We're way overdue a post on Shanghai (the last, I'm shocked to discover, was in October last year). Shanghai was somehow displaced by Istanbul as sparkling-city-of-legend (and indeed the two have much in common, as Paul French explains).

As it happens, the recommendation for the book featured in this post also came from French, whose informative and entertaining City of Devils, about the Shanghai underworld of the 1930s and early 1940s, I considered here. (He also wrote the gripping Midnight in Peking, and maintains a wide-ranging and gem-packed blog called China Rhyming.)

First published in 1946, Honeymoon in Shanghai is the work of a French author called Maurice Dekobra (1885-1973). I couldn't find a French edition, however, and resorted to reading an English translation by Lord Sudley, aka Arthur Paul John James Charles Gore, 7th Earl of Arran (1903-58).

Quick digression here: My e-copy came from a great resource that I've only recently discovered: The Internet Archive. It's free to join, and depending on what you're looking for, you can either download it straight off, or "e-borrow" it on an hourly basis. Honeymoon in Shanghai was downloadable. My version (as per the info at the beginning) originated from the Aide-de-Camp's Library, Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, and its original print copy was certified as conforming to the "book production war economy standard". Good, huh? No longer can I complain about the impersonality of electronic books...

Dekobra (born Ernest-Maurice Tessier in Paris) led a fairly colourful life as a journalist, war-time interpreter and liaison officer, caricaturist, and writer. His first runaway hit was The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (La Madone des Sleepings), which appeared in 1925, and was probably the reason an article in The Times in 1928 described him as "the biggest seller of any living French writer -- or dead one either". Fluent in English and German as well as his native French, he left for the US during the Second World War, and before and after that period travelled to Japan and China. According to this source, he came up with his pen name after watching a snake charmer in North Africa working with two cobras ("deux cobras", which suggested De-kobra, which finally became Dekobra)... Sounds a little unlikely, but who knows?


Shanghai, 2018

Honeymoon in Shanghai is a strange book in many ways. We are first introduced to Magali, the French widow of an impecunious American operating out of Saigon, and her daughter, Claudette. They have travelled to Shanghai at the behest of the late husband's brother, Larry, and it is clear that they are looking for a new start in life.

The backdrop is distinctly overwrought and orientalist:

"The rain was falling on Shanghai, that malignant city where death laughs yellow; the city which twangs on a Chinese lute its lament of corruption, where the Tao-Tai [provincial officers] lounge for ever on holiday, where generals have no armies, embezzlers run loose, shipowners have no ships, and opium-takers walk the streets with dark-ringed eyes.

"The rain was falling on Shanghai, on the boy teasing the laughing sing-song girl, on the slinking half-caste, on the oily pimp, and on the Russian 'taxi girl' selling her body to save her soul.

"It was raining on Shanghai, that grinning mask laid by white hands over the ageless face of the Son of Heaven...

"One would have said that Asia was weeping endless tears over this hybrid city, built by Mercury, God of thieves, on the threshold of the former Empire of the East."

And the characters are nothing if not larger than life (though not necessarily incredible, given all we read about Shanghai in the 1930s...). Uncle Larry, Magali's brother-in-law, lives an unkempt and slovenly life in a house stuffed with disparate Asian bric-a-brac. He shares this abode with a Chinese wife whom he "bought" 10 years ago when she was 14, plus a cat, a monkey, a chameleon, and a macaw. He's bad enough, but the melodrama ratchets up several notches further with the introduction, firstly, of Boris, Count Stolitzine, a classic Shanghai, finger-in-all-pies, womanizing Grand Seigneur, who -- inter alia -- owns the Topaze, a nightclub where Magali finds employment as "Captain" of the unfortunate and put-upon band of taxi-dancers (the Topaze, French tells us, was probably modelled on Sir Victor Sassoon's nightclub, Ciro's); and secondly, of Paolo Borgia, a completely dotty creation, who fancies himself descended from Pope Alexander VI, and also runs a number of dodgy businesses that intersect with and complement Boris's (while Boris supplies the Chinese army in Chongqing, Paolo sells information to the Japanese, so that -- as Claudette puts it -- they cancel each other out).

Things start to turn to custard for Magali and Claudette when the former has the bright idea of introducing her daughter -- with a false name and pedigree -- to this bizarre duo, who both end up falling in love with her.

Added to the pot we also have Madame Flora Ying, the mistress whom Claudette eventually supplants in Boris's affections. Dekobra tells us that Boris came across her in a nightclub in San Francisco, called the Forbidden City. (This actually existed, as discussed and illustrated here.)



Subsequent chapters bring us storms of jealousy, vengeance, blackmail, and romantic duplicity. There's a love triangle where Boris plays off both Magali and Claudette; a pistols-at-dawn duel between Boris and Paolo, which results in the paralysis of the latter, and the exposure of the former to the wrath of the Japanese; and a bout of "cerebral fever" when Claudette discovers her mother's romantic entanglement with Boris. Really -- never a dull moment.

In the background, world events pile up: England and France declare war on Germany in 1939; foreigners -- feeling as though they are "dancing on the edge of a volcano" -- wonder whether to leave while they can; Pearl Harbour brings the United States into the war and the Japanese into Shanghai's International Settlement.

Up to now, the book has been increasingly frantic, but at the level of a kind of operetta. Now it turns totally dark. At the vengeful instigation of Paolo, Claudette is hauled off by the Japanese to the notorious prison at Bridge House. There, surrounded by misery, and under threat of sexual violence, she manages to commit suicide.

The epilogue, not entirely convincingly, shows us Magali working out her guilt at a medical mission near Chongqing...

Honeymoon in Shanghai, according to French, was not enthusiastically received by reviewers at the time, although it was admitted that Dekobra knew "all the Shanghai gestures". Nevertheless, he rates it: "It neatly encapsulates the idea of Shanghai as a place to reinvent yourself, escape bad starts in life and troublesome pasts, though perhaps overdoes this a tad [yeah, a tad...]. Still, it has been rather overlooked and, while it’s no Malraux, it is better than most of the contemporary portrayals of the city I’ve read."

I wasn't bowled over, but I would certainly have another go at Dekobra's oeuvre. As this article by Verstraeten and Van Hove explains, he exemplifies a nostalgic cosmopolitanism that encompasses not only different geographical contexts but also a cast of characters from an impressively international social echelon. More interestingly, he succeeds in "adapting older themes, geographies and generic models to new cultural constellations". As well as portraying cosmopolitan contexts, his novels are cosmopolitan in themselves, "in that they almost immediately began to circulate internationally and can be seen as early examples of the phenomenon of the international bestseller". He made elite cosmopolitanism accessible to a broader, less well-heeled audience, "ingeniously mixing elitist social assumptions and highbrow cultural references with popular generic models such as the novel of adventures". What Dekobra brought that was new was that he employed his cosmopolitanism and his realistic journalistic style in the context of "the relatively new and rapidly expanding cultural domain of middlebrow culture".

So there's definitely more to explore, which is always a good note on which to finish a book.