Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Joseph Conrad would have been able to find his way around the Singapore of the 1960s. He described a walk through the city in his long story "The End of the Tether." But the old horizontal city of shophouses and bungalows had become a vertical city of tall buildings, and because of intensive land reclamation, the whole of Singapore was bigger by forty-three square miles. What had been the waterfront was now far from the sea—Beach Road was nowhere near the beach. Restrictions and subways limited the traffic on this island of merchandise for sale, highly organized streets, clusters of housing estates, and many mansions. Flyovers had replaced narrow lanes, parks had replaced slums and shophouses. A city of restaurants and department stores. A city of frenzied shoppers, most of them young. What struck me was that, as an effect of living in this place, Singaporeans were strange without knowing they were strange.

"You are here at an auspicious time," a Singapore friend said.

"I hear that a lot."

"No, really. They just unbanned Saint Jack"

My Singapore novel, published in 1972, was at last available in Singapore. And the movie made from it in 1978, by Peter Bogdanovich, was being shown in theaters. It was the only Hollywood film ever made entirely on location in Singapore—but done by trickery, as the Singapore-based writer Ben Slater had revealed in his recent book, Kinda Hot: The Making of Saint Jack in Singapore. Bogdanovich had not revealed to the authorities that he was filming my banned book, and because of this deception, and the film's portrayal of the sex trade, the Chinese gangs, and the more colorful neighborhoods—such as Bugis Street, thoroughfare of transvestites—the film had been banned. Because the ban had been lifted, and I had just arrived, my friends alerted the press. I was interviewed. It was the first and last time on my trip that my face appeared in the local papers.

Four interviews, each posing the question (among others) "What do you think of Singapore?"

Singaporeans, keenly aware that they live in a safe, very tidy, highly organized, and generally unfree city-state, need to be reassured that it is Shangri-la. It didn't matter that I'd been in Singapore for only two days.

"It all looks absolutely marvelous," I said.

Interviewers can encourage harmless self-glorification in their subject, or they can be obstinate and unimpressed, or devious. But they have their uses. A great way to find old friends in a foreign city is to be interviewed for the press. In Singapore I met many people I would otherwise have been unable to find: great friends growing old here, and even old enemies—enemies, after all these years! But a cruel and unforgiving government can make its citizens cruel and unforgiving. Several people who were informants for the interviewers said, in so many words, what a horse's ass I had been and how they hadn't liked me.

"I talked to two or three of your former students," one interviewer said, clicking her pen over her stenographer's notebook. The open page was covered with neat handwriting.

"Let me say one thing," I said, interrupting her. "The university students I had in Singapore were the brightest, the best, the most hard-working of any students I'd ever taught. And they spoiled me. I never found students that good anywhere else, so I gave up teaching."

"That's quite a compliment. What did you teach?"

"Shakespeare's contemporaries, like Middleton and Tourneur. The revenge plays of the Jacobean period. What else? I gave a series of lectures on The Winter's Tale, and tutorials in Conrad, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence—all the stuff on the Cambridge syllabus. Great Expectations" She was writing this down. "So what did they say?"

"They weren't very complimentary."

"Really?" I was surprised. The head of the English Department, D. J. Enright, a highly regarded English poet and literary critic, much loved by the students, affected an air of bonhomie with them, while being something of a taskmaster with his staff. He was a hard worker himself, and he suspected me of being an upstart. His need to assert himself had turned him into an inveterate gossip, and his puritanical streak made him a retailer of steamy rumors. He held court in the Staff Club, where we all drank beer, moaned about the government and the weather, and speculated on campus adulteries. As the first American who'd ever taught in Enright's department, I had to prove I was a scholar. And I needed the job; I tried hard to impress him. I liked the diligent students, so I felt my effort was in a good cause.

"One of your students said, 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything. So I'm not saying anything.'"

I swallowed and said, "Go on."

"Another one said you were arrogant. Does this bother you?"