for the fighting cock whose confiscation finally poisons his heart; of Raka for the beauty of his lord’s wife, for the beauty of the dance, and, finally for his own fair face. The Balinese characters here are very far from being the naked savages that the Dutch declare them to be but, rather, are thinking, sensitive, cultured people who might have stepped out of a hauntingly idyllic landscape painted by Walter Spies.
Baum seems often to have drawn her characters from life and was not unwilling to enter into the minds of locals in a way that seems strikingly unpatronizing for the time. So while Fabius is clearly Spies, even at this remove, it seems likely that the character of Raka, the beautiful but adulterous and finally leprous dancer, is borrowed from that of Rawa, Spies’s favorite male performer from the village of Pagutan, who was notorious for his infidelities and whose otherwise perfect face and body were marred by bad teeth. Spies regularly took his visitors to watch his performances. More generally, the male-male relationships in the story and the resolution of the conflict in the rescue of Oka, the Balinese youth, by Dekker, his Dutch enemy who is then overwhelmed by the sheer physicality of his male beauty, seem to owe more than a nod towards the homoerotic milieu of Campuan in which Spies himself moved and to which Baum herself was accustomed since her Berlin days.
And yet, despite her informed empathy for local people, Baum does not fall into the mistake of casting the plodding Dutch who oppose the comely Balinese as mere monsters. While she shows Bali as a very special and enchanted place, it is not without its flaws that build up to gradually erode the idyllic state of her opening, and she is careful to declare in her introduction her admiration for Dutch rule. In her book, the Dutch are devious and ambitious but their belief in their own civilizing mission, while overblown, is no mere empty pose. The burning of widows and the physical mutilation of criminals, both part of traditional Balinese life, were as repugnant to a wider world then as they are now elsewhere and the same arguments were bandied back and forth then as are deployed now. Vicki Baum never embraces uncritically the romantic and exotic notion of Bali as a paradise on earth, as did some others of the Ubud set, and remains, to the last, an independent and critical thinker.
Love and Death in Bali was well received when it first appeared in German in 1937. It would be several more years before the National Socialists proscribed Vicki Baum’s books and consigned them to the flames. The English translation enjoyed modest success in Great Britain where the London Times remarked coolly that “The characters that emerge from this earthly paradise are appropriately attractive” and the Observer was not alone in noting, “As a novel, although it is often vivid and powerful, and although it is readable throughout, ...(it)... is of less value than as a brilliantly sustained record of unfamiliar ways; but the record is deeply interesting.” Its greatest success was undoubtedly in the U.S., where it was listed as a best seller by the New York Times. Their reviewer probably hit the nail on the head by noting of the author, “Not only has she chosen for her setting that enchanted South Sea Island which has lately been so overpublicized, but she has written it in terms remote from the maunderings of crooners and the ecstasies of casual tourists.” For Bali was far from being unknown, and its imagined attractions were very much in the fashionable air, with commentators of the time The term, goona goona—magic—even briefly became a euphemism amongst the New York glitterati for sexual allure, and Cole Porter included “a dance in Bali” as one of the listed endearments of his “You’re the Top” hit song of 1934. Miguel and Rosa Covarrubias, similarly guests in Ubud, had shot a film there that was widely publicized in New York, and one of Miguel’s Balinese paintings was chosen for the cover of Vanity Fair in 1936. It was voted the best cover of the year. As a well-known designer as well as an artist, he was even able to arrange a sort of extended Balinese promotion in the windows of the Franklin Simon department store, complete with Balinese-inspired textiles and an outrigger canoe, before he released his own book The Island of Bali in 1937, the same year as Vicki Baum’s. All this ensured that Baum’s novel fell on well-prepared ground and was enthusiastically received. “By far the best book which Miss Baum has written in years,” roundly concluded one reviewer. Given subsequent developments, it is ironic that Vicki Baum notes in her own preface that the real Bali contains no Bali bars, Bali bathing costumes and Bali songs. Life, since then, has imitated art.
Vicki Baum had been astute enough to see which way the political and artistic wind was blowing in Europe and moved herself and her family to the United States in 1932. In 1938 she became an American citizen. Love and Death in Bali was one of her last books to be written in German rather than the English that she later embraced. She died of leukaemia in Los Angeles in 1960, having successfully concealed the true nature of her illness from her family until the very end, a ploy she allegedly borrowed from the plot of one of her own novels.
Nigel Barley
Preface
It must, I think, have been in 1916, a time when Europe was too much preoccupied to remember the existence of a little island called Bali, that I came by chance into the possession of some very beautiful photographs. One of my friends had got them from an acquaintance—a doctor who lived in Bali. They made such an impression on me that I begged my friend to give me them; and I kept turning again and again to these pictures of men and beasts and landscapes, whenever the horrors my generation was exposed to—war, revolution, inflation, emigration—became unbearable. A strange relationship grew up between these photographs and me; I felt that I should one day come to know those people and that I had actually walked along those village streets and gone in at those temple doors.
It was not until 1935 that I was able to make the voyage to Bali. My first visit was the realization of a dream without a hint of disillusionment. The privilege I enjoyed of seeing the real and unspoilt Bali instead of merely the modernized and tawdry fringes which tourists skirt in comfort was due to a letter of introduction to Doctor Fabius.
It was Doctor Fabius whose now faded and yellowing photographs had played so great a part in my life. He had the reputation of being the oldest Dutch resident and an eccentric with an unrivalled knowledge of Balinese life. The other Dutch officials on the island had a great respect for his professional ability, his knowledge and his influence over the natives. At the same time they were inclined to laugh at the way he lived and said of him that he was half Balinese. He was a white-haired, lean, silent old gentleman, of an ironical turn of mind and rather averse to visits from persons like myself. In spite of this a peculiar sort of friendship developed between us in the course of time, and this resulted in his taking me with him to more and more distant villages and allowing me to see the real life of the Balinese.
When I returned to America I had a strange feeling of homesickness for Bali; I wrote several letters to Doctor Fabius which remained unanswered. I went back to Bali a year later for a second, and this time a long, visit, and found that he had died of pneumonia. The works of art, which had filled his house to overflowing, had been bequeathed to various friends; but for me Fabius had singled out one of those cheap, funny little Japanese tin boxes. I received this legacy with a feeling of perplexity and surprise. The box contained papers, some written by hand, some typewritten. There were pages from diaries, notes on customs and ceremonies, memoranda of all sorts, and also a long novel, the theme of which was the conquest of Bali by the Dutch. With them was a letter, in which Doctor Fabius authorized me in a few rather ironical sentences to reduce this jumble of manuscripts to order—“a task in which I have always been hindered by my Balinese laziness,” as he said—and to publish what I thought worthy of publication.
Love and Death in Bali is the book I have extracted from these papers after trying to discard what was redundant or too involved. It is concerned with a historical event which is known in the story of the colonization of Bali as “Puputan,” that is, roughly, “The End.” Nevertheless, it is not in the strict sense a historical novel, but rather a free rendering of actual occurrences.
Names and characters have been altered and the order of events is sometimes arbitrary.
