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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 8, 2002
Back to school
Yes the sullen unionized teachers of Ontario have condescended to receive our children back into their schools for another year. And the frazzled summer-baked parents of the province have sent these children on their way. Our spendthrift school boards have been dealt with by the strait-arm of the education bureaucracy. And another year of state child-minding has commenced. I was rescued from this scene of squalor the other day while sailing the Internet. By a few stray keystrokes while "googling" I was suddenly projected into another space and time. I discovered the face of an oriental man about 50 by name Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul and immediately recognized it as that of an old friend last seen at age about 12 in the schoolyard of Bangkok Patana. The "Somtow" was slightly confusing for I remembered him as "Cookie". (By the miracle of e-mail he remembered me as "Wuzzie" about an hour later.) We were fellow students in this old-fashioned British private school catering mostly to non-American foreigners but with a few places for the local elite. In the mid-1960s it was three storeys of flaking yellow plaster under a corrugated roof beside a minor "klong" or canal in the jumble of embassy and residence lanes south of Sathorn Tai Road. Though I hadn't heard of him in all these years Cookie had remained vivid to memory as the smartest male human being I had ever met. (Strange to say the most intelligent woman I ever met was also a Thai.) He was my subconscious test of the "mute inglorious Milton dogma" -- which holds that millions of "mute inglorious Miltons" never learn to sing because they don't get proper schooling. Now my extension of this dogma is that millions more who do get proper schooling also never go on to achieve anything. And Cookie would have been my proof for if Cookie had not gone on to write immortal books or compose exalted music the case was closed. As I say he was not a normal kid. He was distantly related to King Mongkut of Siam but there are quite a few like that in modern Thailand. Still most kids do not compose Aeschylean tragedies in verse before the age of 11 let alone set them to music. Fewer still try it in Greek. For that matter not many have even written full-length science fiction novels at that age playing with fairly advanced concepts in physics and cosmology; or are in the habit of discussing "the nature of truth" over sandwiches in the lunch pavilion. I was a bit of a prodigy myself; but I was in awe of Cookie. Another member of our "set" was a Bengali Niloy still not located. He wrote little potted histories as I recall: early dynastic Egypt the Hittites Sumeria that sort of thing. The three of us together with a couple of Bengali stragglers -- Subash Amitav -- were in charge of the termites in the school library and at the core of its dramatic society. (Niloy and I were also plausible spin-bowlers; Amitav could bat; Subash was mostly good at stealing things. Cookie could only stop cricket balls with his nose or spectacles.) I went looking for Cookie several times in later passes through Bangkok. I couldn't trace him for as I now learn he left town for Eton College in 1966 then proceeded to Hollywood California by way of Oxford University. Turns out he is now back in Bangkok; has been composing and directing symphonies; writing arranging and staging Thailand's very first original opera production Madana; and mounting the second Mae Naak. If you are passing through Bangkok this week you must catch the memorial service for 9/11. His Requiem will be performed on Wednesday alongside Mozart's by the Bangkok Symphony and Orpheus Choir both under Somtow Sucharitkul's musical direction. (Apparently it will be covered by CNN.) Truth to tell he is in his second breath as a musical composer having burned out in his mid-twenties after making a fair splash on four continents (but entirely unknown to me). As a kind of self-therapy he settled back to write some 43 books (at least that is how many he published) in an extraordinary range of fictional genres with an uncanny ability to anticipate popular crazes with books that appeared a couple of years too soon. The same goes for his adventures in screenplay where his low budget film The Laughing Dead which he describes as a Mayan-new-age-exorcist-slasher film did achieve a kind of cult status; but Ill Met by Moonlight a gothic punk adaptation of Midsummer Night's Dream came out too far ahead of Baz Lurman's similar treatment of Romeo and Juliet to make any money. Somtow whose fascination with horror he attributes to his mother having taken him to see Hitchcock's Psycho eight times when he was eight years old was been falsely cast as a prophet of "New Age". He did just happen to write at age 11 the poem which became the epitaph of Shirley MacLaine's Don't Fall off the Mountain. (She found this piece entitled "Kith of Infinity" in the Bangkok Post while passing through the city but was under the impression it had been written by an ancient dead sage; years later after establishing his authorship Somtow was able to collect $500.) Moreover his Riverrun Trilogy has become associated with the divination method of bibliomancy. (This is because as Somtow explains the book contains all the tropes of popular culture from the '90s -- myth, sci-fi, and fantasy -- thrown into a cuisinart and served up as a humungous chopped salad. A good psychic could undoubtedly find any answer she wants there. ) But in reality his constant theme is redemption today as when I knew him in childhood. And whereas some critic said about a book in which he reports a vision of the Virgin Mary that It seems to strike at the heart of people's most cherished beliefs, -- Somtow retorts that My thinking's not that far from the Pope's. I'm just coming at it from a completely different direction. Now there was going to be a moral to this story something about the way schools can encourage or discourage the "mute inglorious Miltons" that may pass their way. But I've forgotten what it is. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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