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THE ORDEAL OF WALTER SPIES

Bali can capture the emotions and the hearts of anyone who visits the island, be it only for a few days. There was a saying that Theo learned on Tahiti: three days is not enough; three weeks is too long; for then you can never leave. Theo applied that saying to Bali. He intended to stay only a few weeks, or a month or two at the most, and once he stayed longer than a month he couldn’t leave. Theo mused that if Gauguin had known of Bali and its pristine culture, he would have come here instead of Tahiti whose culture had virtually been destroyed by the time of Gauguin’s arrival at the end of the 19th century.

But it wasn’t only artists, writers and poets who got caught up in Bali’s charm. People like Noel Coward and Charlie Chaplin also fell under its spell. It can be categorically said, it was Walter Spies who started it all. The romance of Bali began with him, but, fortunately, it didn’t end with him.

Walter Spies began the romance which eventually led to his doom. In the beginning he was mentor to many foreign artists, including Theo, even though Theo was not always in agreement with him. Theo was not in accord with Spies’ belief that the Balinese had to be taught how to paint. Theo felt differently, that foreign artists who came to Bali should learn and not teach. In respect for Spies, Theo kept his feeling to himself-until the very end. What eventually happened to Walter Spies was a terrible tragedy.

When Spies arrived in Bali he found a culture completely devoted to art; the notion of art for art’s sake was alien. The Balinese had no word for artist-painting, stone and wood carving, weaving, playing musical instruments, and, above all, dancing. Those things were what one did when not fishing or working in the rice fields.

It is an axiom of art history that the primitive movement had a profound influence on the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century Europe. As one of Spies biographers put it, “Spies had an uncanny affinity for the Balinese sensibility, and he thoroughly transformed the arts of the island in the fourteen years he lived there. The famous school of painting in Ubud, one of the principal attractions for people from every part of the world, was virtually his invention”. Perhaps but Theo did not agree.

Traditionally the Balinese considered painting to be among the lowest of the arts; such painting as was done before Spies came was comparatively unsophisticated, consisting mainly of astrological calendars and scenes from the wayang, the mythological shadow-puppet show popular throughout the archipelago. Painters were limited by convention and by the natural pigments, such as bone, soot, and day that were available to them.

Spies, later joined by the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, introduced Balinese artists to the wider range of colors of Western painting, and to the variety of effects possible with ready-made brushes and canvas. There’s no question about it, according to Theo, they both, Spies and Bonnet, introduced Western techniques to Bali, like perspective, and to paint scenes from everyday life. Theo felt the two tampered with tradition.

Spies did much to reveal to the world the art of Bali, other than its painting. The best-known example of Spies’ work is the dance of Bali, the Kecak, in which a chorus of men lie in a circle, loudly chanting “chak-a-chak-a-chak” as elaborately costumed solo performers act out a tale from the Ramayana. The Kecak was choreographed in its present form by Spies in 1931. Originally,

the chorus was much smaller and performed in a trance, but Spies wanted to create something more dramatic for a film he was working on, Victor Baron von Plessen’s “Island of Demons.” It was an early effort to capture the romance of Bali and, ironically, it was the film that enticed Theo to leave Basel and go to Bali.

Although Spies had a beautiful house in Ubud, he often found the place overrun by guests. When that happened he would take refuge in a bamboo pavilion he had built in Iseh, far distant in the mountain of East Bali. Once he took Theo to have a look at his retreat. Theo had no thought that one day soon the house in Iseh would serve as his escape from the Japanese, and later would become his home for many years to come.

Theo found on Bali exactly what he had been seeking all the while: a simple, joyous existence, a calm life, and with poetry all around. As time went on, he realized he had not the slightest wish to leave. Bali offered him the atmosphere into which his painting fitted more naturally than anywhere in the world.

As Walter Spies had become a legend, Theo too was becoming a legend, and in his own time. Mention Bali and Theo Meier came to mind.

Theo soon found himself entertaining a great number of guests when they came from afar to visit. His expertise in cultural matters, his culinary delights and all his mixtures alcoholic, became as legendary as his artistic output. A meal prepared or supervised by Theo was an experience not to be forgotten.

Spies had been helpful to Theo for through him Theo met many illustrious personalities, and for this Theo felt grateful, but Theo and Spies had their own differences.

Aside from his affair with Barbara Hutton and other female admirers, Spies was sexually inclined in a different way, and the results turned out to be disastrous. The Dutch authorities, scandalized at the general moral laxity of foreigners in Ubud, and as part of a crackdown on homosexuals throughout the colony, arrested Spies on New Year’s Eve, 1938, and charged him with committing sodomy with a minor. According to his biographer, Hans Rhodius, the Balinese were shocked and puzzled by the arrest, and, feeling sorry for him, they brought his favorite gamelan to play for him outside the window of his jail cell. The boy’s father came to Spies’ defense and told the trial judge, “He is our best friend, and it was an honor for my son to be in his company. If both are in agreement, why fuss?”

The Dutch, however, were not impressed.

Spies was released from prison in September of 1939 pending trial. While war was breaking out in Europe, he threw himself into the study of insects and marine life, turning out some exquisitely observed gouaches of his specimens. After Germany invaded Holland, the following year, all German citizens living in the Dutch East Indies were arrested. Spies, the last German on Bali, was sent to a prison in Sumatra. There he continued painting and organized an orchestra which he conducted in performances of Rachmaninoff. In 1942, fearful of an imminent Japanese attack, the Dutch authorities put their German captives on a ship for transport to Ceylon. The day after the ship embarked, a Japanese dive bomber hit the vessel with devastating results and it began to go down. The Dutch crew abandoned the sinking ship, leaving the prisoners on their own to drown, slowly and horribly. Theo lost a friend and deeply lamented his passing. Theo feared now more than ever before that the changes that were talking place in Europe would spread to the rest of the world. His fears were justified. The Germans invaded the Netherlands. Japan now went on the aggressive in Southeast Asia. There was no European power to stop her.

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UNDER THE SPELL

Ubud was an art colony and as such it did not appeal to Theo. He had always steered dear of groups. But he did have many friends there and went often to visit. There were no hotels and invited travelers stayed in the bungalows that Prince Gede Agung Sukawati had built for the circle of painters, painters that he patronized.

Ubud was at the time considered to be the most exotic art colony in the world. Its inaccessibility was one thing that had to do with it. The other was the popularity one man everyone want to meet, Walter Spies.

As mentioned, Spies arrived in Bali in 1927 for a short stay, and he never left. In Ubud he encountered a culture as graceful and refined as any in the world. Everyone, it seemed, was an artist of one sort or another. Even child dancers participated in mystic trances which enacted the fables of the Hindu classic Ramayana. Of course, there was the exuberant, clangorous accompaniment of the gamelan. But what also attracted Spies mostly were the paintings. He admired the traditional art and sought to learn from it. But he rejected what did not suit his inclination. In a short time Walter Spies made a name for himself and celebrities flocked to his door. He eventually started a school of learning introducing Western principles into Bali’s ancient art forms.

With Theo it was different. He didn’t paint fashionably, and never considered that he belonged to a movement between him and his surroundings. Color for him was his school and he needed no teacher to tell him how to paint. Indeed, color was all-important. It flowed from the dark-toned palette of his youth to the clear, glowing tonal opulence of his painting in the tropics. He saw a cloud or a tree, and the thought welled up in him how beautiful that object was. At such moments he was at peace with himself.

It was clear from the moment he arrived in the tropics that his love was for the female body. He loved the mulattos of Martinique, the dark skinned Polynesians on the Pacific islands and he especially loved the fair-skinned women of Bali. He loved the fineness of their bodies, the texture of their skin, and for certain their very existence. They were alive with expressions and emotions. The women of the tropics were more than objects of beauty for Theo. He once said he could not paint a female nude body without having an erection. He told how his wife had slashed an unfinished canvas of a nude he was painting. “She was jealous,” he said. “Not jealous because the girl was nude. All women in Bali went around half nude. No, she recognized the look in model’s eyes. When she saw that painting she knew I was making love to the model.”

Theo never stopped learning, and he was learning much on Bali. “When we paint, we try to consign the colors we see in real life to those we put on canvas,” Theo once said. “It takes time to learn to see. If I am painting a landscape, I suddenly see a yellow in a green tree, and it becomes blue on my canvas. Eventually, we begin to exaggerate, we begin to be selective, and finally it ends up just as nothing. You can, for instance, paint a blue in a tropical landscape, as blue as it actually is, but consigned to canvas, it is not the picture. The color is there, the blue is there, but it doesn’t come alive. Then I began to realize that the tropical landscape is not at all as we see it. It is, rather, an experience. This landscape is warm in tone, and so I start, in simple fashion, to paint my pictures over a reddish priming coat. And then the green tones and the other colors come to life. When the picture is finished, it is redder than Nature, but yet conveys the landscape accurately. One must translate.”

Theo continued: “I often work with blue outlines. How I came to do this I don’t remember. Blue is a sort of handwriting that goes across the picture so as to emphasize something. I feel this to be beautiful. I depart from Nature to a certain degree. I am less concerned with an intimation of Nature than with a representation of my impression of it-my concept, my dream but abstract painting is not to my taste. My mind is too much involved with the senses than with the visual, not tied up with a depiction of reality. I always seek for the simplest form. I simplify deliberately. I sometimes make a couple of preliminary sketches. If I had not studied thoroughly the music of the Balinese orchestra, I would probably not have managed to portray a Rejang dance realistically.”

On Bali the beauty of the music had naturally influenced Theo’s painting, as did the mystics of the island. When Balinese people lose something, they consult a balian, a benign sort of sorcerer, who tells them where to find it. Balians can interpret dreams, cure sickness, go into trances, and speak in the voices of ancestors. And magic, in the form of the island’s unique religion, is at the core of Bali’s arts. A blend of Hinduism and nature worship, the Balinese religion is an ecstatic union of the spiritual and the aesthetic, reminiscent of the religion of ancient Greece. Bali’s famous trance dances, for example, suggest the rites of Bacchus: in one of the sanghyang dances two girls who are supposedly untrained in the dance’s intricate choreography go into a trance and, eyes firmly shut, move in perfect unison. The dance is named after the divine spirit that inhabits them.

One breezy morning in 1941, Theo recalls he was sitting beneath the palms in his garden in Sanur talking to Jacorda Rai Sajan, another Raja friend of his from Ubud. In the course of the conversation, he looked at Theo and said: “Theo, we had a very pleasant evening together yesterday and went to bed contented. A few hours later, I woke up to find a light shining in your studio; you were painting. I noticed the same when I visited you a week ago. Are you an addict, like the old-smokers? Is something the matter with you?”

Theo looked at him and was puzzled. “Painting is just one part of life,” he said, “like music, writing, traveling, love.”

Perhaps it should be explained at this time that Jocorda Rai was a learned Balian, in fact, he was a Balian usada, a medicine man who receives his enlightenment from studying the Usanas, the Hindu-Balinese books on the philosophy of life and the art of healing. And now, before Theo knew it, he was extracting from Theo the story of his life, bringing to mind events stretching back to earliest childhood. An uncomfortable thought occurred to Theo, a fear that Jocorda Rai was trying to persuade him to resist his passion for painting. Sensing this, he wanted to break off the conversation.

Jacorda seemed to understand. He gave a friendly laugh and said “Theo, you are a chronic cock-fighter!”

A few days after the conversation with Jacorda Rai, a strange happening took place. In spite of the threat of war, an American yacht appeared off shore in Sanur and dropped anchor. Theo along with dozens of Balinese stood on the beach to watch a long boat with a crew of five or six men row ashore. It seemed so odd, with the imminent threat from the Japanese who were invading the islands that an American vessel would appear.

A sailor wearing a captain’s cap was the first to step ashore. Seeing Theo was the only white man on the beach, he walked up to him. “Name’s Sheridan, Sheridan Fahnestock, the Fahnestock South Sea Expedition”. He extended his hand. The second sailor stepped up. “This is my brother, Bruce.” Theo shook his hand.

The brothers explained their yacht was the 137-foot Director II which had sailed from New York in February 1940, and she carried two Presto disc-cutters, the state of the art recording devices of the day.

Theo was really puzzled now when he heard about the recording devices. He wondered what could these two brothers possibly want. He didn’t have to wonder long. Sheridan explained their mission.

“We have come to record traditional Balinese music for the New York’s American Museum of Natural History,” he said. “If we can be so bold, we are calling it The Music of the Gods.”

Theo’s ears perked up. Anything to do with Balinese music was his interest.

Sheridan went on, stating that, they brought along two miles of insulated microphone cable, enabling them to record on shore while the equipment remained safety aboard the boat, with two skilled radio technicians at the controls. “This method,” he said, “will enable us to record in the least obtrusive manner possible, while obtaining the highest quality results.”

Theo said he was at their service and would aid them in any way needed. When the brothers learned of Theo’s involvement with Bali music they were delighted. But the task they wanted to achieve would not be easy. The driving energy of the large gamelan ensembles featured haunting voices, bamboo flutes and reed instruments, and one featuring nothing other than an Indonesian Jew’s harp. Most important of the gamelan ensembles were the magnificent bronze gongs and metallophones, the bronze-keyed xylophones.

Then there was the Kecak, which they certainly had to record. The Kecak was the legendary Monkey Dance, a complex counterpoint of interlocking chants by a 200-man chorus, building to a kind of ecstatic, other worldly frenzy.

Two miles of cable would not go far. The villages where the music was made were far apart. The solution was to bring the performers to Sanur. Fortunately the Balinese were only too eager to perform for the Americans. They came in carloads and busloads to Sanur bringing with their musical instruments, some which were very cumbersome and heavy to transport.

Theo was like a director at a great music hall in Europe, instructing the groups where and how to set up shop and when to begin playing. Soon half the island, it seemed, came to Sanur each evening for three weeks, until the recordings were finished. They came to watch the performances as well as to listen to the music.

The Fahnestocks were delighted with the results. Unfortunately overshadowing the expedition was the Japanese threat of war. Indeed, the whole of the Dutch East Indies was about to fall to the Japanese. A few weeks after the Fahnestocks set sail for America the war did erupt. It was uncanny timing for they completed recording in September 1941, and arrived back in the United States with their Music for the Gods only weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Fahnestocks had sailed away and it was but a year later that Theo learned that the Fahnestock expedition was also on an intelligence assignment undertaken at the request of President Franklin Roosevelt. At an earlier White House meeting, the President had asked the brothers to evaluate Dutch military preparations on Java, and assess the usefulness of small watercraft for Pacific Islands combat. Whether or not the Fahnestock brothers were gathering information for the US Government, Theo never knew, but upon hearing what the president had asked the brothers to do, if the Japanese were to find out, Theo could be in a very delicate situation.

Theo had problems other than the Fahnestock brothers being spies. After five years of marriage, Meg wanted a divorce. She and Theo separated and soon after each went their own way. Theo tried to be callous and indifferent but in truth he was terribly heart broken.

And he was alone again on Sanur Beach.

Bali, indeed, was Theo’s training ground. The lessons he had to learn were often painful and did not always go away easily.

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This chapter’s photo captions in the printed publication:

Page 164       – Theo preferred to live in Sanur and not the art colony in Ubud. And like
                          Le Mayeur, he liked to paint outdoors.
Page 167       – Theo often bathed in the stream behind his house when young girls were also          
                          bathing.
Page 169       – The schooner Director II appeared on day offshore at Sanur Beach in front of  
                          Theo’s house.

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AN ARTIST IN PARADISE

Theo knew no one on Bali when he arrived, and he had no letters of introduction; but a name he had heard before he arrived; and a man he wanted to meet, was Walter Spies. Spies had arrived in Bali in 1927 and in ten years had made quite a name for himself. All one had to do was mention the name Bali and Walter Spies would come up. He was not only a gifted artist but a musicologist as well. He knew everything about Bali-music, dance, shadow plays. Any time someone had a question or a problem to solve, he went to see Walter Spies. When Rudolph Bonnet came to Bali the first thing he did was look up Spies. When Colin McPhee wanted to build a house, he went to see Spies, and so it went. Theo had been on Bali two months and still hadn’t met him. Spies, he heard, was off gallivanting around Southeast Asia, The story was that Barbara Hutton, the flamboyant American heiress, had fallen madly in love with him and with the money she had paid him for some of his paintings, he had built her a fine house with a swimming pool next to his home in Ubud, but by the time it was finished, she had moved on to Persia with a new lover. When Theo learned Spies was back in Bali, he rented a horse and carriage and with Meg they went to Ubud to visit him.

The carriage driver knew the place and drove up to the house, a dark brown, two-storey building clinging to the side of a steep ravine. Dense foliage screened it from the road and gave it an aurora of a secret abode. They were met by two young Balinese boys who led Theo and Meg to the house. There to greet them stood Walter Spies, a legend in his own time. He was quite tall and very dignified looking. He was forty some years old and in the prime of his life. His straight brown hair was neatly trimmed and he wore white shorts and a plain white cotton shirt. Theo almost expected him to be carrying a tennis racket.

He was strikingly handsome, as any Hollywood movie star might be. Theo could see now how Barbara Hutton had easily fallen in love with him.

Spies spoke first to Theo in English, in an accent that was British, but upon hearing Theo’s German accent, his face lighted up and he switched to German. “I heard that you were here on Bali,” he said with a smile. “Another German patriot.”

“Swiss,” Theo spoke up without hesitation.

“Yes, yes, of course, you are Swiss. One hardly wants to be German in Dutch territories these days,” Spies replied and quickly changed the subject and led Theo and Meg on a tour of the house. The house was like a museum, but not stuffy like museums. Everything chosen was in good taste. The walls were decorated with Balinese paintings, some antique pieces and quite old and, dominating one wall in the living rooms, was one of Spies’ own paintings, a forest scene in great detail with long shafts of light filtering down through dense foliage. It did have a touch of Rousseau about it.

There was a grand piano, as well, in the living room.

Below the house was an oval swimming pool fed by a bamboo pipe from a hillside springhouse. They gathered at the poolside. Spies called for drinks from one of the houseboys and asked if anyone wanted a swim. He had bathing costumes for anyone who did. He then departed, returned in swimming togs and dove into the pool with great aplomb, hardly creating a splash. He swam up to the side of the pool while his houseboy brought him a tray of whiskey bottles and placed it in front of him. Half immersed, he poured the drinks. He called for the boy again, to bring him gin. “I have some good Holland gin that just came in,” he announced happily. He kept the conversation going with uncontroversial chatter as he poured drinks.

They were soon joined by another quest staying in the house. Spies introduced her-Miss Vicki Baum. Theo knew about her, and that she was visiting in Bali. He had no idea she was in the same house with Walter Spies. Theo had wanted to meet her. He was interested in her love for music. Miss Baum, Austrian by birth, was well known for her 1929 novel Menschenim Hotel which was made into an Academy Award winning film, “Grand Hotel”. She had been to Bali the year before and now had returned to write a novel.

“Miss Baum is doing research for her new novel, A Tale of Bali, and she must tell us about it,” Spies said.

Servants brought a low table laden with more bottles and glasses, and presently trays of food arrived. Spies vanished and returned, this time in long trousers and a sporty batik shirt. They all lounged on mats around the table. Night was falling and servants lighted wicks floating in oil in half coconut shells hanging from the trees. Somewhere in the distance, and unseen, a small gamelan group began playing. “Perhaps now Miss Baum can tell us about her novel,” Spies said, holding up a glass of Holland gin. She was reluctant at first, but once she began she was like a runaway locomotive without breaks. She got caught up in her own emotions; the tale she had to tell was about a subject that had also interested Theo greatly. It centered on an event dear to the heart of all Balinese, an event that changed forever the relationship with the Balinese and their Dutch masters. Miss Baum had to stop every now and then as her voiced choked up with emotion. She explained what happened on September 14, 1906, when a Dutch force landed at Sanur beach, and finding no resistance, they marched, in dress parade formation to Denpasar. They passed through a deserted town and approached the royal palace. To the tune of wild beating of drums coming from within the palace walls, they were greeted by a silent procession that emerged from the place, led by the Raja being borne by four bearers on a palanquin. The Raja dressed in traditional white cremation garments, wore magnificent jewelry, and was armed with a ceremonial kris dagger. The other people in the procession consisted of the Raja’s officials, guards, priests, wives, children and retainers, all of whom were similarly attired.

Miss Baum’s voice now waxed lyrical as though she were on stage and performing for a large audience. She began speaking with quiet reverence. “When the procession was close enough for the Dutch force to see the whites of their eyes,” she said, “they halted and the Raja stepped down from the palanquin and signaled a priest to come forth. The raja then handed the priest his dagger and on the Raja’s instructions, the priest plunged the dagger into the Raja’s breast. This was the signal for the rest of the procession to begin killing themselves and others. While this was happening, other royal followers attacked the Dutch with lances and spears, forcing the Dutch to open fire with rifles and artillery. It’s told that the women mockingly threw jewelry and gold coins at the troops. As more people emerged from the palace, the mounds of corpses rose higher and higher. Approximately 4,000 Balinese died. After stripping the corpses of valuables they sacked the ruins of the burned palace.”

Silence followed.

Spies broke the spell and spoke up. “The Dutch colonial government learned a lesson from the affair,” he said. ”As a result, the authorities became lenient and thereafter they did little to interfere with the people’s way of life. The highest authority on the island is the Resident of Bali and Lombok, an officer who lives in north Bali and who is responsible to the Governor General of the Dutch East Indies in Batavia. There is an Assistant Resident in the south in Denpasar, but he is more preoccupied with living than administering. We have eight Rajas. The system that controls runs from the Dutch to the Rajas and down through village councils to the people.”

Theo and Meg returned that night by their horse and carriage to their humble home on the beach at Sanur, with Theo deep in thought during the ride. Spies was his teacher and he was a willing student, but he did not fully agree with his teacher.

After that initial meeting, Spies invited Theo often to his house. Perhaps because he envied Theo for his time to himself to paint. Spies complained that his many guest were taking up his time, but Theo noticed he didn’t stop extending invitations. Theo in turn did meet many of his guests, some he enjoyed meeting, others he detested. One guest who greatly fascinated Theo was Margaret Mead, the anthropologist known for her work The Coming of Age on Samoa. She came to Bali with her husband, the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson, to do field work on the Balinese and later on the inhabitants of New Guinea.

Margaret and Gregory had the captain marry them on a ship that brought them to Bali. It was her third marriage. Theo liked her for her anthropological studies but he did find her annoying at times. Theo gathered from their conversations that she not only studied these primitive people but she lived with them, intimately. When Theo told her about his trials with the women in the New Hebrides, she wouldn’t let him alone. She probed into his sex life, and anyone else who was around, asking them all sorts of questions. She made it sound that it was for the sake of science but Theo wondered about this. He got particularity perturbed when she wanted to talk to Meg. He kept her away after that.

There was some friction between Mead and another frequent guest, Colin McPhee. McPhee was a musicologist who had studied with the avant-garde composer Edgar Varese. He then met Jane Bila, a disciple of Margaret Mead. McPhee, having heard about the charms of Bali convinced his wife she should pursue her anthropological studies there, which was supported by Mead. Once on Bali, McPhee became so interested in the local music he decided he wanted to take up the study of Balinese music. When McPhee and Spies became friendly, and Spies agreed to help McPhee build his own house nearby, Bila left Bali before completing her research. Theo thought it was odd that she had left her husband until he and Spies visited McPhee at his home one afternoon. It was a short walk and they arrived unannounced. McPhee was lounging on the verandah surrounded by three or four handsome young boys. McPhee introduced them as his houseboys. Theo figured they were more than houseboys and perhaps they were the reasons for his wife’s departure.

Theo had missed meeting Charlie Chaplin, but he did get to meet Noel Coward. Theo had to admit he didn’t understand a word Coward had said in his twang diction. Coward had traveled from Singapore to Bali especially to meet Spies. He spent three weeks and took advantage of the Steinway in the living room. Theo noticed that Coward was demanding and had a temper. Spies explained to Theo that what made him angry was when he arrived and found there wasn’t a single Spies painting for sale. He became even more irate when he learned that Barbara Hutton and Charlie Chaplin had bought several before his arrival. Coward scribbled out the following poem:

As I said this morning to Charlie,
There is far too much music in Bali.
And although as a place it’s entrancing,
There is also a thought too much dancing.
It appears that each Balinese native
From the womb to the tomb is creative,
And although the results are quite clever,
There is too much artistic endeavor.

After visiting with Walter Spies, Theo began to form his opinion of Spies as both the artist and a man. He made the following entry in his journal; “WS is a painter, a very individual one, his pictures, quainter to be exact, are Rousseau-like of figures in the jungles, but even more surrealist and diffused with a vivid unearthly light.”

Theo was interested to know what became of Colin McPhee. He knew, of course, that McPhee got out of Bali in time to escape World War II and went to New York in 1940. Theo later learned that he lived in a large brownstone house in Brooklyn, which he shared with Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten, among others. He was responsible for introducing Britten to the Balinese music that influenced such works by the British composer as “The Prince of the Pagodas”, “Curlew River”, and “Death in Venice”. Later in the decade, McPhee fell into depression fuelled by alcohol, but he did began to write music again. He became professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA.

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This chapter’s photo captions in the printed publication:

Page 156       – Theo wanted to meet Walter Spies long before he came to Bali. Spies had arrived    
                          in Bali in 1927 and knew every one of importance who ever came to Bali.
Page 161       – Noel Coward, left, and Charlie Chaplin right, came to Bali often, and when they did
                          they stayed with Walter Spies.

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YES, THERE IS A BALI
Balinese Maiden

One morning, after visiting Le Mayeur the night before, a tall young woman appeared at Theo’s house on the beach. She was very pretty, a young girl unconscious of her beauty. She carried a rather heavy canvas bag upon her head which she quickly took down and placed at her feet, and stood there at the entrance, her eyes lowered. She was painfully shy; she whispered her name-Meg. Theo could only stare at her wondering who she was. Why did she come? Her smooth, brown body, clothed only in a sarong, was broad shouldered and narrow hipped. Her breasts were small but firm, those of a girl just reaching puberty. Her face had the dignity of a painting, very much like a painting by the Mexican Covarrubias. Theo wondered if she might not be the same girl. She had large eyes, like in the painting, and full lips. Her black hair was brushed back, except for a single wild lock that fell over one brow, and her pierced earlobes were lodged with gold plugs. She was no more than seventeen, a child. She spoke to Theo in Balinese, and Theo had learned enough of the language to understand what she had said-but could he be wrong. He asked that she repeat what she had said. She came, she said, to be his model, and she would live with him. She boldly announced he wouldn’t have to pay for a horse and carriage each day. She had all her belongings with her. She edged the bag slightly forward with her foot.

Theo bid her to enter. He asked who sent her. She replied that Ni Pollok had. She looked around the house, and seeing the bedroom with Theo’s bed along the wall, she entered, unrolled her sleeping mat and spread it on the floor next to the bed. Meg, with all her worldly possession in a single bag, unceremoniously moved in.

Meg proved to be a fine model and Theo was pleased with her. She would pose for him for hours on end, assuming any position that he desired. She was uncomplaining and sat on an uncomfortable bamboo stool, brushing with her fingers her long hair that fell to her waist, partly covering her naked body. The third day she was there, sitting on the stool in front of Theo, she asked if he found her unappealing.

“Why do you say that?” Theo asked.

“You prefer to sleep alone in your bed,” she said.

“But you are so young,” Theo said.

She rose up to the full height, tossed her long hair over her shoulders, and came to him. “Tell me if I am too young,” she whispered.

Theo was, at first, baffled with the attitude of the Balinese towards sex, that they have neither modesty nor immodesty. He commented in his journal: “They are not romantic when it comes to sex, and this might disturb most Europeans but it is something I must get used to.” Europeans want to possess, but not the Balinese. Being in love and having sex, Theo learned, that the two, love and sex, are poles apart in Balinese thinking. He pondered the question; can a European man ever determine that a Balinese woman loves him? He learned that the Balinese treat sex as any other part of the ordinary business of life; it has no more emotional importance as eating does. But this was the Balinese dichotomy These simple people can be jealous, which he had already leaned in the short time he was in Bali. This was where caution was needed. But the learning did not come easy.

Theo was finding the Balinese a carefree, happy people, and this he liked. They laughed easily and found humor in the most trifle of things. Theo couldn’t help making comparisons-the Balinese with the Polynesians. The natives of Tahiti and the Marquesas were forever searching for something-as unhappy, discontented people do-and they found fault in everyone and everything. The Balinese, in contrast, had what they wanted from life. In Tahiti a girl, bored with life as most of them were, could stare at a coconut all day long. On Bali she would pick up a coconut and start carving it. Theo concluded that the Balinese form a kind of group happiness, not separable by the individual. They enjoy the company of others. The principles they adhere to are not always applicable to other societies, nor understood, and certainly not to European society.

Theo wondered what made the Balinese the way they were. A perplexing question. Little by little he came to the conclusion it was their leisure and the very way they spent their free time that counted. Nature is in their favor. They are blessed with a pleasing climate so there is not the need to worry about the fundamental necessities of life, like keeping warm. There was the land itself, fertile and rich. The lands provide their needs. The people were freed from the ills of western civilization, and this gave them leisure and time to develop their arts-music, dancing, sculptures, painting and even the art of daily living. They had time for love.

A painter, a dancer, a sculptor, each day they worked in the field, and at day’s end they came back to their village without the inherent difference, or feeling, of superiority among one another. Each man was equal to his neighbor, differing only in individual talents and abilities. With leisure to create and without the lack of anxiety, they lived as free souls. This was the very reason that Theo felt he could not return to Basel.

In Bali Theo found a culture untainted by modern life but nonetheless vibrant, with nothing museum-like about it. The island was home to one and a half million people, all who lived together in unrivalled social and cultural unity. He had the feeling they were at one with their world; outward changes, such as the advent of the Dutch conquerors, seemed to have had but a superficial effect on them. After all, they had experienced similar conquests at earlier times in their history, as when the Javanese invaded the island in the 15th century. In Balinese society, literature, music, painting and sculpture, besides being advertisements of religious rituals, had a place in everyday life. Not all was explainable. Doors, for example, were hung with small pieces of white cloth covered with drawings of protective deities that were made by any talented neighbor and consecrated by a priest. The partitions facing the entrances into the compounds were sometimes adorned with rather naughty relief to keep away demons, who were thought of as being prudish. Great statues of priests stood guard at crossroads for demons can only move in a straight line and thus when they came to these statues they had no option but to turn back. The scenes painted at the bottom of cremation towers were also intended to deter demons. There was much that Theo had to learn but he was a willing student.

Theo became enraptured by the music and dance of Bali the first time he heard a gamelan and the first time he witnessed dancers at a temple. He sat up all night long in many temple courtyards watching a Legong or Kris dance. He studied the dancers’ graceful movements and the next day put them into oil paint on his canvases.

The Balinese, Theo discovered, were fond of their traditional dances, which mostly had religious significance and these depicted some of the famous mythological epics found in Hindu stories. Every village had its own gamelan orchestra and dance teams, and Theo wandered from one village to the other. At one village or another there was certain to be dances at a religious festival, a marriage or some other ceremony.

The gamelan intrigued Theo as much as the dance. Gamelan music became bewitching to him. He tried to distinguish the various types of orchestras that accompany the dances, but, after learning there are about two hundred kinds, he settled for a few favorites. As for the dances, he enjoyed them all, barong, Legong, kechak. He watched young girls, as young as four years old, learn the craft from their mothers. Their dance was more than arms and finger movements. It was many levels of articulation, the face, eyes, hands, arms, hips, and feet, all coordinated to reflect layers of percussive sounds. It was magnificent to watch, mesmerizing in many ways and all encompassed the true spirit of the Balinese.

Theo’s education took time, and time he had. He was the happiest he had ever been in his life.

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YES, THERE IS A BALI
Getting Used to It

Two weeks after he settled in, a native approached him with a request to please paint mice on this white cloth-the cloth being intended for a small cremation tower. He couldn’t imagine what it was all about, but he would learn shortly.

The beach in front of his house was a traditional location for ceremonies of this sort. Arrangements were planned for a ritual cremation of mice. These creatures, Theo learned, were part of the retinue of the goddess of death and thus considered sacred. When mice became too numerous and started eating the rice, the peasants had no compunction about killing them, provided they cremated the remains. The day the cremation took place even the government offices were closed. The ceremony ended with the performance of plays with masked actors and general merriment. Theo was discovering life as he never imagined possible.

Facing the sea, Theo would sit with his easel before him, delighted there was so much to paint. He didn’t need to search. Subject matter passed before his very eyes: a woman loaded with empty coconut shells in a basket upon her head, while in contrast a junk with its sails set made its way to an island opposite him. He began working on a large canvas which he called Segara Rims-The Golden Sea. “It sounds like a melody,” he wrote in his journal about the painting. “The colors! If you live long by the seaside here, you see colors as a picture.”

Theo was sitting at his easel one morning when a young boy brought a message written on rice paper. It was from Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merpres, the Belgian painter. Theo had longed to meet the painter. Le Mayeur had taken his Balinese wife, a dancer, to Singapore to perform Balinese dances to entice customers to buy his paintings. Le Mayeur was now inviting Theo to dinner. This will be interesting, Theo thought. The message said the boy would return and escort him to his house an hour before sunset. Theo nodded his approval to the boy who hastily vanished down the beach.

Theo could hardly concentrate on his painting for the rest of the day. He knew for a fact that Le Mayeur was an aristocrat. Theo wondered might he be a snob, or worse yet, a man who had taken up painting as a mere hobby, a dilettante in the arts, as some wealthy people often do? You always hear about someone important, maybe a head of state and they have retired. They have taken up painting, something they always wanted to do. Theo always found it disgusting to hear such things. He wondered about this when the boy returned and he followed him down the beach to La Mayeur’s house. It was a fifteen-minute walk. He found the painter sitting on a chair in front of the house when he and the boy approached.

Le Mayeur rose slowly and greeted Theo warmly. He was not a young man; his face was wrinkled and very tanned. His gaunt high cheekbones gave away his age. Theo knew him to be twenty years his senior. As for his tan, Theo remembered being told Le Mayeur liked to paint in the open, shirtless, under a tropical sun. “I like to sit here in the evening for the view,” he said in French.

He then said a few words of greeting in German. Theo responded in French and that became their lingua franca.

“Come, we must go inside,” Le Mayeur said and Theo followed along a path that lead through a densely covered arbor thick with lilies and jonquils and an assortment of other flowers, all that rendered the air heavy laden with a pleasing, fragrant odor. They came to an outdoor sitting room, furnished with bamboo chairs, and wrapped in soft green light. Beyond them was a thatched cottage. La Mayeur bid Theo to be seated, clapped his hands, and a lithe young girl, perhaps in her early teens and bare breasted, entered the room. La Mayeur spoke to her in beautiful, well-articulated Balinese and she with a slight bow disappeared much like a shadow vanishes. “We will have arrack,” Le Mayeur said.

“Arrack,” Theo replied.

“So you know Tahiti I hear,” Le Mayeur said as they waited for the servant to return. Theo was a bit surprised how word got around the island. Without waiting for a reply, he continued. “I too followed in the footsteps of Gauguin, by sailing off to Tahiti and French Polynesia to become a painter. The places were already in decline and it sorely disappointed me.” The servant brought the drinks, two tall bamboo containers, and Le Mayeur continued to tell how he arrived in Bali. His talk was scripted, something he had said many times over, and he said it as if this was what Theo wanted to hear. Theo listened in politeness, giving a nod occasionally. After Tahiti, Le Mayeur told how he had searched for several years for a quiet and peaceful place to paint. He traveled across India, which greatly fascinated him, and through much of Southeast Asia. He was one of the first painters to capture Angkor Wat on canvas. Then he heard about the charms of Bali; he arrived on the island in 1932, four years before Theo had arrived.

Theo listened quietly and, as though transfixed by the drink and the aroma of scented flower, he hardly took notice of a figure that had materialized from out of nowhere in the doorway, a figure more fantasy than real. At first Theo wondered if his eyes were deceiving him, or had his host set some sort of trance upon him. But when the figure moved Theo knew she was real, a half na• ked goddess in the dim light of the sitting room. “This is my wife Ni Pollok,” his host said proudly and with kindness.

Theo was indeed spell bound by her beauty. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, maybe younger, and Le Mayer had mentioned earlier that he was born in 1880. He was more than fifty years old.

Dinner was announced. Ni Pollok led the way followed by her husband and then Theo. They passed from one room to another through gold, carved doors. Le Mayeur’s paintings were everywhere, framed and hanging on all the walls. His subject matter was not so much of Bali as it was of western concepts of dream life in the tropics. Slender, light-skin maidens lounged about in flower sprinkled meadows under Japanese parasols against tender yellow and green lights. The paintings were, to Theo’s thinking, presented in an unreal world of freely imposed figures in make-believe settings. These settings were fake but obviously the women were real, or made to appear real, and this is what buyers were looking for.

Theo kept his silence.

Theo and his host sat on high-back western-style chairs and dined on a lace-covered tablecloth. Ni Pollok sat on a low bench slightly behind her man as he told how they had met. Sometimes he translated to Ni Pollok in her own language and it brought her to laugh, at which she coquettishly covered her face with her hands. Le Mayeur made no bones about it, more than anything else, it was the women that he liked to paint. Theo admired him for his honesty. Le Mayeur, having met Ni Pollok and another dancer, Ni Ketut Reneng, at a Legong dance in Denpasar, he invited the two women to come to Sanur as his models.

They accepted and the routine was for Le Mayeur to collect them both every morning in a horse drawn carriage. The streets were quiet and the half hour that it took to reach the beach at Sanur was marked by the clip clop of their horse. Le Mayeur amused the girls by singing opera. “He has a very good voice, “Ni Pollok chimed in, speaking in French.

And so, during the early morning at Le Mayeur’s studio the two girls held poses while the artist painted them. In the afternoon when the sun became unbearably hot, under a canopy he would teach them to write, drawing letters in the sand for them to copy.

It was the beautiful Ni Pollok who Le Mayeur fell in love with and eventually married. Their wedding celebration was in Balinese style and they say half the island attended.

“You live alone?” Le Mayeur asked, cautiously, and when Theo remarked that he was looking for the right woman, Le Mayeur smiled. “I am glad to hear that.”

Theo returned often to visit Le Mayeur and his beautiful wife, and that was usually in the afternoon in the• downpour of heat when not even a leaf nor a palm frond rustled, when neither man painted. Despite Le Mayeur being commercial with his paintings, paintings that tourists bought, Theo nevertheless liked him more for what he stood for than for what he splashed on canvass. Theo learned that Le Mayeur was, admittedly, an eccentric member of the royal family of Belgium. Theo was also aware that the name Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merpres had meaning in Belgium and tourists just off round-the-world cruise ships made it a point, the highlight of their journey, to visit him, and to be served drinks and snacks by his gracious topless wife and her pretty servants. And those who dined at night with Le Mayeur returned home with tales about the huge Balinese feasts they had, the fine gamelan music they listened to and the subtle dance performances they saw. They in turn were given the opportunity to buy Le Mayeur’s paintings. “Painting is a business,” Le Mayeur once said to Theo, and Theo learned from him.

One story that amused Theo was what happened when Le Mayeur was visited by one Mr. Smit, a Controleur and senior official in Denpasar. It was said, Mr. Smit did not like foreigners, or even his own countrymen. Mr. Smit visited Le Mayeur one day to check his permit to live in the Dutch East Indies. He found the artist in his front yard, dressed in a sarong with no shirt, painting a Balinese girl who, like him, wore a sarong with no top. Mr. Smit examined the permit and left.

A few days later he notified Le Meyeur that he objected to a European wearing native dress-and also to a European painting what he termed ‘nude women’. Le Meyeur soon after received a letter from the head of the colonial government warning him for his so called “immoral behavior” at his dinner parties. If these dinners continued, the letter stated, he would be deported. Le Mayeur wrote to his cousin the King of Belgium, who in turned wrote to Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, who in turn wrote to the Governor General of the Dutch East Indies, who in turn told the puritanical governor of Bali to shut up. He did, certainly. Le Mayeur’s parties continued, and he didn’t stop painting on the beach. Theo concluded that La Mayeur was a good friend to have. He did visit him often.

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YES, THERE IS A BALI
Finally Got There

The Babi-Express cargo vessel that carried Theo from Singapore to the port of Singaraja on the north coast of Bali could not have arrived any sooner to suit him. Another ten miles and he feared he might have jumped overboard-it was that awful. He disembarked smelling like a swine.

Theo was hardly ashore, standing on the beach observing his surroundings, when Babi-Express began taking aboard its cargo of live pigs. This got Theo thinking. How was he going to get from Bali to Tahiti? Traffic moved from Bali to the west toward Singapore and not eastward across the Pacific. He would probably have to travel across the East Indies to Timor, make his way to Darwin in Northern Australia, cross the continent to Sydney and pick up a ship there. The French line Messageries Maritimes had regular service to the islands from Sydney. His decision would have to wait. Theo now had a month or perhaps two months to enjoy himself so let it be. Bali was waiting.

But all did not seem to be going well. Chaos reigned in Singaraja. An hour before he arrived aboard Babi-Express, a liner from Amsterdam, carrying both tourists and Dutch military personal to their new posts, had dropped anchor in the harbor. The local agent for the Dutch Koninklijk Lines was still greeting passengers as they disembarked. The port itself was a dismal place with the town of Singaraja located on a bluff high above. Arriving passengers had to scramble up the hill or else hire the services of a palanquin, a sedan type chair carried by four porters.

Theo wondered if Bali was as remote as everyone claimed it to be. Tourism had taken root as far back as 1920 when the Royal Dutch Steamship Company added the island to its itinerary. By 1930 there were about a hundred visitors a year; a decade later when Theo arrived, the figure was around 250. It was all there in a brochure one of the passengers had handed him. The tourist spots were farther to the south of Singaraja. To get there, visitors had to traverse the island by motorcar to reach the capital city of Denpasar where they would spend a night or two at the luxurious Bali Hotel that had opened in 1927.

To avoid being carried by a palanquin, Theo, to the jeers of the handlers, scrambled up the bank on his own, carrying his bags, easel and paints, slipping and sliding with every step. He was sweating and hot when he reached the top, and he was glad that he made the decision to leave his oils with Hans back in Singapore.

Theo was disappointed at the first sight of Singaraja. It was a village, not a town by any standards, and it was a town in a sad state of despair, with the main street lined with [lean-to’s and shacks. It was not that poverty and slum areas offended him, for he had certainly seen his share in his travels, rather it was that he expected something else. He had pictured Bali to be different.

A dozen touring cars had gathered at the edge of the village to take passengers to Denpasar where they would check in. Theo, who the tour guides thought to be a passenger from the cruise ship, was ushered into the lead touring car. He didn’t object and took a seat far in the rear of the car. His bags and easel were hoisted to the top of the car and strapped down. Once he was seated he felt sorry of the others in the car when they began complaining. They sniffed the air wondering where the horrible smell was coming from. Some put the blame on the farmers’ fields outside the widow; others said it must be from the cargo piled on the roofs of the cars. They all made guesses but only Theo knew where the smell came from. He tried to sink lower and lower into his seat but it did little good. The smell of swine persisted.

The cars took off all together, rumbling and bouncing over the deeply rutted road. Theo was grateful that the rough ride distracted from the smell. After twenty minutes when the cars began the climb into the mountains the mood changed. The scenery was breathtaking. They passed through village after village, each one appearing behind a wall enclosure-walls of grey-brown dried mud topped with thatch or else red tiled roofs. Villages had elaborately carved temple gates of bright vermilion brickwork, much of it carved in stone. The construction of the temples with their multi-tiered roofs was striking. And all along the route men carried bamboo poles across their shoulders with heavy sheaves of rice stalks suspended on each end while sturdy women ambled along, hips swaying, their back rigid, balancing towering piles of pottery and food stuff on their heads. All wore sarongs of brown or plaid cloth, except for the small children who ran naked. Above the waist, women like men were uncovered and the young women’s breasts stood out round and firm. Theo began sketching in his mind. Occasionally the car stopped abruptly to avoid hitting a rounded belly pig, not for fear of hurting the pig but doing harm to the vehicle. Huge water buffalos, some pale pink and some grey, wallowed in roadside streams or lumbered about with children fast asleep on their generous backs.

At the Bali Hotel the caravans of cars came to a halt and here the tired, dust-covered passengers disembarked, sighing with relief that they had arrived. Theo scrambled to get his bags and easel before porters carried them into the hotel. Once he had his belongings he set out to find lodging. He found accommodation, which he noted in his journal the next day: ”A rather primitive Chinese hotel. Through the windows of my room, as I lay awake, I heard faint strains of music. The sounds fascinated me. I left the hotel and began to follow them in the moonlight. I came to an open courtyard. I looked upon an animated scene, dancing girls, half in a trance, made small, flower-decorated offerings to their gods. A chorus of male voices chanted in the background. Young women began to sway to the soft tunes of the temple orchestra. After hours of gazing and growing weary from the scent of burning incense, I found my way back to the hotel just as dawn was breaking. This is Bali. Beautiful Bali.” The intoxication that Theo felt that night would never leave him. It only seemed to intensify.

Theo rented a bicycle from a Japanese camera shop and set out to explore Sanur. He took a swim in the ocean and liked what he saw, the vast open, empty beaches, the tranquility, the loneliness. This was what he was looking for but first he had to check out Ubud, the art center that he heard so much about. To reach Ubud, being in the low hills, he took a lorry bus rather than travel by bicycle. He wished he hadn’t; there was little he could see cramped in the back of a lorry on hard wood seats.

There were no tourist hotels in Ubud. Travelers stayed in the bungalows that Prince Gede Agung Sukawati had built for the circle of artists he patronized. Others who came camped in the temple grounds. Theo was aware that Walter Spies lived in Ubud but he was not ready to meet him. He wandered about the town, had lunch in a teahouse and took the bus back to Denpasar and rode his bicycle back to Sanur. Theo found his trip to Ubud interesting but he preferred to live by the sea.

He was fortunate. The Chinese owner of the hotel where he was staying had a cottage at Sanur and when Theo showed interest he called for a horse and carriage and took Theo there. The cottage was little more than a hut with plaited bamboo walls and a thatched roof There was a pallet for a bed with a mosquito net above the bed suspended from the ceiling. The house was centered in a cluster of trees and tropical growth. The important thing for Theo was that it had a view of the sea. He saw its potential, a fine place to paint. He might need more than a few weeks on the island, he reasoned so he took it for a month. The owner agreed, one month, longer if he wished. Theo moved in instantly and set up his easel.

Theo was happy with the house. A thought amused him, being Swiss and now living by the sea. He wondered if Helga would love the sea, but he quickly dismissed the thought. Switzerland was far behind him now. Another place; another time.

Theo liked especially the evenings when he felt that the whole romance of Bali presented itself in its full glory. In the late day the sea took on a magnificent golden tinge. Coconut palms that stood in front of his house framed a perfect scene, a scene that came alive, like a moving film. In the hills behind him the landscape with its violent, pure colors dazzled and blinded him.

Something, it seemed, was always happening at Sanur. A young boy brought him a monkey on a chain and presented it as a gift. The next day an old man from the village brought a cockatoo. There were fresh coconuts, and stocks of bananas and ripe papaya on his doorstep when he awoke in the morning. Who brought the gifts he never knew; no one ever mentioned them. Theo took up his easel and began to paint with eager energy he never knew he had. He did not seek to imitate nature that he saw all about him but instead to employ the elements available to him to create a new world, similar to Gauguin but different. His aim now was to give expression to the feeling of mystery which came upon him, a total stranger, as he stood face to face with the wonders of reality of a strange Balinese world. At last, he now had a goal. It was settled. Tahiti could wait, at least for a few months. He had found what he wanted. He had no need to invent compositions. They were all around him, in the temples and in the daily lives of the Balinese.

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RETURN TO THE TROPICS

Back in Singapore Theo took up Hans Burckhardt’s invitation to stay at his spacious home, and in return he painted landscape murals for his host. He did enjoy his time there. “Singapore was a tumultuous city, a veritable microcosm of Asia,” he wrote in his journal. ”Among the most vivid memories I have of my visit is the noise. Radios were not very widespread in 1935 and so the inhabitants made their own music. The combined effect of all these sounds streaming out from the open verandahs was very intriguing. Sometimes, I even joined in the cacophony myself by singing out loud with renditions of Honegger’s “King David”.

While Theo was in Singapore, a wealthy Chinese merchant commissioned him to paint his daughter’s portrait, The portrait reached public attention, and from this came Theo’s big break. The Swiss consul had recommended Theo to paint the portrait of Sir Song Ong Siang which was to hang in the City Hall. Sir Song had the distinction of being the first Chinese gentleman in Singapore to receive a knighthood from Her Majesty the Queen of England. The commission would pay him four thousand Singapore dollars.

Theo began work on the assignment by making a drawing of his client’s Attila-like face, which stimulated a pretentious article in the Straits Times in April 1935. After the article appeared, Sir Song was not altogether pleased with the drawing. He showed Theo a reproduction of the famous portrait of the Duke of Wellington on horseback, together with a photograph of himself as a young man.

“Just copy this painting on a fairly large scale, with my face instead of his,” he said. Theo couldn’t restrain himself and burst out laughing. That was goodbye to the 4,000 Singapore dollars, but that wasn’t the only commission to go south. It happened again when a respectable manager of a Swiss company in Singapore invited a number of friends and Theo to dinner. The manager indicated to Theo that commissions were certain to come from the get-together.

“I confidently expected commissions to materialize after the meal,” Theo wrote in his journal. “We finished eating and drinks were served. Then my host admiringly showed us what he called ‘a genuine work of art.’ The painting in question was a landscape of bygone times by a bygone artist. It was so bad I couldn’t help let slip a very graphic but somewhat uncouth expletive in Basel dialect. That was that. Singapore’s high society washed its hands of me – all, that is, except my old friend Hans Burckhardt who said, “Meierli-bisch a Siech!”

Theo now laid out his plan to return to Tahiti, but first he wanted to visit Bali in the Dutch East Indies. There were no liners from Singapore to the island. The only ship that Theo could find was a cargo vessel called Babi-Express, a boat used to carry pigs, called babi, from Bali to Singapore. A few days later Theo was on his way to Bali. Having discharged its cargo in Singapore the boat was empty but in a very smelly state.

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HOME AGAIN IN SWITZERLAND

Theo returned home to Basel with mixed emotions. He was pleased that he was able to repay his debt with the paintings he had promised. And he found, as he wrote in his journal, that the city’s cultural life was beginning to blossom. There were concerts by world-famous artists and the city authorities had provided a liberal budget for the visual arts. Frescoes, mosaics and sculptures were ordered to fill every available space in the city. Art had become part and parcel of the social order.

But Theo felt for all that, the painter was still an outsider. “This is not what I am looking for,” he wrote in his journal “It wasn’t that I was anti-establishment. A Ballios I was born and a Ballios I remain. But the life I found in Basel struck me as being fake. I could not become part of it; my whole fabric revolted against it. I longed to find a place where the painter played a natural part in the life of the people.”

The place that Theo longed for was the South Seas. There he had found happiness and contentment, and there he could paint what he wanted to paint and where he wanted to paint without being questioned. It was the freedom he enjoyed and cherished so much. He had to return. But what about the ones he was leaving behind?

Theo wondered how Helga would take his leaving for the second time. He didn’t have to wonder long. He learned she had met the son of another baker, and with the prodding of her father they married. He admitted it was wrong for him to say that he did not feel jilted for he did but beneath it all he was happy for her, and happy for himself. He knew deep down he could never take her to Tahiti with him. He couldn’t take anyone anymore. He had to do what he had to do alone.

Thus, Theo planned his return. With the success of his first trip he was not criticized and thought to be crazy as he had been before. But what would be painful was leaving his mother, father and sister. His father still had hopes that his son would come back to the fold. The problem was alleviated somewhat when his sister began to take an interest in the office machine business. But the news of Theo leaving again was not taken lightly. The mental suffering, the anguish that he had to endure, was his awareness that this was not going to be a short trip. He was returning to the South Seas to make it his home, to remain the rest of his life. To remain in Basel was to lose himself as an artist. It was most likely he might never return, never to see his mother and father again. His only salvation was the hope that they would understand. And for that, only time would tell.

Theo was not that solvent and money, as always, was the problem. But he wouldn’t let that deter him. Wealth to him was not money; he felt he was wealthy. Happy as a lark, once decisions were made and plans settled, he began to round up subscriptions for a new paintings club. “Not that I needed all that much. Sea fares were still cheap in those days in the fall of 1934,” he wrote in his journal. And so for 350 francs he bought a passage on the Hakezaki Maru to Singapore.

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STOPOVER IN SINGAPORE

In Hong Kong, Theo booked a passage to Marseille on the Japanese steamship Hakezaki Maru with a three-day stopover in Singapore, two days in Ceylon and another two days in Cairo. He was anxiously looking forward to meeting up with Lucas when he arrived in Singapore. He had a hundred tales he wanted to tell his friend, about the Sing Song girls and warlords and so much more. He didn’t know where he would begin. Maybe he would tell him first how the natives of the New Hebrides burned his canvases, or how Dr. Wong tricked him into venturing into warlord controlled China. But those tales that Theo wanted to tell Lucas would never happen. Instead of Theo finding Lucas waiting for him, he found a cable from him. Lucas would not be meeting him in Singapore. He was staying longer in Sydney, and the news was that he was engaged. He would meet Theo in Basel later with his new bride. Lucas had met his match. He had gotten engaged to one of the flamboyant daughters of his host in Sydney. He was getting married.

Theo was terribly disappointed, still he decided to make the best of Singapore with the short time he had. He wasn’t one to lose time or harbor over regrets. “I found that I looked upon this island colony with different eyes after all my experiences,” he wrote in his journal. He was expecting to find an Asian city much like Hong Kong, but found something totally different. The architecture struck him most strangely. Here was Art Deco architecture in the tropics, something he never expected. It wasn’t exactly what he had in mind to paint but there was the other side of Singapore that caught his attention. It was the riverfront and the shop houses in the old town, shop houses with sagging lintels and with vines hanging down from rooftops.

But first he had to find Hans Burckhardt, a Basel merchant who was established for many years as an importer-exporter in the colony. When he did find him, the merchant invited Theo to stay with him, and seeing Theo’s enthusiasm for Oriental art suggested that Theo remain behind and wait at least until the next ship departed for Europe. There was a liner departing a month later, but Theo felt he had to return, settle his affairs at home and then return to the Far East. ‘TI-1eo had made up his mind. He was not going to remain in Basel, or any place in Europe. He would return to the tropics as soon as he could. The decision didn’t come suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, but quite the opposite. It came ever so slowly, gradually, almost without his knowing. He found himself no longer wanting to live in Europe. After a time he felt he was destined to remain forever in the tropics. He wanted to paint in the tropics and nowhere else. He began to make plans. He would return to Singapore, yes, spend some time, and then he would make his way to Bali before sailing on to Tahiti. Tahiti was where he longed to be.

Theo also admitted in his journal that the rigors of traveling were wearing him out both mentally and physically. On top of this, he had contracted a severe bout of amoebic dysentery in China and he felt only the doctors in Switzerland could help him. It was time to go back. He assured Hans Burckhardt he would return.

Before he left Singapore, there were a few things he wanted to do, and that was to meet Chinese artists. He remembered how Max Beckman had learned from the Chinese and gained inspiration for his serious paintings by preparing his raw canvases in different tones and shades. He applied very casually his brush strokes so that they appeared to be purely accidental in their application. When Theo’s approach to painting became less formalistic, he adopted this method of undercoating the canvas himself, like the Chinese did. After reading translations of Chinese writers on Chinese art he found this was nothing new. The Chinese masters used the same techniques back in the eleventh century.

Theo did manage to have brief meetings with a few Singapore artists-Lim Cheng, Cueing, Soo Ping and Chen Chon Sweet, all watercolorists. Chen Chon Sweet had been recognized as one of the key pioneer artists in Singapore. But Singapore was not known to foster the arts and Theo was surprised that a well-known and successful artist as Lim Cheng was, who had just returned from a three-week vacation in China, had to go back to work in his shop to make ends meet.

Theo did not find modern Singapore to his liking. Although he found it interesting, he did not care for the Art Deco architecture. He discovered the art was based on mathematical geometric shapes, which he concluded any draftsman could master. But Theo did find delight in old Singapore, especially the waterfront and river areas. The godowns facing the river, built side by side along Boat Quay, were enough to fill any artist’s pallet. Theo sketched as rapidly as he could. Here was the pulse beat of the city. Buildings of cracked plaster and sagging lintels, with rooted ivy plants growing right into the fabric of the walls, filled Theo’s sketch pad. He marveled at what he saw. Here was the waterfront, not much more than a hundred years old, and the buildings were in decay.

The congested Singapore River, however, had all the real drama. Hundreds of bum boats with their painted eyes fought for space along the river. Goods carried on the backs of barefooted coolies-bales of rubber, crates of tin, bags of rice and coffee, and what have you-made their way up narrow, single-planked gangways to waiting bum boats and lighters to be further transported to freighters and cargo vessels anchored out in the roads. And out in the roads, too, were salt-carrying junks down from Siam, all rafted together, awaiting the artist’s brush. There wasn’t enough time for Theo to capture all that he wanted to.

That was the waterfront, old Singapore, with all its color and fascination, but there was another side, a bulging Singapore that was, to Theo, not so flattering. The island colony was Great Britain’s first line of Eastern defense. The port was an unbecoming military bastion. The short time that he was there, three days in fact, five guns were mounted in Sentosa, that small wooded island separating Singapore from the open sea. The British were concerned about the Japanese invading from the sea and prepared for such an assault.

When Theo departed Singapore he carried some fifty canvases aboard Hakezaki Maru. The ship moored in Ceylon for three days and here Theo got an enchanting perspective of Hindu and Buddhist temples. “An honest tropical setting,” he wrote in his journal. He was determined more than ever now, after witnessing Hindu architecture, that he would return to tropical Asia, and especially to Bali with her strong Hindu influence. The seeds were well planted in Theo’s heart.

His next port-of-call was Cairo and here again he felt deeply rewarded. He noted in his journal: “with my encounter with the monumental beauty of ancient Egyptian art.” Six weeks after departing from Singapore, wobbly-kneed and worn out, he arrived back in Basel on a cold February morning. He had done it; he made it around the world, as both a vagabond and a painter. How happy he was deep down in his heart.

Theo wrote in his journal: “The customs authorities took a long time examining my paintings, some of which were painted on old coffee sacks, eventually deciding to tax them as carnival decorations and charging me fifty francs for the privilege of importing them.”

Theo paid up and was back at his home in Basel.

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FOOT LOOSE IN CHINA
Despondent, War-Torn Country Side

The Chinese countryside was a land of deprivation. Not a living plant or bush existed. Theo made notes in his journal: “The Chinese can boast of 5,000 years of culture but it isn’t evident in their mud villages.” He couldn’t help making comparisons between the Chinese and the primitive Kanakas of the New Hebrides. What did civilization bring to the Chinese peasant, certainly not food? The Kanakas had at least grubs and worms they could eat but the Chinese had nothing, nothing but a flat, dull, insipid countryside. “Nothing extraordinary in any way,” he wrote.

The sense of their grave and oppressive existence grew heavily upon Theo. He was trudging along, moving ahead but he knew not to where. He felt he was no different than the poorest of the poor peasants they met on the road; they too were marching off but to nowhere. Mankind was not moving ahead but backwards.

Then, what they hoped wouldn’t happen, did happen. Armed Chinese blocked the route ahead of them. They were bandits. They were ruffians, clad in a hodgepodge of clothing from peasants’ sheepskin vests to discarded military uniforms. Though they respected the doctor’s flag, they demanded medicine from the doctor. Seeing the opportunity, and with an idea in mind. Theo took out his sketchpad and began sketching the leader of the group. Upon seeing Theo, he turned away from the doctor and marched up to Theo. He stopped short, smiled and then laughed aloud, a big coughing laugh when he saw the caricature Theo was drawing. When it was completed Theo tore the sheet away from the sketchpad and handed it to him. But Theo did not wait for neither praise nor comments. He immediately began sketching other bandits, and he gave them their portraits. Pleased with the sketches, the bandits let them pass without further harassment, and with all the doctor’s medicine intact.

With the next bandits they met they were not so fortunate. The new gang of ruffians wanted money, which the doctor duly gave them. He anticipated this would happen and had Chinese currency in neat little red packets ready to hand out. But still not satisfied, the bandits took the doctor’s horse. Figuring there would be further ambushes, the doctor asked for written acknowledgement they had already been robbed. This was most unusual but nevertheless, with a bit more cajoling, the leader signed a paper the doctor scribbled out. Theo remarked in his journal “this was his first experience of banditry in Asia. What would be next?”

Now that the doctor had no horse, he walked side by side with Theo, and as he did, he talked on incessantly about the greatness of the Chinese culture; Theo made no attempt to stop him. Theo simply wondered how he had the capacity for such blindness, not to take notice that there was no hope for these unfortunate people with their thousands of years of culture. Their only salvation would be a strong leader, and who might that be. Dr. Wong considered General Chiang to be no more than a warlord himself Sun Yatsen might have unified the country, but he was dead. Dr. Wong named others, strings of others; some he favored, others he wrote off as scoundrels.

Theo heard but he did not listen. He was more interested in the faces of the Chinese that he saw. To Theo their faces told their whole story, and every time he had the chance he sketched them. Sometimes he made sketches as he walked, remembering a face they had just passed. As for the countryside, he sketched outlines, mountains, hills, valleys, clouds, and then wrote down the colors he would later use when turning the sketch into an oil painting. It was a technique he used over and over.

Theo did find the naked hills worthy of dramatic compositions. When they stopped during a rest break and he took out his paints, the Chinese gathered to look at what he was painting. It was obvious by the transparent looks on their faces that they were bewildered. Why paint a picture of a forlorn hillside? Nature to the peasant was something that simply existed and didn’t need an interpretation. Theo found this not so unusual for he had similar experiences when he painted landscapes in Polynesia. Why paint a landscape, the natives often asked him? It’s always there, so why do you have to paint it? But it wasn’t always with primitive minds, he recalled. Back in Basel in the old section of town he came upon an old and warped door with peeling red paint and a sagging lintel that fascinated him. He rushed home, collected his paints and easel and went back to paint the door. Some old folks stopped and laughed at him. “Don’t you have something better to paint?” As results would have it, one of the art shops in town took the painting and displayed it in the front window. Soon when people passed down the street in the old town and saw the door, they stopped to admire it. But it’s not very likely that people would think much the same of a painting of the bleak and barren hills of China,” Theo thought, blowing his warm breath into his cupped cold hands.

The countryside became monotonous, unchanging, bleak and barren and void of even a dried twig. The Chinese had left nothing standing. The villages were no better than the devastated countryside. Every village, even the smallest, had the scars of warfare with roofs of the houses blown away. Exposed rafters and beams, like skeletons in a house of horrors, lent a macabre air to the whole experience. The watershed in the fields with aqueducts that took centuries to build were in ruin. Tracks from vehicles crisscrossed the fields, having destroyed the continuity, the very symmetry, of what had once been order and purpose. How the peasants survived the devastation was a mystery to Theo. How could humans possibly survive in such total ruin? They have nothing, nothing.

“The little food they did manage to keep,” Dr. Wong explained, “they had to hide from the warlords.”

Traveling was extremely difficult with the road conditions the way they were. To add to the misery, now that it was winter, the tufts of mud along the ruts were frozen and made walking terribly cumbersome. Theo found it much easier to walk at the rear of the caravan for then much of the surface was flattened out from those who preceded him.

Theo was baffled by these wearisome warlords who ruled China at their own whim. “Do they not have compassion for the people, their own people?” Theo asked the good doctor.

“We had one good man, a general who came close to becoming the Emperor of China,” the doctor explained one evening when they were camped. “His name was Yuan Shikai, but he died a few years ago in 1928, and his death, everyone thought, brought the end to the warlord era, but then new minor warlords have started popping up and this is what we have to contend with today.”

He told how hope had turned to General Chiang Kai-shek who emerged as the leader of the National Revolutionary Army. But many of the more powerful warlords who were not defeated opted to fight against the new national government.

Theo realized they were traveling in a country in the midst of turmoil, a country ruled by bands of thieving warlords. He could see no hope for the Chinese peasant. None whatsoever. At night, curled up in a blanket and nearly freezing, he thought of fresh baked bread and the wonderful aroma that came from the bakery across the street where he lived. He thought about the buxom girl who had brought warm bread to him, rolled up in her apron. He thought how pleasant it would be to be curled up next to her now. Wasn’t that his true life, next to his own people, not like this?

They were two weeks on the road when they came to a village which, unlike all others they encountered, was ghostly still. No kids came running to observe them; no faces peered at them from behind half-opened doors. It was so strange for the village was not abandoned; there were signs of life. Smoke rose from the chimneys of several houses. Something was awry. Dr. Wong fell to the rear and joined Theo at his side as though seeking his comfort and protection. He joined Theo just in time, for just as they entered the village, armed men with rifles and bandoleers of ammunition slug over their shoulders, appeared. Those without rifles flashed mean-looking knives above their heads.

“Warlords,” Dr. Wong muttered. There was little they could do. They continued walking straight ahead. The mob of armed, unsmiling bandits stepped aside to let them pass, with Dr. Wong and Theo following up the rear.

They had gone only a few yards when an officer with medals pinned to his worn quilted coat, stood defiant in the center of the street, leaning heavily on a cane. The sight of him and his henchmen was enough to send chills down anyone’s spine. But then a curious thing happened. Theo became aware that Dr. Wong had suddenly relaxed. When he looked over at the doctor he saw a smile come to his face. Then he broke from ranks and marched directly to the head of the line. A dozen yards from the officer he extended his hand. The soldier saluted and then grabbed Dr. Wong’s hand. The officer then motioned for the marchers to break file and set up camp.

Once they had set up camp, with warming fires in the confines of an enclosed courtyard, Dr. Wong came and explained that the officer was the person he had come to see.

“He sent for me, to attend to his wife who is ailing,” Dr. Wong said. Upon hearing this, the thought angered Theo, that he was not told of the purpose of the expedition. Dr. Wong had used him as a decoy. The doctor continued, speaking in a tone of almost reverence for the officer: “He’s a general, Feng Yu-hsiang, a Christian General. He was the son of an officer in the Qing Imperial Army and had spent his youth immersed in military life. He joined the Army when he was just fourteen, as a deputy soldier. By the age of sixteen, he had proved himself and became a regular soldier. But like many young officers, he was involved in revolutionary activity and was nearly executed for treason. In time he rose to become a powerful general in Chiang Kai-shek’s army, until he criticized Chiang’s failure to resist Japanese aggression. He was stripped of his rank and power and then he joined the Chahar People’s Anti-Japanese Army. He quickly became commander-in-chief with a strength claimed by him to be over 100,000 men.”

Theo never saw the general again after that first appearance, and he felt relieved that he hadn’t, not with Chiang Kai-shek still holding the reins of power over much of China. He knew he was treading on dangerous ground. For him to be captured by Chiang’s solders would mean certain death.

It was the last time Theo saw Dr. Wong, maybe the last time anyone saw him. He vanished into the hills with the general. Theo assumed he attended to the general’s wife. After a few days, Dr. Wong sent word to Theo that he was to return to Canton with the servants. Theo never did learn the fate of his doctor friend. Later on, when Theo was in Singapore, news was that Chiang had put down the Fujian Rebellion. The rebels called themselves The People’s Revolutionary Government of the Republic of China. “Had the doctor been involved in any way?” he asked himself He would never know.

The march back was much quicker and far less troublesome. Theo’s party had papers that granted them free passage, but still Theo wondered what if the wrong warlord had seized power. He knew that some leaders of the National Revolutionary Army’s Eighth Route Army were deployed to southern China to suppress communist rebellion, but instead they negotiated peace with the rebels. In alliance with other Kuomintang forces, the 19th Route leaders broke with Chiang Kai-shek and took control of Fujian and proclaimed a new government. Theo was fortunate that he reached Canton at all, and he was a very happy man with the paintings of Chinese peasants and warlords which he had rolled up and tucked under his arm when he reached Hong Kong. He no longer entertained thought of finding a room in Hong Kong and painting. He was anxious to reach Singapore.

In Canton, Theo sent a cable to Lucas telling him he would meet him in Singapore.

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