SLEEPING WITH GENIUS
Sleeping With Genius - Luxury Travel Magazine
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Sleeping With Genius | |||||
| By: John Borthwick, Issue 26 - Autumn 2006 | |||||
| ( Bangkok, Thailand, Singapore, Hanoi, Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, Penang, Malaysia) | |||||
| TO REVISIT THE LOUCHE “FAR EAST” HAUNTS OF THE LIKES OF MAUGHAM, KIPLING AND COWARD, MEANS DISCOVERING THAT NOSTALGIA IS STILL WHAT IT USED TO BE. | |||||
| In 1987, Singapore’s Straits Times lamented with uncharacteristic wryness that “Hotels in the steamier reaches of the Orient aren’t what they used to be. All but gone are the grand verandahs where plots for novels and more serious misdeeds were hatched over pink gins behind potted palms.” By the 1980s many of Southeast Asia’s grand old hotels had fallen into a post-colonial funk, unloved and under-funded by their new masters. The Straits Times went on to regret that in place of “beady-browed sots in white linen suits who conducted colonial and Cold War chicanery long into hot nights laced with whispers of gold, guns, opium and flesh”, hotels such as Singapore’s Raffles were now “occupied mainly by ripe German tourists and shoestring Australians with no visible means of laundering”. Gone, for most of these once-glorious gin palaces, were the days when famous writers arrived, scribbled, then swanned off, leaving a trail hopefully of minor scandals or at least bon mots. The tale about celebrity playwright Noel Coward being asked by a Bangkok hotel night manager whether he had a gentleman in his room – to which Coward replied, “Just a moment and I’ll ask him” – did no damage to a hotel’s reputation. I recently went in search of the last of these “Far East” (as it was known in colonial days) watering holes where the ghosts of old geniuses perhaps still snoozed. I wanted to see if fate, not to mention the market, had been as attentive to them as literary nostalgia has. First stop was, of course, the venerable Oriental in Bangkok. “I was almost evicted from The Oriental because the manager did not want me to ruin her business by dying in one of her rooms,” recalled author William Somerset Maugham of his first, malaria-wracked visit to this grand palace overlooking the Chao Phraya River. The year was 1923 and Thailand was still Siam. Maugham survived both malaria and the management, and stayed on to pen a travel book, The Gentleman in the Parlour. The Oriental has long exploited its literary cachet, highlighting a stellar guest list that includes Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, VS Naipaul, Norman Mailer, Paul Theroux and Jung Chang, not to mention pot-boiler specialists such as Barbara Cartland, Wilbur Smith, Jeffrey Archer and Fred Forsythe. The most expensive accommodation is in the Authors’ Wing – the hotel’s 1876 original – in the four sumptuous Conrad, Maugham, Coward and Michener suites. Nearby, in the River Wing are other suites named for Gore Vidal, John le Carré, Greene, Cartland and Smith. “Each suite is decorated according to the authors’ preferences,” says Kurt Wachtveitl, the hotel’s general manager. I’m not sure how they channelled the taste of Joseph Conrad (last visit, 24 January 1888), but the Barbara Cartland Suite is, predictably – and perhaps painfully – all pink, while the Le Carré Suite, according to Wachtveitl, “has a distinctly English masculine quality”. In the rooms honouring the natty and foppish Noel Coward I notice that the wallpaper features a fitting visual pun, a gilded peacock-feather motif. Non-guests cannot enter the Authors’ Wing, but can enjoy a ruinously good afternoon tea in its lounge amid a welter of louvres, palms and languid fans. My favourite times at The Oriental are spent enjoying a nightcap-with-jazz in The Bamboo Bar, then contemplating the Chao Phraya’s midnight nocturne from a high balcony. My next stop, the recently refurbished Eastern & Oriental Hotel Penang, has hosted its share of acclaimed scribes – among them Rudyard Kipling and Hermann Hesse, as well as the ubiquitous Maugham and Coward – but details of their visits are thin. During the E&O’s term as World War II Japanese occupation headquarters, the hotel archives were trashed. Somewhere there survives a picture, circa 1889, of a linen-suited Kipling under the grand old Java tree (that still stands on the hotel’s shore front), supposedly penning his famous Jungle Book. Or was he more musing along his own lines (from The Road to Mandalay): “Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst /Where there ain’t no Ten Commandments an’ a man can raise a thirst”? The Eastern & Oriental was founded, along with Singapore’s Raffles and The Strand in Rangoon, by Armenian entrepreneurs, the four Sarkies brothers. In 1927 it was advertised as ‘The Premier Hotel East of the Suez, boasting... baths with hot and cold running water, individual telephones and the world’s longest sea-front lawn at 842 feet’. During its post-WWII decline, jokers sometimes declared that E&O actually stood for Expensive and ‘Orrible. Noone could say that today, having seen the brilliant restoration completed in 2001. The parquetry floors, vast lobby dome (complete with multiple echoes), bentwood café chairs, marble-topped tables and, of course, 101 elegant suites overlooking the sea, reflect an exceptional restoration married with 21st century amenities. The E&O’s heritage belongs to Penang; it doesn’t just belong to us, says the hotel’s owner Dato’ Tham. And that’s how the place feels – far more relaxed and democratic than say, The Oriental or the Raffles. The E&O has four sea-facing Writers Suites, each with a separate dining room, lounge and bar. They are named after Kipling and Hesse, plus that recurring pair of colonial eavesdroppers, Maugham and Coward. The latter quipped that Malaya was a “first-rate country for second- rate people”, then poked further fun at his fellow Brits abroad with the famous lines, “In the Malay States, there are hats like plates which the Britishers won’t wear/At twelve noon the natives swoon and no further work is done/But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Hermann Hesse, who stayed at the E&O around 1911 while researching his great novel Siddhartha, is remembered with a spacious suite boasting, among other things, a vast bathroom with a classic, capacious eagle-foot tub. Gazing from my balcony over a Malacca Strait dusk, all I might suggest for the E&O is to add a Sir Harry Flashman Suite – into which the room maids admittedly might tremble to enter. The dowager empress of Asia’s grand hotels is Singapore’s legendary Raffles. The usual literary suspects trailed their solar topees and bar chits through here, starting with Joseph Conrad in 1888, the year of its opening. Thereafter, the Raffles’ breezeways and ballrooms witnessed an imperial parade of tigerhunting types and literary blow-ins gracing (or occasionally disgracing) its Writers Bar. As well as Coward and Maugham (who inevitably have suites named after them), other celeb scribblers included André Malraux, Pablo Neruda and James A Michener. What happens, I wondered, when a colonial post inevitably goes postcolonial? An extensive makeover in 1991 restored beautifully the Raffles’ 103 suites and its famed Billiard Room, Long Bar, Courtyard and Tiffin Room, not to mention her fine ‘tropical baroque’ facade. However, with the addition of an arcade of brand-name boutiques, the Raffles’ former aristocratic hauteur seems to have been traded for a self-conscious consumerism. Noel Coward was an irreverent quipper about anything (for instance, “Sunburn is very becoming, but only when it is even – one must be careful to not look like a mixed grill.”). I wonder what he might say about the allstarch- and-archways Raffles of today. Both Hanoi and Saigon (sorry, Ho Chi Minh City) can still seem like places from the pages of Maugham or Marguerite Duras – or like Raffles before the redecorations. Other than the Vietnam-raised Duras (author of the semi-autobiographical tale of illicit East–West passion, The Lover), the European novelist forever associated with both cities is Graham Greene, creator of The Quiet American. Hanoi’s Metropole, which opened in 1901 as the finest hotel in French Indochina, saw a malaria-recovered Somerset Maugham putting the finishing touches in 1923 to The Gentleman in the Parlour. Around the same time, Noel Coward for once had nothing particularly witty to say about being confined to the hotel during an anti-French riot. Greene arrived in 1951 and soon after began working on his prescient novel of French, then American, political and military hubris in Vietnam. In the late 1980s, following half a century of war, the once elegant Metropole was sorely in need of love, paint and money. In 1992, revamped as the Sofitel Metropole, it re-opened still sporting its trademark green shutters and white facade, along with original hardwood floors and high ceilings. For literary nostalgia buffs, seeking to “sleep with genius”, so to speak, Graham Greene is everywhere – there’s a GG portrait in Le Club Bar, not to mention a GG suite, GG cocktail, GG martini and even a GG duck à l’orange. “You couldn’t believe it would ever be seven o’clock and cocktail time on the roof of the Majestic, with a wind from Saigon River,” laments Greene’s protagonist, Tom Fowler, stuck in the heat of Vietnam’s Southern Delta and longing to be back at the cool rooftop bar of the Majestic Hotel. I sit at the Majestic, drinking not Fowler’s favourite, a Vermouth Cassis, but a local 333 beer and re-reading The Quiet American. I can almost hear the distant sounds of guerilla war that Greene captured perfectly in one deft phrase: “the gunfire travelling like a clockhand around the horizon”. Greene stayed at the Majestic, which had opened in 1925 as Saigon’s finest abode. Like another of his hang-outs, the nearby Continental, the finely restored Majestic has now recovered from the subsequent ravages of Vietnam’s wartime past. These days its famous Cyclo Café no longer sports the “anti-grenade grilles” that protected diners during the American era. As that writer in the Straits Times noted, “Hotels in the steamier reaches of the Orient aren’t what they used to be.” In some cases it’s not a bad thing. | |||||
| Details: | |||||
| The Oriental Bangkok, www.mandarinoriental.com/bangkok | |||||
| Eastern & Oriental Penang, www.e-o-hotel.com | |||||
| The Raffles Singapore, www.raffleshotel.com | |||||
| The Metropole Hanoi, www.sofitel-metropole-hanoi.com | |||||
| Hotel Majestic Ho Chi Minh City, www.majesticsaigon.com.vn | |||||
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