At the time, the “Old Oriental Hotel” was a one-story building raised on piles offering “Family Accommodations – American Bar – Billiard Saloon – Newspapers Kept – Boats for Hire – Table d’hote with breakfast at 9:10 a.m., tiffin at one p.m. and dinner at seven p.m.” Such luxury was unexpected and worrying to the future novelist, but he was reassured by Captain H.N. Andersen, the former sailor who owned the hotel and was reconstructing the building which survives today as the facade of the Authors’ Wing, overlooking the garden and the river. The hotel admits Conrad never actually spent a night as a guest, but insists “he was a frequent patron of the hotel’s facilities.”
Thus, Conrad and Maugham, along with two other illustrious former guests, Noel Coward and James Michener, today have the hotel’s most expensive suites named for them, each containing a number of their books and period photographs.
I’ve never understood the appeal of sleeping in a room where someone famous once spent the night, but it seems a popular practice in the overnight accommodation business. So many bed-and-breakfast places dating to the 1700s in the United States boast that “Washington Slept Here,”—it’s become something of a joke, and the financial advantage President Clinton found in offering wealthy contributors the use of the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House is somewhat shamefully well known. Similarly, the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port Au Prince, Haiti’s most famous hostelry, has suites named for Graham Greene, Sir John Gielgud, Marlon Brando and Mick Jagger. Presumably it’s a commercial scheme employed in other parts of the world as well. I digress.
Maugham’s long journey from London by sea to Rangoon, then up the Irrawaddy River by steamer and overland by train, car and pony through Burma’s Shan states, and on to Siam, traveling to Bangkok by train, was undertaken to produce his only real travel book, The Gentleman in the Parlour. (It was less than a great success when it was published in 1930 and unavailable for many years before being reprinted in 1995.) At the time of his visit, Maugham was famous as a dramatist who once had four plays running simultaneously on the London stage and as the author of several best-selling novels, including his quasi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage and The Moon and Sixpence, the latter based on the life of painter Paul Gauguin.
From his remarks about Thailand, it is clear that however willing Maugham may have been to travel rough in Burma and in the Siamese north, when his train reached Ayutthaya, he’d had enough and intended to remain aboard, saying that “if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway station?” His guide had other plans and dragged him from monument to monument, allowing him the contentment of one night on a houseboat, then led him finally to Bangkok, where in an act that proves some things never change, he was handed a card by a street tout that read: “Oh, gentleman, sir, Miss Pretty Girl welcome you Sultan Turkish bath, gentle, polite, massage, put you in dreamland with perfume soap. Latest gramophone music. Oh, such service. You come now! Miss Pretty Girl want you, massage you from tippy-toe to head-top, nice, clean, to enter Gates of Heaven.”
Finally, he stumbled into the lobby of the Oriental, burning with fever that may be blamed for the erratic nature of his observations, leading him to remark on the “dust and heat and noise and whiteness and more dust” and calling Chinatown “dark, shaded, and squalid” one day and on the next being bedazzled by the city’s wats.
“They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of the things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this somber earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldness of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmer had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day’s work needs doing.”
Especially impressed by Wat Suthat, he further wrote, “With the evening, when the blue sky turns pink, the roof, the tall steep roof with its projecting eaves, gains all kinds of opalescent hues so that you can no longer believe it was made by human craftsmen, for it seems to be made of passing fancies and memories and fond hopes.”
Other writers who have visited Bangkok may be too numerous to name, although the Oriental has memorialized a wide variety, including, besides the four for whom the suites were named, John LeCarre, Graham Greene, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Barbara Cartland, Kukrit Pramoj—Thailand’s best-known author, as well as a favorite prime minister—Alec Waugh, Romain Gary and Wilber Smith. Why did these authors get some of the most expensive rooms named after them? Some came as keynote speakers for the annual SEA Write awards, presented as an encouragement to young writers from each of the ASEAN countries and co-sponsored by the hotel.
Others were actually working. Graham Greene wrote numerous novels placed in the region—his most famous, The Quiet American, is centered in Vietnam—and actually wrote a letter following one of his visits (framed and hanging in the suite), calling the hotel a place where “almost anything may happen and one may meet almost anybody, from a mere author to an international crook on his way elsewhere.” While Barbara Cartland—whose suite is pink, her favorite color—began writing a novel based in Thailand at the turn of the new century, a romance, Journey to a Star.
As vastly different as the writers were, the hotel was a part of their Thailand experience. Over the years, Maugham enjoyed telling how he almost got kicked out of the Oriental and when he returned to Bangkok many years later, perhaps remembering that early visit, he elected to stay somewhere else.
The Backpackers
Backpackers are the low-riders of tourism: youthful pilgrims in search of themselves under the guise of seeking experience and enlightenment (but for many, in fact, just getting out of the house and school), the holiday-on-the-cheap hordes who’ve been there and done that twice and along the way made Bangkok’s Khao San Road infamous, while throwing enough money at Tony and Maureen Wheeler to allow them to fly Business Class for the rest of their lives (they own the Lonely Planet publishing empire).
In the 1960s, the “straight” world called such people “hip-pies.” But backpackers are a different breed. They’ve partied in Goa and spent a week in an ashram and they wear the same parachute pants from Kathmandu and even take some of the same drugs, but the tie-dyed, long-haired swarm of the 1960s and early 1970s actually stood for something, or tried to, while their clones-gone-astray in the 1990s, as ubiquitous as self-indulgence and sloth, may be rebels without a cause save hanging out (or merely “hanging,” as the current vernacular has it).
The differences between the generations may be understood by comparing books written about them. The first was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a novel deemed unpublishable when the author’s agent sent it around in the 1950s, a manic word-grenade typed in a single burst on a single roll of teletype paper, whose hero was Dean Moriarty (based on the real-life Neal Cassidy), a “sideburned hero of the snowy west” whose energy gave Keouac’s creation a rush like amphetamine. He was one of Kerouac’s “mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center-light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!” Thus, the Beat Generation was defined; the “Beat” stood for beatitude, by the way.