The 1920s...

The Great Gatsby, To the Lighthouse, Bliss, Clouds of Witness, Decline and Fall, Goodbye to All That, Queen Lucia, A Passage to India, A Modern Comedy... The books of my youth.

And here's an amazing glimpse of KL in the 1920s, complete with cricket, rickshaw pullers, Union Jacks, and solar topees.



La Condition Humaine, by Andre Malraux -- "the book that gave life to the revolutionary novel" -- is an account of the 1920s in troubled Shanghai. I started it in Ningbo, but then it got elbowed aside, and I've only just finished it. (And notice the beautiful segue -- Shanghai, the "bitter sea", the "human condition"... -- from my last set of three books.)



Those seeking a political analysis might not be impressed, but Malraux certainly leaves plenty of pictures in our minds. The tragedy of the purge of the communists by their nationalist "allies" is tensely and movingly depicted. And we feel very clearly the dark, brittle atmosphere of conflict-ridden Shanghai, as experienced by an opium-smoking (yet functioning and influential) intellectual, a compulsive gambler, a seminary-boy-turned-terrorist, the spokesman for the French consortium raising cash for Chiang Kai-Shek, a Russian revolutionary who had survived an anti-Bolshevik death squad, and others.



To Aldous Huxley, "nothing more intensely living can be imagined" than the Shanghai of the 1920s.

(He went on to note, all those 90 years ago: "So much life, so carefully canalised, so rapidly and strongly flowing -- the spectacle of it inspires something like terror. All this was going on when we were cannibalistic savages. It will still be going on, a little modified, perhaps by Western science, but not much -- long after we in Europe have simply died of fatigue... [I]t will all be there, just as intensely and tenaciously alive as ever -- all there a thousand years hence, five thousand, ten. You have only to stroll through old Shanghai to be certain of it. London and Paris offer no such certainty." Prescient? I would say so.)

Huxley made that comment three years after publishing Antic Hay, which I bought because I was amused by the scenario described on the jacket. (A schoolmaster, utterly bored with marking essays, throws up his job, and goes to London to try to patent the idea of pneumatic trousers. The theme resonated, shall we say...)

I found it a little annoying to begin with. The characters were so pretentious, so vapid, so thoroughly unlikeable. But as the plot meanders on, you begin to understand the giant gulf of despair that forms the backdrop to their lives. Myra lost her fiance in the Great War, and is a living ghost, speaking "expiringly", and generally epitomizing indolence; Lypiatt cannot create art, and eventually has to face this personal tragedy; Rosie is an airhead because society allows her no sensible outlet for her energies; Gumbril, with his apparent inability to live a life of any meaning, contrasts markedly with his father. Everywhere the novel directs its gaze it uncovers pointlessness and emptiness.

According to this commentary: "The antic hay of the title... is a trope for the mundane distractions -- the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus, alcohol, art, sexual intrigues, and so forth -- that prevent the characters from being overwhelmed by accidie and putting an end to their meaningless, amoral lives. And London, with its constant charivari, its jazz bands, music halls and theatres, its cabarets, night-clubs and pubs, is represented as the home of the antic hay. In the wake of the Great War, London has become an inferno, devoid of morality, religion and love."

P. G. Wodehouse's Summer Lightning is totally without these dark edges. It's a silly little joy of a book, depicting a sunlit, timeless world:

"Here and there, some usually unwelcome global-news item irrupts into the narrative, but mostly the outside world fails to impinge. The Great Depression, World Wars, political and social upheavals -- these scarcely penetrate the walls of the Drones Club...There's a striking consistency of tone and outlook, a reassuring unchangingness, running from the first of the novels ('Thank You, Jeeves,' from 1934) to the last ('Aunts Aren't Gentlemen,' from 1974). It's a gag that never spoils."

And yet there is something disturbing in that very consistency. I hadn't realized -- or had forgotten -- Wodehouse's war-time indiscretions. Orwell, coming to his defence, comments that Wodehouse was effectively stuck in 1914:

"Conceived in 1917 or thereabouts, Bertie [Wooster] really belongs to an epoch earlier than that. [...] A humorous writer is not obliged to keep up to date, and having struck one or two good veins, Wodehouse continued to exploit them with a regularity that was no doubt all the easier because he did not set foot in England during the sixteen years that preceded his internment. His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a nave, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture. [...] His books are aimed, not, obviously, at a highbrow audience, but at an audience educated along traditional lines. [...] In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether 'the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war,' not realising that they were ghosts already. 'He was still living in the period about which he wrote,' says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915."

To me, that's a little tragic.

To round off, here are some more fragments of Malaysia's 1920s. They've survived war, occupation, civil conflict, and bulldozer-fever; and they coexist pretty organically with later manifestations of the city: