ethereal, must be grounded in
hard fact to be at all credible. Without a realistic base, the most wonderful
flight of fancy won’t take off. Ghosts need houses to haunt, and the closer
they come to your bedroom, the better they scare you; so, let’s see the bedroom
first, and hear the floor creak. Even magical realism, so fashionable these
days, starts from a recreation of the real world before magic takes over.
Stream of consciousness, automatic writing and other hip writing techniques
make for exciting pyrotechnics but they become gratuitous exercises if they are
not harnessed to a realistic frame of reference – something the proponents of
art for art’s sake never seem to grasp.
Too many
Thai novels, I found, are dripping with honey and rosy beyond belief. There are
cultural and ideological reasons for this. Thai culture is non-confrontational
in essence and, for the sake of social harmony, the Thai will always try to see
only the “good side” of things and feign to ignore problems as long as they
can: this works to some extent in real life, but applied to the novel, it means
fatal blandness.
Countless
romances fall into this credibility trap, as do most autobiographical works
recalling early youth out on the farm or up on the range. Besides being usually
plot-less, these recollections of days past are so full of nice souls caught up
in petty dramas that they end up sounding at once rosy, drab and trite.
Furthermore, politically minded writers left and right tend to create heroes
that are truly out of this world. When a hundred radical students are locked up
in a tiny cell for a month over two hundred pages and not one of them goes mad
at his sweaty and stinking fellow inmates, we are indeed in the presence of
saints or angels, not of full-blooded young men. When every ten pages or so the
protagonist of a novel swears dedication to Duty and praises Nation, Religion
and King, we yawn and close the book. In this type of crusading literature,
angels are wont to confront devils and heroes to tackle villains – where are
the real men? Novels should never be studies in black and white, but as
multicoloured as life itself. For all their good intentions and bleeding
hearts, the disembodied zombies of most “literature for life” offerings are
less believable than ET or Mickey Mouse, and a lot less endearing.
The same
principle of coherence and verisimilitude applies to dialogue, which is a
paramount device to enliven a tale, speed the action along and give depth to
the characters involved. If there is nothing more dreary than contrived
conversations, and nothing more exhilarating than spirited ones, too much of
even excellent dialogue is not such a good idea, as you end up with a hamburger
without beef – a play or film script rather than a novel.
As for
specialised knowledge, too little is just as bad as too much. A novel involving
lawyers should explain the law and court proceedings well enough to have us
rooted to the bench until the trial ends, yet nobody wants to read the civil
code chapter and verse. However well written, the exchange of blows between
kick boxers over dozens of pages will thrill but the most dedicated fans, and
all but cultured cattlemen will enjoy an offering of a thousand and one tips on
how to raise buffalos.
The third criterion is vision, meaning both scope and originality. Scope
applies not only outward as a macroscopic view of society revealing the
breadth, depth and specificity of a fictional world, but also inward, as a
microscopic study of the self exploring the depth and complexity of man. The
world outside and the world within are both legitimate raw material for
fiction, and as in life are best combined – which is why the art for life–art
for art’s sake debate is so debilitating, impoverishing fiction by
oversimplifying and setting up fences where there should be none.
The
greatest works of fiction change your perception of the world and of yourself.
They may not have great numbers of characters, cover huge geographic or
historical grounds, or depict outstanding events such as war or epidemics:
great literature is not a question of numbers or bulk; it is merely a matter of
sharpness and originality of vision, reaching far out there for the truths and
ways of the world as well as deep inside for the lies and emotions of man.
Each generation
begets a few novels that seem to encapsulate the perceptions of the times, but
these works only last if they remain relevant to later generations by offering
them values common to all of mankind: you do not keep reading Cervantes,
Richardson, Tolstoy, Balzac and all the other greats for what they tell you of
their times but for what they tell you about yourself. Too many novels, though
magnificently written and expertly balanced, lack scope and intellectual
seasoning. They feel hollow and flat. Once you have read them, you are none the
wiser and wonder what all the fuss was about.
The last criterion, specific to this undertaking, is international compatibility. None of the novels
selected is culture specific. Even though some of them have an important Thai
cultural dimension, this Thai texture can be translated, with the help of the
odd footnote, in such a way that foreign readers can still relate to the
stories without missing a quiver of the local bamboo mouth organ (notice I
didn’t write khaen).
There is,
however, a small body of very good but culture-specific novels which defy
translation or even transposition and which I had to reject. This is the case
for example of “Bunluea” ’s Suratnaree, published in 1971, a fantasy
which tells of an island-state in which women hold power and men are relegated
to women’s traditional duties save child-bearing. To readers familiar with Thai
cultural mores, it is a very funny, thought-provoking satire of male-dominated
society, but it would be meaningless to outsiders without a surfeit of learned
footnotes which would spoil reading pleasure.
Another
example is Jao Jan Phom Horm, which I would translate as “Lady Jane of
the fragrant mane” to respect the spirit if not the letter of the title.
Written by “Marla Khamjan” [Mala Kamchan] and crowned by the 1991 SEA Write* award, this short but difficult novel written in sonorous prose tells
the story of a northern Thai princess who makes a pilgrimage through the jungle
to Burma’s Golden Rock to decide which of her two lovers she will betroth. This
highly literary exercise is written in a mixture of Thai and northern Thai
dialect (the text is littered with linguistic footnotes) and all along plays on
central and northern Thai myths and legends. This amazing cultural maze defies
transposition in another language – though I understand one learned daredevil
is attempting a French version of it*.
The twenty novels presented here are extremely
varied in form, content, atmosphere and import, and by and large mirror the
richness and ebullience of the Thai novel, which is still in its adolescence.
The first
part of the anthology provides a bird’s-eye view of today’s literary
environment – or rather lack thereof – as well as a brief presentation of
Thai classical literature and of each of the twenty novels, from a social,
political and literary perspective. Fiction is not produced in a vacuum: every
novel is a result of and contribution to literary history and has its own way
of reflecting both the personality of the author and socio-political realities
at the time of writing.
To write
a comprehensive history of the Thai novel was not my purpose. There are dozens
of minor masters out there whose novels would be instructive to appraise and
take apart; some writers have had an influence in the world of letters out of
proportion with the quality of their works; literary schools and groups have
come and gone, not necessarily in step with historical changes – but to record
all this in some detail would have meant at least another tome, which might not
be of great interest outside of Thai studies.
It was
only once I was done selecting and putting these novels into perspective that I
was struck by two facts: one is that a whole generation of good novelists has
gone missing. I did not engineer the disappearance or rather the literary
mediocrity of authors born between 1921 and the end of the Second World War – a
string of “paternalist” field marshals saw to that, so much the pity. Maybe
there is a lesson here for all to ponder. The other is that, contrary to a
fashionable feeling in Thai literary circles these days, the contemporary novel
is neither dead nor moribund: nine major works have been born in the last
fourteen years, appearing almost on a yearly basis, and there is no compelling
reason to fear that the well is about to dry up.
The
second part of the anthology presents each of the twenty novels, with a brief
biography of the author, a summary of the plot laced with short extracts to
wet readers’ appetites, and a brief critical assessment of each work to show
its social relevance, main strengths and shortcomings. In writing the
biographies of dead novelists, I have had to depend on existing documentation,
which is abundant on celebrated authors but scarce and vague on others who have
long been ignored or neglected. Hence differences in treatment which are all
too obvious and regrettable.
The two
parts of this anthology can be read independently, as can each book section
in the second part. So do browse around by all means! As this is not an
academic work, I have dispensed with a bibliography, but all the books I have
found useful are duly mentioned in footnotes. The back issues of two defunct
literary magazines, Loak Nangsue (Book world) and Thanon Nangsue (Book
lane), and of one ongoing one, Writer Magazine, have been of particular
use, including as a source of most of the photographic portraits of writers on
which the sketches illustrating this book are based.
The
translation of all the excerpts are my own, except one, “Nikhom Raiyawa”
[Rayawa]’s High banks heavy logs (Taling Soong Sung Nak), for
which I used and very slightly edited Richard Laird’s excellent version*.
This
brings me to the sorry topic of translation into English
– not to mention other languages I know nothing about, such as German and
Japanese, which seem to have welcomed a greater body of Thai fiction than
English.
Thai literature, and more specifically the Thai
novel, has been very unlucky in terms of exposure to the outside world. Despite
the massive presence of Westerners on Thai soil for the past forty years or so,
few have become fluent enough in the vernacular to read Thai fiction with
discerning pleasure and fewer still have felt the need to share their
enthusiasm with fellow English speakers.
As a
result, besides a handful of collections of short stories, less than ten novels
have ever been translated into English. It is only in recent years that two
good translations of excellent novels have seen the light of day*. As for
the rest, either the novels that were well translated were far from outstanding** or those
that were outstanding were maimed in translation***. At the
time, the few thousand expatriates who were able to lay their hands on these
English versions were so grateful that they existed at all that they closed
their eyes to their shortcomings, but the world at large may be forgiven for
thinking that there is no such thing as good Thai literature.
By
publishing accurate literary translations of Thailand’s top twenty novels, Thai Modern Classics hopes to change
such a perception.
Because
these translations are meant to be read primarily for enjoyment by people who
may not even know where Thailand is located – left of Vietnam, man, below
China’s paunch – I have opted to use as few words in Thai as possible and keep
footnotes to the bare minimum. These novels are rich enough in local colour
without having to doll them up with allegedly untranslatable terms for cheap
effect unmeant by the author. So, words used to designate people (ai, ee,
yai, noo, phor, mae, phee, nong and
the like), which are so much part of the way the Thai express themselves but
tell nothing to outsiders, have been and will be deleted as a matter of course
(or translated in a roundabout way whenever possible), and titles of nobility
will be translated with rough equivalents on an ad hoc basis.
Thai
titles of royalty and nobility
Thai royal
lineage fades out over five or four generations, from Jaofa (Crown
Prince[ss], child of a king) and Phra Ong Jao (child of a king born of a
minor wife or concubine; also, child of a Jao Fa, hence grandchild of a
king), Morm Jao (child of a Phra Ong Jao [Mom Chao or MC])
to Morm Rarchawong (MR) and Morm Luang (ML). Future generations
are allowed to add na ... (na Ayutthaya, na Songkhla...) to their surname
to denote royal origins. All of the above titles translate as Prince or
Princess. The children of a prince and a commoner (addressed as Morm)
lose one rank.
Titles of nobility, which were created in the mid-15th century,
were abolished in 1932. They were, by descending order of importance: Jao
Phraya, Phraya, Phra, Luang, Khun, Muern, Phan and Thanai. Rough
European equivalents would be Duke, Marquess, Earl or Count, Viscount, Baron,
Baronet and Knight. These titles were bestowed according to the importance of
the administrative office held. Unlike European feudal titles, they were not
hereditary and could be revoked at the king’s pleasure. All titles came with
land, 8 000 acres for a prince, 4 000 for a Jao Phraya, down to 10 acres
for a commoner. At the end of the 19th century, government officials began
receiving salaries instead of land.
Literary translation is a difficult exercise demanding probity and
modesty on top of a good command of both languages involved. Traduttore,
traditore. The Italians got it right: the translator is a traitor; to
translate is to betray – to betray words and phrases in one language for
different phrases and words in another, in the name of the higher loyalty due
to the original meaning and to the original style. Each language has its own
genius, its own way of composing a sentence, its own idioms, colloquialisms,
etc, and a certain amount of grammatical and syntactic manipulation is inevitable
to achieve a fair transmutation. But there are limits to what a translator is
allowed to do, as his paramount task is to stick to the original as much as
possible. Literary translation is not a mere question of rendering the meaning
accurately, as for any official or commercial document: it is also a crucial
question of style. Real writers are style-conscious and agonise over the
right word and the right rhythm, and they are entitled to a faithful rendition,
which seldom goes word-for-word, of course, but should not extend to the
complete rewriting some translators try to pass off as “creative” translation.
The only
creativity I know in translation is in sticking to the original phrasing as
much as possible and yet managing to produce a text that flows like the
original but does not sound translated – that does not smell of milk and
butter, as the Thai say. It is a craftsman’s labour of love, not the
legerdemain of a failed creator squatting over someone else’s text. And it is
the only approach that allows not just the tough yet manageable performance of
one translator translating one novel with one style but the damn near impossible
exploit of one translator translating twenty different novels with twenty
different styles. How successful I have been in such a foolhardy undertaking
is for readers to judge.
A quarter century ago, my mentor Claude Julien,
then editor of Le Monde diplomatique, a man and a professional for whom
I have the greatest admiration and respect, used to teach us, cub reporters,
that our foremost duty was to be disrespectful – not that he wanted us to be
impolite or unduly aggressive, but that we should take nothing at face value
and never fear sacred cows.
This
“duty of disrespect” lesson has stuck, perhaps only too well. The flippant and
at times sarcastic tone I have adopted in these pages is meant to lighten
serious matters and should not be mistaken for ‘disrespect’ in the common
sense. Rather the opposite, in fact: I would like readers everywhere to share
my passion for literature, impatience with local sacred cows and faces without
value, and admiration for those writers who have achieved excellence against
so many odds. And I would like the Thai among them to realise how sanuk
literature can be once it is free of the boring drone they remember from their
days of forced labour on school benches.
The Good,
the Bad and the Ugly are in this country too – why not say so? And if they
still shoot the messenger and his horse, well, so be it. Chang khao parai
– oops, I mean: mai pen rai!
Bangkok, 31 August 1994
A
foreigner with a modicum of Thai entering a large bookshop in Bangkok today
will be – er – disconcerted. No collection of classics. No Penguin, Pelican
or Bantam equivalent. No complete works of important writers in one volume or
one set. No literary criticism section. None of what all Westerners and many
Asians take for granted at home.
Skirt the
mountains of technical manuals written mostly in English on all kinds of
subjects, and the ever growing tide of computer gobbledibooks, management
how-to’s and self-serving why-not-you’s promoted at the foreground – yes, Dale
Carnegie and Vance Packard are alive and smiling more than ever on Bangkok
shelves amid their prolific yuppie progeny.
Turn to
the literature section. In one corner, a hodgepodge of cheap, mean paperbacks
cater to students’ required-reading chores. In another, religious pamphlets
fight for light with ghost stories. In a third, Chinese epics in translation,
two or twenty tomes per set, offer pig’s-blood-red covers with huge gilded
scratches for titles. Between the racks of glossy Thai mags with English names
and displays of Japanese cartoons with Thai blurbs spread flowery acres of
homespun hardback romances usually sold at a hefty discount. Serious modern
literature comes in increasingly expensive paperbacks of all sizes merely
dumped by genre – three shelves of skinny collections of short stories or poems
to perhaps two of local novels and ten of contemporary foreign blockbusters in
translation. Most of the paperbacks are less than two years old and few older
than five.
Our
standard bookshop is a fairly accurate reflection of what Thai reading tastes
are all about: India-spun dharma, home-grown ghosts, China gore, local soaps,
and the West without a past – and, oh yes, some local novels too.
That’s
not all. When we mooted the Thai Modern
Classics project in January 1993, we asked thirteen Thai professors of
literature, literary critics, writers and other discriminating readers to each
provide us with a list of what they deemed to be the best novels ever published
in Thai, irrespective of length, style or trend. Ten of them complied, sending
us lists of between ten and thirty-five stories, which, once collated, amounted
to ninety-nine titles*. Half of
these novels we readily found in neighbouring bookshops, but it took months of
assiduous shopping, borrowing and photocopying to gather the other half. We
roamed all main bookshops in town and the network of shops lending out novels
for one or two baht a day; had hardly any luck with the second-hand booksellers
at the Jatujak [Chatuchak] weekend market and just a little more with the
romance peddlers around Wang Boorapha; came back with heavy booty from two
national book fairs; borrowed a couple of volumes from Thammasart [Thammasat]
and Jularlongkorn [Chulalongkorn] universities’ libraries; went in vain to
the National Library, whose novel section is a national disgrace; then asked
friends, who asked their friends – and, as we neither stole nor begged, we are
still five titles short, including one of the very first Thai novels, published
only some eighty years ago*. Such is
the health of Thai literature today that half of what ten specialists deem to
be the country’s best novels are just not readily available. It is easier to
buy Château-Lapompe ’57 than “Bunluea”’s Thutiyawiseit, published in
1968.
The book
cult and bookish culture that any Westerner inherits at birth simply do not
exist here, except in very narrow circles. There are three reasons for this.
The first is the weather. The second is the present rush to riches. The third
is the past and its many legacies.
The Thai
have known none of the long cold evenings that have forced generations of
northern barbarians indoors and into the habit of killing time with parchment
and quill, till they got hooked on words and every bum with a bun believes he
can be Proust, publishing houses force-feed a bloated market with impeccably
crafted bores and all-time masterpieces that don’t last the season, and too many
literary critics are as blind as Borges and Ved Mehta though they still have
eyes to read. Tropical nightlife has indeed other charms, and now that the
moneyed urban class has turned on the air-conditioning, it may be too late for
such sedate pastimes as reading and ’riting, when home means videogames and
TV soaps, and the office, mere ’rithmetic.
In its
rush to become an economic wonder of the world, Thailand today has little time
for wordmongers that don’t make money. Junior executives on expense accounts
may creditcard a Baht 1 437 treatise on cybernetics to great prestige, but how
could they justify a B90 expense for a novel by “Seeboorapha”?*
In
Thailand as elsewhere, book publishing is a business, and many of those who run
it seem to be more concerned with turning a safe profit than taking risks for
the sake of promoting literature, that elusive yet exacting whore.
Less than
a dozen printing houses churn out popular novels – romances by ladies for the
ladies, goons-guns-and-gore sagas for the armchair supermen – usually
presented in packs of two volumes per story. These form the bulk of fiction
ingested in this land but they are to literature what flour is to cake:
unleavened words in need of breadth, depth, vision or, quite simply, talent.
In the
narrow clearing where real literature sprouts, a few mammoths trample the grass
frail upstarts are trying to nibble. On the foreign books side, Asia Books and
Duangkamon [Duang Kamol or DK] handle most imports, commission a few books in
English and distribute small, locally based, European-language publishers, who
know only two gods, the Past and the Groin. On the Thai side, DK, which once
impulsed the literary scene by subsidizing a remarkably wide-ranging and
meaty literary review, Loak Nangsue (Book world), and did publish some
books of note before turning to more juicy, megalomaniac ventures, has long
been upstaged by Dork Ya, which is milking affluent fiction lovers for whatever
they are worth by reprinting old novels in pretty, hence pricey paperbacks and
convincing growing numbers of short-story writers and novelists – beginners as
well as best-selling authors – to adopt the same format.
For its
impressive output, Dork Ya relies on its own network of bookshops, which
practise all of the marketing tricks in the book – a marker and transparent
plastic cover with each book purchased, a B500 membership card with coupons
entitling one to special discounts, trinkets suggested as (onerous) gifts
during holiday periods... you name it, they are doing it. By distributing its
own books, Dork Ya avoids the major hurdle small-time publishers face: the need
to go through distribution companies, which dispatch books to the bookshops in
town but simply do not monitor sales.
Actually,
nobody does, which explains why authors prefer to sell their stories to
publishers for a relatively modest lump sum rather than accept a potentially
more lucrative percentage on sales. This type of contract, compulsory in the
West, is also discouraged by the standard practice of launching novels and
volumes of short stories with a print run of 2 000–3 000 copies (it used to be
ten times as much twenty years ago, old timers grumble, without specifying for
what kind of novels). Books in demand will be reprinted time and again in the
same quantities over a period of weeks, months or years. A novel or collection
of short stories that sells more than a hundred thousand is a phenomenal success
in Thailand, a country of nearly sixty million inhabitants, two thirds of whom
are going or have gone through at least seven years of schooling. Contrast this
with South Korea (population: 45 million), where, I am reliably told, even
“difficult” novels sometimes reach the half million mark.
The desktop
publishing revolution has prompted many would-be and confirmed writers to set
up their own shoestring operations, too often without bothering to have their
manuscripts properly edited – there aren’t that many competent editors around
anyway. Their output has not reached tidal wave proportions yet, far from it,
but growing numbers of shoddy works tend to give good fiction a bad name and
confuse and waylay readers – all the more so as the press generally fails to
assess the quality of the works published.
When they
report at all on books, most newspapers and magazines take the easy way out by
presenting the new publications of the week or the month of whatever genre in
equally brief notices usually culled from the cover blurbs. A few weekly
magazines or supplements of daily newspapers (Sayarm Rat and Matichon
essentially, sometimes Phoojatkarn daily and weekly) offer a little of
their precious space to literary columnists and critics, who also find the odd
page in a few glossy monthlies (Sarrakhadee, Lalana …). Professional
critics rightly complain of a dearth of outlets outside of academe, though
recently the same desktop publishing revolution has brought about two literary
monthlies, Writer Magazine and Phuean Nak Arn (The reader’s
friend)*, and a
third, Chang Wannakam (The wordsmith), was due to be launched in late
1994**. Though
the first two are a far cry from their forerunners, Loak Nangsue
(1977-83) and Thanon Nangsue (Book Lane, 1983-87), in terms of
craftsmanship, scope and depth, they have been warmly welcomed in the circles
that care about fiction and books in general.
Bangkok’s
English-language press isn’t helping much. Not so long ago, The Bangkok Post
surprisingly dropped its weekly “Bookmarker” page, which offered one of the
best critical assessments of Thai literature in the land, and then The
Nation started a weekly “Book Focus” page, whose idiosyncratic editorial
approach is seemingly little concerned with the Thai scene.
Despite
the earnings to be gained from movie or TV adaptations, few novelists are able
to live off their writings. Those who do are either word processors running
overtime as they cater to the popular market and simultaneously churn out three
or more novels published in magazines which pay them by the line, or part-time
novelists who spend too much of their time and talent on writing chores, as
columnists, reporters, feature writers and the like. To my knowledge, the only
novelist and short-story writer who hasn’t bowed to market demands yet is doing
reasonably well is Chart Korpjitti.
The
market for the novel is narrow indeed, yet this is not to say that writers are
not well considered. On the contrary. Educated Thais have taken to heart Rama
VI’s injunction:
“Respected
in countries the world over
Are those
who can read and write books
Only
fools cringe at the written word
And no
one but a clod would scorn a poet.”*
This was
proclaimed some time around the First World War, when poets had blue blood or
the blue chips of courtly office. In today’s plebeian Thailand, the literary
scene has grown hectic to a fault. Though there are a few loners, Thai writers
are a most egregious lot. They congregate at all manner of cocktail parties,
forums and vanity fairs, attend learned seminars, regroup in sundry chapels
that booze eloquent on one and all, and they have their own guild, the National
Association of Writers of Thailand. The youngest among them pay tribute to
their elders in the best patronage tradition, when they are not busy badmouthing
literary prizes that keep eluding them.
The
powers that be have been making meritorious efforts to add to the corporation’s
aura, notably by liberally bestowing each year the title of National Artist
(and a yearly stipend unto death) to a couple of sexagenarians who have blackened
their weight’s worth of paper – prompting one wit to hiss, “Why fret? The way
they go about it, we’ll all be National Artists one day”*. Since
1972, as part of the many activities of the yearly National Book Week, the
government-sponsored National Committee for the Promotion of Books chooses the
“most outstanding” novel of the year and, for good measure, like in beauty
pageants, one to four runners-up. Almost unfailingly, this eminent jury swaps
quality for market weight, though on some years it feels self-conscious enough
to withhold its “most outstanding” label. Of the ten novels in our selection
that pertain to this period, only two received the distinction and one a
second-best commendation**. It may
be no accident that the two award-winners also received the commercial SEA
Write Award, which has generally better selection criteria, hence a credibility
that translates into hefty sales the National Committee for the Promotion of
Books fails to generate. A couple of banks have also instituted their own
tax-deductible literary do’s that betray good intentions and accountants’
tastes.
The
glamour and the gloom of literary activities in present-day Thailand are both
legacies of the past. The Thai literary tradition is only seven hundred years
old, and for much of this time, was confined to the palace and a small elite of
rulers and their entourage. The corpus of works is relatively small. Writing on
palm leaves or on handmade, folding bloc-notes of rough paper was no sinecure,
so few copies were made – and, through wars, carelessness, bugs and the sultry
heat, manuscripts were easily damaged and destroyed. The Chinese perfected
silk writing more than two thousand years ago; they never told the Thai. The
French had their first manuscript on paper by 1240, half a century before the
Siamese engraved their first stone. The German Gutenberg printed the first book
in 1436, yet printing presses only reached Siam three hundred and ninety-nine
years later. The technological gap, which in the last century and a half has
been reduced to zero thanks to the instant communications of our global
village, was compounded by radically different socio-political conditions
and resulted in an inordinate delay in the spread of education among the
people, for which Thai literature is still paying the price in terms of
anaemic markets and rock-bottom standards.
Education
for all became compulsory – on paper – only after the First World War, and a
reality after 1932. Teaching of literature in the last two years of elementary
school began in 1960*. In
secondary school, a two-step reform in Thai-language teaching in 1978 and 1981
reduced the study of Thai classics in favour of more modern works and tried to
promote critical assessment of literature. Good move, but many academics were
up in arms, and they also complained that, in higher education, only those who
specialise in the language field can really study Thai literature. Obviously,
the country needs more engineers and computer nerds than word wizards, or so
the short-sighted profess. So they reap what they sow. Although people at large
do read fiction (how else can you explain the phenomenal success of Bangkork
[Bangkok] and Bangkork Sa-khwae [Bangkok Square]*?),
fiction lovers remain an elite of a few thousand urbanites.**
Judging
from available university manuals, including the most exhaustive to date, Development
of Thai literature***, current
teaching of literature at university level remains – to an inquisitive western
mind – overly scholastic, nomenclature-oriented, ignorant of the lives of the
writers, seemingly reluctant to openly appraise and grade the literary value
of the works studied and strangely bereft of alternative critical viewpoints,
which are at best mentioned in passing but never explained or used.
Some
savvy critics go on delightful chopping sprees: they show their mettle by
slicing up the novel into so many types as they would sausages. One holds for
thirteen literary schools and ten types of novels; twenty-two types, counters
another; not at all, thirty-six, raves a third – all of them unbelievably
blind to the evidence that the single most important trend in the Thai novel is
zoological: does not our selection include two novels about elephants, two more
about snakes, one about a tiger and one about a gang of mad dogs? Seriously,
what is the use of categories such as “family-life novels”, “aristocratic
novels”, “new-elite novels”...? Great fun, perhaps, but no dice.
Periodically,
the Ministry of Education updates a list of suggested off-hours reading
material for secondary school students. The criteria used for that list are
certainly legitimate and praiseworthy (adequacy to the age group, promotion
of love of the motherland, love of nature, etc, perhaps even syntactic correctness
and nobility of characters), but the strictly literary merits of the works
chosen seem to hold low priority. Of the current list of twenty-seven novels
thus suggested, only five are in our own selection – but then the moulding of
young Thai minds was not our immediate concern.
Criticism
is easy, but it should be kept in mind that the Thai have come a long way in
practically no time – the past century or so. To better understand this,
let us stroll down history lane and watch the flowering of Thai letters as we
go along, as there is much to be gleaned that will help us understand the
moods, manners and themes of the Thai novel, that belated western import
grafted under peculiar circumstances.
Even
though the origins of the Thai people remain a matter of speculation*, it is
accepted that they came into their own in the 13th century, when they set up
their own state at Sukho-thai, under an absolute ruler. The fledgling state
expanded fast under its fourth king, Rarmkham-haeng – who had the good idea to
tell us about it in stone. By then, the Thai were growing rice and fruit trees
and crafting pottery. There were two classes: the rulers (royal family, palace
officials, Brahmin priests, top Buddhist monks) and the ruled (servants, and slaves,
i.e. prisoners of war), bonded by a patronage system of reciprocal
obligations – loyalty in return for protection. Their vision of the world
stretched as far as China for trade and Lanka for religion. Without discarding
their ancestral animism or the Brahminic practices of their Khmer former
masters and neighbours to the east, they espoused Buddhism. Starting with the
eighth king, Lithai (1347-68?), the monarchs called themselves Maha Thamma
Rarcha, or great dharma kings. In the early 15th century, Sukho-thai
allied itself with its more dynamic southern neighbour, Ayutthaya, by which it
was eventually absorbed.
The
literature of Sukho-thai was inscribed on stèles, stone slabs, metal plaques,
and later monastery or palace walls. The first inscription is traditionally
considered to be a stèle Rarmkham-haeng had made in 1292 and King Mongkut
discovered in 1833 (see below). In the last decade, however, revisionist
historians have argued that it was forged by Mongkut in the 1840s or 1850s to
legitimise his rule*. The
four-sided stone, 111cm tall, bears 124 lines in what is considered to be the
earliest example of written old Thai, derived from Khmer, itself derived from
the ancient Pallavan script of Southern India. Like the dozens of stone
inscriptions found throughout the northern part of central Thailand – the
cradle of Siam – it is in (often rhythmic) prose (see below).
[Inscription one of Sukho-thai – first 40 lines]
My father was
named See Inthararthit, my mother Lady Sueang and my elder brother Barn Mueang.
We were five siblings: three boys and two girls. My eldest brother died when he
was still a child.
When I was nineteen years old, Lord Sarm Chon, the ruler of Mueang
Chort, came to attack Mueang Tark. My father went to fight him on the left;
Lord Sarm Chon drove forth on the right. Lord Sam Chon moved his troops
forward. My father’s men, defeated, dispersed and fled in confusion. I did not
flee. I mounted my elephant, forced [him] through the troops and pushed him
ahead of my father. I fought an elephant duel with Lord Sarm Chon. I fought
Lord Sarm Chon’s elephant, Mart Mueang by name. Defeated, Lord Sarm Chon fled.
Then my father named me Phra Rarm Kham-haeng [Rama the Bold] because I had
fought Sarm Chon’s elephant.
During my father’s lifetime, I tended on my father and on my
mother. When I caught game or fish I brought it to my father. When I picked up
sour or sweet fruits that were edible and delicious, I brought them to my
father. When I went hunting elephants, either by lasso or by [driving them into
a] corral, I brought them to my father. When I raided a village or a town and
captured elephants, men or women, silver or gold, I turned them over to my
father. When my father died, my elder brother was still alive, and I served him
steadfastly as I had served my father. When my elder brother died, I received
the whole kingdom for myself.
In the time of King Rarm Kham-haeng this land of Sukho-thai is
good. In the water there is fish, in the fields there is rice. The lord of the
realm does not levy toll on his subjects; they freely lead their cattle to
trade or ride their horses to sell; whoever wants to trade in elephants does
so; whoever wants to trade in horses does so; whoever wants to trade in silver
or gold does so. When any commoner or man of rank dies, his house, trained
elephants, wives, children, granaries, rice, retainers and groves of areca and
betel trees are left in their entirety to his son. When commoners or men of
rank quarrel, [the King] examines the case to get at the truth and then settles
the case justly for them. He does not side with thieves or favour receivers [of
stolen goods]. When he sees someone’s rice he does not covet it; when he sees
someone’s wealth he does not seethe with anger. Whoever comes on an elephant to
see him and ask him to protect his country, he takes care of generously.
Whoever has no elephants, no horses, no men or women, no silver or gold, he
gives [some] to him and helps him restore his authority. When he captures
enemies or their commanders, he does not kill them or beat them. A bell is hung
over the opening of the gate yonder: if any distraught commoner in the city
has a lawsuit, feels gripe in his belly and pain in his heart and wants to make
it known to his ruler and lord, it is not difficult: he strikes the bell which
the ruler has hung there; at the call, King Rarm Kham-haeng, the ruler of the
kingdom, goes and examines the case impartially. So the common people of this
city of Sukho-thai praise him. They plant areca and betel groves all over this
city; there are many groves of coconut and other fruit-bearing palm trees in
this city, as well as groves of mango and tamarind trees. Whoever plants them
takes possession of them…
[This
translation is based on the combined works of Bradley, Coedès and Griswold,
modified in the light of Piriya Krairuek [Krairiksh]’s remarks in The Ram
Khamhaeng Controversy.]
The only
significant piece of poetry of the period is the Royal Precepts (Supharsit
Phraruang) attributed to Rarmkham-haeng – or was it Lithai? – and inscribed
on a wall in a Bangkok temple during Mongkut’s reign. In simple Thai, the
ruler teaches his subjects how to be loyal, friendly and considerate, and insists
on the importance of knowledge.
The
outstanding work of the period is Lithai’s Traiphoom Phraruang (The
king’s three worlds), transcribed on palm leaves in 1778 from an old version
from Phetburee [Phetchaburi]. It is the Buddhist Divine Comedy; its purely
descriptive approach presents an extraordinarily detailed and vivid vision of
the universe and the place of man in it (see below).
Didactic
or rhetorical, the works of the time were meant to glorify, testify and edify.
They were paeans to the rulers recording nation-building efforts and offer
glimpses of traditions and social conditions.
The three worlds
– nether world, corporeal world and ethereal world – hold 32 realms which
together constitute the universe. The first world, a world of woe, comprises
the various hells and the realms of supernatural creatures, tormented spirits (preta)
and starving souls (asura). The second is the world of man, from which
one can reach, through meditation, the ethereal world that culminates in Nirvana,
to escape the cycle of reincarnations. This excerpt focuses on the gestation of
man.
The material
qualities that are born male or female all begin as kalala [infinitely
small, initial corpuscles] and gradually grow in size day by day. On the
seventh day, it is like water used to clean meat and is called amphutha.
That amphutha grows every day. After seven days, it thickens like lead
in a melting pot and is called peisi. That peisi grows by the
day. After seven days, it hardens in the shape of an egg and is called khana.
That khana keeps growing day by day. After seven days, bumps appear in
five places like warts and this is known as the pentamerous-wart stage – two
for the hands, two for the feet and one wart for the head, and from then on they
gradually take shape day after day. After seven days, palms and fingers are
formed. By the forty-second day, there is hair, there are nails on the feet and
on the hands and all the organs that make a human being are accounted for.
[...] that child sits in the middle of the mother’s womb and has its back
against the coating of the womb. The food the mother has digested is beneath
that child. The food the mother takes anew is above that child. All the time
the child sits in the mother’s womb, it suffers a great deal, hating and
loathing beyond endurance the dampness and the stink and the worms with 80
rings which reside in the mother’s womb, a fetid place where they reproduce and
grow old and die and decompose. Those masses of taeniae and worms are seething
in the mother’s womb. Those taeniae and worms are all over the body of that
child, like maggots dwelling in rotten fish or in refuse and faeces. The
umbilical cord of that child is hollow like the stem of the water-lily known as
blue lotus. The end of this hollow cord is suspended and connected to the back
of the mother’s stomach and all the delicious, nutritious foods and liquids
drip through that cord into the stomach of that child, and the little one is
fed day and night. [...] That child [...] sits crouching in the mother’s womb,
with both fists clenched, its body bent double on its knees, its head resting
on both knees. In this position, blood and lymph drip all over his body
continuously, and it looks like a monkey sitting dejectedly in the hollow of a
tree with clenched fists during the rain. Inside the mother’s womb, it is very
hot as when we take banana leaves to boil them in a pot. Everything the mother
eats is burnt and digested by the power of that burning internal fire. The body
of that child is not burnt, though, because it is in the order of things that
that child has enough merit to be born as a human being, and that is the reason
why it neither burns nor dies. But while it is in the mother’s womb, it does
not breathe nor does it even once stretch its arms and legs as we do. Therefore
that child hurts all over like someone locked up in a very narrow jar [...] and
whenever the mother walks, sleeps or lies awake, the child in her womb suffers
agonizing pain like a newborn fawn in the hands of a drunkard or like a snake
mishandled by a charmer. Its suffering does not last a few days. Its suffering
lasts seven months, sometimes eight months, sometimes nine months, ten months,
eleven months for some, and there are even some that take a full year to be
born. Whoever stays in the womb for six months and is born will not live.
Whoever stays in the womb for seven months and is born, for all the mother’s
efforts will never be healthy or resistant. Whoever comes from hell to be
reborn is born with a burning body and, while still in the womb, feels listless
and ravenous. Moreover, the mother’s flesh contributes to the heat. Whoever
comes from heaven to be reborn is born cool in body and soul and, while still
in the womb, feels happy and pleasantly disposed. Moreover, the mother’s flesh
is refreshingly cool. At the time of birth, karma turns into a wind in the
mother’s womb which blows the child’s body upward and lowers its head to face
the exit, like the damned [that the] devils grab by the ankles and throw
headlong into the wells of hell one hundred fathoms deep. When that child comes
out of the mother’s womb, it cannot avoid great pain and suffers all over, like
a male elephant tugged and pushed through a narrow back door...
In the
Ayutthaya period (1350-1767), however, pedagogy took second place to
entertainment, and sturdy prose turned to light-headed poetry. By then, the
kings called themselves Theiwarart or god-kings. At first, their power
radiated outward from the palace to the inner city, to the rice fields and to
the towns beyond. Later, the realm expanded and consolidated through war,
marriage, diplomacy and trade. The aristocracy and the state apparatus grew
accordingly. By the mid 17th century, separate administrative structures were
created for soldiers and civilians, who nonetheless fought together in times of
war.
The first
two kings of Ayutthaya encouraged literary endeavours, and an unknown author
during the first reign, inspired by a northern tale, penned Phra Lor*, the
first tragic and gracefully erotic love affair written in Thai. But it was
under Narrai (1656-88) that art and literature reached their golden age in the
Sukho-thai period.
The world
perception of the Thai had never been so broad. Europeans had discovered Siam,
and they eyed its riches and frowned at its idols.* The
Dutch in the southeast, the English in the south and west were running trading
outposts that would soon turn into colonial empires. The Persians wanted to
convert Narrai to Islam, the French to Catholicism. Narrai and Louis XIV
exchanged embassies. A Greek adventurer schemed his way to the top of the Siamese
administration, only to be executed when his royal protector passed away.** During
these three decades of relative peace and growing prosperity, art and
literature blossomed. Narrai’s favourite minstrel, the legendary Seeprart,
earned himself the title of Prince of Poets.
Seeprart,
the prince of poets
Nurtured on his father’s primer (the Jindarmanee), he
breathed in verse and had lightning wit. See was nine when his father came back
from court one night with two verses King Narrai had been unable to turn into a
quatrain.
What is it that tarnished your cheek, my beloved?
Did some mosquito, fly, gnat or midge furtively bite you?
When Phra Ho-rarthibordee woke up the next morning, he found the
stanza completed. Respecting rhythm, rhyme and tone, his son had added:
Who could possibly brag of touching your fair skin?
Who would dare bruise the flesh I cherish?
The king was so impressed that he insisted on See entering his
service at once and, to assuage the father’s fear that the unruly boy would
fall foul of the drastic palace law, he promised that, no matter what See did,
he’d never be condemned to death. See proved so gifted that Narrai bestowed on
him the patronymic of Seeprart or Glorious Sage. The boy grew into a gallant
young man. One day, the king asked his courtiers to make poems in praise of the
floats the ladies of the court had made for a water ceremony. Seeprart had his
eyes on a lady-in-waiting who was somewhat older than himself, and this led to
the following exchange:
How deftly you pleated nipa palm
Into this fine floating junk!
Shall we sail and bail in it heart to heart?
Young as I am, I’m eager for the trip
Tut
tut! Foolish rabbit prancing at the moon
Forgetful
of his lowly lot
Peacock
spreading his tail for the clouds
Oblivious
of the beast in him
Ah ha! Foolish rabbit indeed who prances at a moon
So lofty that the eye must search sky-high
Come loving season beast goes to beast you know
Mistress and slave, nay, I say – we both belong to earth
When Narrai learned Seeprart was sending inflamed poems to one
of his concubines, he commuted the death sentence, which was mandatory under
palace law, into exile to Nakhorn See Thammarart*. There, Seeprart became the
star of poetic contests. But soon rivals accused him of sleeping with one of
the governor’s minor wives, and the governor ordered his execution. Before he
died, Seeprart wrote on the sand with his foot:
Mother Earth be my witness
A master’s disciple I still am
If wrong let me this blade deserve
But if you slain an innocent
May this sword strike you back
As soon as Narrai hears of this, he has the governor executed.
As well as his improvised poems composed during poetic jousts,
Seeprart left two major works, Kamsuan Seeprart or Seeprart’s lament,
composed during his journey to Nakhorn See Thammarart, and Anirut Khamchan,
the story of a young monarch who while asleep is taken by the gods to the
daughter of the king of a distant land and, when he wakes up, goes through hell
and high water to finally be reunited with her.
* Seeprart was
lucky. One of Narrai’s successors, King Borromakoat, had his own son, Crown
Prince Thammathibeit, a most gifted poet, beaten to death for loving one of his
concubines. It took 180 strokes, history records. The lady was similarly
dispatched.
The first
Thai primer, Jindarmanee, was culled from a Pali manual. Soon, even
young princesses learned to read and write. Some of the best poems of the
period drew their inspiration from the Jataka tales*.
At
Narrai’s death, European interlopers were kept out of the country for 150
years. The world of the Siamese shrank accordingly, but poetry went on flourishing,
and developed increasingly sophisticated forms*.
Distinctive new formats were born, such as the nirart** or
narrative of a journey and the phleing yao or elegiac love epistle. The
first dramas were performed at court, mixing monarchs, myths and magic, with
enough coarse words and sexual innuendos to please the village crowds.
Education became so important that families of note set up and sponsored their
own temples to ensure the schooling of their offspring.
Yet, even
before Narrai’s death, the kingdom had entered a period of palace intrigue and
rebellions, and the rivalry between members of the royal family and titled
officials weakened the realm and contributed to its demise after repeated
assaults from the Burmese. In 1767, Ayutthaya burned – and so did most of
its palm-leaf manuscripts.
After an
interlude of fifteen years in Thonburee [Thonburi], the first of the Rama
kings, founder of the Jakkree [Chakri] dynasty, set about building Bangkok and
the kingdom we know now.
The year
was 1782, and Siam was about to languidly enter the modern age. There were more
tussles with the Burmese during the first reign, three decades later some
unpleasantness with the French over Cambodia and Laos and, later still, with
the English over the Malay states, but by and large the central administration
was left to get on with the work of building a modern state.
At first,
nothing much changed: same administrative system as in Ayutthaya; same dual
social structure of rulers and ruled. For most people, life still centred on
the house and the temple. There was little formal education outside the
palace. Yet, a legal system was cobbled together in 1804.
By the
third reign (1824-51), however, things began to move. The state-controlled foreign
trade – with China, India, Java, Portugal, England, etc – grew rapidly,
fuelling an economic boom, until the Sino-British Opium War (1839-42) undermined
export income. The tax system was overhauled and state coffers were full. The
first formal centre of higher learning was created at the Phra Cheithuphon
monastery in Bangkok. While the first Thai princes were sent abroad to learn
English, the first English and American missionaries entered Siam, Bibles and
medicine in hand.
This
early Bangkok period saw feverish efforts to write anew the lost works of the
past, by relying on vivid oral traditions. This yielded the major classics of
Thai literature – the best version of the Rarmakian*,
inspired by the Ramayana, Inao*, Khun
Chang Khun Phaen and Phra Aphaimanee. All but the latter, written by
the People’s Poet, commoner Sunthorn Phoo (see below), were collective
efforts, in which the kings themselves were both orchestrators and major
contributors. Rama I wrote several plays, including episodes of the Rarmakian
and Inao, various nirart and a précis of moral precepts**. Rama
II, Rama III and Sunthorn Phoo contributed to Khun Chang Khun Phaen,
generally held to be the classic of classics, for the perfection of its style,
its true-to-life characters and its depiction of not just the palace crowd but
ordinary folk and their foibles, frolics and festivities. Based on a local tale
inspired by a real story that took place at the end of the 15th century, it
tells of the love triangle between noble Phaen, wealthy Chang and the woman
Phim-Wanthong, the only daughter of a well-to-do merchant, who has become,
quite unjustly, the epitome of the wanton wife.
Sunthorn
Phoo, the people’s poet
Sober now yet still drunken with love
How can I my true yearning deny
Liquor fumes in late morning fade
But love keeps me drunk day and night
Nirart Phookhaothong
Do not in mankind trust, he preached,
So fickle and unfathomable.
Warped and wrought creepers
Aren’t as crooked as the human mind.
Phra Aphaimanee
For all my friends, I feel I have no friend
As none’s like thee, o my absent sweetheart
Chums cannot to a wife compare
Nor pals to a life partner
Sunthorn Phoo was born four years after Bangkok, and his seventy
years (1786-1855) spanned four reigns, with greatly changing fortunes. His
parents divorced before he came to life. His father, some commoner hailing
probably from Ayutthaya, married and settled down in Rayong Province. When the
couple divorced, his father became a monk and his mother returned to the employ
of the king’s brother, in the Back Palace, at what is now (thanks to Allied
bombing during World War II) the Bangkok Noi railway station on the Thonburee
side of the Jao Phraya river. There Sunthorn Phoo was born, and introduced to
the prince as a child. He was educated at the Seesudarrarm monastery nearby.
The next we hear of him, he is in his teens and in jail, either
for the crime of being smitten with a lady-in-waiting of the prince or for
riotous behaviour while under the influence of alcohol. It was behind bars, in
any case, that he started his masterpiece, Phra Aphaimanee, which would
be twenty years in the making. At the death of the prince, he was freed, and
soon Rama II made him his amanuensis and official court poet, with the title of
Khun Sunthorn Wo-harn (something like Baron Gift of the Gab). He had three
wives in quick succession, who each gave him a son. When his protector died,
Sunthorn Phoo, then 38, lost royal favour and became a monk, visiting various
royal temples, writing a great deal, until he disrobed and fell on even harder
times and had to beg for little mercies from noble admirers. When Mongkut
ascended the throne, Sunthorn Phoo, in the employment of the king’s brother,
was reinstated, as Phra Sunthorn Wo-harn, five years from his death.
In the course of his long life, besides his contribution to such
collective works as Khun Chang Khun Phaen, he wrote no fewer than nine nirart
or elegiac travel poems, five very long and very tall tales, four lengthy
lullabies, three sets of precepts and maxims all Thai know, two lyrical dramas
and a play.
Phra
Aphaimanee
This wondrous flight of fancy defies summarizing. It tells of
two young brothers, prince Aphaimanee and Prince Seesuwan, who were sent out in
search of broad knowledge and military skills as was the custom for young sires
in those days. When they return, one an expert (magic) pipe-player, the other a
champion fighter with wooden sticks, their father chases them away. A series of
adventures follow, involving, among sundry mythical creatures, a sea ogress who
gives Aphaimanee a son; a family of mermaids gobbled up by the ogress except
for one daughter, who bears Aphaimanee a son as well; a sweet eastern princess
in distress who, after many twists and turns (piracy, flight, nunhood), bears
him twin daughters; and a gorgeous but nasty Lanka princess, who gives birth to
yet another son, who turns into an awful brat. When a hermit puts an end to all
quarrels, the tired heroes become monks at long last.
This extraordinary tale is a shimmering ode to love, women,
knowledge and modern science. Aphaimanee learns English. The poem bristles with
futuristic weaponry, airplanes and even a (yellow?) submarine. The princesses
handle weapons, run armies and countries, and show little of the modesty
expected of ladies of the time.
Experts say that Sunthorn Phoo, besides putting much of himself
and the women of his life in this work, borrowed freely from Indian and Chinese
tales and from local lore, but they agree that never had a work of fiction been
so highly personal and inventive. Immensely popular from the start, Phra
Aphaimanee is an essential component of Thai culture even today, and is
repeated in proverbs, sayings and cartoons.
Khun
Chang Khun Phaen
When war breaks out between Ayutthaya and Chiangmai, handsome
Phaen has just wedded lovely Phim, whom ungainly Chang (Elephant) also loves.
Phaen, a warrior, is away for so long that Chang is able to convince Phim’s
mother that Phaen is dead, whereupon he marries Phim, who takes the name of
Wanthong. When Phaen finally returns with a beautiful prisoner in tow, his
ex-wife refuses to see him. Peeved, Phaen goes away, but, in spite of his many
good fortunes, he can’t forget her. He goes back and convinces her to flee with
him into the jungle. Chang tries all the tricks he knows to get her back and
finally goes to the king and accuses Phaen of high treason. The king orders
Phaen’s arrest. Long battles ensue, in which Phaen maintains the upper hand,
but when Phim becomes pregnant he decides to surrender. He is jailed, and Chang
resumes life with Wanthong, who delivers a boy.
Phaen’s son grows into a worthy warrior, who convinces the king
to have his father released. Father and son go to war against Chiangmai again
and win a decisive battle. After the son marries and takes his mother to live
with them, Phaen’s love is rekindled and a jealous Chang petitions the king to
get his wife back. Unable to decide whose wife Phim-Wanthong is, the king
enjoins her to choose. She can’t – and the king orders her to be beheaded.
The period also saw a translation of Mon
chronicles* and a shift from India to China as the main source of inspiration.
Chinese immigration had started under Tarksin, ruler of Thonburee and himself a
Sino-Thai. Chinese influence on Thai literature started in 1865, when Jao
Phraya Phrakhlang (Hon)** wrote Sarm
Kok, translated from the 15th century San Guo, known to the western
world as The Romance of the three kingdoms. This protracted struggle
between warlords in ancient China captured the fancy of the Siamese, who found
in its exciting episodes, written in beautiful yet easily understood language,
“a kind of soft manual for everything from good government to moral precepts”***. To this
day, Sarm Kok has inspired an amazing amount of exegesis and periphrastic
versions as well as the translation of a huge body of Chinese chronicles and
romances.
Throughout
the period, literary works became increasingly entertaining, with nirart,
love epistles and the writing of the countless tales and legends of the popular
Buddhist tradition. Surrounded by mythological creatures, the characters nonetheless
had flesh and blood, and their passions evolved with the plot. Greater
sophistication was leading to a noticeable diversification of styles. The
period saw many new poets, nobles and commoners, male and female, and under
Rama III two satirical works appeared. They were written by a woman, Khun
Suwan, who was poking fun at some officials. There was also a parody, Radein
Landai, which transposed Inao’s aristocratic love triangle among the
lowest of the low – an Indian cowgirl, her husband and an Indian beggar. All
were indications of an unprecedented independence of thought.
When
radical reformist King Mongkut ascended the throne in 1851, he opened up Siam
to the West. As a result, many changes took place in Thai society.
Administrative reform along western lines revolutionised daily life, right down
to the way of behaving and dressing. Slavery was eventually abolished in
1905, and everybody given (high-sounding) family names.
As
England took over the Indian subcontinent, Burma and the Malay states, and
France grabbed Indochina, the two colonial powers agreed to leave Siam as a
cushion between their dominions, but not without kicking up much dust at her
borders. Germany, Russia and Japan became new stars in the Thai cosmogony.
Foreign trade was no longer state controlled. Siam exported teak, tin and
increasing amounts of rice. Banking and land transportation were born. More
young Siamese aristocrats were sent abroad; the palace called in foreign
female teachers*.
Literacy increased, textbooks were ordered, and the body of reference texts in
Thai continued to grow.
The first
foreign missionaries ushered in western values and methods. In 1835, Dan Beach
Bradley, an American medical doctor and evangelist, imported a printing press
and Siamese type which had been cast in Bengal to answer both his Lord’s and
the Thai bureaucracy’s demand for printed material. Thirty years later, he was
to launch The Bangkok Recorder, after which the local press developed
exponentially: under Rama V (1868-1910), there were 59 publications in Thai,
English or Chinese, from daily newspapers to quarterly journals, including a
women’s fortnightly magazine – and 133 under Rama VI (1910-25). The first
all-Thai daily** started
on 26 September 1875. These publications as a rule did not last long, but they
were breeding grounds for writers, sealing the unholy alliance between the
fact-chasing press and modern fiction.
The
belated introduction of printing was a decisive turning point. From then on,
prose would recover the primacy it had lost four centuries earlier. Thai
writers would finally come down to earth and discover realism. They also discovered
another way of writing, concise, factual, efficient, yet with its own beauty.
Non-fiction helped form generations of writers, and fiction (short stories,
plays and then novels) rapidly relegated poetry to has-been status.
For a few
decades longer, however, poetic works of note were still being composed. In
1906, Rama V wrote Ngoh Pa* in eight days, as well as the much praised
documentary Phra Rarchaphithee Sipsong Duean (Twelve months of royal
ceremonies), and Rama VI more or less closed the classic poetic era with Phra
Non, the last khamluang, which he finished in 1916.**
During
Jularlongkorn’s long reign, as part of a new administrative structure
modelled largely on the British colonial system, education grew by leaps and
bounds, making inroads in urban areas. A school for royal pages (scions of the
nobility and of commoners in high charges) was created within the palace in
1871; a cadet military school* opened
ten years later; in 1884, the first university, Jularlongkorn, was created**; Bangkok
temples opened the first formal schools. By the turn of the century, Siam
adopted a copyright law, the Siam Society was founded in 1904 and the first public
library was inaugurated.
Meanwhile,
more students were sent to Singapore and Europe – sons of the elite, no doubt,
but soon grants were available to deserving commoners. These young men,
directly exposed to western values, in time brought them back home, and, in the
field of literature, introduced the short story, plays and the novel.***
For many
centuries, literature was an exclusively aristocratic pastime, at once
instrument of governance, educative medium and source of entertainment.
Aristocrats, nobles and other dignitaries (including the leaders of the
Buddhist clergy) borrowed freely from popular tradition – a mixture of
animistic superstitions, tall tales and magnified local events which Hinduism
then Buddhism peppered, salted and cheerfully churned to better edify the
faithful.
In turn,
popular literature fed on the palace output, essentially via the temples.
Farmers then didn’t read, nor did many of them have access to court to watch
its plays and poetry pageants. They listened to sermons, to the love songs
improvised by itinerant minstrels playing bamboo mouth organs, to the courtship
contests in which village lads and lasses taunted one another in salvos of
improvised and often risqué verse, and watched the plays during temple fairs –
burlesque performances of the likei, masked dances, shadow and puppet
shows and in latter days Chinese opera, which together accounted for the bulk
of rural belles lettres, at once coarse and sophisticated, witty and crass.*
The
predominant influence was Indian, but it was fine-tuned to fit the national
psyche, which Seinee Prarmoat [Seni Pramoj]** once
chuckled is “as flat as our Central Plain” – as if it took a mountain to make a
soul lofty, or an ocean to give it depth!
The
various Thai versions of the Ramayana throughout the centuries have no
use for its heavy metaphysical speculations and only recount its anecdotes,
which inspired many other Thai classics as well. Ditto for the more ancient Mahabharata.
(Actually, these Indian classics came second-hand to the Thais: the Mahabharata
through the Khmers, the Ramayana from southern India through Java.)
The
aristocratic writers of the classic age were at the top of the authoritarian
social order and their main beneficiaries. Steeped in Buddhist culture, they
breathed Buddhist values, which were fine instruments for maintaining the
social status quo. “These poets all had the same approach to life,” once noted
the Dr Johnson of Thai literature, Bunluea Theipphayasuwan*. “They
all believed in the protection of the Triple Gem**, they believed
in good and bad deeds, that we have karma and face obstacles resulting from
karma, if not in this life then in the next.… They had no qualms with this, so
did not in their writings touch upon metaphysical issues, not even from their
own religion. They didn’t ask themselves what man is, who man is, why he is
born or where he is going. They didn’t care about the characteristics or the
state of society, why there were rich and poor, princes and peasants. … They
were interested in individual human beings, how their behaviour differed, how
their differences showed, in speech, attitudes, expressions. Thai poets were
interested in man in his five life attributes … (form, sensation of pleasure or
pain, perception, consciousness, discrimination), as beings endowed with
passion and lust.”*
In other
words, these privileged versifiers were happy with their lot – as well they
should – and didn’t bother themselves with silly metaphysical questions that
could have upset their digestion and the royal scheme of things. Theirs was a
world of feelings, fantasy and fun – the last especially, as befits a people to
whom nothing is worth doing if it is no fun and who never asks whether a book
is interesting but whether it is sanuk – fun to read. The celebrated
palace wit was as self-deprecatory as it could be scathing – and it is a great
pity indeed that with such droll material, so many students of Thai classics
today complain of being bored!
“The
values expressed were love of peace, love of nature, living kindness,
simplicity of the way of life, sense of fun and sense of poetry,” notes another
analyst of Thai classical literature**. “The
only apparent ideology was a deep attachment to the land, religion and the
ruler” – the holy trinity that the Thai flag embodies and which has become
identified with the best and the worst of Thai nationalism.
Unsurprisingly,
the characters these aristocrats created were kings and other beautiful palace
people who were enmeshed in magic practices and met supernatural creatures –
from talking animals to gods, griffons and ghosts – that gave the stories
mythical appeal and scope. Theirs was a dreamy world of wonder, which befitted
the god-kings and their exalted entourage and had the populace agape, excited
and awed. Medieval Europe knew much of the same make believe – and isn’t it the
very psychological spring that novels of the prince-meets-Cinderella variety
trigger all along? Every empty stomach or alienated soul needs to dream.
Changing
the seat of power, from Sukho-thai to Ayutthaya, from Ayutthaya to Thonburee
and then finally to Bangkok, spurred more works but also meant starting all
over to resurrect the classics that had been lost or destroyed. The same old
tales of human love and love for the land were told and retold: creativity was
in the language rather than in the plots – the canvas, the characters, the
settings were already there and so were the many conventions of each genre.
Besides, Thai literary works were meant to be read out aloud or performed, and
this no doubt helped develop collective memory, which palliated the paucity of
manuscripts and their destruction, but it also helped enhance the capabilities
of the language.
And what
a wonderfully musical instrument it is! The Thai language is tonal and mostly
monosyllabic; its soft and hard consonants and long and short vowels are music
to the ear and call for play on rhyme and rhythm. Traditionally, literary
beauty stems from the use of poetic words that are pleasant to hear and stir
the imagination.
The
various forms of poetry developed in the course of a few centuries are highly
complex, with inner rhymes and set places for certain letters, and these formal
constraints tend to favour verbal performance over significance. Classic poets
focus on roop rot klin siang – flavour, smell, shape and sound, which leaves
little room for thought. Ideally, a poet’s sophistication shows in a combination
of sounds and rhythms that will not overwhelm the ear to the point of drowning
the meaning. In practice, however, even the best of them tend to err on the
alliterative side.
Consider
the following, from Sunthorn Phoo’s Journey to Suphanburee:
Kháo
Khíao Khoat Khùm Khùèn Khiang
Khiang
Ròm Rùèn
Rûk Rang Riang Rìap
Rôi
Hóam Hak
Hing Hái Híang Húa Hart
Hàèng Háé
Yang Yai
Yòrt Yuen Yòi Yòak
Yò Yoan Yen*
It means
something like this:
Myriad
em’rald mounts and mellow mounds mired
In tidy
tides of tightly textur’d tectal trees
Shyly
show shaggy shrubs shaving shrivel’d, shrinking shoals,
But
blasted bulky babuls bow and buff, benign breeze below.
Great
stuff indeed. To most Thai, this is cream of poetry. To Westerners, it is arty
mumbo jumbo. Thai poets – like our Renaissance versifiers – do not describe
landscapes: they shape them as they chime along. The result is at best a jungle
à la française, more often a melodious mess or jaunty jingle, which
trains the ear but not the brain. (Hence the talent and success of Thai ad
slogan mongers today?) Primacy goes to sound, rather than meaning. And it is
an enduring legacy: students from the earliest age must stumble through thousands
of these tongue-twisters. An admirable outcome of this is that many can
actually versify for fun when the mood strikes them. Poets have been known to
improvise collectively on television – my verse, your turn – and it is said
that in the royal courts of yore, the meanest poets never spoke but in verse.
The few
examples of poetry translated in these pages show, however, how weak their
substance can be once they are shorn of their sonorous garb, whose exceedingly
baroque lavishness is alien to the rather sober genius of western languages.
The
courtly tradition of music-at-all-cost has strongly influenced contemporary
prose writing, notably through the use of clusters of adjectives, which, in
moderate doses, also characterises old-fashioned colloquial speech, proverbs
and other sayings*. This is
the phairoh phroh phring sanoh hoo or palace school of writing – the
expression means ‘pleasant to the ear’, as does its central word phroh –
as opposed to the concise, functional phroh school, which came from the
west via the media a century ago and is slowly gaining ground. Somewhere in
between, there seems to be a third tradition, Buddhist, didactic and
repetitive in essence, as expressed notably in the much-thumbed Dhammapada**, a
collection of sayings attributed to the Buddha that has inspired kings and
monks alike since ancient times.
O the transience of love
I
know now thou art like water
Gushing
forth and past and away
And
never ever flowing back
Inao – Rama II (1809-24)
O my so charming sweetheart
Were there a tree reaching the clouds
I’d hoist thee up in the ether
As none I find, whither can I turn?
Shall
I leave thee with Heaven or with Earth?
I
doubt I can trust the gods to behave
Shall
I commit thee to the wind then?
I
fear its caress would hurt thy fair skin.
Nirart Narin – Narinthibeit (Rama II
reign)
Stop the fire from smoking
Stop the sun and the moon from shining
Stop thyself from aging
Achieve all this then thou can stop gossip
The
ocean, though too deep to fathom,
Can
still be sounded
The
highest mountain can be measured
But
man’s soul, ah, that’s truly hard to probe
Knowing little, yet claiming to know all
Like a frog ignorant of sea or ocean
Boasts of the depth
Of its tiny native pond
Fair-weather
friends come by the hundred
When
wealth is gone they know thee not
But
a true friend ready to die for thee
By
all the ghosts, that’s really hard to find
Khloang
Loakkanit – Somdeit Krom Phraya Deichardisorn
(Rama III reign: 1824-51)
Whoever dare invade Thai land
We Thai will fight to the bitter end
Sacrifice our blood and indeed welcome death
For dying thus, our dignity remains
Should
Siam endure we too can live forever
Should
Siam be destroyed how can we Thai survive
We
would soon all expire
And
with us the Thai race
Sayarmanutsati – Rama VI (1910-25)
Poetry
has had “a strong influence on [prose] in structure and figurative language.
Alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, imagery, similes, metaphors and poetic symbolism
are not uncommon in creative Thai prose writing. Even the official language is
laced with poetic frills and vestiges of eloquence and sophistication. These
poetic habits unfortunately often mar Thai prose by creating redundancy and
obscuring the structure where clarity is needed. Thus the natural power of
prose is weakened. … Compared to western prose writing, which enjoyed a much
longer period of development and enrichment, Thai prose in general, except in
very exceptional masterpieces, lacks sophistication, articulateness and clarity
of thought and expression.”*
Perhaps
this is too harsh and sweeping a diagnosis, but it is certain that Thai fiction
had a hard time shaping up, notably because of conflicting influences from
China and the West and of the use of generally mediocre western models.
The
translation of The romance of the three kingdoms in 1865* had
given fiction face, favour and flavour, wetted the appetite of a fast-growing
reading public and encouraged officials to couch their fantasies on paper for
fun or fame. Sarm Kok was written in such refined Thai that it set a
standard in prose writing which still inspires would-be authors – in a
direction almost diametrically opposed to the tenets and modes of expression of
western novels. During the second half of the 19th century, Chinese chronicles,
sagas and fables fought for attention almost on a par with western fiction and
even after the Thai novel came into its own in the 1920s as a transplant from
the West, Chinese fiction has survived as a branch of popular literature.
The
western novel caught on because it was relayed by partly West-educated kings
and princes who sought to modernise their country and saw its survival in
playing the international game according to western rules. Jularlongkorn (Rama
V) was fluent in English, as had been his predecessor, Mongkut; Rama VI was
educated at Sandhurst and Oxford. In the 1870s, a handful of youthful princes
freshly back from England made it their business to introduce the formats and
methods of the Victorian publications they were familiar with and launched
journal after influential journal. Throughout the second half of the 19th
century, thanks to the progress of printing, spread of journalism and rapid expansion
of the bureaucracy, fiction took to the homes of well-to-do commoners, the
core of a nascent urban middle class, and the ever growing ranks of the newly
literate went on a crash course of western literature.
The first
Thai literary diviners did a medley of English-language fiction, simplifying
fables, telling tales anew, condensing classics and translating, adapting or
rewriting at will short stories, which found popular niches in the pages of
growing numbers of periodicals. Thus were Thai readers introduced to Aesop’s
fables, the adventures of Robinson Crusoe and many others. Later, English translations
were used to get at A thousand and one nights, Omar Khayyám’s Rubáiyát,
Boccaccio’s Decameron, and several Indian classics – all of which
were very much in line with the nation’s poetic and classic mainstream.
Besides
the periodicals, which became increasingly plebeian, a favourite aristocratic
medium was the stage, especially for operettas. Rama V wrote a version of
Gilbert & Sullivan’s Mikado and, in the 1910s and 1920s, his
successor showed more lofty if still light taste by translating The Merchant
of Venice, Romeo and Juliet and As you like it, and by
adapting Othello.* Others
under him popularised Madame Butterfly and The tales of Hoffman.
The short
story in the 1870s and the novel in the first quarter of the 20th century went
through the same process of translation, adaptation and finally creation.
By the
end of the 19th century, the Thai short story had come into its own and was
well received, even by ordinary people, thanks to the various periodicals.
Perhaps the most influential of these was Wachirayarn Wiseit, a weekly
magazine which managed to last a decade (1885-94). It was there that what may
well have been the first experiment at novel writing by a Thai appeared in
1886. The author of Sanuk Nuek (Fun thinking)*, Krom
Luang Phichitpreecharkorn, was a half-brother of Jularlongkorn and one of
his most trusted officials.
The first
instalment of Sanuk Nuek described four young Buddhist monks discussing
what they were going to do once they disrobed and left the Borworn Niweit
monastery in Bangkok. Three of them thought they would resume their careers in
the civil service. The fourth was not sure, as he was attracted to the material
and spiritual advantages of staying in the monkhood.
Imaginary
conversations in fictitious surroundings were not exactly unheard of at the
time, but having a well-known temple as a setting could only mean one thing:
the story was for real, and reporting such irreverent chatter by monks was
deemed an insult to the institution. Courtiers were up in arms, and the Supreme
Patriarch, who was also the temple’s abbot (as well as an uncle of both the
author and the king) threatened to resign his temple charge, which alarmed His
Majesty. The Patriarch, in a typical charade, wrote to the king, not to protest
but to ask for royal pardon on behalf of the author for making the king angry
at having upset his uncle, i.e. himself... Jularlongkorn wrote back explaining
that this bit of West-inspired fiction was not meant to be taken seriously and
no offence was or should be taken – and he berated his brother. There was no
second instalment. This bout of censorship on the very first attempt at Thai
novel writing is all the more unfortunate as everyone agrees Rama V, though an
absolutist monarch, was a staunch supporter of freedom of expression in art and
literature. If anything, the episode showed that the reading public was not
ready for modern fiction. It would take another generation, the continuous
translation of western works and the progress of Thai fiction writing to change
parochial perceptions.
During
the first three years of the 20th century, a main conduit of Victorian English
culture was a review candidly entitled Lak Witthaya (Stealing
knowledge), set up by England-educated aristocrats to publish western
literature in translation or adaptation. It was there that the first foreign
novel, a sentimental melodrama, was serialized. Its title? The vendetta*. Its
author? Marie Corelli.
Marie
who?
Ms
Corelli was allegedly the favourite author of Gladstone and Queen Victoria and
was read in colonial India and even farther-flung outposts of the British Empire.
Never significant and long forgotten at home, she is still alive and selling in
Thailand, where all of her dozen novels have been piously translated!
According
to literary lore, this tale of vengeful love moved a Thai nobleman to write a
“Buddhist” response, in the form of a long story entitled The non-vendetta**, which,
instead of revenge, “ends with the forgiveness of the husband, winning him
the hearts of his wife and her lover”*. If such
a work did exist, it would technically qualify as the first Thai novel or at
least proto-novel. As mentioned earlier, although everybody in academe has
heard of it and claims to know someone who knows someone who once read it, we
haven’t been able to find any trace of it other than hearsay.** (This is not altogether surprising: early novels in Thai are prized
collectors’ items; some books, perhaps many, have disappeared; and few are to
be found where they should be – in public libraries – as the practice of
depositing duty copies was and remains virtually unknown.)
In any
case, the great success of The vendetta encouraged Thai translators to
carry on in the same vein. For all their classic poetic studies, these
foreign-educated sons of the elite, princes, nobles or smart commoners, had no
particular knowledge of western literature and were drawn to exciting bestsellers
of the time, which they hoped would win over an ignorant home audience always
eager to be entertained. Unsurprisingly, these talent scouts unerringly went
for second-best. They had Jane Austen and George Eliot; they went for Ms
Corelli. They had Goldsmith, Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Meredith or even
Bennett; they went for such luminaries as Sax Rohmer, Williams Laqueux, FW
Bain, Charles Garvice, Henry Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Walter Scott,
Rudyard Kipling, O Henry – the commissaries of Victorian and Edwardian popular
chow.
On the
French side, where fewer Thai students ventured, they could have picked
Flaubert, Zola, Mérimée, Proust or even Gide; they chose Alexandre Dumas père,
for his Three musketeers and Count of Monte-Cristo, which came to
Siam as silent movies in the early 1920s, and Guy de Maupassant for just one
story, “La parure” (The necklace).
In the
early years of this century, a young aristocrat, who, under the pen name of
“Dorkmai Sot” or ‘Fresh flower’, was to become the novelists’ novelist for her
seminal influence over two generations of romance writers, was led by French
nuns to wash her brain with the soaps of “Delly”*, which
make Barbara Cartland’s novels look like marvels of profundity. It is a minor
miracle indeed that she eventually managed to write a bit like George Eliot.
Mediocre
works were thus the dominant formative influence on Thai novelists and
short-story writers. In the 1920s, another training ground opened for them when
(western) movies came to Bangkok and spread in the provinces like wild fire. As
the films were silent, clever publishers started movie magazines that explained
the action to the viewers, and later also published film synopses, and even
plays. The foreign-educated officials and English-proficient students who worked
on these magazines and scripts thus had a splendid opportunity to learn some
of the tricks of the art of fiction – of a type strictly geared, again, to
popular entertainment. One such group of new graduates who sharpened their
quills and skills on film scripts went on to launch an avant-garde magazine, Supharpburut
(Gentleman), “as a middle-class counterpart of the aristocratic Stealing knowledge”*. This
group, led by “Seeboorapha”, was to be a major creative force both in
journalism and in fiction in the 1930s, 1940s and well into the 1950s.
Meanwhile,
Thai writers were trying their hands at the new medium. The future Rama VI came
up with a Sherlock Holmes type of whodunit** which
was serialised between 1904 and 1907. In the early 1920s, by then a king, he
wrote what is considered to be a rare example of a proto-novel.***
Around
that time, after the first tide of sentimental romances, the scope of foreign
novels in translation broadened to include historical novels, detective
stories (more Sherlock Holmes, some Arsène Lupin), humour (Jerome K Jerome, WW
Jakobs), adventure stories and tales of family problems.
Literary
experts find it nearly impossible to determine whether the novels published in
Thai during the first two decades of the 20th century were genuine creations,
mere transpositions of foreign novels, or, more perversely, Thai stories
transplanted in some corner of Europe or China to cash in on the vogue of
western novels and Chinese epics. Nevertheless, it is accepted that Thai
novels with Thai characters in Thai settings finally surfaced in the early
1920s. The first two most popular Thai novels, serialised in 1923-24, were
detective stories*; there
was also a marginal production of cloak-and-dagger yarns and the start of
humorous series à la Jerome; yet the bulk of the works were prince-meets-pauper
pulps in which a last-minute revelation secured a happy ending. By then, the
first professional writers had been born, usually journalists-essayists who
also wrote fiction, but theirs was a hardy lot.
When, in
their fictional world of the mid-1920s, Wisoot told Maria that there were very
few Thai novels in his country, he was indeed well informed. Wisoot was
determined to return to “write a new type of novel that [would] be the best in
Siam” – and he did just that. Or rather, his creator did.
It took a
24-year-old aristocrat just returned from Paradise (Europe and the USA) to
bring the Thai novel to life. The year was 1929, and the young man was Morm
Jao Arkartdamkeung Rapheephat. He basked in controversial glory for a
year or so, then ran away from gambling debts and soon took his own life.
The
circus of life (Lakhorn Haeng Cheewit) tells the story
of a poor, unloved Thai aristocrat who goes abroad to study law only to fall in
love with a white woman. He becomes a journalist, criss-crosses Europe and the
United States and returns home broke and broken-hearted. It was an immediate,
scandalous success. The 2 000 copies of the first, luxurious edition, each
priced at a very steep B3.5, were sold within months, and a cheaper but still
very expensive (B2) edition of another 2 000 copies sold almost as fast. These
figures show how wide the Siamese readership had become by the late 1920s.
Since then, the novel has been reprinted dozens of times and has sold more than
a hundred thousand copies.
The
scandal, and main reason for the book’s success, was that, in a work which drew
no visible line between fiction and autobiography, a young aristocrat had the
cheek to air dirty family linen in public. The future dean of Thai literary
criticism, Phra Ong Jao Junlajakraphong, then a student in Cambridge,
decreed: “A book must be either an autobiography or a novel. It cannot be
both!”*
Another
factor was that here, at last, was a novel written by a Thai about the world at
large. To every official who had ever studied abroad, to every student about to
go, to all the readers who had been fed with western fiction and wanted to know
more, reading it was a must. For several generations, going to England, France,
Switzerland or more recently the United States had been a pilgrimage to the
promised land for the crust of the Siamese elite; and here was a little prince
who had gone everywhere. Although not an expressly political work, the novel
denounced the evils of polygamy, arranged marriage and interracial marriage.
These were sensitive issues of the time – Jularlongkorn, who had died in
1910, was the last polygamous king, and monogamy was the name of the game at
the court of the new king, Wachirarwut.
Sixty-five
years later, the quality of the novel lies in its classic craftsmanship:
twenty-four chapters of equal length, each subdivided into three or four
sections, with skilfully dosed narrative, description and dialogue (as if young
Arkart had subscribed to some mail-order course on “how to write a publishable
novel”); in its lively tone, at once elegiac (“overly romantic” to some*) and
enchantingly naive, to the point of unselfconsciously carrying some of the
racial prejudices of the time; in the full-blooded life of its characters,
given equal treatment, whether they are foreign or Thai; in its modern themes
of alienation, absurdity and injustice in life; and in its language, which is
astonishingly modern, simple and direct, although conservative critics to whom
the only decent prose is the flowery courtly style consider it “nondescript”** and
dismiss its “awkward English-Thai structure”***.
Also in
1929, another important Thai novelist, aristocratic “Dorkmai Sot”, published
her first two novels, and yet another future prominent writer, commoner
journalist “Seeboorapha”, penned two as well – after four in a row the year
before. One of the two, A real man (Look Phoochai), won high
marks from Thai critics. As pioneers of Siam’s modern fiction, the three have
always been given equal credit and their first novels professed to be of equal
merit, but it took several more novels before either the princess or the journalist
came to literary maturity and produced works as accomplished as young Arkart’s
first.
Meanwhile,
stupendous changes took place in the socio-political environment when, in 1932,
a bloodless coup turned the absolute monarchy into a constitutional one (see
below). The fantastic take-off of the Siamese economy since 1850 had been
predicated on a colossal development of the bureaucracy, which counted 12 000
salaried employees in 1892 and four times that many only thirteen years later.
By 1910, the Ministry of the Interior had no fewer than 15 000 employees.* The
modernisation set in motion by Mongkut in the mid 19th century and hastened by
Jularlongkorn at the end of the century thoroughly upgraded the country, crisscrossing
it with canals, roads and railways**, strengthening
and diversifying its administrative system and urbanising its elite, but it
unwittingly fostered serious political challenges to the monarchy.
The
intensive recruitment of smart young men as junior civil servants went beyond
the needs of the administration. The lower ranks of the bureaucracy did not
participate in decisions and became frustrated. When the Great Depression set
in, drastic austerity measures were taken, and the meritocracy was at the
receiving end.* Pressure
for democratic change built up. Already, in 1887, some officers had petitioned
Jularlongkorn for a parliamentary constitution. The king said this was
premature and dismissed the troublemakers. By 1930, Pracharthipok, Rama VII,
was not opposed to finding a new power balance, but he was overtaken by
events. On 24 June 1932, a coalition of foreign-educated civilian and military
reformers led by Preedee Phanom-yong [Pridi Banomyong] overthrew him and he
abdicated three years later.**
In the darkness before dawn...
[Opening lines of Look ahead, vol. 2
(Lae Phai Khang Na II), 1957, by “Seeboorapha”]
In the darkness
before dawn, before the rays of silver and gold spread across the sky, as
farmers built fires in their stoves to cook rice, preparing themselves to
labour in the paddy fields in rain or shine with their companion of hardship,
the buffalo; as blue-collar workers got up from their mats, on which they had
slept away the exhaustion of the previous day, and packed just enough food to
restore their strength so that they could face the hard work of a new day; as
peddlers and traders prepared their woven baskets and their trays to peddle
their wares along rivers and canals or in the marketplaces in order to support
themselves from one day to the next; as government employees were still asleep
in their beds; and as nobles and tycoons still slumbered blissfully in their
soft and lofty four-posters – a tremendous social change had also woken up and
was getting ready to manifest itself in the next hour or so. A new power which
had grown in full view of the myopic old power was coming out of hiding and
preparing to crush the shaky, tottering old order to pieces. The history of
Siam was entering a new chapter and those who were writing it, in other words
the scribes of human destiny, the authors of that social change affecting mankind,
were no Brahma or God or any sacred being, but mere men.
Were one to claim that Brahma was the creator of this new
chapter of history, the creator of this momentous social change in the darkness
before dawn that day, then Brahma took the form of files of army trucks full of
ammunition, and of armoured tanks bursting with offensive weapons such as
cannons and light machineguns. Starting from the barracks of the First Cavalry
Regiment, which was in charge of the King’s security, helmet-clad troops
bristling with weapons were advancing with terse, tense faces to smash the old
power to smithereens.
As pale golden rays began to fill the sky, life itself tossed
and woke up just as History was taking a new turn, but the heirs to power and
fortune were still enjoying their sleep with a bliss inherited from centuries
past. Brahma was manifesting Himself in the form of a group of soldiers, civil
servants and civilians who called themselves the People’s Party and openly
congregated inside the Anantha Samarkhom Throne Hall. All around the
Equestrian Statue, the whole contingent of Brahma’s troops was out in force,
together with cannons, machineguns and tanks.
Rebel!
Overturn the Administration!
Take away the King’s powers!
The 28th day of June 1932 saw the birth of a revolution. When
the power holders finally woke up that morning, they found that their ancient
authority had been swiftly confiscated by a group from a new class.
Soon, the
civilian and military components of the new ruling elite clashed, and as early as
1938 the army strongman, Field Marshal Plaek Phiboonsongkhrarm*, gained
the upper hand. “Marshal P”, as the Thai call him, ruled throughout the war
years. Three years after the Japanese had left the kingdom, he was back in
power, and insisted on renaming the country Thailand. Marshal P befriended the
Americans, who were later to bankroll successive Thai military dictators in
the name of anticommunism. (They continued to do so until 1975 when, having
lost their war in Indochina, they withdrew lock, stock and pork barrel from a
country they had mightily contributed to modernise and westernize.)
The 1932
advent of a new elite made up of commoners meant the demise of the old
aristocratic power holders. The uneasy relationship between the two nurtured
much of the literature over the next quarter of a century and beyond. Indeed,
“Bunluea”’s Thutiyawiseit, published in 1968, focuses on this very
topic with an impish yet tender look at the past.
The first
ten outstanding novelists on our list, the pioneers of the Thai novel, were all
of the same generation: all were born between 1905 and 1920, before or during
the First World War, which was of only marginal importance to the kingdom of Siam.
They came of creative age at approximately the same time, with the exception
of “Bunluea” and “Utsana Phleungtham”, who were late bloomers. Six of them
were born aristocrats (Morm Jao Arkartdamkeung Rapheephat, Morm Rarchawong
Khuekrit Prarmoat, and half-sisters “Dorkmai Sot” and “Bunluea”, who were morm
luang) or children of the recent nobility (“K Surangkhanang” and Thanorm
Maha-paoraya). The other four were commoners – and journalists to boot. As
journalists, they were sensitive to social and political developments, and
fitted in the lower ranks of the new elite. Arkartdamkeung’s Wisoot, the
narrator and hero of The circus of life, though a petty aristocrat (a
mere na Ayutthaya), was also a journalist. In those days, fiction and
journalism did walk hand in hand.
The
eleven outstanding novels these ten authors published have different social
backdrops, but it is only among those that were written after the war that we
find works playing up social and political differences among the aristocracy
and the new elite. Yet, Arkartdamkeung’s Circus of life warned that all was
not well among aristocrats, that ferments of discontent were in the air, that
a change of values, standards and behaviour was needed (his second novel makes
these points more clearly). Had he lived, the little prince probably would have
sided – at least initially – with the new masters, the self-proclaimed
representatives of the people.
Of the
next four novels of note three were all published in 1937, and the fourth,
Thanorm Maha-paoraya’s An elephant named Maliwan (Phlai Maliwan)
was serialised during the Second World War, in 1942. All four share the same
mix of romantic themes and realism, the same search for the noble values of
life, for moral rules, and all involve characters taken from the aristocracy.
In those times of uncertainty and sudden upheaval, there was a need for
defining common, lasting values.
“Dorkmai
Sot”’s Noblesse oblige is set among the aristocracy in the
not-too-distant past. The orphaned daughter of a bankrupt nobleman shows
herself a true phoo dee or “person of quality” by obeying her father
and ensuring almost single-handed the welfare of her household by dint of personal
sacrifice. Although nothing in the story allows the reader to guess that a
revolution had taken place five years before the book came out, Noblesse
oblige is clearly a quest for a new legitimacy for the founding values of
the aristocracy, an attempt to perpetuate nobility by defining its essence,
i.e. nobility of character – as if the author were saying: “Times have changed,
but see how good and grand we were: you should imitate us.” This ties in well
with the other dimension of the novel – its constant reiteration of Buddhist
values, which bind rulers and ruled in this land and are the most obvious badge
of Thai-ness. At the same time, the acts of the heroine, who deliberately
flaunts cumbersome conventions, suggest a lesson for the aristocracy itself:
adapt to the times* to
survive in essence if not in privilege, and rewards will follow. “Sunshine will
follow the rain.” This “piece of cheap and shallow wisdom” on the last page is
a most felicitous ending, perfectly in tune with plebeian times. This and most
other novels by “Dorkmai Sot” have inspired generations of women novelists of
lesser talent who have stuck to the same aristocratic themes, which have become
less and less relevant as time has gone on, thus accounting for most of the
stereotypical, escapist popular fiction that flooded the market well into the
1970s.
With The
woman of easy virtue (Ying Khon Chua), “K Surangkhanang” is also
presenting her “person of quality”, but from the other side of the palace
fence, as it were. Her prostitute heroine, a one-time-foolish, forever guilt-ridden
provincial lass, has aristocrats among her clients, and a wealthy, low-ranking
nobleman as lover and father of her child. Utterly conscious of her
destitution, she sacrifices herself for the welfare of those she loves – her
lover and their child. The author’s standpoint is akin to that of “Dorkmai
Sot” in its defence of self-sacrifice, honesty and other beautiful moral
values, but different in that she focuses on the hypocrisy of society as a
whole, aristocrats and commoners alike, a society which passes judgments based
on appearances and doesn’t give the virtuous a chance – whatever “Dorkmai
Sot” may preach. (In this, “K Surangkhanang” is the literary ancestor of Chart
Korpjitti, who will make the same point most forcefully in The judgment
some thirty-five years later.) The book also puts paid to the common
misconception that prostitution in Thighland was started by the US advisors and
Vietnam-weary GIs on R&R*. They
merely blew the age-old pastime to mass-market size, giving it an arguably
more humane dimension than the Dickensian teahouses, vice dens and other
brothels that catered to such needs before them. Of course, in keeping with the
morality of the times, this exposé of moral degradation and dignity is
positively Victorian. Christian nuns and priests taught the elite, Buddhist
monks were responsible for teaching the masses, and the 1932 coup leaders
brought back hefty doses of bourgeois morality from Europe. In such a context,
writing a novel on prostitution was sulphurous enough, and an even remotely
erotic treatment was out of the question. Ironically, the novel was saved by
its edifying value, since it could be used as a warning to girls of itchy
crotch.
Thanorm
Maha-paoraya’s Elephant named Maliwan, like Noblesse oblige,
takes place in aristocratic times, although away from the Court. This love
triangle with a twist involves a drunken nobleman who befriends an elephant
whose jealousy will cost both of them dearly. The two main male characters are
princes with golden hearts. The provincial governor is the archetype of the
upright, efficient and compassionate administrator we find in several novels
of the period: the ambassador in Washington in The circus of life; the
duke and interior minister in Noblesse oblige; and the provincial
governor in Marlai Choophinit’s Field of the great (Thung Maharrat).
Thanorm’s tale is for the most part light-hearted, even humorous, but the
finale is tense and sorrowful. Again, the main emphasis is on sacrifice in the
name of love. So here are three aristocratic authors sharing the theme of
sacrifice as a redemptive value. Sacrifice is indeed part of the panoply of the
well-born, who are supposed to compensate for (if not expiate) their privilege
by going out of their way to be kindly to the lesser born.
Commoner
“Seeboorapha”, on the other hand, rams this noble value down aristocratic
throats with Behind the picture (Khang Lang Pharp). The story
“behind the picture” is that of a young, ambitious Thai student in Japan whose
infatuation with a not-so-young yet very attractive visiting Thai princess
fades with time. Her forbidden, unspoken love for him, however, leads her to
her death. Again, the princess, true to form, sacrifices herself for the man
she loves, for his career, for his future wife, wealth and happiness. She is
the aristocratic sister of the “woman of easy virtue”, socially antithetical
and yet morally alike. The reader feels for the princess more than for the
callow young man but, insofar as both are representative of their respective
milieu – the aristocracy and the rising middle class – Behind the picture
is a transparent allegory of Thai society. The princess is a fragile plant
grown under glass and stunted by the antiquated rules of property of the old
order; she belongs to the past and her future is doomed. The future belongs to
the young man, impetuous, callous and materialistic as he is. This commoner has
no qualms about loving a princess; he does not feel constrained by conventions.
Of course, this social message is not the focus of the novel, which is both a
romantic and exotic tale of unrequited love smothered by social conventions and
a novel of self-discovery for the young man, who outgrows his puppy love for
the tangible if prosaic rewards of a life of labour and material comfort –
strict bourgeois fare.
Three out
of the four outstanding novels of the next period, all published in 1951-53,
are much more concerned with the tug-of-war between aristocrats and commoners.
Prince Khuekrit Prarmoat’s Four reigns (See Phaendin) is as
forceful a defence and illustration of the splendour and charm of aristocracy
as “Seinee Saowaphong”’s two classics – Wanlaya’s love (Khwarmrak
Khong Wanlaya) and Ghosts (Peesart) – are a denunciation of
the old aristocratic order and a celebration of the new elite. What had been
an uneasy cohabitation in the 1930s had indeed turned into near confrontation
in the 1950s, with the new perception that the current power holders had merely
substituted themselves for the nobility at the top of the old order.
By then,
fifteen years had elapsed and many things had happened. In 1938, the military
gained the upper hand in running the state, in the person of Field Marshal
Plaek, though the civilian faction among the reformists was still very much in
the picture. As the Second World War spread from Europe to Asia, Thailand sided
with the Axis powers, which allowed Japan to invite herself into the country on
6 December 1941 with 50 000 and soon 150 000 soldiers. The Thai leaders put a
brave face on the occupation, Prime Minister Plaek deciding – rightly – that
the nation was no match to the Japanese army and that the best policy was to
grin and bear it. Yet, Preedee Phanom-yong and other leaders of the
anti-Japanese resistance still sat in the government and went about making
life difficult for the gatecrashers. Literary activities slowed down
considerably, not just for the lack of printing material. Because of war-time
restrictions and government censorship, even before the Allies started to bomb
Bangkok, many writers put themselves out to pasture in distant corners of the
land.
In 1942,
as part of sweeping reforms to galvanise the nation and bring her to “modern
standards of civilisation”, which included such ludicrous edicts as requiring
women to wear hats during visits to government ministries and every man to kiss
his wife before leaving for work in the morning, Marshal P ordered a thorough
revision of the Thai language to simplify spelling and normalise the use of
personal pronouns. Though they did put up with it for the duration, it was too
revolutionary a move for people to accept. Yet the thinking behind it was
sound: the idea was to speed up alphabetisation and foster equality through
language.
In Thai,
unlike words derived from the Chinese, which are monosyllabic and tonal and are
written as they are spoken, words derived from Pali or Sanskrit are almost
never spelt as they are pronounced*, making
the learning of the Thai language a strenuous exercise. Thai pronouns carry
notions of superiority and inferiority in status, gender, age, knowledge,
power, etc. Instead of the “I-you” pair in the English language which, in
theory, gives prince and pauper equal say, and which is now normalised in Thai
as phom-khun for men and (di)chan-khun for women, a
Thai speaker has a wide array of personal pronouns and substitute nouns which
imply superiority or inferiority, familiarity or distance, respect,
indifference or disdain, etc, and automatically define the social status (or
sentimental state) of the speaker and, by inference, of the listener. The Thai
constantly play on them, unconsciously or deliberately, to express all manner
of feelings, subtly praise or insult, curry favour or keep aloof, but the
system is anything but egalitarian. In fact, by its very nature, the Thai
language not only reflects but also perpetuates relations of inequality and, as
such, is a major obstacle to democracy, which implies personal relations on an
equal footing, at least in principle. But when Marshal P’s linguistic samurai** trimmed
down this marvellous maze to five personal pronouns***,
cancelled “useless” letters of the alphabet, sprinkled vowels all over the
place and chopped off mute syllables, the reform was universally perceived as
an intolerable assault on national culture, as a rape of the Thai soul. The
experiment, started in 1942, was discontinued almost as soon as the “mad
hatter” was out of power (July 1944), yet those few books that were printed
during that period did bear all the stigmas that Thai readers now find so plaek
weui – so weird indeed. Nevertheless, Marshal P’s activism has had lasting
effects on the way people dress, eat and greet one another.*
Far
greater changes were in the offing, however. The difficulties experienced by
Bangkok residents during the war, though less terrible than in war-torn Europe,
led to a breakdown in the tradition of solidarity. While selfishness made
inroads among the needy, war profiteers became filthy rich. Lawlessness and
violence were on the rise. The Thai military was a pathetic joke, and some
Free Thai patriots were having a field day as vigilantes. In those days of Thai
hyper nationalism, Thai-Chinese tension was running high in the capital. For
one year before the Japanese surrendered in August 1945 and for a couple of
years afterward, the government hardly functioned. One wing was trying to
placate London, which wanted to make Thailand pay for siding with Japan during
the war, the other curried favour with Washington, which had its own Cold War
calendar, and no one ran the country.
And then,
the unthinkable happened: on the morning of 9 June 1946, young King Anantha,
who had come back from Switzerland seven months earlier and was about to return
there, was found in his palace bedroom “with blood still oozing from a wound in
his forehead, a Colt .45 automatic pistol by his side”*.
Suicide? Murder? The death was never convincingly explained. On the night of
the same day, his brother, Phumiphon Adunliadeit [Bhumibol Adulyadej] – the
current sovereign – was proclaimed King Rama IX. Born in the United States and
a student of engineering, he was 18. On 14 August, he left for Switzerland, to
undertake law studies in Lausanne. He would return to Thailand for good in
February 1950.
Dr
Preedee, who was prime minister at the time of Anantha’s death, resigned
immediately, and vicious rumours orchestrated by some royalist circles
accused him of being responsible for the king’s death – a damning lie he could
never disprove. When a military coup brought Marshal P back to power in 1947,
more as a figurehead this time than as a real leader, Dr Preedee fled abroad
and, after a last, bloody and botched countercoup in February 1949, went into
exile in Peking and then in Paris, where he died in 1983.
While
Marshal P ruled in name and his two main subordinates, Army Gen Sarit
Thanarat and Police Gen Phao Seeyarnon, faced each other in a nine-year
standoff, each building up his own clientele, anticommunism became the order of
the day. With Washington turning on the tap of financial and military aid,
Thailand revamped its army and became a main instrument in “the prosecution of
the Cold War in Asia”*.
Even
though Phao and Sarit, locally educated upcountry folk, “behaved with the
ruthlessness of old-style warlords”**, especially
Phao, who routinely jailed, tortured and assassinated political opponents,
there was still more than a modicum of freedom, and repression generated its
own radicalisation among the Bangkok intellectual elite. Post-war winds blew
generous socialist and revolutionary ideas from Europe, more overseas students
were coming back with new models and aspirations – and to a widening gap between
their hopes and abilities and the local realities they faced. Progressive
forces were elated by Mao Tse-tung’s triumph in China, and buoyed by the
examples of the newly independent states and struggling liberation movements
of Southeast Asia. The communist movement made its appearance and radical
thinkers such as Jit Phoomisak and Asanee Phonlajan began to reassess history
and denounce Thailand’s feudal past and its modern legacy. In literary
circles, the notion of social commitment gained ground and led to a schism
between the proponents of “art for life’s sake” and the defenders of “art for
art’s sake”. This literary polarization, which reflected the political polarisation
of the Cold War era, was to poison the world of letters for three decades, here
as in so many other developing countries, by pushing works of art into extreme
positions which were impoverishing. For the progressive wing of writers,
artists were duty-bound not only to reflect in their work the realities of the
time but to denounce their evil ways and the reasons for them and, while they
were at it, offer ways to correct them. Thus, it should come as no surprise
that most of them* ended up writing political pamphlets rather than novels, marred by
heavy dogma, black-and-white characters, entire chapters of theorizing and
many other capital literary crimes. Writers who did not share such an activist
viewpoint tended to ignore social issues and concentrate on their own navels,
without the talent required to turn them into credible microcosms; or else they
turned to the escapist yarns of popular literature (which also came in handy
for radical writers in the late 1950s when intellectual terror forced them to
mend their ways).
The
flag-bearer of the progressive novelists of the 1950s is “Seinee Saowaphong”,
the alias of Sakchai Bamrungphong, who penned Wanlaya’s love and Ghosts
in quick succession. But this is a historical distortion: his novels had
relatively little impact in their time; they were resurrected and taken as models
some twenty years later by the next wave of even more dedicated activists. (Of
much greater ideological and literary impact at the time were the novels of
“Seeboorapha”, even though they suffered from serious literary shortcomings.)
The
titles of both books are misleading: the first is not a romance; the second,
not a horror story. Wanlaya’s love is an intellectual novel discussing
the new, iconoclastic ideas that thrilled progressive circles in post-war
Paris. Ghosts focuses on the rise of a new generation of socially
committed Thai youngsters who side with the underprivileged to help them fight
exploitation. Typically, the story comes to a climax with a confrontation
between the hero and the heroine’s father, an old aristocrat, followed by the
heroine’s defection from her gilded world to put herself at the service of the
people – Wanlaya’s mission, too. After all this time, the aristocracy was
still being fingered as the enemy, as an emblem of the dominant old order.
Technically,
both novels are innovative in their swift use of cinematographic techniques, as
the narrative hops from one scene to the next, from one set of characters to
the next. All the characters are interrelated at one point or another in the
story. For all its Paris setting, Wanlaya’s love is not an exotic novel:
it is the first truly cosmopolitan Thai novel, in which foreign characters are
as organic and important as the Thai ones – narrator included – and on a par
with them (unlike in The circus of life, where all characters are seen
through the eyes of the narrator and subordinated to him). And yet, all the
intellectual issues debated or illustrated in the novel refer to Thai
realities. Compared with their predecessors in The circus of life, the
elite world of Thai students abroad depicted here has come a long way. Whereas
Wisoot’s discontent was passive and predicated on his own unhappy disposition
and sense of victimisation, Wanlaya and her friends are more radical, more
socially committed, out of optimism and trust in human nature as much as out of
their sense of outrage over social inequities.
Ghosts, on the
other hand, is set entirely in Thailand among Thai characters, and contrasts
three different worlds: the world of the past elite (the old aristocrat’s
house); the world of modernity, peopled by a new middle-class elite (bank and
law offices); and the world of the rice farmers – the idea being that the
second must forsake the first and ally itself with the third.
Although
not all of his characters are commoners, the author takes pains to present his
heroes as “ordinary people”, modern-time antiheroes that should, however, be
taken as models. In both novels, the main theme is the need for the educated
with a social conscience to put themselves, their knowledge and their talents
at the service of the exploited – Seinee is merely suggesting commitment and
action at grassroots level, not recommending seizure of state power, as a later
generation of activists would. Ironically, what saves these two novels from
turning into leftist pamphlets, especially the first, is probably the author’s
self-confessed fear of repression, which made him hold back and keep the
dialogue short. Given the grandiloquence and posturing of the hero of Ghosts
as he confronts a tableful of aristocrats, such self-imposed understating is
definitely a blessing in disguise.
At the
same time as “Seinee Saowaphong” was writing his best novels, Khuekrit
Prarmoat’s Four reigns was being serialised. This long novel, published
in two or four volumes, is a tour de force, not only because it was penned day
by day for instant publication and still remained coherent and taut, but also
because it managed to present half a century of history in easy and vivid terms
and in such a light as to glamorise royalty and discreetly undermine the new
champions of democracy.
The
author was a fierce upholder of the graces of aristocratic Siam and a prominent
politician in his own right, and his paean to royalty was no doubt partly
written to revive a glorious past and restore faith in the much-shaken royal
institution. Ever since Pracharthipok’s abdication, Siam-turned-Thailand had
had to make do with regents and mostly absent, underage kings, and the death of
King Anantha had traumatised the nation, striking as it did at the very heart
of the Thai soul. During his first tenure as Leader, as he liked to be called,
Field Marshal Plaek had postured as a surrogate king and there were questions
about his real intentions regarding the throne. Back to Thailand in 1950, King
Phumiphon was still very young, untried and, for all his popularity, had yet to
find enough elbow room to assert himself. It was only after Gen Sarit Thanarat
seized power in 1957-58 and exalted the throne to consolidate his own position
that the king began to acquire the authority, prestige and influence he has
been enjoying ever since.
Khuekrit’s
master stroke was to present a historical panorama in romance-like terms and
in such an idealised way as to nurture nostalgia for the power and glory of the
old order. Half a century of royal splendour and sorrow, from the golden age of
the Jakkree dynasty in the closing years of the 19th century to the death of
King Anantha in 1946, are revived through the life of the heroine, Phloy, who
embodies all the qualities of the 19th century “person of quality”, devoting
herself wholeheartedly to king, husband, children, relatives and friends – in
that order of priority. Nothing in the technique of the novel is new; the
story unfolds in chronological order around a small nucleus of characters which
expands as time passes. The narrative develops into a family saga which allows
the author to highlight some of the main transformations that have taken place
in Thai society in the last few decades, from the 1932 “betrayal” to wartime
profiteering. Through Phloy’s eyes, we are treated not to high-level politics
but to the light-hearted chronicle of daily life at the palace and among the
gentry, in a way which is immediately accessible to the majority of Thai. What
makes the novel outstanding is its very scope, its realism, the credibility and
full-bloodedness of its characters, each a recognizable human type, and its
witty and easy style.
Written
during the same period, The field of the great (Thung Maharrart)
– another misleading title! – by Marlai Choophinit is not concerned with the
old order–new order tug-of-war – at least, not directly. The novel is the
chronicle of an upcountry district of central Siam seen through the rise of a
local leader at the turn of the century. To the author, it is a way of depicting
his birthplace and rekindling childhood memories, but it is much more than
that: an at once realistic and elegiac social fresco spanning thirty years, a
convincing example of nation-building, an ode to human endeavour and
wilfulness, and the exaltation of a commoner – rewarded with a title of
nobility in those monarchic times. Unlike his friend and fellow journalist and
novelist “Seeboorapha”, whose radicalisation and commitment to principles
landed him in jail and finally forced him into exile in China, Marlai
Choophinit was not averse to working within the system and, pretty much like
the hero of his masterful novel, he died (albeit at a much earlier age) in
honour. A consummate stylist, Marlai, in this novel, stalks way ahead of the
corny rural sagas that, by then, had become part of the popular fare. Some of
the very first Thai novels in the 1920s had rural backgrounds, but they hardly
went beyond the Robin Hood or Black Tulip models. “Mai Mueang
Deurm” and Manat Jan-yong, the latter better known for his short stories,
wrote fairly decent cloak-and-dagger or Romeo-and-Juliet type of novels set in
the boondocks and, with the enormous and unfinished Raya, which takes
place during the Second World War, Sot Kuramaro-hit finally found his style
away from his euphuist beginnings (which many Thai readers praise sky-high),
but none had even the beginning of psychological finesse and dramatic sense
Marlai displays in his “bourgeois” tableau, The field of the great.
Four
reigns and The field of the great were written by mature authors, as
were Thutiyawiseit and The story of Jan Darra (Rueang Khong
Jan Darra). Whereas the first two flow in chronological order, the latter
two weave in and out of the present through numerous and sometimes lengthy
flashbacks. Despite their great diversity, these four major works have several
common characteristics. They offer the same breadth of vision, the same time
frame (a lifetime, except in the case of Marlai’s novel), the same wide array
of protagonists around a single hero or heroine, and the same Buddhist
undercurrents.
By an
extraordinary literary coincidence, the aristocratic characters of the latter
two novels were drawn from the same stock of real-life people that were also
the models for the characters of Noblesse oblige: the extended family
and domesticity of the two writing half-sisters “Dorkmai Sot” and “Bunluea”,
who shared with their famously fertile father the compound of which the author
of Jan Darra was a dedicated eavesdropping neighbour! Three individual
talents, three widely different treatments: young “Dorkmai Sot” twenty years
earlier had featured the manicured lawns, the polished guest rooms, the
impeccable public façade; “Bunluea” preferred the boudoirs, salons, galleries
lined with portraits of the ancestors, and the nitty-gritty of social gossip;
as for “Utsana Phleungtham”, he single-mindedly decided to take a hard,
cheeky look at the bedrooms.
Seemingly
inspired by the goings-on at the Barn Mor palace of Morm Rarchawong Larn
Kunchorn, the 1965 Story of Jan Darra takes place in the expansive residence
of a retired nobleman whose carnal deportments set the tone for the whole
community. The story focuses on the sexual rivalry between His Lordship and Jan
Darra, the hated son who is not his son and who, in time, will reap revenge
over his tormentor. Erotic pursuits described in hyperbolic, neoclassical
fashion are merely a pretext to create in intricate detail a self-contained
microcosm ruled by lust if not passion and by scheming self-interest. With its
skilful construction, psychological convolutions, lush prose and steamy yet
inoffensive sex scenes, not to mention its overly Buddhist moral stance, this
is an exceptional novel with hardly any equivalent in the world of
literature. Of course, when it came out in weekly instalments in the mid 1960s,
it shocked many, but as it did not directly tackle political issues – if
anything, it showed the nobility in shady, prurient light – the powers that be
must have decided they could live with it. The book version, reprinted every
ten years or so, has been sold under cellophane ever since, a cult novel if
ever there was one in Thai literature.
With
“Bunluea”’s Thutiyawiseit, published in 1968, we are back to the
conflict between the old aristocracy and the new power holders, or rather to
its aftermath. By then, the nobility had abandoned any aspiration to power,
which was held by military clique after military clique co-opting or
suppressing all potential rivals. By depicting the life of the wife of a
military strongman – modelled on both Marshal P and Marshal Sarit – “Bunluea”
analyses with deadly accuracy the stuffy world of high society and provides a
scathing picture of life in the corridors of power. She goes beyond particular
cases to reveal the mechanisms that make the upper strata of Thai society
behave the way they do, to the bafflement of outsiders. To the author, for all
their lofty goals, the gang of commoners who took over in 1932 did not change
anything much; instead, the exercise of power changed them and made them
conform to the authoritarian patterns of yore, down to allowing courtly
etiquette to be revived. Ideology, political programmes don’t count; what
counts is, under the imperative veneer of social conventions, the survival of
the toughest, in a constant clash of cliques and fluid feuds of vested
interests. Power corrupts and alienates; societal pressure condemns leaders to
behave as feudal lords and enjoy all the trappings of high position as long as
they remain on top. Indirectly, yet perhaps not unwittingly, “Bunluea” the aristocrat,
“Bunluea” the free-thinking academic, added grist to the mill of those radicals
who were denouncing Thai society as semi feudal and demanding a form of
government in which leaders would be accountable to the people – but that’s
another story, or rather, that’s history about to unfold: the overthrow of military
dictatorship and short-lived attempt at grassroots democracy are only five
years down the road. Though clear, the political message is unobtrusive: by
focusing on the wife rather than the husband, the author keeps politics in the
background and dwells instead on the comedy of manners of the elite, as
counterpoint to the psychological dilemmas and quest for authenticity of the
heroine. Cha-orn, like Phloi in Four reigns, understands little or
nothing of politics, although, unlike Phloi, she tries to as she is very much
at the receiving end of it. She is trapped in her unquestioning love for her
husband and the demands of her position as wife of a powerful man. She
belatedly realises that she has led a charmed life out of self-deception compounded
by social hypocrisy, and she recovers her equanimity by eschewing the world
of make believe that has seen her social triumph – but by then she is but a
sidelined widow.
The moral
of the story is unobjectionable. Even though the novel throws the whole Thai
political process in poor light, and at one point one of its most congenial
characters speculates on how long it will take for military leaders to go
back to the barracks they should never have left, readers of the time saw in it
first of all a charge against the former military dictators. The new strongman,
Field Marshal Thanorm Kittikhajorn, was trying to offer a more humane profile
and broaden his powerbase. This, and the moral authority of the author, ensured
the safety of the novel, which only had passing success and was soon out of
print anyway.
Thutiyawiseit and The story of Jan
Darra were to be the last gems of the pioneer generation, and the only
outstanding novels in the three decades that separate Ghosts (1953) from
The judgment (1981), which is the first of nine top contemporary novels
on our list, written by eight authors all born in the fifteen years following
the Second World War (1944-58).
Indeed,
between 1920 and 1944, a whole generation of novelists went missing. This is
not to say that no novelists were born during that period, but none were able
to produce first-rate works – and neither were the confirmed writers of the previous
generation.
Why was
this so?
Quite
plainly, it was because of the climate of intellectual terror instituted by
military strongmen throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The post-1920 generation
came of creative age during what the Thai now call “the dark ages”, when the
intimidation and elimination of political opponents practised by Pol Gen Phao
were outdone by the blanket political repression instituted, as of 1958, by
Marshal Sarit, who turned his back on democracy, abolished Parliament and
instituted an autocratic regime with himself as prime minister. For good
measure, progressive intellectuals and other political dissidents were jailed,
newspapers closed down and books burned. For the next sixteen years, the
age-old patronage system, which had been somewhat weakened or at least atomised
by parliamentary democracy, flourished anew, and martial law and martial
order reigned. While political and intellectual development was set back for
a generation, the economy expanded. More rice was produced and exported; large
chunks of forest were decimated and replaced by farmland, and the military
began siphoning off public funds from the banking and manufacturing sectors,
while American and Japanese interests took a commanding hold on much of the
rest. As the population expanded, the gap in income between the countryside
and Bangkok widened. By the mid 1960s, disgruntled peasants in the impoverished
Northeast joined the ranks of the outlawed Communist Party of Thailand and
took up arms against the tyrants in Bangkok. The first armed clashes between government
troops and insurgents* led the
military to step up repression. Myriad US advisors flocked in. At the same time,
a massive US military build-up turned the kingdom into a huge aircraft carrier
for the Indochina war next door as well as a permissive playground for weary
GIs.
In those
drab-and-khaki days, writers who were not already in jail had the choice
between exile (“Seeboorapha”), silence, or self-censorship, the choice of the
majority. “Dorkmai Sot” was too sick, physically and mentally, to write any
more and left her last novel, a satire of the days of the “mad hatter”,
unfinished. Marlai Choophinit, who had felt strongly enough during the war to
refuse to write as long as Marshal P’s abused his language, shrugged and went
back to churning out romances, war novels, wildlife tales and other works of
fiction. The diplomat “Seinee Saowaphong” penned a few, incredibly lopsided
and shallow exotic novels before giving up fiction for a long, long while. The
horde of lesser talents turned to adventure and love stories for the popular
market, with a few finding notoriety in naughty plots clad in titillating
prose. Were it not for dear old “Bunluea” and that good old sex maniac
“Utsana”, one could say that the Thai novel died out in the 1960s and 1970s.
By
keeping creative writers away from their main lifeline – the exploration and
exposition of social realities – the military gave pen power to a posse of
female romance writers whose obese and bland blockbusters have accounted for a
major slice of popular reading ever since. In time, “K Surangkhanang” – the
oldest and one of the best writers of this genre – was superseded by the
absolute queen of pulp, “Kritsana Asoaksin”*. Since
her first Seato** literary
prize in 1968, Kritsana has collected the top literary national prize no less
than thirteen times, far outpacing her nearest contemporary competitor,
“Seefa”***.
The
intellectual damage done by the military didn’t stop with their provisional
demise in 1973. The decade-long monopoly on power held after Sarit’s death by
Marshals Thanorm Kittikhajorn and Praphart Jarusathian (and Colonel Narong
Kittikhajorn, son of the former and son-in-law of the latter) had blocked
promotions within the military, despoiled the rest of the elite and alienated
much of the urban middle class. When university students in Bangkok began to
protest in favour of civil liberties and against foreign, especially Japanese,
domination of the economy in 1972, they found much overt and covert support. Their
movement gained momentum and finally, on 14 October 1973, after much
bloodshed in the capital, the “three tyrants” took the king’s advice and fled
the scene. They would be back.
The three
years that followed were a heady, anarchic, violent and bloody intermission.
This attempt at democracy at the grassroots resulted in the fall of four
governments and ended with another bloodbath (the massacre of peaceful
demonstrators in and around Thammasart University on 6 October 1976) and a
return to the dark ages. For one long year, an extreme right-wing government
pushed the country to the brink of civil war until it, too, was removed by a
less asinine junta led by General Kriangsak Chamanan. Despite a number of coup
attempts, Gen Kriangsak and his successor, Gen Preim Tinasoolarnon [Prem
Tinsulanonda], succeeded in swinging the political pendulum back to the middle
path. They restored civil liberties and fostered the fitful parliamentary
democracy Thailand now knows, which is caught between the threat of military
might (i.e. the May 1992 murdering frenzy) and the all-too-real dictatorship of
money lust.
The 1973-76 period, marked by extreme
left-wing rhetoric and a surfeit of radical activism, did not wake Thai fiction
from its coma. Reality was so much wilder. The fall of political fetters
allowed an outburst of art-for-life literature in short forms: songs, poems,
short stories, cartoons, articles and pamphlets. There was no time for novels;
few were penned, and none good. Instead, proselytes used surrogates: novels
from the past. Student radicals – the “ghosts” and Wanlayas of the 1970s – were
too busy playing deadly games with state power, by organizing farmers, workers
and prostitutes and generally “being realistic by demanding the impossible”,
as their counterparts in 1968 Paris had advocated. Rather than write their own
novels, they resurrected the great old “rebels” of the 1950s. “Seeboorapha”,
“Seinee Saowaphong” and a few other literary corpses were given a second lease
of life in a frenzy of didactic, pirated editions which printed passages deemed
revolutionary or at least progressive in bold or italic.
The
following years were traumatic for a whole generation of intellectuals.
Immediately after the 1976 Thammasart massacre, thousands of young men and
women belonging to the educated elite of the nation fled into the reluctant
arms of the communists holding out in the kingdom’s jungles. An ideological
debacle followed in those hills, as irreconcilable differences between urban
radicals and staunch Maoist guerrilla leaders led in some cases to gunfight,
and the quarrel between big brothers China and Vietnam played havoc with the
Thai insurgents’ logistics, forcing almost all dissidents to return to
mainstream society, dreams shattered, hopes crushed.
The
trauma of these few years of aborted democracy and defeated revolution could
not find immediate translation into fiction, although it would, in the next
decade. But by then, the ever evolving Thai society would have other
priorities, and many of the old, plus some new, dreams and nightmares.
Chart Korpjitti’s Judgment (Khamphipharksa),
which burst onto the literary scene at the beginning of the 1980s, is the story
of a humble and upright young man wrongly accused by fellow villagers of
sleeping with his father’s widow. No matter what he does, he can’t convince
them of his innocence and only finds solace in drink and liberation in death.
This powerful novel is a sombre and sardonic satire of Thai society and its
blind consensual reverence for authority. A distinct move away from the “us”
versus “them” thinking which dominated the previous decade, it pits one
individual against the rest of society – the crux of modern times.
When the
novel appeared in 1981, Thailand had changed significantly compared to a few
years earlier. Politically, the nation had pulled back from the brink; the
left-right polarisation was over: the Thai were all brothers again; stability
and freedom were again trying to find a modus vivendi. Economically, the
country was embarking on industrialisation, diversifying its crops, sending
its labour abroad, welcoming mass tourism and preparing to enter the era of
globalisation; rice-and-smile Thailand would be the next economic “dragon”, the
next Nic of East Asia.* The rape
of natural resources progressed unabated, as did rapid urbanisation and the
spectacular growth of the urban middle class, which adopted the values and ways
of life of middle classes everywhere, forsaking more than a little of its Thai
identity in the process. Ideologically, everything was being rethought. A
generation of intellectuals had burned their wings trying to improve society
and were suffering from a massive existential hangover – call it
disenchantment, alienation, sense of inadequacy or awareness of the
absurdity of life. Those returnees from the jungle given to introspection began
to question themselves and to try to figure out where they had gone wrong.
Others transmuted their failed hopes of collective change into social action at
the grassroots, investing themselves in nongovernmental organisations, or
sought influence through established political parties that were yesterday’s
foes. Most just gave up and, with bile in their mouths, went about the mundane
task of earning their rice – and most of those with good education have succeeded
in becoming part of today’s moneyed elite. For those who had been too young or
too unconcerned to take sides, the motto was also “Look out for Number One”.
Such was the case of Chart Korpjitti, yet he was the one who warned that
Number One was at the mercy of others, all of the others.
The angst of a generous and impatient generation
chastised by history has been more perceptible in the short story than in the
novel. Even so, not long after Chart posited the equation of modern times – the
individual versus society – two very different novels came out in 1985: Time
in a bottle (Weila Nai Khuat Kaeo) by Praphatsorn Seiwikun
[Prabhassorn Sevikul] and Of time and tide (Thalei Lae Karnweila)
by Atsiri Thammachoat [Ussiri Dharmachoti]. They shared the same anguish over
change and the tantalising cult of the past.
Both are
first-person accounts. The narrator of Time in a bottle is an adolescent
who refuses to grow up and accept his parents’ divorce, cannot get over his
unrequited puppy love for an older girl and is unable to answer the love of
another. Uninspiring studies smother his artistic aspirations, and he is
unable to face the world in a mature way. He feels frustrated and alienated by
life around him, and seeks solace in memories of his childhood, when his world
was whole, problem-free and suffused with parental love. At one level, the
story reads like an allegory of Thai society, torn by conflicting ideals and
harking back to the times when it was (supposed to be) one big, happy, united
family. At another, this immature kid is the archetype of the average urban
middle-class youngster confronted with urban middle-class problems, and is singing
the blues of the urbanite. Indeed, of all twenty novels, Time in a bottle,
whose very title is a reference to a foreign song, is the least Thai. It could
easily have taken place anywhere, except for the intrusion of the 1973-76
political events, which interfere greatly with the latter part of the story
but, being unintelligible to the narrator, are left unexplained and thus
contribute to the overall climate of alienation.
The
anonymous narrator of Of time and tide also bemoans the past. But here
the similarity ends. Arranged like an album of faded photographs, this slim
volume tells with great poetic simplicity and sensitivity the changes that have
taken place over a generation within an uprooted seaside community. This theme
is explored using the parallel stories of the narrator’s mother, a ship-owner
who has lost everything, and a thrice-widowed young mother-of-one whose last
husband, a policeman and an outsider, is killed for betraying the community.
The melancholy reflection on the vagaries of time and tide ends on a derisive
note: the festive balloons blown over the waves by the wind celebrate the
demise of the community and portend the fate of the seaside resort that has
replaced it – everything, eventually, will be gone with the wind. The
Buddhist message about the transience of all things is not lost. What also
comes through these nostalgic pages is the hardships of the little people, the
curse of a community which loses its age-old complicity with nature and
cultural identity to more powerful, alienating forces of progress from outside.
It is not difficult to see parallels with the changes taking place in Thai
society as a whole.
Rejection of society can take many forms.
Marginality is one, fashionable in contemporary world literature ever since the
Beatnik generation. The protagonists of Mad dogs & Co (Phan Ma Ba),
by Chart Korpjitti, are all misfits from the city and from all social strata
(save the peasantry). High on booze or drugs or both, they drift from one beach
to the next, in an idle existence that takes meaning in fun, freedom and, above
all, friendship. This hefty, polyphonic, thoroughly modern novel, written in
instalments for a women’s magazine before it came out as a book in 1988, cocks
a snook at the peddlers of kitchen-and-couch novels by taking an abominable
bunch of gentle, honest, humble dropouts as heroes. Despicable louts in the
consensual eyes of society, these harmless souls are the very cousins of the
hero of The judgment, yet are spared his fate as they find strength and
salvation in numbers. The picaresque account of their frolics is underpinned by
a more traditional theme: the estrangement between fathers and sons, as seen
through the detailed life history of the two protagonists. As in his first
novel, Chart makes us love his characters and condemn the prejudiced,
hypocritical society that condemns them. Unlike his first novel, which
provokes chuckles and snorts of disgust, Mad dogs & Co makes us
laugh at the antics of his drunken creatures and sigh at their admirable acts
of kindness.
The first
volume of The white shadow (Ngao See Khao) trilogy, written by
“Daen-aran Saengthong” (Saneh Sangsuk) in the mid to late 1980s but only
published in 1994, is a far more powerful rejection of society. This pioneering
work uses experimental and poetic writing and is likely to serve as a model
to future generations of writers. It is at once far ahead of its time in the
Thai context and very much a by-product of it. Ostensibly inspired by the best
of world literature in themes and techniques, it is a highly autobiographical
account of the life of a social rebel, a university student in search of love
and understanding through necessarily frustrating sexual and intellectual pursuits.
Exposing the relations of power within couples (be they friends or lovers),
exploring in great detail and forthright language the relationship between
sexuality and love, it is also a fierce, iconoclastic assault against all the
sacred cows of Thai society – from the family to the Buddhist clergy, from
education to the military. In the name of what? In the name of the white
shadow, the unattainable purity and innocence the erstwhile child that man is
is forever reaching for. Vehement, immature and negative as it is at times, The
white shadow reflects the views of a growing fringe of the
university-trained, foreign-influenced urban intellectual elite, fed up with
the palinodes of a schizophrenic society whose traditional values are
hopelessly inadequate to modern realities but which is incapable of
integrating the basic civic values (rule of the law, justice, equality, sense
of responsibility...) that underpin the western mores it so eagerly adopts. If
anything, this outrageous and superb novel is proclaiming that Thai society has
lost its moorings, and is a call for help.
Wa-nit
Jarungkit-anan’s Cobra (Mae Bia), first serialised then published
as a book in 1987, also touches on the divorce between old Thai values and
modern ways of life, but is far more subtle. The story is set among the cosmopolitan,
moneyed elite, a favourite breeding ground for mainstream Thai romance. At
first glance, the novel is a classic love affair between a married man, a
foreign-educated businessman from Bangkok, and a seductive, liberated woman
who owns both a travel agency in the capital and a traditional Thai house
upcountry. She spends much time in that house, which is watched over by… a
cobra. Man and woman come to share the same bed because of the cobra; the wife,
a modern-day “person of quality”, finds out and fights back; the cobra
eliminates hero and villains alike: all of this makes for exciting reading.
Though killed at the end, the cobra is still somehow around, and this adds to
the puzzle of its symbolic significance and to the sense of mystery of the
tale. The novel also cleverly spoofs traditional romance stories. As in many
prince-meets-pauper soaps, the hero is an orphan, who owes his wealth to
well-to-do adoptive parents and to his foreign education, but what this prince
is really hankering for is the status of a pauper. His quest for identity and
obsession with old things Thai is emblematic of the country’s loss of its own
cultural heritage and of the uncertain battle of a section of the Thai intelligentsia
trying to preserve and restore some values of the past to forge a viable modern
Thai identity.
Three
years earlier, more reptiles had slithered into print, in a totally different
environment and with an entirely different aim. Wimon Sainimnuan’s Snakes
(Ngoo), published in 1984, is a daring denunciation of the abuses
committed by some Buddhist monks and illustrates how the creeping consumerism
and materialism that have become prevalent in modern Thai society have made
inroads into the church. In order to ensure the prosperity of his derelict
monastery, a young abbot uses deceit to milk a credulous rural community dry,
with the help of the village chief, a power-hungry rapist who represents the
lay authority. The snake-hunting hero, who loses his wife but soon wins her
sister over the predatory village chief, does lose his battle against the
gullibility of the people. Although it deals with a highly sensitive topic, the
novel was not banned or censured, due less to a new sense of tolerance from
the touchy Buddhist clergy than because it reflects widespread concern among
believers. Many among the urban middle class are shocked by all manner of
recurring scandals involving monks and want to see a return to the purity of
the doctrine, as an anchor in the money-mad ocean of modern life. The growing
spiritual and even political influence of Buddhist sects in recent years
attests to this trend, and Snakes is choice literary grist to their
mill.
In the
same year, the first of only two excellent metaphysical novels was published.
“Nikhom Raiyawa”’s High banks heavy logs (Taling Soong Sung Nak)
was one of the most exciting literary events of the 1980s. Unlike The path
of the tiger (Thang Suea), by “Sila Khoamchai”, which came out in
1989 amid general indifference, not to say collective blindness, High banks
was critically acclaimed.
Nikhom’s
and Sila’s novels are rare examples of successful literary works which offer
several levels of interpretation and much food for thought. Like Chart
Korpjitti’s Judgment, they are typical Thai tales as well as parables
with universal appeal.
High
banks is the moving story, set by a river in the northern hills of
Thailand, of a mahout and his elephant: raised together, man and beast are
estranged for long years, and when they are finally reunited, it is to die
together. The novel is also a reflection on the alienation, grandeur and vanity
of artistic creation. The protagonist spends long years crafting a wooden
elephant in order to exchange it for the real one he has lost ownership of,
only to leave it unfinished when he realizes his beautiful creation lacks one
crucial element, life. The message is clear: the greater work of art is life
itself, and our greater duty, its protection. Furthermore, High banks is
a poetic meditation on illusion and reality, on life and death, and on man’s
duty on earth. The beauty of this tightly written work is its web of simple
symbols whose meaning becomes clear as the story unfolds, as engrossing at the
anecdotal level as it is thought-provoking in its implications. Although the
tragic, yet peace-inspiring vision of the world presented here is thoroughly
Buddhist, the novel is totally free of religious jargon. Non-Buddhist readers
will find in it the fundamental values of what civilisations the world over,
religious or not, call wisdom.
The path
of the tiger is an uncomplicated and yet remarkably complex novel, written in a
prose as luxuriant and breathtaking as the hilly jungle the story is set in. A
young hunter leaves his wife and children and enters the jungle to track a
deer, only to realise he is being stalked by a tiger. After a night of terror
hiding from the tiger in a tree, he confronts the king of the jungle – and
survives. He discovers that the route to survival is total self-control and to
not pose a threat to the tiger. Typical of that generation of well-meaning
radicals who had taken to the hills, the trapped young hunter comes to
understand that the situation he is in is very much of his own making, because
of his own impatience and pride. Nothing is to be gained from confrontation.
The higher truth is to achieve perfect equanimity, total stillness of the
heart, in order to rise to any challenge – a quintessential Buddhist truth.
Armed with it, the distraught militant can now return to mainstream society,
eyes level and heart still.
The present generation of writers are members of
the middle class. They are by and large better educated than the pioneers*,
including their aristocratic forefathers. They may not all be as
well-travelled, but they have enjoyed a wider exposure to foreign fiction
(thanks to two local literary reviews in the 1977-87 period, a greater body of
translations, and generally wider direct access to foreign works in English),
and as a result they write in a more sophisticated and more intellectual way
than their predecessors.
One of
the greatest influences on their story telling has been the various techniques
used in film making (swift scene changes, flashbacks, crisp dialogue). This is
particularly evident and deliberate in the works of Chart Korpjitti, who
writes as if he were looking at the world through a camera lens. This style of
descriptive prose is also seen in the works of Praphatsorn Seiwikun, “Nikhom
Raiyawa” and Wimon Sainimnuan.
One thing
that has not changed, however, is the extreme reluctance of all these authors,
different as they are, to give any but the skimpiest physical descriptions of
their characters – not unlike some of the less orthodox western novels of
recent years. For all you know, their characters are six-foot blondes with
green eyes. Chinese influence? Cultural taboo? Respect for the reader’s
imagination? Fear of being taken for the five-baht-a-line word processors of
popular persuasion, who find in lengthy descriptions an easy way to fill the
pot? Or deliberate creation of archetypes, defined only by their thoughts,
words and actions? Hard to say.
In terms
of structure, three of the nine novels (The judgment, Snakes, Cobra)
progress chronologically, three (Time in a bottle, The path of the
tiger, The white shadow) break the narrative with unobtrusive
flashbacks, while the last three innovate in one way or another: Mad dogs
& Co by pegging its flashbacks to the seemingly rambling marathon
conversations of drunken friends, with just enough disregard for chronology
to simulate inebriation without getting the reader drunk, and by contrasting
literary descriptions and racy narrative with the gutter language of its
dialogue; Of time and tide by revealing the whole plot in the first
three chapters and using a patchwork approach to telling the tale; and High
banks heavy logs by offering a highly sophisticated construction of flashbacks
and flashbacks within flashbacks, and introducing events and symbols whose
significance only becomes clear as the story unfolds.
All nine
novels have symbolic titles and are effused with symbols. The class concerns of
the previous generation have been ejected; as predicted in Ghosts,
aristocrats of all ilk have been relegated to the museum, their concerns, likes
and dislikes a thing of the past; and sacrifice as a way of life is no longer
in fashion. Social criticism at its most provocative is either global (The
judgment, The white shadow) or sectoral (Snakes: the misuse
of religion; Of time and tide: the onslaught of progress on a
community); or else it is diffuse, a secondary concern, to be read between the
lines. Buddhist values, Buddhist concepts, argued or hidden, exalted or denied,
are almost a constant in all of these novels, as they were in most of the
pioneers’ great works. But other notions have crept in. Primacy of the
individual, world weariness, sense of alienation, distrust of pervasive
materialism, nostalgia for the past, quest for meaning in life, are the dominant
themes, which reflect individual sensitivities as much as they do the constraints
and concerns of the times.
Where is
the Thai novel headed?
I do not
know. Talent is unpredictable – and so are the twists and turns of Thai
politics, as the men in boots and the men in bow ties play strip poker with the
wealth and future of the nation: khaki cant versus greenback greed. But if I
had to venture a guess, I would bet on more “white shadows”, more alienation,
more angst and ire, and more back-to-basic-Buddhism reactions to modernity –
at least until such time as the nation finds its cultural bearings in the
global village it has most heartily undertaken to join and set shop in.
The
dominant gale today, blowing over the Land of Smiles the mixed blessings of
amoral megabucks and Hollywood’s mendacious mindlessness, is setting off
healthy cultural resistance and literary protest, just as military repression
in past decades triggered political radicalisation. In politics as in
literature then as now, success is a question of degree, however. Thai
writers, who have read Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, Salinger and Steinbeck
with profit may yet discover Bellow, Irving, Pynchon, Roth, Vonnegut and their
equivalents in European and other literatures, and these foreign
word-magicians may inspire them to generate their own masterpieces, which would
in turn serve as references and sources of inspiration for the rest of the
world. Or they may be smothered under the worldwide tidal wave of trash that is
recorded in weekly bestseller lists, if they mistake it for the real thing, as
their forefathers once genuflected to Marie Corelli. But the chances are that
they cannot escape world cultural pressures and that – pliant, if proud, people
that they are – they will keep on adapting to the latest international modes of
expression to make their unmistakably Thai voices heard.
What,
then, is a Thai voice? The twenty novels presented in this book provide as many
different answers, and it is left to individual creators to add new
definitions. Thailand and her people are in a transitional phase in which, it
seems to me, total acculturation is a distinct possibility. The antidote to
this calamity is neither in literature nor in the past: it has to be found by
Thai society as a whole, and I expect future Thai novels to reflect this
search. Paradoxically, this may take the form of self-centred microcosms rather
than macroscopic views. The circus of life and The white shadow,
the first and latest Thai novels of note, have so much in common it is
troubling: both scandalous in their times (the former publicly and gloriously
so, the latter in a sly way which has its author insulted and threatened on the
phone by anonymous callers), they are written by disenchanted young men who have
taken their cues from the best of foreign literature, and they are ostensibly
autobiographical and self-centred, yet challenge dominant values and present an
arresting, original vision of the world.
For now,
the future of the Thai novel, of Thai society as a cultural entity, is still
open. In the increasingly materialistic and consumer-oriented society old Siam
has become, the power of money is both a bane and a boon for literature and the
novel in particular.
On the
one hand, affluence and economic opportunities are siphoning off the talented
away from the craft of fiction and into less arduous careers in advertising,
public relations and other mass media sinecures. As the cost of living rises
and social solidarity decreases, more time and effort are needed to feed self
and family, and it is becoming harder for the novelist to find the quality time
his labour of love demands and to fight the temptation of commercial writing,
where meaningful money lies. The mystique of success combines with technological
progress to encourage green talents to rush into print before they are ready –
and to despair and look elsewhere after their first predictable failures. The
market for quality fiction is hardly expanding, and to work for it requires
unfashionable discipline and sense of sacrifice. If the only full-time novelist
of Thailand, Chart Korpjitti, is doing well, perhaps it is because he has no
children to take care of and has turned his back on Bangkok for the solitude
of the backwoods. How many are prepared to do this?
On the
other hand, the wealth generated by economic progress does also work for the
betterment of literature, gradually improving the literary environment through
a reorientation of culture: globalisation is speeding up cultural exchanges and
knowledge of foreign languages, which for some translates into better exposure
to foreign works of fiction. In recent years, sponsors have been found for new
literary awards. Literary magazines have found new life; more will appear
soon. Since the late 1970s, these outlets have not merely helped sell books:
they have opened the minds of the intellectual elite that read them and
contributed in their own ways to Thailand’s present exposure to international
trends. This year, cheap classics of foreign literature in English are on sale
in Bangkok. Next year, a visionary tycoon will no doubt launch a cheap
paperback collection of the best Thai literature has to offer and thus help
raise the cultural level of the masses, spreading the literary bug that is sure
to beget new talented writers in due time. And then, look at us: Thai Modern Classics, a multimillion
baht undertaking spreading over several years, would have been unthinkable only
five years ago.
Barring a
sudden, improbable, return to the dark ages, the present twisted economic
miracle will persist, and the post-war baby boomers will keep on producing
works of note, while the younger generations – writers in their twenties and
thirties who are busy right now mastering the art of the short story – will in
turn bolt onto the field of the great novel and delight us with tomorrow’s
truthful lies of fiction. What these will be, again, I do not know.
What I do
know, however, is that, despite tremendous odds as we have seen, the Thai novel
has long come of age, and that it is high time for it to receive the welcome it
deserves from the world beyond its language barrier. After all, this is the era
of globalisation, and globalisation works both ways.
In
the ten years since these lines were written, much has happened. There has been
no return to the dark ages, but a hefty step backward for the whole of society
when the Thai economic bubble burst in mid 1997. Thai Modern Classics was one of the many casualties and had
to be discontinued, after only four years of existence in which we managed to
translate eleven of the twenty novels selected, and to publish ten. (The
eleventh one is Seinee Saowaphong’s Ghosts, which you will find here.)
Even though I am now working again for TMC’s erstwhile financier, there is no
question of resuming this worthy project to completion, the more’s the pity. Current
financial strength does not allow it, and neither does the general health of
the market, where fiction is the last thing that sells. Over the past ten years,
Thailand has done without literary magazines, and makes do these days with
“chat” groups on the Net. Book reviews continue to be published in
general-interest or trendy magazines, writers to be interviewed, and short
stories and even poem to be published. Yet the bulk of the books on offer have
nothing to do with fiction, unless you call fiction the plethora of teenage
stars’ probably ghost-written memoirs that readers seem to crave these days. In
a shrunken market, it has come to the point that few publishers bother to put
out literary novels if it is not the “novel year” of the SEA Write Award. Thus
every three years four to five dozen novels appear like mushrooms during the
rainy months, perhaps a dozen will be read and discussed in literary circles
for a few weeks, and one will be crowned and sell – a very unhealthy state of
affairs. In 1994, the award went to Chart Korpjitti’s second masterpiece, Time
(Weila); in 1997, to Win Liaowarin’s improbable Democracy shaken
and stirred (Prachathippathai Bon Saen Khanarn) [2008: now
available in English under that title]; in 2000, to Wimon Sainimnuan’s hasty
and arcane Immortal (Amata) [2008: the English version I penned, though
unpublished, is available on thaifiction.com]; and in 2003 to a mere string of
short stories whose title and author I forget: the slide in quality is
unfortunately most telling.
[January 2008 update: As of June 2006, with again
Sonthi Limthongkun’s backing, I have resumed full-time translation of the
remaining titles and the publication of seven or eight of them should take
place this year. In the meantime, you can find them on this website to read for free on screen.]
1905–1932
Morm
Jao Arkartdamkeung
Rapheephat, Thailand's first outstanding novelist, was a social misfit, a
destitute aristocrat who lived in a world of his own, gambled his life away
and killed himself at the age of 26.
He was born on 12 November 1905 in
Bangkok, the sixth of eleven children and the third of six sons of Phra Ong
Jao (His Royal Highness) Rapheephat Thanasak and Morm Orn. His
father, an Oxford law graduate, started in 1896 as minister of justice under
Rama V at age 22 and helped write the body of Thai laws, which earned him the
title of “Father of Thai Law”. He became minister of agriculture in 1912. He
was also a wealthy landowner, the owner of a rice mill and several sawmills,
and reared chickens in the large palace compound at Samsein, by the Jao Phraya
river, where the family lived with a host of relatives. At one stage, he imported
bicycles into Siam, and was the first to bring in a motorcar – a
Mercedes-Daimler – in 1904.
Prince Arkart was 13 and in his second
year at Assumption School when his parents divorced in 1918. His homely
mother, Morm Orn, was discarded by her husband, who accused her of being
an inveterate gambler; Morm Orn, for her part, did not take well to her
husband’s philandering – he had had yet another daughter with a minor wife of
sorts, Morm Daeng. After the divorce, Morm Orn went to live on a
durian plantation at Bangjark, on the Thonburee side of the river, and only
Arkart and one younger sister stayed with her. His father, who was then 44
years old, promptly remarried the 20-year-old, “pretty, smart-looking and
clever”* Ra-ang Prarmoat (Khuekrit Prarmoat’s
mother’s elder sister), who gave birth to a daughter. For all his wealth and
prowess, the handsome prince developed tuberculosis. He went to Paris for treatment
and died there in August 1920.
He left most of his estate to his
eldest son, who within a few years ran it into the ground thanks to his lack of
commercial sense and passion for horse racing and for gambling. Morm
Orn, like the narrator’s mother in The circus of life, received nothing
from the “Father of the Thai Law”. As for Prince Arkart, he did receive a minor
share of the inheritance, which, together with a more substantial provision
left by his paternal grandfather, eventually allowed him to finance a trip to
London in pursuit of an education.
The year her husband died, Morm
Orn and her two children moved back to the family compound at Samsein, and in October
Prince Arkart entered Theipsirin, a school for children of the aristocracy. At
18, he began contributing articles and short stories he had translated to the
school magazine.
Intending to study for the bar like his
father, Prince Arkart left for England, and arrived in London on 1 September
1924. One month later, “he was sent to stay with a Captain Fraser at Queen’s
Cottage, Bexhill-on-Sea, for coaching in English, French and history. He
returned to London in February 1925 and continued his studies under a Mr
Coumbe; he received private tuition in English and composition from LWT Cooper
at St John’s College,”* and left England probably in March 1925
for the United States, after receiving a royal grant to study at Georgetown University,
in Washington DC. This means he could not possibly have shared the journalistic
and amorous life of the hero of his main novel during all those years in
England and mainland Europe.
What he did in the US, and exactly how
long he stayed there, is not known. He later claimed to have been involved in
journalism, and his stay was cut short when he developed eye trouble. This led
to an operation which left him partially blind for more than a year.
Unlike his hero, who spent six years
abroad and travelled all over Europe and Asia, Prince Arkart was back in Siam
after less than four years. Like his hero, he had no diploma to show for his
foreign endeavours.
He returned to Bangkok via Japan in
1928 and was briefly employed at the Post Office, which he left under a cloud
after substantial amounts of money went missing. He then joined the Ministry of
Public Health, and part of his job consisted in checking the work of upcountry
officials. His first novel, The circus of life (Lakhorn Haeng Cheewit),
created a storm when it was published in 1929. This pioneering work of fiction
was widely perceived as a thinly disguised autobiography and an unseemly attack
on his own kin. He awkwardly denied the charge in the preface to his next
novel, Yellow skin white skin (Phiu Lueang Rue Phiu Khao)*, which was published the following
year. He also wrote two collections of short stories, Broken daydreams (Wimarn
Thalai), which came out in 1931 when he was no longer in Siam, and The
whole universe (Khrop Jakkrawahn), which was published after his
death.
In January 1931, he fled to Hong Kong,
leaving behind substantial debts. An official enquiry into his absence without
leave was started but he was left undisturbed in the British colony. He
apparently lived off articles he contributed to the local press and briefly
shared a house with a friend before moving to the Cecil Hotel. To acquaintances,
he would often claim that he was going to Canton for business transactions,
which was understood to mean casinos in Macau. His passion for gambling, a
family trait, seems to have been a constant feature of his life since
childhood, when he used to keep his mother company on her gambling forays. By
all accounts, he became increasingly despondent – “possibly mad”, one consular
report suggested.
His decline continued for more than a
year, until he was found dead in his hotel room on 14 May 1932. Although word
spread back to Bangkok that he had died of malaria, which has long been the
official line, consular reports at the time stated that he gassed himself to
death. According to his younger sister (the model for the novel’s Little Samruay),
he made a similar suicide attempt during his days in London.*
Prince Arkart appears to have spent his
brief life feeling utterly unloved. According to relatives and friends, he felt
that he was neglected by his father (which other siblings deny) and this seems
to have nurtured a tremendous complex of inferiority, sense of injustice and
fear of neglect. His father’s treatment of his mother may have also reinforced
his sense of being left out. Even before siding with her, he had marginalised
himself within the family compound. He also felt financially insecure. Even
his trip to Europe to acquire an education was a gamble, and he lost: he came
back empty handed, though full of the experiences that would enrich The
circus of life.
Despite his tendency to boast, Prince
Arkart apparently never had the trappings of the aristocracy and got on well
with the common people. His closest confidante was his nanny, and as a young
boy he spent much time with the workers who toiled around the family palace.
With relatives and friends, he was withdrawn. Perhaps the clearest inside into
his childhood is to be found in his portrayal of Wisoot, the narrator of The
circus of life.
“Poor, not very handsome, with an
ordinary, not-so-gentle face” (his beloved sister’s description), Prince Arkart
“was rather unfortunate in love” *. According to close relatives, after
his return from the US, he fell in love three times, but was spurned twice, and
he broke up the relationship with his fiancée, the 22-year-old daughter of the
wealthy governor of Nakhorn Sawan province (“You deserve a much better husband
than I could ever be,” he wrote his “Dearest Darling” in English from Hong
Kong*).
The circus of life is dedicated to “Maria Vanzini, the
beloved friend for life of the author” and the plot revolves around Maria Grey,
a Fleet Street journalist. A photograph of Maria Vanzini is featured in every
edition. A buxom woman with a slightly horsy profile, Maria looks much older
than her early twenties. In his preface to Yellow skin white skin, Prince
Arkart states that he met Maria Vanzini in the US, that they travelled together
back to Asia, but that she is not Maria Grey, merely a distant model. Wisoot,
in the same novel, informs us that, since their final separation two years
earlier, Maria Grey is happily married to a German diplomat and the mother of a
two-month-old son.
The story of Wisoot’s and Maria’s
infatuation – translated here – may strike the reader as rather contrived, less
because it is improbable that in that time and age a woman would declare her
love so openly than because, had she done so, the writer should have prepared
us for it and make it look natural.
In previous pages, Prince Arkart
handles other characters in a more mature way and one wonders why the smooth
flow of the text is lost during the romantic scenes.
The
circus of life (Lakhorn Haeng Cheewit) 1929
The
narrator, Wisoot Suphalak na Ayutthaya, has returned to Thailand without a
degree after six years of wandering in Europe, the United States and Asia, and
considers himself to be a social failure. Now 28, he tells the story of his
life since his days as a poor little rich boy: he is one of many children of a
distinguished and wealthy aristocrat, who is a high-ranking official at the Ministry
of the Interior and has little time for him. Deprived of his father’s love and
care, Wisoot feels neglected and broods in his corner. The only person who
sympathises with him is his ugly old nurse, who will show him how to gamble,
and his only friend is her grandniece, who is half Chinese. At Theipsirin
School, Wisoot starts a friendship with Pradit Bunyarrat, who invites him to
his house.
As
agreed, I went to
Lord Banlue’s house at five o’clock
that evening. As soon as the boat reached the landing, I saw Pradit who
stood waiting for me, dressed in trousers of light-brown silk and a shirt of
white hemp. We walked across the field, went up to the house and he took me
into the waiting room, which was luxuriously appointed. On the walls beautiful
portraits of ancestors of the Bunya-rat family hung in a row. Decorative items
both old and new were artfully displayed. Pradit took me to a corner of the
room and pointed out some small antiques exhibited in a glass chest – a tiny
Sphinx, a tome of papyrus, pyramids, pharaohs and various other Egyptian
artefacts. I stood admiring these beautiful objects until I felt a hand tap me
on the shoulder. It was Pradit. My love and respect for him was growing by the
minute.
“Before long we shall be neighbours,
you know,” he remarked, pointing through the window to a building under
construction. “Your mother bought that piece of land from us to build a house,
and I gather that several members of your family will stay there.”
“Eh! I know nothing about this,” I
answered. “I only know that it is being built to be rented out.”
“That is not the case at all,” Pradit
stated.
At that moment, a young woman came
through the door.
“Lamjuan! Lamjuan!” Pradit called out.
“What is it, brother?” she answered as
she halted in front of the door.
“Where are you going? Come in and talk
to us first.”
She walked demurely towards us and
stopped in front of her elder brother.
“This is Mr Wisoot,” Pradit introduced
me, then turned to me and said: “And this is my little sister, Lamjuan.”
She hastened to bring her joined hands
to her face and bowed. I bowed back and we stood looking at each other with
curiosity.
“Tonight the moon will be full and
after dinner we intend to go out in a row boat. Will you join us, Wisoot?”
Pradit said invitingly.
“I am afraid I would be an imposition,”
I objected.
“What imposition?” Miss Lamjuan
answered. “We have already prepared food for you too. Father bought a new boat
today. It is beautiful and fast. You will like it if you come with us.”
I watched her with sudden interest. The
refreshing sound of her voice and her modest demeanour were most praiseworthy.
Lamjuan was one of the most beautiful young ladies I had ever met. She had a
soft white complexion, a beautiful egg-shaped face with big eyes at once coy
and sharp, and long hair rolled in a rather pretty bun. That day, I remember,
she wore an ultramarine-blue crêpe de Chine silk shirt bordered with lace and a
long cream-coloured skirt.
“You agree then,” she prodded as I
stood there smiling. “You stay with us for dinner and then we all go out in the
boat.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “we will certainly
have fun.”
“I say, Lamjuan,” Pradit said. “Has
Father come back yet?”
“How could he be back? He came to fetch
Mother and they went out together again. They certainly enjoy going out, these
two, for all their years,” she declared, laughing warmly.
That night we went out on the river in
the beautiful row boat. I was made to sit at the rear, Lamjuan sat in the middle
and her brother in the front. I still remember this was the fifteenth day of
the waxing moon and a holy day, and the full moon shone brightly. The sky was
devoid of clouds and the river was quiet. Occasionally, a steamer or a speedboat
would pass by, tossing our boat in a rather amusing way.
Ah, dear readers, from what I have told
you of my story so far, you will certainly agree that since I was born, that
day – that night – was the happiest, the most contented of my life. It was the
first time I had the opportunity to really know Pradit. The soft, sweet voice of
Lamjuan in the light breeze was like exquisite music which has forever resounded
in my memory.
“I understand, Mr Wisoot, that you will
come and stay with your mother in the building next to our house,” Pradit said.
“It would be nice if Mother really came
here: we would go to school together and meet often,” I answered. “But do you
know for sure that Mother will come?”
“What do you mean?” asked Lamjuan with
obvious surprise. “Don’t you really know, Mr Wisoot?”
“I know nothing,” I said truthfully.
“Don’t you know what is going on in
your own house?” she asked, smiling mockingly but without a trace of condescension.
“I do not really pay attention to what
is happening at home.”
“It may be your duty not to tell us
anything,” Lamjuan said in a slightly resentful way, “but it is all over town,
you know.”
“I am telling you the truth: I do not
know anything at all,” I answered.
“Odd, isn’t it?” Pradit exclaimed.
On the boat back home, I kept thinking
about what Pradit and Lamjuan had told me. My mother would go and stay at the
house in Bangjark. Would she then leave Father? Pradit and Lamjuan had talked
as though they knew the story in detail. Something must have gone wrong at
home, but how was it that I did not even have an inkling of it?
As soon as I reached home, I began to
investigate. Ordinarily, I never paid much attention to the affairs of my
parents and relatives. It was my habit since childhood. I tried to study and
remain aloof, avoiding anyone in the house unless it was necessary.
At seventeen, I had gone to stay with
my maternal grandmother in her small house, and I had lived there for three
years by then. If something was happening in the main house where my parents
stayed, it was either not important enough or too important for me to be told
about it. Even though we shared the same compound, it was as if I and all of my
relatives were living in different corners of the world.
I was happy staying with Grandmother,
because she was compassionate and took care of me with all the goodness of her
heart. Besides, she had been frequenting the temples for decades, had become
free from earthly attachments and was observing the Buddhist precepts with
saintly dedication. She had never thought of warning me about the common evils
of the world because she did not know them and had no wish to learn about them.
The story of Mother leaving the house
where she had lived for twenty years and moving to the house on the Thonburee
side was an ordinary one, similar to so many other stories happening in the
large noble families of Siam, when an ageing wife no longer able to please
would simply be discarded. Even though he was of about the same age as his
wife, the husband was still strong, lusty and wealthy, and he went on looking
for what he had no right to enjoy but could still obtain by hurting the
feelings of his aged spouse, who had been his faithful companion for decades.
If a wife out of necessity had to sit and watch the behaviour of her husband,
she would be bleeding inside drop by drop. Alas! Such is the fate of the Thai
wife, the supreme woman-mother. If a wife could no longer stand this and saw a
way out, she would run away for dear life, forsaking the wealth she had helped
generate and accumulate for decades, leaving it in the sole care of the
unreliable gentleman who was trading old for new and would end up with some
girl with a pretty face, condemning his old wife and their children to a
hand-to-mouth existence at the mercy of fate. Life! O life!
You may be beginning to wonder about my
earlier statement that the love between my parents was most precious and pure,
now that a bitter separation had occurred. Could such a precious and pure love
have lasted as long as twenty years, which would be unprecedented in Siam?
Besides, that separation in old age was totally unexpected. So, what other love
will you find in this country that is more marvellous than this?
One day, as I had just come back from
school and taken a shower, a servant came to tell me that Mother wanted to see
me in her bedroom. I went up trembling with dread because I already knew what
she was about to tell me. I found her seated on one corner of the bed. As soon
as she saw me, she smiled a little, sad smile.
“Wisoot,” she greeted me, “I do not see
you very often these days. How are you spending your time?”
“I am out and about as usual, Mother,”
I answered as I walked to her.
“Are you enjoying yourself?”
“More or less. I am used to it.”
“I say, Wisoot,” she said, considering
me carefully, “I am about to go and live in the orchard house.”
“I sort of heard about it.”
“I don’t think that anybody here wants
you to stay. Would you like to go with me?”
“Yes, Mother. Aren’t some of us going
with you anyway?”
“No. Only you and Little Samruay. Why
would the others go and stay with their mother?”
Despite her sweet smile, I could see
that she spoke with bitterness and resentment.
One month later, the orchard house at
Bangjark was ready. We – Mother, my youngest sister Samruay and I – fled and
took refuge there. We helped one another arrange the house and make it as
pleasant as people of our condition could afford. We were not quite sure
whether we would have enough to live on. In fact, I could not help but conclude
that Mother was rather poor. Were her current small income to dwindle further
she would have to sell some jewellery and gold in order to make ends meet.
Mother was often short, and the jewellery was disappearing by the day.
When we were in the orchard house on
the Thonburee side, even though we were next to Bangkok, there was no peace and
security as in the capital. Bandits were thick on the ground, and wherever one
went one heard shouts of “Thieves have entered the orchard!” “Thieves have
broken into the house!” “Bandits have harmed someone!” and so on.
At first, I was afraid but after a
while I got used to this kind of danger. Even though danger always surrounded
the orchard house, I felt a thousand times happier than when I was staying in
the house in Samsein. Look at it this way: I lived next to Pradit and Lamjuan,
two young people whose friendship was a gift of love, happiness and comfort
bestowed without the slightest reservation.
At the end of that year, Father died.
His will gave Mother, Little Samruay and myself no share of the inheritance.
Father had left all three of us to carry on with our hard life without any
succour. As far as I was concerned, I did not feel very disappointed because
this was only to be expected and I was man enough, in any case, to keep myself
out of trouble. Little Samruay would grow into a beautiful woman and find a way
out when she came of age. But Mother was most to be pitied. She was old and had
undergone hardship for twenty long years and that was her reward! When I think
about her life then, I feel that my own suffering was not even one thousandth
of hers. Alas! The circus – the circus of the world!
The circus of life!
Aware
of his own situation and unpromising future, Wisoot does his best to resist his
attraction to Lamjuan, the only friend he has left once Pradit wins a
scholarship and goes to England to study mechanical engineering.
In
any case, he is soon evinced by a Lieutenant Kamon, freshly returned from
England, who promptly monopolises Lamjuan’s attention and marries her: Wisoot
feels utterly betrayed.
He
persuades his eldest brother to let him have the money set aside for him by
their grandfather, and leaves for England, intending to study law. On the deck
of the ocean liner, he begins to feel a new sense of freedom. For him the West
is paradise on earth, notwithstanding his unpleasant seaport experiences along
the way and his first inkling of European realities at Marseille.
In
England, he is sent to live with the Andrews, an English family at
Bexhill-on-Sea, where two London
Times journalists, Lady Moira Dunn and Maria Grey, come visiting for a week.
A
period of smooth happiness started in my life while I stayed with Captain and Mrs Andrew. It was a
strange bliss. It was more than people of my condition deserved. I had better
luck than I had any right to even imagine and the truth was that the Queen’s
Cottage was the abode of supreme happiness in paradise for both body and soul.
Even now, though my body is thousands of miles away, my soul remains there
forever. Never shall I forget the Queen’s Cottage.
The peace and quiet of Bexhill in which
I was thoroughly immersed was not conducive to loneliness and misery. That peace
and quiet gave me a unique opportunity to read all kinds of books and learn
about the ways of the world past and present. Charles Dickens, Sir Philip Gibbs
and other famous authors were my friends and they came to converse with me
every day and gave me more felicity than I could ever express, teaching me
about life and making me pity some people whom I would have hated otherwise.
Within this blessed solitude, constant reading and learning generated in me
wonderful thoughts and dreams and gave me the ambition to create something
that the world would notice, something that would contribute to the happiness
of mankind on this, our common Earth. I dreamt and thought about what our good
life should be like. I would create some work to fit that dream, and pondered
what form it should take. I thought of all the goodness and beauty of the
world, which I would try to immortalise in writing. But these pleasant reflections
had neither consistency nor substance; they were like thin air, and I was like
a bird in a tree who is not sure on which branch he will come to roost. This
kind of musing went on until I met Lady Moira Dunn and Maria Grey.
Lady Moira Dunn was not merely a
citizen of England or of any particular country; she was a citizen of the world
and her thoughts were of the world. Even so, she loved England because she was
English. She was prepared to sacrifice herself for her country at any time.
Even though she was aware that the British government and England herself did
many things wrong, she still stood by them with body and soul, because she
believed that she was a true part of the English nation and as such the rights
and wrongs of England were hers too.
I am a Thai, born in Siam of Thai
nationality. My character is thoroughly Thai and no power on Earth would force
me to belong to another nation. My duty to the land of the Thai is of the same
nature as Lady Moira’s duty to England. How unfortunate that I did not have the
opportunity to stay with Captain and Mrs Andrew and know Lady Moira and Maria
Grey before I went to live in the house in Samsein as a son of Marquess Wiseit
Suphalak. There is no way that I could know for sure what my life would have
been like, but I might have been able to make Father really love me and be
truly kind to me, and I might as well have been able to love my parents,
relatives and friends more than I ever did. What a shame, don’t you think.
The saying ‘to go abroad is to gain prestige’
probably applies only to those Thai students who have the opportunity to mix
in good foreign company. Thai students abroad are just like Thai students back
home: some are lucky, others are not; some go abroad and return improved,
others come back the worse for it. Those who return with a pleasing disposition
and constructive thoughts have had excellent opportunities during their stay
abroad, staying with foreign families of high or fairly high standing and
receiving a good ethical and professional education. Others, even before they
go abroad, behave like uncouth Chinamen, spitting everywhere, swearing and
talking vulgarly at all times, and once they return from abroad, they behave
just as they used to, they do not change in the least and constitute a threat
to the peace and quiet of the land. That is because they never met anything
good abroad, and even if they did, good people were unable to correct them and
finally gave them up and abandoned them to their own nature. Whenever I went to
the Chinaman’s dancing hall or to any of those places Thai people abroad like
to patronize, I would meet youngsters like these always surrounded by dancers
and drinkers, always roaring drunk and making vulgar comments about everything
without the least sense of propriety. I think that those who sent these
unfortunate Thai students abroad must also share the blame. Rather than
selecting them beforehand, those with money and power send them without
thinking about how much damage their bad manners could cause Siam. Badly
behaved students should be corrected in our country, and those who cannot be
reformed should be sent to gaol. We should not leave it to foreigners to
correct them, as it could cause pain and shame for the students, those who sent
them and the country as well.
I want you to understand that foreign
countries are a paradise only for a few Thai students.
As for me, I must count myself among
the lucky ones. Though I went abroad for only six years, I had the chance to
see and experience many beautiful things and to visit wonderful places. I saw
things that were at the very heart of the country’s progress. I did see the pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow and I can die happy. Once you have read this
story, if you are able to see in it something even remotely good and beautiful,
you owe it largely to Captain and Mrs Andrew, to Miss Stephany, to Lady Moira
Dunn and to Maria Grey. Had I not had the opportunity to know these five
people, I would never have been able to write this story.
The Andrew family helped me appreciate
the goodness and beauty of the English way of life. They taught me the duties
of a good child towards his parents, brothers and sisters, and I was never as
happy as the time I was studying. Lady Moira Dunn guided me towards certain
things that were good and beautiful. She was the one who helped orient my
thinking in a suitable way, the one who stilled the branch for the bird of my
thoughts to come to roost and nest. Maria Grey is the wonderful power that will
compel me to write this story to the very end. I write it for her!
Talking
of Maria Grey, even though we have finally parted for more than a year now, her name and spirit are still deeply
etched in my memory and will remain there forever. Remembering her brings
happiness and the thought that, whatever life will be like in the future, it
will be worthwhile because I have lived long enough to meet a woman like her.
Besides being my friend and my love, she has been my guide as well and she will
keep guiding me in the many ways of goodness and beauty. Maria Grey!
The day after Lady Moira and Maria
arrived at the Queen’s Cottage, I hurried to get dressed before dawn, hoping to
be lucky enough to meet someone downstairs. As soon as I went into the living
room, I saw Maria standing at a window. She wore a dark-brown skirt and a
jumper with black stripes, a sports outfit that was fashionable among women at
the time.
“Good morning, Bobby,” she greeted me
as to a close friend. “You are up early.”
“Good morning, Miss Grey,” I answered
politely. “You too are indeed up early.”
“Working people like me only stay in
town,” she claimed with a sweet smile. “A holiday like this comes once in a
long while. I must seize the opportunity to get up early to go out and breathe
the pure air of the sea as much as I can. Will you accompany me, Bobby?”
Her tone, although almost alike a
command, was melodious and her offer most agreeable to my own purpose. To go
for a walk with a young woman as lovely as Maria, and for the first time in my
life! Who would have refused?
“Let’s go, Maria. But wait,” I said, “I
will go and change. It will only take a few minutes.”
“All right, hurry up.”
The Andrew family had taught me how to
dress correctly on all occasions in conformity with the tastes of the English,
and I had become quite an expert at it. I had soon put on plus fours and a
jumper and I went down to Maria.
“Oh, Bobby,” she exclaimed in surprise
at seeing me dressed in a way she had not thought possible, “you dress so well,
but your jumper is too thin. Aren’t you afraid of being cold?”
“If I am cold, walking will soon warm
me up,” I answered, pointing to the sun, which was appearing above the wooden
fence on the side of the house. “Look, there is already some light and it
should be pleasantly warm before long. We have not seen any sunshine for a week
here but today the sun is coming out especially to welcome you, Miss Grey.”
“Tell me, is this the way Thai poets
express themselves?” she asked. “If so, Siam must be a paradise.” After a short
pause, she added: “But don’t call me Miss Grey. It is so formal. I call you
Bobby – my name is Maria for you.”
“All right, I shall call you Maria from
now on.”
We then began our walk together, now
walking now running to get some exercise along Middlesex Road and down to the
beach, where we strolled at leisure, talking away.
Bexhill was as peaceful as ever. Apart
from the sighs of the waves that broke on the shore at regular intervals, there
was no other sound. We went past buildings of various sizes – restaurants,
clubs, churches, houses to let. In front of us were St-Leonard and Hastings.
These big resorts were so dead quiet they seemed completely abandoned.
“Bobby,” Maria asked, “is it true that
you are poor?”
“What do you think?”
“Moira and I talked about it last night
and we agreed that you were not telling the truth. For all we know, you are a
prince in your own country, with wealth and a huge palace.”
“Not at all, Maria,” I answered, then
smiled. “What I told you at the dinner table last night is the truth, nothing
but the truth. I am poor. If I had not met and stayed with Captain and Mrs
Andrew, I would not have known how much of a burden life is, and I may have
been long dead.”
“I like poor people who are well
educated,” she answered, then glanced sideways, looking at me with her
beautiful eyes. “They always make me happy. I have seen a lot of poverty,
Bobby. I used to stay in the East End of London and at Montmartre in Paris.”
“And you also used to stay in posh
Mayfair and Rue de la Paix,” I added.
“I think I have liked you since the
first minute I saw you at the railway station, Bobby,” Maria said as if to
change the subject. “I first noticed your eyebrows, which look so much like
those of the Buddha. Your eyes are so big, so full of goodness and honesty. I
have felt since the beginning that we were going to be real friends.”
I looked at Maria, my beloved friend,
with delight. She linked her arm to mine and we proceeded until we came to a
fairly large rock jutting out into the sea. Maria invited me to sit on it and
talk with her. “Oh, it is so wonderful, Bobby,” she exclaimed.
“Bobby,
tell me the truth,” said my beloved friend. “Do you have the drive to do something big that the world will notice?
The ambition to become famous?”
“I do, Maria,” I answered. I took her
hand and held it tightly. “I am ambitious. I want to be a good writer in Siam,
my country. I am poor, and I want to find enough wealth to have a decent enough
life through writing books, but this is difficult in Siam: nobody there likes
to read books, and most writers lose money.”
“Why not be a writer in Europe or
America, then?”
“There is much competition among
writers here,” I answered, “and I do not believe that I know the language
well enough to write as well as English or American writers do. I have the
ambition to write something outstanding unlike anything anybody has ever done.
Siam is a country with the best opportunities, but, before I achieve success, I
must make myself known to create public interest.”
“How right you are, Bobby,” Maria
answered. “To advertise is most important for the success of any kind of
endeavour, and maybe in Siam someone has already written a few novels of
substance to open the path.”
“Maria,” I said admiringly, “you are
still very young and yet you have a fairly good knowledge of Siam. I am amazed,
because what you say about Siam having only a few novels of substance is very
close to the truth.”
“I was only guessing,” she answered,
“but if that is the case Siam is the best place to carry out the kind of undertaking
you have in mind, Bobby. The important thing is that you must make yourself
known. I am sure you will succeed. This much I can predict – do you know
why?”
“I don’t, Maria.”
“Last night, Mrs Andrew gave us a few
of your short stories to read in our bedroom. Some are good, they have
substance and are deeply moving, which shows that you have elevated thoughts
and a good character full of kind-heartedness. Moira will ask you to let her
present these stories to the editor of a monthly magazine we know who will
check them, and maybe some will get printed as well.”
“What! I have been able to write that
well?” I asked incredulously.
“You have done them well enough, but I
do not want you to be overconfident,” she answered. “You must try to write
better than this several times over, but you have told me that you have the
ambition to write a new type of novel that will be the best in Siam. Why don’t
you join a newspaper, then?”
“Why should I?”
“To write a good, useful novel, one
must know a lot about life beforehand, and reporters and newspaper correspondents
must travel around; they go to various places and see more of life than people
in any other profession. Since your heart is not in being a lawyer or a judge,
why do you bother to learn law?”
“The life of a novelist in Siam is very
risky, Maria. Writing a novel, you must fear dying of hunger more than anything
else.”
“Bobby, have you never felt that,
whatever we undertake in earnest, there are lots of obstacles and dangers along
the way? For the peace and quiet of the country, we must get rid of thieves,
which puts the detectives, the police and ourselves at risk to some extent.
Whatever we do, we must face danger. I want you to be successful in the way you
really want, Bobby. I like you very much, because I am certain that you are a
good man – good for me and good for the world.”
“And what story do you want me to
write, Maria?”
“You must become a journalist, to go to
various places in the world beforehand,” she said, moving closer, almost touching
me, “and then write about all the kinds of life you’ve encountered, and call
that story The circus of life.”
I did not answer in any way. We fell
quiet for a while, watching the small waves breaking at the bottom of the rock
on which we sat side by side.
The
days and times of supreme happiness for me in the company of Maria Grey were
inexorably drawing to a close. The needling feeling that soon the friend whom I
most loved must go away without knowing when or indeed whether we would meet
again kept piercing my heart relentlessly. Although we had only known each
other for four days, Maria was clearly showing me how much she felt for me. She
believed in my abilities, she believed that my ambitions would soon be
fulfilled. She called me “my Bobby” and I was her Bobby only. Even though we
had not once told each other that we loved each other, dear readers, we knew
each other’s heart well enough. I tried to suppress the extravagance of my love
because I felt that I had no right to it. As for Maria, she tried to show the
world that we were in love, because she held that pure love is nothing to be
ashamed of.
“Maria,” I said, almost imploring her, “if
you are good to me like this forever, I think I must love you – love you
more than my own life for sure. I know I should not, because – because we have
no right.”
Maria immediately looked at me with sad
eyes, smiling a little.
“Bobby, why do we have no right?” she
asked, wrapping her arms around me. “Why can we not love each other?”
“There are many reasons, Maria,” I
answered, seizing her in my arms in the same fashion. “The main one is that you
are European, living in a cold country with certain customs. I am Thai, I come
from a very warm country with other customs – very different from yours. You
would not be able to get along with my relatives and friends in Siam and – and
I am poor, Maria. Where would you find happiness?”
“Bobby,” she answered, “haven’t you
ever thought that God created everything on earth as couples, has meant one
being for another being, and we do not know what He has meant for us until we
meet that other being? Why can we not love each other?” she insisted. “Coolies,
beggars – even they get married, and surely we are better than coolies or
beggars, because we have received an education and we can choose what we want.
O Bobby, my darling, I love you. I love you. You must try to understand.”
We fell into each other’s arms and
exchanged a kiss of the purest love.
“I have only known you for four days,
Bobby,” she declared slowly, “but I feel like we have known each other since
we were born.”
“Maria, since the first minute I saw
you at the station,” I said, still holding her gently in my arms, “I have felt
that I would be in seventh heaven for seven days, but after those seven days
are over – you will leave, Maria.”
“Bobby,” she said with a beautiful
voice, “time and duty may force us to be apart from each other but love will
bind our hearts together forever. We will meet again, Bobby. I know that this
world is full of mercy for the two of us. God will not allow us to feel hurt.”
“Lady Moira told me about the life of
reporters and newspaper correspondents yesterday,” I said sadly. “I know that,
no matter what, it is your duty to go anywhere. It will be difficult for me to
find you. I am afraid that once you have left we will be separated until we
die, Maria.”
“Separated until we die!” she exclaimed
with dismay. “That cannot be true, Bobby, that is impossible. We shall meet
again. Aren’t you also going to London? I stay in London all the time, and so
will you, and we will meet there, we will meet everyday if you so wish.”
“Are you certain, Maria, that we can
meet in London?” I asked.
“I love you so much, Bobby,” she
moaned. “I love you so badly that I am allowing my heart to press you into changing
your way of life in a direction you have not chosen.”
“Maria,” I declared, looking at her
earnestly, “what do you want me to do?”
“In your country, you have never
received anything of value,” she said, bowing her head to rub it against my
shoulder. “No one there wants to help you. You have no position or anything to
care for. And you still are not free?”
“Free, Maria – I am free.”
“Then what do you want to read law and
go back to Siam for?” she asked. “Who wants you? What will you do there? Why
don’t you apply to be one of us journalists, to stay with us, to stay with me,
Bobby? I want you – I want you more than anything in the world. Stay here
and everybody will want you. You will have parents – Captain Andrew
and Mrs Andrew. You will have friends. You will have a woman who loves you and
who will love you for as long as we live. You must be a journalist, Bobby, my
darling. Be it for me, be it for the life and happiness of us both.”
It is true that “tears are happiness
and happiness is sorrow”. I was then happier than anyone ever will be, I was
happy because I loved Maria, I was happy because I was certain that, whatever
person I was, at least one woman in the world loved me with all her heart, body
and soul – and that woman was a foreigner from another land, speaking another
language and endowed with another complexion. Yet I was suffering because the
woman for the sake of whose love I was dedicating my life was about to depart.
As she implored me again and again and mingled with me in the highest love, I
knew not how to answer her questions – and tears flowed ceaselessly.
“Have you already forgotten, Maria,” I
asked her finally, “that you told me the other day you want me to go back to
become someone important in Siam, that you want me to write The circus of
life for the Thai people to read?”
“I talked that way then because I did
not know you well enough,” she answered. “Now I know your character and
feelings. I cannot let you go back to your country. I feel that you would only
waste your time there.” After a moment, she added, with a voice that had lost
hope: “But then, Bobby, if you really want to go back to Siam, to your
country, to your own kind, to your home, you should do it – nobody can stop
you.”
“Not at all, Maria, I am not thinking
like that at all,” I answered. “I love you more than to let you go and not want
to see you again. But your idea of me becoming a journalist scares me. I am
afraid I do not know English well enough.”
“English is a language that is easy to
learn, and you know it well enough already. I don’t see any reason to be
worried,” she stated.
“It is getting late, Maria, we should
be going back home, lest Mother is worried,” I urged her.
“Let’s go, Bobby.”
We walked arm in arm down the beach,
turned into Middlesex Road and finally reached the Queen’s Cottage. I felt
that Maria was angry with me. I was afraid that she was, but I did not know
why.
Lady
Moira has warned Wisoot not to become too serious about the affair, because he
and Maria have incompatible cultures. Despite their mutual attraction, the two
lovers agree to make no commitments.
Not
long after the two ladies have left, Wisoot receives a check for an article of
his to be published in The
Times. When it is time for him to start his formal education in London, the
Andrews find him family board in Hampstead, which turns out to be a grim
boarding house populated by insufferable Indians. Wisoot feels miserable: he is
unable to find Maria Grey, and his only friend Pradit is so preoccupied with
his girlfriend and so unfriendly that Wisoot decides not to bother him any
more.
After
a week, he returns to Bexhill and Captain Andrew finds him better lodgings in
Fulham. He enters a London law school at Middle Temple, but does not like it
and spends most of his time writing articles and short stories under the pen
name “Bobby”.
One
day, he is invited to join the London Press Club, where he meets Maria Grey
again. Their love has not changed, yet nothing seems to happen between the two.
Wisoot soon forsakes his law studies and turns to full-time journalism. He
shares a flat in Earl’s Court with a Times
colleague, and the two of them are soon sent to Paris on an assignment. Wisoot
is as enthusiastic about Paris, “the city of romance”, as he was unimpressed
with bleak London – so enthusiastic indeed that both he and his roommate pick
up a couple of easy-going live-in “wives”, kept for a song in these times of
economic crisis. When Maria Grey finds out about it, he coolly reminds her of
their agreement.
Wisoot
and Maria meet again on their way to Monte Carlo, and yes they are desperately
in love with each other, but work pulls them apart. As secretary to the deputy
editor of The Times,
“Bobby” criss-crosses much of southern Europe for more than a year. In Monte
Carlo, he becomes briefly involved with a flirtatious Hungarian countess.
Later, in Geneva, a sudden illness prevents him from covering the meeting of
the three Great Powers at the League of Nations. He recovers and accompanies
his boss on trips to almost every country in Europe. The author uses the
occasion for postcard presentations of the places Wisoot visits.
Back
in London, “Bobby” notices that his roommate and Maria have become intimate and
he feels despondent. A car accident keeps him in hospital for a month, and he
becomes convinced that Maria has betrayed him. (This may be a transposition of
the author’s alleged attempted suicide in London.) He decides to leave Maria
and her new lover well alone, sinks into further gloom and considers moving to
the US when he is informed that a royal grant is available for him to study
diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington.
A
month later, Wisoot learns from Maria that she still loves only him, yet he has
to sail away across the Atlantic. On the liner, he becomes acquainted with Sir
Percival Humphreys, a famous antique dealer, and his family.
He
starts his new life as an external student at Harvard, taking summer courses in
literature and American history. He catches the eye of a charming young Thai
student named Jurai, but he will not allow the relationship to blossom beyond
friendship. At Georgetown University, he studies so hard that his eyesight
fails him. A major operation leaves him temporarily blind and, although Sir
Percival takes him to his house in New York, his failing sight will not allow
him to resume his studies. He travels around the US with Sir Percival, helping
him design advertisements.
Maria
accepts an invitation to be a guest of the Humphreys, who insist that Wisoot
must not try and talk her into marrying him, as all agree a mixed marriage
would be a terrible thing, both for themselves and for their progeny. The two
lovers meet again only to promise each other eternal love.
Wisoot
decides to return to Siam and, as Maria, Sir Percival and his daughter head for
the East, they all leave on the same boat: more postcards from Hawaii, Japan
and China. In China, Wisoot meets his former roommate and his former deputy
editor and joins them in their journalistic endeavours. But health fails him
again and he is stranded in a nursing home in Shanghai. Maria finally leaves
for New York, and two days later he takes a boat back to Bangkok.
After
six years of rich experiences round the world, a broken-hearted Wisoot has
nothing to show by way of academic qualifycations, and can only hope to find
a slot at the bottom of the bureaucratic structure, while his brothers and
friends are enjoying their social success. The novel ends with the death of
Lamjuan’s husband.
The
circus of my life ends with the death of Lieutenant Kamon. As for myself, I may keep on drifting. No
particular direction offers any meaning, especially in how to carry out my
life. The past is past, and I must forget the circus of life. Something new is
about to start, and I hope it is not as grievously sad as what has just ended.
Beyond
the scandalous autobiographical side of the novel, washing the dirty linen of
the aristocracy in public and pointing an accusing finger at the head of the
family, The circus of life is a truly unique novel, much more accomplished
than its immediate contemporaries, whether Dorkmai Sot’s Her enemy and Nit
or Seeboorapha’s Real man.
The immediate appeal of the novel is
its exceptional scope: for Wisoot as for Prince Arkart, “all the world’s a
stage”. Wisoot is not just a foreign student who comes back with experience of
a given country: he has gone everywhere, he has seen it all – from Lindberg
returning to the US after his first trans-Atlantic flight to the aftermath of a
big earthquake in Japan and the civil war in China.
Today's Western readers may not be
impressed by what I have termed “postcard” scenes, or by the author's often
clumsy name-dropping, but to the Thai readers of the time, these glimpses of
the world beyond their world were momentous. And doubly so: here was a love
story (and a very proper one at that) involving a Thai and a foreigner and told
by a Thai writer, not just another translated foreign work. The exotic flavour
of this sad romance had tremendous popular appeal, and inspired a long line of
exotic novels. Only six years later, Seeboorapha took a leaf off The circus
of life when he published Behind the picture, a sentimental novel
largely set in Japan which also tells of unfulfilled love.
Like Lady Moira Dunn’s, the author’s
thoughts “are of the world”. Among the pioneers of the Thai novel, Prince Arkart
is the only one with an international perspective, looking at Siamese society
from the outside. The author, however, never waxes too lyrical over the Thai
students’ “paradise on earth” and carefully points out some of the West’s
social failings.
The circus of life forcefully criticizes arranged
marriages which imply subservience of the wife and allow the proliferation of
minor wives – by far the dominant bone of contention among the young
generations of the time and the dominant theme in Thai literature for years to
come.
Prince Arkart also suggests that
Siamese youth should cultivate an ability “to think and have minds of their
own”, but he is no revolutionary or social satirist. Wisoot’s concern is
individualistic: he is ambitious, he wants to be recognised by society as an
outstanding writer. He is also a failure, though a lovable one.
1905-1974
“Seeboorapha” was an outstanding man by any
standard, one of the best newspaper editors and foremost novelists of his time,
as well as a progressive Buddhist thinker and a political fighter for social
justice who would not compromise his ideals. He had the guts to say no twice
to the dictator who courted him – and paid for it by losing his job time and again,
spending more than four years in jail and the last sixteen years of his life in
exile. It is a bitter irony indeed that the most political of leading Thai novelists,
whose name was anathema and whose novels were banned for two decades only to be
praised sky-high by radical zealots in the 1970s, will probably be best remembered
for one of his least political novels, a romantic and exotic love story which
is little representative of his outstanding contribution to Thai letters and
Thai society.
Handsome,
smooth, soft-spoken, he went through life wearing the patronymics of Kularp,
which means Rose, but for posterity Kularp Saipradit will forever be “Seeboorapha”,
Resplendent Orient, no less!* This is no idle remark: in pre-World-War-II Siam,
names were an issue, and Kularp never received the Thammasart law degree he
was entitled to because he refused to adopt a more masculine-sounding name.
He was born
in March 1905 at Hua Lamphong, in the heart of Bangkok, the second of two
children of a lower middle-class couple: his father, Suwan, the son of a traditional
“eye doctor”, was chief clerk at the Railways Department; his mother, Sombun,
hailed from a rice-farming family in Suphanburee, but at an early age had
moved to Bangkok to stay with a relative and is understood to have sojourned at
the Suan Kularp palace (hence her son’s name).
Suwan, who
taught his son how to read and write even before Kularp entered primary school
at the age of 4, fell sick and died two years later. He was 35. Kularp, his sister
Jamrat, three years his senior, and their mother moved to a shophouse at the
foot of Yotsei Bridge. Their mother made dresses for a living and sent Jamrat
to train as a classical dancer and actress and Kularp to a military training
school to prepare him to become a palace soldier. After two years she managed,
through unknown connections, to have Kularp enrolled in the select Theipsirin
School. There, between 1920 and 1924, Kularp found himself in the company of
Prince Arkartdamkeung, Marlai Choophinit and several other future well-known
novelists; like them, he contributed poems to the school magazine, Seetheip.
Fresh out of
Theipsirin and not quite 20, Kularp started work teaching English in the
evening at a private language school run by the owner of a printing press, who
also had his staff translate novels and summarise the plots of newly imported
foreign movies in the daytime, before sponsoring a magazine which folded in
less than a year. Kularp then joined the popular army magazine Seina Sueksa and soon was an assistant
editor, but because he was a civilian his promotion was blocked. Unfairly
refused a post as a translator in the Survey Department, he quit Seina Sueksa and decided to concentrate
on writing fiction.
Between 1926
and 1932, he wrote no fewer than nine novels. (In 1928 alone, he wrote three
novels and two collections of short stories.) Although they established his
reputation as a leading novelist at a time when novel writing was still in its
infancy, most of these works have little literary appeal other than a smooth
style.* Two of them,
however, stand out: A real man (Look Phoochai) and The war of life (Songkhrarm Cheewit). A real man tells the story of a carpenter’s son whose education allows him to
become a successful, fair and altruistic judge, and who is rewarded with a
title of nobility. The war of
life, a novel composed of 33
letters exchanged by a poor, idealistic civil servant and his sweetheart, a
rich girl who has fallen on hard times but will desert him to become a movie
star, openly draws from Dostoevsky’s Poor
people.
By 1929,
Kularp had gathered his friends into a publishing group, Supharpburut
(Gentlemen), which included some of the best writers of his generation. Under
Kularp’s leadership, the group went into journalism, and followed him through
thick and thin in and out of half a dozen publications over the next twenty
years. The only other personality who had such a seminal, if less structured,
influence is Prince Khuekrit Prarmoat.
The group
started with a fortnightly, also called Supharpburut,
with Kularp as its editor and manager. The magazine lasted a little more than a
year. Then Kularp became editor of a Bangkok political daily, but after three
months, one of his articles criticizing the gentry led to the paper’s closure.
His and his group’s next venture was a daily, Thai Mai (New Thai), from which the group resigned nearly two years
later when an opinion piece by “Seeboorapha” entitled “Humanitarianism”
displeased the owners. They went on to set up a weekly, Phoonam (Leader) and by June 1932 Kularp was negotiating the
editorship of a daily newspaper to be secretly sponsored by the king when
absolute monarchy was overthrown on the 24th of that month by Preedee
Phanom-yong’s People’s Party. Shortly
thereafter, Kularp and his group started a daily, Pracharchart (The sovereign nation), which was owned by a prince
but came to express views close to Dr Preedee’s.
In 1934,
Kularp spent three months in retreat as a monk and wrote another mediocre novel,
Facing
sin (Phajon Barp). The following
year he married a graduate from Jularlongkorn’s Faculty of Arts, Chanit
Priyacharnkun, who became the noted translator of three of Jane Austen’s novels
under the pen name he thought up for her, “Jooliat” (Juliet), and helped him
translate Maugham’s Pool, Chekhov’s In
exile and Gorki’s Mother. The couple had a daughter and a son.
In early
1936, Kularp was forced to resign from Pracharchart:
the strongman at the time didn’t appreciate his broadsides. Late that year, he
went to study the press in Japan and on his return wrote The
jungle of life (Pa Nai
Cheewit)* and his romantic masterpiece, Behind
the picture (Khang Lang Pharp), both
serialised in 1937.
Then it was
back to the press again: in 1939, he and his group started the Supharpburut daily, which soon merged
with Pracharchart. In 1944 and 1945,
Kularp was elected president of the Thai Newspapers Association. In late 1947,
he and his wife left for two years in Australia, where he studied political
science. On his return, he started a printing press (Supharpburut Press, of
course) to publish his own works and those of his friends in cheap editions. He
also wrote several books, including Till we meet again (Jon Kwa Rao Ja Phopkan Eek), 1950, an
incisive pamphlet denouncing the ills of Thai society but a poor novel
sacrificing the credibility of its characters on the altar of political
truth.
In 1951,
Kularp set up the Peace Foundation of Thailand, which was widely viewed as a
local antenna of the Soviet-controlled Peace Movement. The next year saw him
protest against the war in Korea, demand the lifting of press censorship and,
when he went to distribute food and blankets to the needy in the Northeast, he
was among more than a hundred “agitators” arrested on 10 November 1952. Accused
of “treason” and summarily condemned to nineteen years and four months in
jail, he was freed in February 1957 to celebrate the advent of the 25th
Buddhist century.
It was during
these years in jail that he wrote the first two volumes of an unfinished
trilogy, Look ahead (Lae Pai
Khang Na), which many rightly consider to be his most accomplished
political novel. This sweeping retrospective of the changes that took place in
Thailand throughout the first half of the 20th century are realistically
presented in some of the best pages ever written in Thai, but the writer’s tone
is excessively didactic, and the story switches heroes and changes direction
in the second volume, whose abrupt ending suggests it is unfinished, although
Kularp did write some twenty pages of the third volume.
Shortly after
his liberation, Kularp went to the Soviet Union as a guest of the government,
and the following year he headed a delegation of writers to China. While he
went on to an Afro-Asian writers’ conference in Tashkent, back home Field
Marshal Sarit Thanarat seized power and all the members of Kularp’s delegation
were jailed on their return. Faced with the same fate, Kularp chose to remain
in China, where he led the life of a “democratic personality” in exile,
lecturing on Thai literature at Peking University, contributing to the
Afro-Asian Solidarity Front’s cultural activities and to the Thai service of
China’s external broadcasting radio. He applauded the “student uprising” of
October 1973 in Bangkok, but was unable to take advantage of the changed
political climate to return home: he died of pleurisy in Peking on 16 June
1974.
Kularp’s
fictional writings evolved with his political thinking, which took him from an
idealistic faith in the power of education and individual good will (translated
into romantic novels written around clean, ambitious heroes working their way
up within the system) to a growing concern for social justice and radical
change of the socio-political system by relying primarily on the people (the
clear message of his last novels). Neither a communist nor a sycophant of the
establishment, he twice turned down the offer of a senator post to remain his
own man and carry on his fight in favour of justice, freedom, equality and
progress on paper, which cost him dearly but secured his prominence in national
history.
Behind the picture (Khang Lang Pharp) 1937
Two days after the narrator hangs up a picture in
his study – “a
watercolour depicting a stream flowing past the foot of a mountain” with two vague figures sitting “on a
boulder almost touching the water” –
his wife notices it and dismisses it as a rather ordinary landscape. The
picture has a special value for the narrator, however, as it “was
painted with the artist’s life” and
prompts him to recall “every scene, every part, from the beginning to
the final act on which the curtain fell so tragically, only recently”. End of the prologue.
The action starts in Japan, at a time when Nopphorn,
the narrator, then 22, has been studying at Rikkyo University for three years.
The young man is asked by a friend of his father’s, His Excellency
Atthikarnbordee (University President), to make arrangements for his honeymoon
in Japan with his new wife, Princess Keerati. Nopphorn finds a house and a
maid for the couple and welcomes them and their cook on their arrival at Tokyo
Station.
His Excellency is a kind-hearted and wealthy widower
“of over fifty”. His beautiful new wife looks “no
more than twenty-eight”. Nopphorn,
requested to spend most of his vacation with the couple, and more particularly
with the princess, rapidly becomes close to her. As their friendship blossoms,
the princess increasingly confides in him, revealing that she is actually 35;
despite their age difference, Nopphorn feels strangely drawn to her.
Relations between myself and His Excellency and
Princess Keerati went on
as usual. One evening three or four days later, His Excellency was invited to a
reception. Princess Keerati said that, as she was feeling poorly, she did not
relish the thought of mixing with a large crowd and requested that she be
allowed to rest at home. His Excellency therefore asked me to stay and keep
his wife company.
It was the period of the waxing moon
and after dinner we both felt it would be utterly foolish not to go out and
enjoy the moonlight. I suggested that we take out a rowing boat in the public
park, which was only ten minutes’ walk
from the house. Princess Keerati approved.
It was still dusk when we got there,
and there were crowds of local people strolling in the park. Some sat on
benches, watching others rowing on the large boating pond. We walked around
the park two or three times until we felt tired and decided it was time to
climb into a boat. There were
already four or five boats on the water, which was about the right number, as
more of them would have created too much commotion in the pond. I took the oars
and Princess Keerati sat herself down comfortably in front of me. As we lost
ourselves in conversation, I let the boat drift on its own.
A bright moonlight lit up the surface
of the water and the different kinds of plants around the park, and the whole
scene was extremely pleasing to the eye. Princess Keerati kept enthusing about
the beauty of nature at this time of night, and I agreed with everything she
said, though my attention was elsewhere. In the course of my life, I had
enjoyed the beauty of the full moon hundreds of times but my eyes had never
feasted on the sight of a living creature bathed in moonlight that was as
beautiful as the woman before me that night.
To add a little to the pleasure of our
outing that evening, Princess Keerati was wearing a white silk kimono with a
bold red pattern which made me think of the large chrysanthemums I had
admired at the Takarasuka Park the previous fall. As the moon came out from
behind clouds, its bright light made the flowers all over her body appear real.
Whenever Princess Keerati turned her face upward, the mild breeze played with
the strands of her hair and the moonlight lit sparkles in her moist eyes,
holding my complete attention.
She sat with her legs stretched towards
me. Her tapering and fleshy feet were starkly white. She leaned back a little,
absorbed in the beauty of nature.
“Don’t you feel happy, Nopphorn, on a
lovely night like this?” she asked softly, turning her glittering eyes towards
me. I started a little, as I was deeply enthralled by the beauty of her face.
“I am so happy that I wouldn’t know how
to put it in words,” I replied eagerly.
“Doesn’t it make you feel a little
homesick?”
“It has been more than three years
since I left home, Milady. At first, I did miss home occasionally, but after a
while that feeling faded away.”
“And you don’t miss home anymore ...”
“No, and least of all in a moment like
this.”
“You and I are completely different in
this respect. When I feel safe and my heart is full of the beauty of nature,
like now, I can’t help but think of those I love most. I think about Father,
about Mother, about my younger sisters at home, where it was so peaceful and we
were so happy. I think of life ten years ago, when we were all living there
together, and I think of my own life then, a life full of happiness and hope.
You must be quite hard-hearted, Nopphorn, not to think of home at a time like
this.”
I wanted to answer, and almost did,
that in her presence, under the spell of her charm and beauty, I never thought
of anything else and would find it hard to think of other things. I dared not
speak so forthrightly, however, because I was not sure what made me feel this
way.
“I am not hard-hearted at all, but I
have to concentrate on my studies. Besides, to be quite frank, Milady, nothing
pleases me more than to be of service to you.” What prompted me to reveal
something of my true feelings I do not know.
“Now, now, you are trying too hard to
please.”
I looked away, and she went on: “How
many more years do you have to study?”
“About five, because once I’ve finished
my studies, I intend to find work here for a while to get some experience.”
“That’s a long time. You will end up
Japanese and may even marry one of those Japanese women that impress you so
much, and settle down here.”
“Oh, that’s totally out of the
question,” I protested. “I am impressed by Japan’s progress and I am also
impressed by Japanese women, I must admit, but this doesn’t mean I’ll become
Japanese. I do not for an instant forget that I am Thai and that I am part of
the Thai nation, which still lags behind other nations. I came here to study in
order to take knowledge back to our country. Ultimately, my goals are in Siam –
and so is marriage.”
That reference to my marriage was
prompted by Princess Keerati’s remark, as it reminded me of the girl to whom I
was engaged. Indeed, she was merely a fiancée, whom Father had picked out to
ensure that I would return to marry or at least to caution me not to get
involved with women overseas. Since she was only my fiancée, not a girl I
loved, I didn’t think of her in personal terms, but rather wondered about
married life in the future.
“Your aims are praiseworthy,” Princess
Keerati said with sincere admiration. “The two things that await your consideration
in Siam – work and marriage – are important indeed. Have you made any plans
yet?”
“I intend to specialise in banking,
because, as far as I know, there are very few people in our country who are
interested in this field. That’s where my future profession lies, I think. As
for marriage plans, I haven’t even given them a thought. I feel it’s a matter
of too much import for me to get involved in for the time being.”
I felt slightly uneasy that my answer
to Princess Keerati did not make it clear that if I had made no plans, it was
because the matter was already settled. Barring unforeseeable circumstances, I
would have to marry my fiancée, whom I scarcely knew, let alone love or even
understand. I do not know why I did not tell Princess Keerati. Was I trying to
keep it from her? I am not
really sure. In any case, I did not lie or try to deceive her. I probably had
no such intention. After all, she had not asked whether I had a fiancée waiting
for me in Siam. But what if she had asked? How would I answer? My heart was
pounding.
“Your thinking is very mature for
someone so young,” Princess Keerati said when I finished speaking.
By then, our boat was drifting gently
in the middle of the pond. I picked up the oars and pulled on them to make us
go forward. I was still in a state of agitation and wanted to move so that our
conversation may also change course. Our boat slid behind another in which two
young women sat singing softly in unison. They were rowing slowly, gazing up
rapturously at the moon.
“They sing beautifully,” Princess Keerati
whispered. “They seem rather carried away by the song; it must be a really
moving one. Could you translate the words for me?”
“It’s a song of consolation, not a love song,” I told her when the two girls had finished singing. “It is meant to make them feel content with their own lot. The lyrics say: ‘Though we are not cherry blossoms, there is no shame in being flowers of another kind; let us simply be the most beautiful of our kind. There is only one Mount Fuji, but this does not mean the other mountains are worthless. Even though we are no samurais, we still can be their companions. We can’t all be captains for where could we go without sailors? If we can’t be the road, we can still be the walkway. There is a place and work in this world for everyone of us. However great or small that work may be, we are sure to have something to do. If we can’t be the sun, let us be stars instead. Though we were not born men, there is no slight in be