Books: Sentimental Journey

RETURN TO MALAYA—R. H. Bruce Lockhart—Putnam ($3).

In his best-selling British Agent, Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart told of the high-pressure diplomatic and love affairs that marked his days in the British Embassy in revolutionary Russia. In its sequel, Retreat From Glory, he described his post-War disillusionment, a long-drawn-out affair involving debts and dissipations in the Balkans, that left him looking dolefully on the modern world and suffering from an understandable fatigue. Readers of those two books who have come to expect from Bruce Lockhart well-bred accounts of international intrigue are likely to be disappointed with Return to Malaya. It is a record of his visit, with funds that the success of British Agent provided, to the Eastern Islands where he had spent three years as a young man.

There in his early twenties he had worked on an uncle’s rubber plantation and enjoyed a love affair with a high-spirited Malay girl named Amai. Always a great one for going on pilgrimages, pondering on every historic birthplace and battlefield within reach of his far travels, Lockhart was on a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Pierre Loti when he decided to find out what had happened to Amai, as well as take a rest from journalism.

Lockhart made his sentimental journey a pretty stately affair. He expected trouble about a leave of absence from his boss, Lord Beaverbrook. But that Napoleonic publisher, who had read Lockhart’s account of his youthful indiscretion with Amai, betrayed that hushed sentimentality that seems as much a British characteristic as muddling through. “I suppose,” he wrote, “that you are going in search of the little wooden shoes.” This referred to Lockhart’s description of his separation from Amai, when his last glimpse had been of her little wooden shoes outside his bungalow. So, in 1935, in company with Lord & Lady Rosslyn, Lord Rendlesham, Lord & Lady Pembroke, Miss Dorothy Round and several others, he made his way slowly back to Amai.

He avoided the entertainments of the voyage, preferring to go to bed early and get up at dawn, read Conrad, study Malaya, brood upon the remarkable changes since his first trip East 27 years before, and talk with the captain about the lore of the lands they passed. Passing Aden he thought of Rimbaud’s tragic fate, and of how strange it was that the Frenchman should be the favorite poet of “a man so immaculate in thought, word and deed as Mr. Anthony Eden.” Passing Ethiopia he thought of Conrad, who wrote a chapter of Almayer’s Folly in a steamer named Adowa. His mind richly stored with literary and historical illustrations, everything that happened seemed to remind Bruce Lockhart of some celebrated incident.

Aided and embarrassed by friends who showed all Beaverbrook’s excitement about his return to the land of the little wooden shoes, Lockhart soon found that spectators were almost more interested in his reunion with Amai than he was. He put it off as long as possible, fearing to find Amai a fat, betel-nut-chewing grandmother. He lingered in Singapore, speculated about the British Empire and colonial service, the future of the East, revolution and the consequences of the cinema lowering white prestige before the yellow races. When at last he met Amai, with his friends waiting nearby and much of the native village looking on, he found her a grave, well-preserved, attentive woman who said politely that she had heard he was rich and successful. They exchanged formal comments about their careers, and the self-conscious traveler, feeling a little ridiculous and more concerned than ever about the prestige of the white race, hurried on to visit Java, Bali, Sumatra, Macassar, and other island haunts with the passionate absorption of a middle-aged romantic who had set out in quest of his youth, found it and decided it had not amounted to much.