As of Saturday
the French crew and Karen were still going back and forth as to whether they
were coming to my house to film on Sunday or Monday while trying to work out
their shooting schedule for the Sarawak pepper story because they would only
have access to Michel’s drone until Tuesday since he would be returning to
France.
Finally they agreed that after the
Fort Margherita shoot to come to my house.
I knew my wife Jenny
was getting anxious, so I told her on Sunday morning before I left the house
for Fort Margherita, I would text her with the latest details—when they were
coming and how many. Her biggest concern
was having to answer a question on Somerset Maugham. I assured her they just wanted to meet my
Bidayuh family.
 |
| Dressed for Gawai! |
Laure was
delighted when I told her about Jenny’s German and French connection—she works
for X-Fab, a German company that had recently expanded into France. Also my mother’s side of family came from
France as part of the Huguenots expulsion in 1572 and eventually arrived in America
in 1630. My father’s side mostly came from Germany, having arrived in America
in the early 1800’s. So you can say I am
also a Franco-German project, ideal for the Franco-German Arte.
Laure was thrilled
that I had another French connection, as a tango dancer in the film
Indochine.
She said she was a big fan of Catherine
Deneuve and was delighted when I showed her some photos from the
shooting.
Indochine was a period piece, between the wars, when dinner guests
dressed up...even in remote corners of the world as they did here in Sarawak when Maugham visited.
 |
The Indochine Tango Dancers. standing
Robert Raymer, Joelle St-Arnoult, Angela and Lee Clark;
seated Anni Nordmann,
Andre Cluzaud, Laurence, Seibert Kubsch |
Looking back, I
had to admit I seemed rather dashing (wearing a tuxedo, having makeup and your
hair professionally styled helped). I feel
far less dashing today with a lot less hair.
After we finished
filming at Fort Margherita, after taking another tambang across the river, after some delays searching for a bank to transfer
money from France and a late lunch, I left early since the others were coming together in a van. We
seemed to be picking up people, too, so I kept updating Jenny, they’ll be four,
no make that five, now it’s six—not including me. I arrived home with just enough time to take
a quick shower and a change of clothes. In
fact, I was stepping out of the shower when they arrived.
Feeling refreshed and serving
them refreshments of orange slices and Danish cookies and a few local tidbits
to snack on, I presented myself to Richard who wanted to film me inside my office. He took some artistic shots of me reflected
on the glass of two bookcases, alongside a sketch portrait for a clever double
imagine, and additional shots behind me.
I was awfully glad that we recently
redid my office, adding some nice cabinets and additional light. I even had framed copies of my books on top
of one of the cabinets, including Trois autres Malaisie,
the book that had attracted the attention of Laure
Michel back in France. I was also glad my wife insisted I get a
haircut!
Needless to say my children, Jason
12 and Justin 10 were amused; maybe even a little impressed….All this fuss
over their stay-at-home-writer-father….The younger one, who is the reader and
writes his own stories, took the most interest as I prattled on about Somerset
Maugham and the District Officers that he wrote about on those lonely
outstations who often took in a local woman as a “sleeping dictionary”, a
common practice then in Sarawak, though frowned upon in Malaya.
These were not
women they would marry; they would cohabitate with them, bear children with
them, but if they wanted a “real” wife, they would return to England and find
one, often on short notice, and bring them back with them, as Maugham described
in “The Force of Circumstance.”
Guy had a local
woman for ten years and three half-caste children, a detail he forgot to tell
Doris when he asked her to marry him and follow him to Sarawak, to a remote
outpost alongside a Borneo river. When
the previous “wife” kept coming around the property, Doris would enquire about
her and her children, as to who was their father.
Guy replied, “Oh, my dear, that’s the sort of questions we
think is a little dangerous to ask out here.”
But then she learned the
truth—that these kids were his. Unable to accept this new reality, Doris
eventually returned to England, so Guy moved his native “wife” and three kids
back in.
Nowadays these so called
“half-caste” children are considered mixed or pan-Asian, having inherited “the
best” from both parents. We’re proud of
our children and the fact they are bi-lingual and have inherited two cultures
can be an advantage.
I then talked about how
Maugham got ideas for his short stories, largely from three sources.
One: his notebook.
“I filled my notebook with brief descriptions of their appearance
and their character, and…stories began to form themselves...” He also wrote, “I have taken living people and put them into the
situations, tragic and comic, that their characters suggested. I might well say that they invented their own
stories.”
No doubt he had
fun writing about the characters he met in Borneo, drinking their gin pahit and stengahs…for example, he pitted
a snob against a cad in “The Outstation.”
In The Summing Up he wrote: “Fact and fiction are so intermingled in
my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the
other.”
As a writer, I know that
feeling, when years later I would bump into someone with startled recognition,
only to realize that I had based a character on them and had totally forgotten
where the original inspiration came from.
I would suddenly feel embarrassed and think, if only they knew…. Maugham,
no doubt, felt that embarrassment, too; other times, he felt lucky he wasn’t
sued for slander!
Two: newspapers. Maugham
got ideas for some of his most sensational stories from newspaper reports about
a murder or a juicy trial. This was how
Maugham got the idea for one of his most famous stories, “The Letter,” taken
from an actual trial ten years prior to his first visit to Malaya ….Leslie, who
was married, was indignant that her lover had recently been living with a
Chinese woman. She invited him to her
bungalow (while her husband was in Singapore) and shot him six times.
In the Maugham
story she was acquitted after her husband paid a large amount of money for an
incriminating letter that she wrote. In
real life, the woman was found guilty, but five months later, during an appeal,
she got a pardon. Like so many of
Maugham’s characters in Borneo, she literally got away with murder.
Three: Gerald Haxton.
His secretary, traveling companion and lover, Haxton was an extrovert,
unlike Maugham who was shy and had a bad stammer. He would head to the club and get the local
Brits or expats talking about the latest gossip; then he would return to
Maugham and say, “I know I am drunk, but I got a damn good story for you!”
According to the critics, who were rather harsh on Maugham, he was no
stylist, unlike other notable writers of the day like James Joyce. Maugham even wrote, “I know where I stand…in
the front row of the second raters.”
He also wrote, “I
must write as though I were a person of importance; and indeed I am—to
myself.” And “I don’t write as I want, I
write as I can.”
That gives the
rest of us permission to write as we can to get our stories down on
paper. What is important is that the story
gets written.
Once Laure and Richard got
their interview and the shots they wanted inside my office, they took some
family shots on our swing, with my wife, and with the children. The real highlight for our boys was being
able to watch Michel guide his drone in front of our house. He invited them to have a close look at his
controls so they could see what the drone sees.
Laure then invited
my family along for dinner at Siniawan, an old Chinese town that hadn’t changed
much since the mid-1800’s.
They had made
arrangements to meet with a fifth generation Hakka, a part of the “second
batch” (1880’s), after the “first batch” got wiped out during the gold miners’
revolt.
Along the way, we sought out a suitable jungle to finish the Maugham segment. Although we failed, we were rewarded with a nice sunset.
At Siniawan, before we ate a
delicious meal that consisted of wild boar, jungle ferns and rojak, Laure
asked that we sign release forms for our parts in the filming, including the
boys who were amused at “signing” their signatures since they didn’t know how
to write—only print.
Already though, I
was thinking about tomorrow’s adventure, whereby we would go to Semenggoh for
the orangutans and jungle shots, and then upper Sarawak River by longboat to
film Peter for the Personal Invitation story and some additional jungle shots
to finish off the Maugham story.
—BorneoExpatWriter
Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I
Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part II
