Love and Death in Bali. Vicki Baum

      Vicki Baum was born into a wealthy but dysfunctional Jewish family in Vienna in 1888 and trained initially as a concert harpist. By the time she came to Bali in 1935, however, she had laid her harp aside in favor of a typewriter and already enjoyed a considerable reputation as a popular and stylish writer, both in German and in English translation, and had established herself in print and in person on both sides of the Atlantic. Although a prolific author and Berlin journalist, she would always be remembered most for her first 1929 best seller, Menschen im Hotel, (Grand Hotel), which went on to storm the stages of European theatre and triumph on Broadway until it was finally filmed in the United States in a version that featured Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford and won the Academy Award for best picture in1931. This was a turning point in her life. She was famous around the world, yet, as she noted somewhat sourly in her autobiography, a successful book may be harder to live down than a failure and, throughout her professional career, Vicki Baum would struggle both for artistic independence and to be regarded as anything more than a light “women’s writer” of the kind whose work appeared in magazines. Later, with her usual disparaging and ironic wit, she would describe herself as “a first-rate writer of the second rank.” So, while Grand Hotel allowed her to make the transition from Germany to America and move into Hollywood scriptwriting, she would not know real literary success again until the appearance of Love and Death in Bali in 1937.

      By the mid-30s Vicki Baum was disappointed in her lack of definitive success in Hollywood and tired of the interference that was part of the studio system. “Fifty people were using my toothbrush,” as she put it. She embarked on a series of voyages to distant parts, in Balinese dance and drama, as well as organizing cultural displays for a visit of the Dutch Governor-General. Vicki saw an intense version of Bali specially arranged to impress outsiders. After her short visit she returned to America, but was haunted by the memory of Spies and Bali and a book that was lurking in her mind. A year later, at the start of the rainy season, she returned with Dreesen and Lindner and, while they moved on, she would stay a full nine months with Spies in his house at Campuan in Ubud. So it was here, in a riverside guest house he had built for Barbara Hutton (at that time the world’s richest woman) that she would sit down to write Liebe und Tod auf Bali. (This was originally translated as A Tale from Bali but is now, more accurately, rendered as Love and Death in Bali in the present edition). The book was finished, despite attacks of malaria and diphtheria, before she returned to America in October of that year. Love and Death in Bali is just one of several works associated with Walter Spies and the Ubud of the late 20s and 30s for, before the Second World War unleashed itself upon Southeast Asia, the little house in Campuan was at the centre of a bohemian community of artists and scholars who sought to explore and fix their experience of Bali in writing, music and painting. Spies was himself an accomplished musician, painter, ethnographer, cinéast, choreographer and natural historian and became a bridge between the West and the Balinese to such an extent that even the Dutch, the colonial ruling power, could find no alternative to using him as Director when they wanted to establish their new Bali Museum. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Miguel Covarrubias, Colin McPhee, Leon Stokowski, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson—and others famous at the time as artists, opinion-formers and academics but now forgotten—all served their apprenticeship in things Balinese at the feet of Spies and spread his vision of Bali as an enchanted island across the world. From being seen as a place where the inhabitants were primitive and violent, and to which Dutch officials might be relegated as punishment, Bali became a site for Western fantasies about a tropical paradise.

      Vicki Baum was exactly the sort of woman that Spies adored—literate, clever, independent, open-minded and very funny and, in the evenings beside the river at Campuan, their friendship blossomed and flourished. The selfless Dr. Fabius of Baum’s spoof introduction—a device shamelessly lifted from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness— is a tribute to him and his scholarship. We know that she was so taken with Spies as a character that she later began another work of fiction based upon him and entitled Portrait of an Unknown Man; alas, it was never completed. It is significant for understanding the relationship between her experience in Bali and her writing about it that, when subsequently asked to compose a memoir about Spies, she declared that this was now impossible, as her fictional Spies had completely eradicated the historical one from her mind. Whereas in the introduction of Love and Death in Bali the author edits the rambling manuscript of Fabius, in real life that relationship was reversed, and it was Walter Spies who painstakingly amended Vicki Baum’s text to correct the ethnography and provide the confident local color that makes it such a vivid read and such a convincing introduction to the Balinese way of life. Vicki Baum was deeply affected by Bali for the rest of her life and attributed to it a sort of personal spiritual awakening, so that the title page of the book bears a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita. Perhaps this deep personal involvement explains why it has gone on to become an unquestioned classic and continues to shape the Western encounter with Bali.

      Love and Death in Bali skillfully intermeshes several different stories that all come together in the infamous puputan, the slaughter and mass suicides that brought the old Bali to an end in 1906 and finally extended Dutch rule from the north over the south of the island. The invasion, triggered by the looting of a Chinese ship cast up on the beach at Sanur, brought the Dutch the military resolution they sought but at the price of worldwide condemnation for the blood shed as they finally crushed out the anomaly of southern Balinese the cruel exactions made on him and his family and sees no reason to embrace a fight between rulers that is none of his concern. So, instead of marching fearlessly into the Dutch guns with his father and his raja, as tradition and his ruler demand, he decides to look after what is left of his own family instead. Raka is a noble dancer, famed for his beauty, who comes to a final acceptance of the apparently unjust punishment that the gods have unleashed upon him and finds release and redemption in the self-sacrifice of a willing death. For him, to embrace the end of Bali is a way to ensure that it lives on. And throughout the book, it is the love of beauty that stalks the pages in several of its divine forms, the love of Pak

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