Post #82: The City of Angels (A Tribute)

4 Dec. 2023

“It was a hospitable place for a man who has done nothing, and who will probably never do anything. For someone with no career, with no prospects, permanently broke, it was the perfect asylum—a natural habitat, in other words, for a man on the lam who had no objective in his day-to-day life but an inquisitive loitering.”

— Lawrence Osborne, Bangkok Days*

Aficionados of Guinness Book of World Records trivia, and most Bangkok residents, will be at least dimly aware that the city styles itself, officially, an abode of angels, the great city, the happy capital of the world, eternal and bejeweled, favored beyond all others by the gods, etc. It’s a mouthful and a pointer towards troubling currents of chauvinism that run below the jolly surface, an undertow that expats sense uncomfortably when the silk masks slip occasionally, but that for the most part we try not to think about too much. Barring such dark thoughts, Bangkok is a very fine place to live, and if local grandiloquence endows it with a little more magnificence than it in fact possesses, oh well, one can get over it with the consoling knowledge that there are plenty of days here, and nights, when one may find oneself believing the hype against all better judgment.

The narrator of Bangkok Days—let’s call him O to acknowledge that literary memoirs cannot simply be equated with factual biography (pp. 38–39)—is no dispenser of smooth and sanitary panegyrics. To him, Bangkok is (or at any rate was, in the late 90s and early 2000s—so close and yet so distant behind the great smart-phone divide) a “pandemonious” city (p. 5), and he likes it that way. The “furious rot,” the “sweet decay that stirs the penis to life,” and the attendant night-time craziness that might bother others about the place, to him stands as one of its chief recommendations (pp. 3–4, 123, 222, 253). Not, mind you, that he presents himself as much of a wild man. Though happy to strike the pose of a latter-day John Wilmot occasionally (p. 5, think The Libertine with Johnny Depp), there is little follow-through on this well-rehearsed part of the Bangkok script. When the lights go out, or turn red, O keeps himself very much in the background, and we can only guess at what he was really up to all those years; from what we are shown, the ruthlessness and hardened realism to which he aspires, by his own professions at least (pp. 7, 245–46, 263), tends to abandon him at the decisive moment (p. 257).

Here’s a man, one senses, who likes to hide in the open, whose real trouble is never quite spelled out. It emerges clearly enough, though only fifty pages into the story, that he is still “looking over his shoulder” at someone he has lost (p. 53), someone (perhaps a composite of several someones) that he is still dreaming of years later (p. 249). By his own admission, he is “waiting in the wings” (p. 215), not quite knowing for what. Accordingly, there is a sense of chosen and calculated loneliness (p. 3) pervading the book’s atmosphere, a touch of Robinson Crusoe imagining that he is enjoying his fictitious removal from the rest of the world, as the original did not, despite O’s protestations (pp. 162, 268). Yet, beyond the shadow that this stylized loneliness casts on every page, literally from the first to the last, the narrator tells us nothing more tangible that would allow us to pin down the real O (or the real Osborne, for that matter). He stays off-set and does not wish to be known, though there are little clues scattered throughout the text as in a subtle detective story. Early hints of Chandlerian turns to come, perhaps, though it is crucial to the story that its author took himself to be a complete failure at the time and did not see things coming.

It is telling, I should think, with what delight O describes the traditional mode of execution here—“a single shot through the heart with a flower placed between his tied hands” (p. 28); this not from morbidity, of which there is not a trace, but with a sense of recognition that one cannot help noticing. No frenzied burner through the Bangkok night, our protagonist, but one who pronounces (“categorically” no less) that “with a quick mysterious tropism one loves every woman one fucks” (p. 26). He yearns, accordingly, for the kind of innocent and complete physicality that he projects on Bangkok (pp. 22, 173), but from which he himself seems to be held back by stiffnesses and diffuse guilts that he in turn projects on the mass of his fellow Westerners (pp. 25, 30). He may be quite right to do so—projections need not be untrue; it’s just that they owe so much to the projector’s orientation.

Though professing himself unable to embrace Buddhism (perhaps not always on the surest foundation of what the Teaching really implies, pp. 26, 68–69), he nonetheless expresses his liking for it because of the short shrift it supposedly makes of the drama and misery of love (p. 271). (How this diagnosis aligns with the local habit of chopping off male members in fits of jealous rage is not explained.) “All lust is grief,” he sets at the very head of his book, with evident approval; and when he describes himself as “sinking like a stone into his own well” (a nicely suggestive phrase only diminished slightly by its somewhat indeterminate meaning), the city becomes no more than “a protocol for this sinking,” because Bangkok is, we are told, where people come “when they feel that they can no longer be loved, when they give up—broken, disappointed, rejected” (p. 6).

There is much more to love, of course, than such periods of dejection and heart-ache, even when they become chronic. And O not only knows it, but puts it admirably on record, as when he asks a celibate priest if love had been the driving need behind his migration to the most dismal parts of the city (p. 229). “Love is the source of everything we do,” answers the noble-minded man of God, “even if we are not aware of it.” He is clearly exempted from the “reeking” that O attributes to godly types elsewhere (p. 24); nor does the hopeful message seem lost on its recipient, however much he insists on having lapsed from his Catholic upbringing (pp. 227, 230). You don’t fall off the Path so easily, whichever one it may be; you just take breaks from it or turn in another direction, often to discover before long that what you meant to leave behind reconnects with your trail a little further down life’s journey.

In one respect, despite all O’s disavowals, the book might even be called a Buddhist meditation of sorts: aging, sickness, and death are never very far from the narrator’s mind. Nor from anyone else’s, as he reminds us (pp. 114, 195), and of course he is right about that. But there is something more to it, something about the distinctive mood of the book that I recognize only too well—a kind of poignant sadness, sometimes sweet, at other times more asperous, that settles on everything it touches (pp. 79, 160, 214, 231, 257). The writer’s dispositional melancholy, sure, but also something about the age at which Osborne wrote the book, around where I am too, when the decline has become inexorable and one dreads, vaguely for now, what might come next; when the battle has not yet become altogether desperate and acceptance of the inevitable has not set in, any more than despondency or exhausted resignation. It’s a mood conducive to Buddhist reflections, wherever one may stand doctrinally, but unfortunately it does not bring, by itself, the joyful lightness that is supposed to be such a defining feature of the Path. An all-too familiar theme to readers of my blog by now.

And this too: we are, most of us elective Bangkokers (in the sense of the German Wahlverwandtschaften), roamers by nature, or rather, we were, often far and wide in the world in our quest for a better somewhere. Then we got the City of Angels into our blood and found, somewhat to our own astonishment, that the desire to wander further afield had quietly waned. (Or perhaps we just ran out of steam, and thus back to the question of life’s stages.) We may prize our individuality as much as anyone, but in this one respect, we lifelong fugitives from tribe do belong to one of our own, united in the conviction that for all its faults, Bangkok is the best we can do, not only for living, but also, just as importantly, for dying, if it came to that, as it must, before long. Where would, where could one go from here? The question may still present itself now and then; but no good answer is forthcoming anymore. So we may check out any time we like, in every sense of that expression, but it seems that we can never leave. Or if we ever did try to do so, it would come at the risk of frightful regrets, with the sinking feeling that we are almost certainly making a terrible mistake. Not that I presume to speak for O, or Osborne, or anyone else; but it is tribal lands, a kind of renegades’ commons, that we are all plowing in our distinctive but related ways.

(Speaking of tribe and our resistance to its claims: one is intrigued but not altogether surprised to discover that O keeps a copy of the Bhagavad Gita always by his side (p. 113), as Alexander the Great did his Homer. Dare I add, not unlike the kind of polyglot high-Victorian adventurer about which O has such conflicted feelings (a problem I don’t share: bless their gumption and pluck, our 21st-century fretting be damned). “I’m British to the core,” he proclaims, “unfortunately for me“ (p. 239)—a line I have arrived at myself, though with none of O’s ironic nuances, a matter in my case not of being witty but of being at my wits’ end. Self-deprecation asserts even as it dismisses; none of that between me and “my” people, only desolation. While I could not be British even if I wanted to, Oxford or not, O would never be German, no matter what. I know it only too well, and I don’t blame him.)

There is a lot more to the City of Angels than these various protocols of rising and sinking, and O can seem a little too keen on making Bangkok out to be no more than a repository for washed-up losers—a theme he keeps returning to as if to a sore tooth. It may be partly intended as a backhanded compliment, I suppose, or even a veiled declaration of love, but it is also a favorite affectation that gets a bit much at times. For unlike the “lifers” of whom he claims to be so fond (pp. 52, 97–98, 197), he, you see, only came for elaborate dental work that he could not afford in New York (p. 9). Never would he be caught still lingering around the city at 60 (p. 22), any more than Mick Jagger would still sing Satisfaction at 45. But the reader is not fooled, and neither is O; he knows full well that the scores he is settling are with himself, and when success catches up with him later and he rises (off-stage in terms of this book) from the ashes—or better, from the rotting, steaming heap with its fetidly exciting notes—he brings the city along, as before he made it sink with him.

Life is the greatest trickster of all, and Bangkok proves no mere dumping ground for useless drifters after all, but something altogether more magical: a rare refuge where wounded men (aren’t we all?) can put themselves together again and keep walking, in defiance of all finger-wagging and naysaying (pp. 97, 150-51). O’s case (or rather Osborne’s) illustrates it beautifully, and if his book were written to a thesis (not that it is), surely it would be this message of hope and good cheer, even if the author might deplore my ready characterization as far too crude and chirpy, and not nearly decomposed enough.

The fruits of a Bangkok sojourn need not always be as glittering as getting compared to Graham Greene in the Times of London. There is room enough for the rest of us between making good in such spectacular ways, on the one hand, and dismissing oneself as a “lazy cunt,” on the other (p. 5). Not only is Bangkok a lovely place to live, it has become our lucky city for many of us, in countless different ways. That is what makes it so special, and definitely deserving of a tribute, both to the new home we have found and to the pen that has evoked it so ably for us, even if one may not agree with every detail.

“One always wants to know,” O muses near the end, “if a place has changed faster, or more slowly, than oneself. ‘Has it been faithful?’ one thinks.” But of course cities cannot be faithful; only human beings can. It is one of the great merits of the book and its author—as I read them—that if one were to ask him whether he had been faithful, he would not, I think, be taken aback by the question. What he would answer, I cannot tell.

*London: Vintage Books, 2010, p. 5. “It is understood among the full-time lammers,” he elaborates a few pages on (p. 15), “that Bangkok is an asylum for those who have lapsed into dilettantism, as one might lapse into a temporary period of mental instability. The great projects, the ambitious flights of the mind—all trashed. They might revive, but not now.”