PeterUK
May 30th, 2015, 21:53
(I wrote the following article with a view to magazine publication. That didn't happen and rather than just let it gather dust I thought it might be of interest to a few readers here. It provides a glimpse of what it was like to be a wealthy gay traveller in Siam in the early 20th century).
The Oriental Hotel, often in recent decades voted the best hotel in Asia, stretches in concrete-and-glass opulence along the east bank of the Chao Phraya river in the heart of Bangkok. The original
hotel, dwarfed and somewhat incongruous in its classical elegance, stands at one end and is now known as the Authors' Wing, where, for a hefty premium, guests can stay in suites (much embellished) once occupied by famous writers. Prominent among these is the Somerset Maugham suite; the hotel loves to advertise the fact that Maugham was a regular visitor. As we shall see, there is some irony to this boast.
By 1922, at the age of 48, Maugham was a hugely successful playwright, novelist and short story writer. With Gerald Haxton, his American lover and companion who was 18 years his junior, he had already completed several of the long and far-flung journeys that he was later to describe as the happiest days of his life. They had travelled to Polynesia in 1916-17, to the Far East (mainly China and Japan) in 1919-20 and to Malaya and the islands of the archipelago in 1921. For Maugham travel was a form of liberation: 'I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.' At a practical level, travel enabled him to gather material for his literary works and in this regard Haxton was particularly useful: his ebullient and friendly nature made it possible for Maugham to meet far more people than he would have done alone, given his natural reticence aggravated by a stammer. Last but not least, travel gave Maugham the opportunity to escape, if only for a while, his unhappy relationship with his wife, Syrie.
Towards the end of 1922 Maugham and Haxton set off on another journey to the East. They sailed to Colombo in Ceylon and from there to Rangoon in Burma. They went overland through Burma, down through Siam to Bangkok and then on to parts of Indo-China, notably Angkor, Saigon, Hu├й, and Hanoi. The book about the trip that Maugham was later to write (The Gentleman in the Parlour, 1930) ends at that point, but in fact the pair travelled onward to Hong Kong and across the Pacific to America before Maugham finally reached London again in May 1923.
The going was often arduous. In the Shan States of Burma they travelled through jungle and up mountain passes, on ponies or on foot; they were sometimes paddled upriver on primitive rafts or jolted along on bullock-carts. All this was borne stoically. Toughest of all was the stage of the journey from Taunggyi, capital of the Shan States, to Keng Tung on the border with Siam. A distance of nearly 700 miles, it took 26 days to complete, Maugham and Haxton riding on Shan ponies at the head of a caravan of mules and porters carrying the luggage. In the book Maugham, ever protective of his public image, gives the impression that he was travelling alone, dealing with hardships as they arose, drawing out interesting stories from strangers, unwinding with a good book or a few hands of patience in his rest-house at the end of each day. The book is deceptive in another way as well, some of its material being imported from other works by Maugham. It's a bit of a hotchpotch, not one of his finest efforts, but enlivened by passages of sharp observation, flashes of humour and some wonderful tales.
The Siam that the two travellers were about to enter from Burma had been largely closed to Western influences until the mid-19th century, as a result of the clumsy and abortive French intervention in its affairs in the 1680s. It has been estimated that no more than 40 Westerners, mainly missionaries and a few traders, were living there in 1850. By the early 1900s, however, there were more than 1000 Westerners in Bangkok alone. Siam's precarious geopolitical position between the French in Indo-China and the British in Burma and Malaya, both casting covetous eyes in its direction, had forced it to open up to foreign trade after the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and to start a process of modernisation which became particularly marked in the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910). Reforms were introduced in many spheres, slavery was abolished and roads and railways constructed. Territory had to be ceded, chiefly to France, but gradually Siam managed to convince the British and French that their interests were best served by allowing it to maintain its independence.
What struck Maugham and Haxton immediately was how much easier travelling conditions were in Siam. They rode on their ponies along better roads than they were accustomed to in Burma. Where the land was flat there were rice fields; where it undulated there were graceful teak forests. They reached Chiang Mai and paid a visit to the Gymkhana Club but had a hostile reception from 'teakwallahs' of the Bombay Burmah Company. Word was starting to get round of how Maugham concentrated on the worst aspects of expatriate colonial life in his stories тАУ murder, cowardice, drink, adultery тАУ and often betrayed confidences in the process. In fact, local anger was to become a regular feature of Maugham's travels in the East and over time he became relatively indifferent to it: 'On my return visits to many of those places a lot of doors were rudely slammed in my face, I was publicly insulted, and some even threatened to do me bodily harm. But I learned to accept all that... If they didn't like the way I honestly thought them to be, then to hell with them.' At the Gymkhana Club there may also have been disapproving assumptions about his sexual predilections. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of Chiang Mai or the club in The Gentleman in the Parlour.
The two travellers continued south into the central plain where rice fields stretched away as far as the eye could see. They passed prosperous villages and at one of these a Siamese official put a red Ford motor car at their disposal. They left their ponies and mules behind and 'sped along vertiginously at the rate of eight miles an hour.' Peasants in the fields stared in amazement at the unaccustomed sight. Maugham and Haxton paused to admire the former capitals of Lopburi and Ayutthaya and then transferred to a train to complete the journey to Bangkok, which they reached in January 1923.
Maugham was not much impressed by the capital: 'It is impossible to consider these populous modern cities of the East without a certain malaise. They are all alike, with their straight streets, their arcades, their tramways, their dust, their blinding sun, their teeming Chinese, their dense traffic, their ceaseless din.' The maze of shop-lined lanes off the main roads had their charm, with their great variety of wares and races, but the broad avenues designed under Western influence near the king's palace looked stagy and deserted, awaiting ceremony. The wats or temples were gorgeous, glittering creations which tickled Maugham's fancy, though their spiritual significance and appeal were mysteries to him.
The hotel at which he and Haxton stayed, the Oriental, was long-established as Bangkok's finest. Its origins, however, were far from glamorous. By the early 1860s, in the wake of the Bowring Treaty, foreign ships were a common sight in Bangkok and an assortment of rough-and-tumble boarding houses had sprung up along the riverfront to accommodate the sailors and adventurers who came with them. Drunken brawls, even murders, were frequent occurrences. One such boarding house was Captain Dyer's Oriental Hotel, which was destroyed by fire in June 1865. A wooden bungalow with a dozen rooms was rebuilt on the site and run by Danes in the 1870s, but it, too, had a boisterous reputation and they were probably relieved to sell it in 1881 to another Dane, Hans Niels Andersen, who was soon to found the highly successful East Asiatic Company. He saw the need for a respectable hotel with comfortable rooms, good Western food and a well-stocked bar and hired a local Italian architect, S. Cardu, to design the new building.
The Grand Opening was on May 19th 1887 when a banquet for 180 guests, including many of the Siamese elite, was held on the hotel's lawn to the accompaniment of two orchestras. They admired the fine Italianate building with its fashionable sitting rooms and dining rooms on the ground floor and its 40 upstairs bedrooms with large verandahs, mahogany rattan furniture, carpets, artistic wallpaper and punkahs operated by small Indian boys. Andersen could legitimately claim to have built Siam's first luxury hotel.
An early visitor was J├│zef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad. He arrived in Bangkok in January 1888 to take command of a ship, the Otago. While waiting for it to be made ready to put to sea, he stayed in a cheap boarding house but spent some evenings chatting to other seafarers in the bar of the Oriental. 'We talked of wrecks, of short rations and of heroism... and now and then falling silent all together, we gazed at the sights of the river.'
The first major function at the hotel was a banquet in honour of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee on May 24th 1888. After the sumptuous dinner there was dancing and then fireworks followed by a 101-gun royal salute. The dancing continued until the small hours and the band played Rule Britannia to round off the night. The reputation of the hotel was truly established when in March 1891 King Chulalongkorn hosted a dinner there for Crown Prince Nicholas of Russia, who then stayed in the best suite for the rest of his state visit. Vast quantities of alcohol were consumed by the Russian delegation and supplies had to be replenished daily.
By the turn of the century the Oriental had become one of the recognised meeting places for Bangkok's expatriate community. Of many nationalities, but predominantly British, the merchants and consular officials often lived in bungalows and villas by the river or just inland where the business district was. They would go to the hotel for dinners and dances, to drink at the bar or to attend social events on the lawn, including concerts, marionette shows, Thai boxing matches and even circuses. Not everyone was satisfied with such fare. Lucien Fournereau, a French architect and writer, having bemoaned the lack of stimulating cultural activities, asks in 1892: 'What is there then to make life at the Oriental Hotel tolerable? Nothing.'
Most of the guests in the early years were business people of one kind or another, but a new group was starting to appear. In Europe, travel purely for leisure purposes had become increasingly popular as the 19th century progressed. The British, in particular, were avid visitors to the Continent. From being almost exclusively an aristocratic or upper-middle-class activity, it had become by the end of the century open to the hordes of the lower middle classes, often sneered at by better-off contemporaries as they clutched their guidebooks, tour bookings, hotel coupons and third-class train tickets. Tourism to Asia, however, was much slower to become established. It was still at the stage of being mainly restricted to the very wealthy with plenty of time on their hands. The sea journey from Europe to Bangkok took about 40 days. Once in the country an adventurous spirit was needed, given the difficulties of getting around and the lack of creature comforts. Yet the allure of the East had long had a powerful hold on the Western imagination. Bangkok had the romantic appellation of 'the Venice of the East' because of its shining temples and palaces and its intricate canal system. One of the earliest tourists, the young Marquis de Beauvoir, spent a week in Bangkok in January 1867: 'The first general view of the Oriental Venice surpassed all that we could have hoped for in our travellers' dreams. We longed to get into gondolas and go through the lively canals which are the streets of the floating town, and where the bustle, animation, and noise bewildered us. And then shall we be permitted to see these sacred pagodas, these royal palaces?'
At first there was a trickle of tourists but, as conditions in the country improved, they gradually increased in number and the Oriental Hotel was well-placed to capitalise on this development. When Madame Maria Maire, an astute businesswoman, became owner and manageress in 1910 (roles she was to keep for 22 years), she introduced a good French chef, redecorated and made concerts free. For a while the hotel flourished, especially at the time of the coronation of Prince Vajiravudh as Rama VI in the following year. Promotional literature was now specifically targeting tourists with references to sight-seeing itineraries, boat trips, efficient guides, special permits for the royal palaces and so on which the hotel could organise. But World War One duly damaged business and in its aftermath the Oriental was affected by the global economic crisis. It started to look rundown: a fresh coat of paint was needed, the water pipes leaked and the roof was in a poor state of repair.
Such, more or less, was the state of affairs when Maugham and Haxton arrived. Maugham, already disappointed by what he had seen of Bangkok, described his room as 'dark, one of a long line, with a verandah on each side of it; the breeze blew through, but it was stifling.' Feeling unwell and feverish, he took his temperature and found it to be 105. He went to bed and sent for a doctor, who told him that he had malaria. He guessed that he had contracted it at the home of a Siamese official (probably the owner of the red Ford motor car) who had insisted that he sleep in his grand European bed which, unlike Maugham's camp-bed, had no mosquito net. As Maugham wryly puts it: 'The anopheles snatched at the golden opportunity.'
It was a bad attack and for some days doses of quinine had no effect. He lay in bed, panting and sleepless. 'Those wooden rooms, with their verandahs, made every sound frightfully audible to my tortured ears and one morning I heard the manageress of the hotel, an amiable creature but a good woman of business, in her guttural German voice say to the doctor: тАЬI can't have him die here, you know. You must take him to the hospital.тАЭ And the doctor replied: тАЬAll right. But we'll wait a day or two yet.тАЭ тАЬWell, don't leave it too long,тАЭ she replied.'
The crisis came and went and Maugham started to recover. Too weak to do much else, he spent several days lying on the terrace of the hotel watching boats go up and down the river. To occupy himself he wrote a fairy tale about a Siamese princess. When he was strong enough a businessman friend took him in the company's launch to see the klongs or canals. In probably the most vivid and well-observed passage of his travel book he describes the busy floating markets, the great variety of boats, the quiet, leafy backwaters, the people going about their chores or relaxing. There is an amusing running conceit comparing the scene to its London equivalent. Little steamers, for instance, 'the omnibuses of the thrifty, puff up and down quickly, crowded with passengers; and as the rich in their great cars splash the passers-by on a rainy day in London, so opulent Chinamen in motor-launches speed along with a wash that makes the tiny dug-outs rock dangerously.' Soon after, he and Haxton left Bangkok to continue their journey.
They returned to Bangkok late in 1925 during another trip to the East. Perhaps surprisingly, they chose to stay at the Oriental once again. By now the hotel had been upgraded: it had been redecorated and repaired, had electric light throughout and a bathroom with modern fittings attached to every bedroom. To everyone's relief Maugham remained in good health during a 15-day stay and he took the opportunity to socialise more. Every morning he would join a gathering of merchants and bankers for gossip in the bar. Although Siam was not a colony, the life of the expatriate community was much the same as in many colonial territories. Behind the surface glitter of parties, receptions, dances, sporting events and the like, there was much boredom, heavy drinking and sexual licence. It was well known that all over the East, and in Siam in particular, there was much sexual tolerance among the natives and that all tastes could be catered to. A few expatriates 'went native' as a result, losing their moral bearings completely. Maugham would have been in his element, sipping on his favourite martini in a chilled long-stemmed glass, listening to all the tales and storing away material for future use.
He made only one further trip to Bangkok, in 1960, when in his mid-80s, as part of a leisurely, nostalgic final tour through the East. He was accompanied by the partner of his later years, Alan Searle, a working-class Londoner. Air travel had made Bangkok a much more popular tourist destination and, as a result, there were many more hotels, luxury and otherwise, to accommodate them. On this occasion Maugham stayed at the new Erawan Hotel. He was a guest for dinner at the celebrated (then less than a year old) canalside Thai house, packed with Thai art and antiques, belonging to Jim Thompson, the American who had single-handedly revived the Thai silk industry and made it highly profitable. It is easy to imagine these two fastidious, secretive men getting on well together. In a brief thank-you note Maugham wrote, 'You have not only beautiful things, but what is rare you have arranged them with faultless taste.' He may or may not have paid a visit to the Oriental for old times' sake, but he was happy to regale reporters with the story of how the manageress had wanted him to be evicted in case he ruined her business.
The Oriental Hotel, often in recent decades voted the best hotel in Asia, stretches in concrete-and-glass opulence along the east bank of the Chao Phraya river in the heart of Bangkok. The original
hotel, dwarfed and somewhat incongruous in its classical elegance, stands at one end and is now known as the Authors' Wing, where, for a hefty premium, guests can stay in suites (much embellished) once occupied by famous writers. Prominent among these is the Somerset Maugham suite; the hotel loves to advertise the fact that Maugham was a regular visitor. As we shall see, there is some irony to this boast.
By 1922, at the age of 48, Maugham was a hugely successful playwright, novelist and short story writer. With Gerald Haxton, his American lover and companion who was 18 years his junior, he had already completed several of the long and far-flung journeys that he was later to describe as the happiest days of his life. They had travelled to Polynesia in 1916-17, to the Far East (mainly China and Japan) in 1919-20 and to Malaya and the islands of the archipelago in 1921. For Maugham travel was a form of liberation: 'I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.' At a practical level, travel enabled him to gather material for his literary works and in this regard Haxton was particularly useful: his ebullient and friendly nature made it possible for Maugham to meet far more people than he would have done alone, given his natural reticence aggravated by a stammer. Last but not least, travel gave Maugham the opportunity to escape, if only for a while, his unhappy relationship with his wife, Syrie.
Towards the end of 1922 Maugham and Haxton set off on another journey to the East. They sailed to Colombo in Ceylon and from there to Rangoon in Burma. They went overland through Burma, down through Siam to Bangkok and then on to parts of Indo-China, notably Angkor, Saigon, Hu├й, and Hanoi. The book about the trip that Maugham was later to write (The Gentleman in the Parlour, 1930) ends at that point, but in fact the pair travelled onward to Hong Kong and across the Pacific to America before Maugham finally reached London again in May 1923.
The going was often arduous. In the Shan States of Burma they travelled through jungle and up mountain passes, on ponies or on foot; they were sometimes paddled upriver on primitive rafts or jolted along on bullock-carts. All this was borne stoically. Toughest of all was the stage of the journey from Taunggyi, capital of the Shan States, to Keng Tung on the border with Siam. A distance of nearly 700 miles, it took 26 days to complete, Maugham and Haxton riding on Shan ponies at the head of a caravan of mules and porters carrying the luggage. In the book Maugham, ever protective of his public image, gives the impression that he was travelling alone, dealing with hardships as they arose, drawing out interesting stories from strangers, unwinding with a good book or a few hands of patience in his rest-house at the end of each day. The book is deceptive in another way as well, some of its material being imported from other works by Maugham. It's a bit of a hotchpotch, not one of his finest efforts, but enlivened by passages of sharp observation, flashes of humour and some wonderful tales.
The Siam that the two travellers were about to enter from Burma had been largely closed to Western influences until the mid-19th century, as a result of the clumsy and abortive French intervention in its affairs in the 1680s. It has been estimated that no more than 40 Westerners, mainly missionaries and a few traders, were living there in 1850. By the early 1900s, however, there were more than 1000 Westerners in Bangkok alone. Siam's precarious geopolitical position between the French in Indo-China and the British in Burma and Malaya, both casting covetous eyes in its direction, had forced it to open up to foreign trade after the Bowring Treaty of 1855 and to start a process of modernisation which became particularly marked in the reign of King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910). Reforms were introduced in many spheres, slavery was abolished and roads and railways constructed. Territory had to be ceded, chiefly to France, but gradually Siam managed to convince the British and French that their interests were best served by allowing it to maintain its independence.
What struck Maugham and Haxton immediately was how much easier travelling conditions were in Siam. They rode on their ponies along better roads than they were accustomed to in Burma. Where the land was flat there were rice fields; where it undulated there were graceful teak forests. They reached Chiang Mai and paid a visit to the Gymkhana Club but had a hostile reception from 'teakwallahs' of the Bombay Burmah Company. Word was starting to get round of how Maugham concentrated on the worst aspects of expatriate colonial life in his stories тАУ murder, cowardice, drink, adultery тАУ and often betrayed confidences in the process. In fact, local anger was to become a regular feature of Maugham's travels in the East and over time he became relatively indifferent to it: 'On my return visits to many of those places a lot of doors were rudely slammed in my face, I was publicly insulted, and some even threatened to do me bodily harm. But I learned to accept all that... If they didn't like the way I honestly thought them to be, then to hell with them.' At the Gymkhana Club there may also have been disapproving assumptions about his sexual predilections. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of Chiang Mai or the club in The Gentleman in the Parlour.
The two travellers continued south into the central plain where rice fields stretched away as far as the eye could see. They passed prosperous villages and at one of these a Siamese official put a red Ford motor car at their disposal. They left their ponies and mules behind and 'sped along vertiginously at the rate of eight miles an hour.' Peasants in the fields stared in amazement at the unaccustomed sight. Maugham and Haxton paused to admire the former capitals of Lopburi and Ayutthaya and then transferred to a train to complete the journey to Bangkok, which they reached in January 1923.
Maugham was not much impressed by the capital: 'It is impossible to consider these populous modern cities of the East without a certain malaise. They are all alike, with their straight streets, their arcades, their tramways, their dust, their blinding sun, their teeming Chinese, their dense traffic, their ceaseless din.' The maze of shop-lined lanes off the main roads had their charm, with their great variety of wares and races, but the broad avenues designed under Western influence near the king's palace looked stagy and deserted, awaiting ceremony. The wats or temples were gorgeous, glittering creations which tickled Maugham's fancy, though their spiritual significance and appeal were mysteries to him.
The hotel at which he and Haxton stayed, the Oriental, was long-established as Bangkok's finest. Its origins, however, were far from glamorous. By the early 1860s, in the wake of the Bowring Treaty, foreign ships were a common sight in Bangkok and an assortment of rough-and-tumble boarding houses had sprung up along the riverfront to accommodate the sailors and adventurers who came with them. Drunken brawls, even murders, were frequent occurrences. One such boarding house was Captain Dyer's Oriental Hotel, which was destroyed by fire in June 1865. A wooden bungalow with a dozen rooms was rebuilt on the site and run by Danes in the 1870s, but it, too, had a boisterous reputation and they were probably relieved to sell it in 1881 to another Dane, Hans Niels Andersen, who was soon to found the highly successful East Asiatic Company. He saw the need for a respectable hotel with comfortable rooms, good Western food and a well-stocked bar and hired a local Italian architect, S. Cardu, to design the new building.
The Grand Opening was on May 19th 1887 when a banquet for 180 guests, including many of the Siamese elite, was held on the hotel's lawn to the accompaniment of two orchestras. They admired the fine Italianate building with its fashionable sitting rooms and dining rooms on the ground floor and its 40 upstairs bedrooms with large verandahs, mahogany rattan furniture, carpets, artistic wallpaper and punkahs operated by small Indian boys. Andersen could legitimately claim to have built Siam's first luxury hotel.
An early visitor was J├│zef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad. He arrived in Bangkok in January 1888 to take command of a ship, the Otago. While waiting for it to be made ready to put to sea, he stayed in a cheap boarding house but spent some evenings chatting to other seafarers in the bar of the Oriental. 'We talked of wrecks, of short rations and of heroism... and now and then falling silent all together, we gazed at the sights of the river.'
The first major function at the hotel was a banquet in honour of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee on May 24th 1888. After the sumptuous dinner there was dancing and then fireworks followed by a 101-gun royal salute. The dancing continued until the small hours and the band played Rule Britannia to round off the night. The reputation of the hotel was truly established when in March 1891 King Chulalongkorn hosted a dinner there for Crown Prince Nicholas of Russia, who then stayed in the best suite for the rest of his state visit. Vast quantities of alcohol were consumed by the Russian delegation and supplies had to be replenished daily.
By the turn of the century the Oriental had become one of the recognised meeting places for Bangkok's expatriate community. Of many nationalities, but predominantly British, the merchants and consular officials often lived in bungalows and villas by the river or just inland where the business district was. They would go to the hotel for dinners and dances, to drink at the bar or to attend social events on the lawn, including concerts, marionette shows, Thai boxing matches and even circuses. Not everyone was satisfied with such fare. Lucien Fournereau, a French architect and writer, having bemoaned the lack of stimulating cultural activities, asks in 1892: 'What is there then to make life at the Oriental Hotel tolerable? Nothing.'
Most of the guests in the early years were business people of one kind or another, but a new group was starting to appear. In Europe, travel purely for leisure purposes had become increasingly popular as the 19th century progressed. The British, in particular, were avid visitors to the Continent. From being almost exclusively an aristocratic or upper-middle-class activity, it had become by the end of the century open to the hordes of the lower middle classes, often sneered at by better-off contemporaries as they clutched their guidebooks, tour bookings, hotel coupons and third-class train tickets. Tourism to Asia, however, was much slower to become established. It was still at the stage of being mainly restricted to the very wealthy with plenty of time on their hands. The sea journey from Europe to Bangkok took about 40 days. Once in the country an adventurous spirit was needed, given the difficulties of getting around and the lack of creature comforts. Yet the allure of the East had long had a powerful hold on the Western imagination. Bangkok had the romantic appellation of 'the Venice of the East' because of its shining temples and palaces and its intricate canal system. One of the earliest tourists, the young Marquis de Beauvoir, spent a week in Bangkok in January 1867: 'The first general view of the Oriental Venice surpassed all that we could have hoped for in our travellers' dreams. We longed to get into gondolas and go through the lively canals which are the streets of the floating town, and where the bustle, animation, and noise bewildered us. And then shall we be permitted to see these sacred pagodas, these royal palaces?'
At first there was a trickle of tourists but, as conditions in the country improved, they gradually increased in number and the Oriental Hotel was well-placed to capitalise on this development. When Madame Maria Maire, an astute businesswoman, became owner and manageress in 1910 (roles she was to keep for 22 years), she introduced a good French chef, redecorated and made concerts free. For a while the hotel flourished, especially at the time of the coronation of Prince Vajiravudh as Rama VI in the following year. Promotional literature was now specifically targeting tourists with references to sight-seeing itineraries, boat trips, efficient guides, special permits for the royal palaces and so on which the hotel could organise. But World War One duly damaged business and in its aftermath the Oriental was affected by the global economic crisis. It started to look rundown: a fresh coat of paint was needed, the water pipes leaked and the roof was in a poor state of repair.
Such, more or less, was the state of affairs when Maugham and Haxton arrived. Maugham, already disappointed by what he had seen of Bangkok, described his room as 'dark, one of a long line, with a verandah on each side of it; the breeze blew through, but it was stifling.' Feeling unwell and feverish, he took his temperature and found it to be 105. He went to bed and sent for a doctor, who told him that he had malaria. He guessed that he had contracted it at the home of a Siamese official (probably the owner of the red Ford motor car) who had insisted that he sleep in his grand European bed which, unlike Maugham's camp-bed, had no mosquito net. As Maugham wryly puts it: 'The anopheles snatched at the golden opportunity.'
It was a bad attack and for some days doses of quinine had no effect. He lay in bed, panting and sleepless. 'Those wooden rooms, with their verandahs, made every sound frightfully audible to my tortured ears and one morning I heard the manageress of the hotel, an amiable creature but a good woman of business, in her guttural German voice say to the doctor: тАЬI can't have him die here, you know. You must take him to the hospital.тАЭ And the doctor replied: тАЬAll right. But we'll wait a day or two yet.тАЭ тАЬWell, don't leave it too long,тАЭ she replied.'
The crisis came and went and Maugham started to recover. Too weak to do much else, he spent several days lying on the terrace of the hotel watching boats go up and down the river. To occupy himself he wrote a fairy tale about a Siamese princess. When he was strong enough a businessman friend took him in the company's launch to see the klongs or canals. In probably the most vivid and well-observed passage of his travel book he describes the busy floating markets, the great variety of boats, the quiet, leafy backwaters, the people going about their chores or relaxing. There is an amusing running conceit comparing the scene to its London equivalent. Little steamers, for instance, 'the omnibuses of the thrifty, puff up and down quickly, crowded with passengers; and as the rich in their great cars splash the passers-by on a rainy day in London, so opulent Chinamen in motor-launches speed along with a wash that makes the tiny dug-outs rock dangerously.' Soon after, he and Haxton left Bangkok to continue their journey.
They returned to Bangkok late in 1925 during another trip to the East. Perhaps surprisingly, they chose to stay at the Oriental once again. By now the hotel had been upgraded: it had been redecorated and repaired, had electric light throughout and a bathroom with modern fittings attached to every bedroom. To everyone's relief Maugham remained in good health during a 15-day stay and he took the opportunity to socialise more. Every morning he would join a gathering of merchants and bankers for gossip in the bar. Although Siam was not a colony, the life of the expatriate community was much the same as in many colonial territories. Behind the surface glitter of parties, receptions, dances, sporting events and the like, there was much boredom, heavy drinking and sexual licence. It was well known that all over the East, and in Siam in particular, there was much sexual tolerance among the natives and that all tastes could be catered to. A few expatriates 'went native' as a result, losing their moral bearings completely. Maugham would have been in his element, sipping on his favourite martini in a chilled long-stemmed glass, listening to all the tales and storing away material for future use.
He made only one further trip to Bangkok, in 1960, when in his mid-80s, as part of a leisurely, nostalgic final tour through the East. He was accompanied by the partner of his later years, Alan Searle, a working-class Londoner. Air travel had made Bangkok a much more popular tourist destination and, as a result, there were many more hotels, luxury and otherwise, to accommodate them. On this occasion Maugham stayed at the new Erawan Hotel. He was a guest for dinner at the celebrated (then less than a year old) canalside Thai house, packed with Thai art and antiques, belonging to Jim Thompson, the American who had single-handedly revived the Thai silk industry and made it highly profitable. It is easy to imagine these two fastidious, secretive men getting on well together. In a brief thank-you note Maugham wrote, 'You have not only beautiful things, but what is rare you have arranged them with faultless taste.' He may or may not have paid a visit to the Oriental for old times' sake, but he was happy to regale reporters with the story of how the manageress had wanted him to be evicted in case he ruined her business.