by Nigel Barley
Introduction
Between the two world wars, the island of Bali in the Dutch East Indies was a unique place of special power in the Western imagination. Only recently colonised, in a great effusion of blood that shocked even the Western democracies, it had become the jewel in the colonial crown of Southeast Asia. The Dutch had appointed themselves guardians of a rich and ancient culture distinguished by lavish ceremonial and spectacle, where beautiful women went bare breasted and handsome men were allegedly available for those of more unconventional tastes. Bali was an obvious site for Western fantasies about Paradise and underwent an influx of foreign visitors. Some were artists, musicians, dancers and writers, attracted by the staggering aesthetic experience that was centred on complex and exotic Hindu rites. Others were scientists, keen to capture the secret of this tantalising and enigmatic culture so that Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the foremost anthropologists of their time, came here and sought to record and interpret what they saw, as they forged the tools of the burgeoning new discipline they served.
Foremost amongst all these expatriates was a charismatic German, Walter Spies, who chose to live in the upland town of Ubud and formed such close links with the Balinese that all subsequent foreigners depended on him as a means of gaining access to the islanders and their world. He was all things: a painter, a musician, an ethnographer, a linguist and a dancer. To his house, flocked the rich and famous of the age: Charlie Chaplin, Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias, Noel Coward, Vicki Baum, Leopold Stokowski, Barbara Hutton and many others whose names, prominent at the time, have now been forgotten. His house by the river at Campuhan, shone like a beacon of enlightenment, scholarship and intercultural understanding for some twenty years.
But such an oasis belongs only in the imagination and cannot endure in the real world, for the foreigners not only brought the idea of Paradise but also their demons with them. Small-minded Dutch colonial administration, personal tragedy, the darker drives of the human soul and the deepening shadow cast by the outside world in a planet headed for another world war – all conspired to bring him down and lay waste Walter Spies’s project, so that he too is now largely forgotten outside Indonesia. Changing ideas have naturally also led to a re-evaluation of his life but – oddly perhaps – least on Bali. There, the school of painting that he founded still flourishes, the musical arts that he supported have continued to transform and grow and he is remembered with genuine affection by both the new Balinese intelligentsia and the children of the ordinary peasants who were his friends.
This is a work of fiction not of history. I have not hesitated to tamper with chronology where the narrative demands it. Thus, the reader should not be shocked to hear that I am fully aware that Rudolf Bonnet could not have encountered Ni Polok on the beach in Sanur as the wife of Le Mayeur in 1929–30, though I have described that meeting. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria happened after the Paris Exposition of 1931 not before as I depict it. The records of the trial of Spies remain inaccessible so the version presented here is invented. Also, it took place in Surabaya, not Denpasar, and Margaret Mead was not actually present but authorial economy dictates the change of venue and personnel. The names of many Balinese associated with Spies have been deliberately changed (though the most prominent have not) so that the decision to invoke that association remains with them.
It is also not a work of autobiography. I am not Rudolf Bonnet or Walter Spies – least of all am I Margaret Mead. Although I have done some small ethnographic fieldwork on Bali, I am not a Balinese expert and do not speak Balinese – as Spies was and did – and I have had to depend on the generosity of knowing others, Western and Balinese, who have been as liberal with their knowledge and friendship as Spies himself was with visiting researchers. Deformations are not necessarily mistakes but mistakes remain, as always, my own.
Canggu, Bali
1
“There are no ghosts in Bali,” I said and did my grand-old-man-of-the-arts face, ravaged by its burden of knowledge. In my later years it has served me well and stares out at the world imperiously from a dozen book covers bearing my name and cataloguing my works. I took off my glasses to show my profile. “A famous anthropologist told me that, so it must be true. On cremation, classically, the souls of the dead soar away as doves released at the high point of the ceremony and come back to this earth as the morning dew. Nowadays, for reasons of economy, they may substitute chickens which, I know, debases the image. The Balinese imagination animates trees and rocks and so forth, and creates witches, naturally, leyak-leyak, that often appear as blue flames dancing across the fields in the dark. When I first came here, the bicycle was a novelty that had somehow got into the Balinese brain and so witches assumed the shape of riderless bicycles pedaling themselves furiously through the streets at night, tinkling their bells. The other odd thing about these infernal machines was that their tyres inflated and deflated themselves rhythmically like panting dogs …”
“Yeah. Like, I’ve already read Covarrubias, Powell and those other old guys, Mr Bonnet. That wasn’t the sort of ghost I meant.”
My interviewer pronounced it “bonn-ay” to rhyme with “Chardonnay”.
“It is properly pronounced ‘bonette’ almost like the American term for a lady’s hat but with an equal stress on the second syllable. Quite simple. People tend to get it wrong. Doubtless, they are associating me with Mon-ay or Man-ay. A sort of compliment then.”
I smiled with old, yellow teeth to show that I modestly accepted that compliment. My interviewer yawned and pandiculated, luxuriantly, displaying blinding American dentition but pencilled no notes, instead stretched long, golden – surely Californian – legs, flecked with hairs of still-lighter hue, and smoothed back thick, honey-blond curls. A memory, as of a forgotten language, tickled at my brain. For most of my life, I had been tuned to a different idiom – dark Asian hair, dusky brown skin, almond eyes. These eyes were blue and very bored.
“Miguel,” I pronounced irritably, “was not always reliable. He wrote the first, definitive work on Balinese culture but he lumped together too much. The Balinese only have culture so that they can argue about what exactly it is. What they do and say in one village is quite unlike what they do and say in the next. Of course, in those days we were pioneers. Knowledge has progressed since then.”
He smirked condescendingly. “The Western myth of progress? Yeah, right. Covarrubias. I said that I had read him, not accepted him.”
“Margaret Mead,” I said, “sat in that very chair and expressed her admiration of his work.”
Unwillingly, he was awed and looked down at the chair where he … where she … It was almost true, too. She had said that but, of course, the chairs had been bought long after. An artist never loses his touch for the significant object that brings a whole tableau to life.
I had agreed to this interview only out of a misplaced sense of duty to scholarship, an American student come thousands of miles to crouch at my feet, a thesis, one of the swarm of “researchers” descending like flies on the corpse of still-twitching Bali. God knows I had done little enough in my life for art and learning. It was clear that I was proving a disappointment. Irritation prickled at the back of my neck.
“What exactly was the title of your thesis?”
He yawned and stretched again. I had forgotten his name and glanced down at the card on the low table by my elbow. It told me – reminded me – that he was James Grits, a graduate student from an East Coast college I had never heard of. He was still stretching. He was a well-built boy. Under the shirt was definite rippling. His large, betrainered feet executed a sort of rapid, rhythmic tattoo to stamp out the final muscle contraction as the soft cotton of his shorts rode up the tanned skin of firm thighs to create a zone of transit
ion fascinating to a painter’s eye. Even at my age, having long laid down my brush once and for all, the artist’s instinct dies hard. I inclined my head to imagine how I would grasp form and shadow of that dusky triangle in my habitual pale pastels, aware that my hands executed involuntary sketching motions. I almost missed the answer when it came.
“Colonial discourses of the exotic Other and the paratextual constitution of the aesthetic fallacy.”
“I see.” I did not, of course, see. This was yet another strange language. In my life I had had to wrestle with so many and now the world was playing me the extreme disservice of changing those that I thought to have mastered. I took a draught of iced hibiscus tea. My companion had ordered Coca-Cola brought by pattering Nyoman and left it untouched and warming in the sun. I remembered the days when Americans wept at the sight of Coca-Cola as a witness of a separate and distant world from which they were exiled and clutched at ice cubes like diamonds. Had he been Indonesian, I should have had to coax him into sipping before I could decently taste my own drink. Now, I swigged. There are some compensations for being a mannerless Westerner amongst other mannerless Westerners. I tweaked the folds of my sarong, a tasteful handpainted batik, tied in the Javanese not Balinese fashion and given to me by President Soekarno, that explored the muted shades of an old sepia photograph. There was a time when we – they, the Dutch – punished Westerners for wearing local dress.
“And how exactly may I help in this endeavour?”
“You know your English is kinda weird – like you swallowed a dictionary.”
“Perhaps the people I learned my English from were kinda weird. As to the dictionary, I once started compiling a Balinese–English dictionary. A lot of people did. Perhaps I learned more English than Balinese.”
“Right. Like I’m saying. It seems to me Bali is still full of ghosts, the ghosts of that clique of privileged Westerners who invented Bali as a site for Western fantasies of paradise, back in the Twenties and articulated the sexual metaphors of domination that underpin it. You’re … like … the only one left.”
“Ah. You mean like the last of the dinosaurs.”
He giggled boyishly in a manner I found charming and then spoilt it by headshakingly returning to the shibboleths of his faith.
“There’s that old misplaced evolutionism again.”
The communists had talked like that, back in the heady days of the Revolution; nothing but endless chains of judgemental notions and “isms”. The writers of the period – Idris, Toer and the others – were now unreadable because of their stilted dialogue. But people had really talked like that. I thought of Sobrat, McPhee’s little friend, shot in the head during some ideological tiff in Indonesian abstract nouns. All those years of refining and schooling his body as a perfect instrument of classical dance to have it thrown contemptuously in a ditch just down the road from here. I gripped my glass of tea in a liver-spotted reptilian claw and tried hard not to slop it on the batik. To retain the beauty of its organic dyes, it had to be washed in a special herbal extract brought from Java. Nyoman had warned me the jar under the sink was running low.
“Some metaphors, Mr … er … become realer every day.” I swallowed hard, enjoying the iron chill on my throat.
“Exactly. That is why they have to be brought out into the light and subjected to critical review and DE-CON-struction.” He had an irritatingly etymologising stress pattern.
I looked round at the light as it fell on my garden. Like all painters – like Mon-ay – I had once been obsessed with light. In old age, I fled it. We were seated, as Margaret Mead had not been, on the elegant Balinese copies of eighteenth-century Dutch furniture that they handcarve a few miles away, as they sit, themselves more comfily, on the cool floor. Above us a shading canopy of purely Balinese CON-struction, serried ranks of razor grass thatch resting on polished coconut trunks and beams that met in a central boss of a raging Garuda bird, rich in fang and claw. My neighbour had done that, the peaceful little old farmer I talked to most evenings as he pottered around and watered his orchid pots and complained of his ungrateful family. Underfoot, we trod simple red Balinese tiles of baked earth. That one there was loose and tripped the unwary. Over the years, I had learned to step round it. With age, one learns to adapt oneself rather than try to change the world. During the construction, I had joked saucily with the women who baked the tiles, made them laugh, even drawn one of the younger ones, her youth already sunk and shrunken by hard labour but the red dust caricaturing rude good health in her cheeks. It had been exhibited recently at, I think, Surabaya.
The whole building was cool and practical – and very cheap. I had not made much money but had learned to value physical comfort, judiciously purchased. Any fool can be uncomfortable, as my friend Walter used to say to excuse some new extravagance. Around us, tinkled water and ponds, the remains of the ancient water palace, rehabilitated, planted with reeds and blue lotus. I had seen them on my first visit to the sacred springs at Tampaksiring and asked a delightful, bathing farmer their name. I knew them, of course, as the ancient Buddhist symbol of the human striving for Enlightenment, the soul struggling up from the mud, through the murky water to the light it somehow knew, even from the seed, was there. As a fugitive from another, colder Enlightenment, I treasured them too. He had shrugged and grinned. “Don’t know their proper name,” and towelled off unselfconsciously a barbarous magnificence of genitals, “but I grow them for the pigs. They love ’em. Just gobble ’em right down.”
“… the centre of it all was Walter Spies,” he was saying.
“Mmm?”
He finally took a swig of the Coca-Cola and grimaced – made what Walter called a schiefes Gesicht, a “crooked face”.
“Warm.” Then said again the name. “Spies.” He spoke louder, obviously assuming I was deaf, as if the distraction of boredom were the exclusive privilege of youth. “It’s time to lay the ghost of Walter Spies.”
Yes. I had thought it would end up there. One way or another, it always came down to dear Walter. And being laid, as a ghost, now that would have amused him greatly. Walter had never outgrown the very worst schoolboy humour.
***
I too was young at the time. I know that is no excuse and these days, in my dotage, youth itself seems to demand its own extenuating circumstances. Nevertheless, there it is. I was young and Walter was simply the most magical person I had ever met. There was a golden glow about him. It was always as if the sun were somehow behind him and his features were blurred by its radiance and there was a force of enthusiasm in him that knocked you down – like one of those big-pawed puppies that rushes at you, expecting your love, overwhelming you with its lapping tongue until all you can do is laugh and submit.
You must understand that I had been raised in grey, wool-stockinged Amsterdam, in a home of solid bourgeois comfort where God and his disapproval daily cast a long shadow. Only the presence of six brothers and sisters created a sufficient pool of anarchy to dent the obsessively regular existence of my parents. My father was a schoolteacher who had worked himself up to be a successful businessman so there were no foolish notions about the value of education for its own sake to be found lurking in that house. Mathematics was studied so you could keep accounts, literature so you could write a sound business letter. It was my misfortune to be attracted to art. To my father that signified poverty, vice – worse – impractical improvidence. My mother, learning of the reason that her son – one of her several sons – was crying himself to sleep at night, avoided confrontation but undermined him slowly with nocturnal whispers. She saw herself as artistic and had executed several fine works of embroidery in the English style. A compromise made my vocation acceptable. It was decided that I was to become a commercial artist. To my father this meant the acquisition of a sensible, useful skill where visual seduction would not exceed that of the corpulent ladies of a certain age to be sketched for the whaleboned corsetry advertisements. (In fact, the few of these ladies that I ever met were both i
mmodest and rapacious women.) As I completed the course and filled my folder with loving depictions of shoes and hats, my mother began to whisper again and I found myself the assistant of an art dealer, Jacob Vorderman, a surprisingly coarse and unaesthetic man who constantly puffed cheroots. The shop was full of perfectly presentable Dutch paintings of cows and windmills and bowls of fruit but, in the back, he pursued a guilty passion for the crazier contemporaries – people like wobbly Kokotschka and poor mad Kandinsky. The walls of his upstairs apartments blazed with their deluded colours.
“What do you think of that?” he would ask, shoving a mass of Kandinsky polychrome spaghetti under my nose. He always wore patent leather evening shoes that crackled as he walked, like a man treading on hot coals.
“It shows a rudimentary sense of form and arrangement,” I opined in my self-righteous schoolboy voice, turning it this way and that. “But what is it? Art cannot be self-referential. It needs a subject. What is it?”
He laughed and snorted, coughed on his cheroot and firewalked away. “The future, lad.”
By now, a further string had been added to my bow. I had started to be offered scholarships and nothing was more tragic to my father than to refuse a proffered cheque. True, they were not large cheques but it was to him an overwhelming idea that I might be paid for doing – as my father saw it – absolutely nothing. All I needed now was to unworthily encourage his suspicions that the art dealer – a man whose thoughts were very far from God – was seeking to convert me to Judaism and I was finally released into the arms of the Muses.
Their embrace, alas, was less warm and more marmorial than I had expected. At the Keyserschool, over the next few years, the ensoured staff taught me to translate a work of art into the rules and techniques that underlay it, into a series of obstacles to be serially overcome. I imposed grids, balanced compositions, calculated perspective. I framed and counterposed. On free days, I crept through the galleries, hitherto closed to my eyes by parental disapproval, to coldly probe, according to instruction, the bosomy flesh of Rubens, the withered skin of Rembrandt, the feral teint of Breughel and reduce them to well-documented visual devices. Caravaggio, alone, moved me strangely. Who knows how long this would have continued but I was saved by – of all things – a resented family holiday.