The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei by Sachaverell Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Take one well-born aging Englishman, with a classical education that has centered around Europe, throw him into Asia, and watch him flounder when he’s not in places that were once part of the British Empire. The intellectual consternation that engulfs this sort of gentleman should be amusing but his excellent education keeps that from happening. Instead pomposity takes over, with rare moments of enchantment that veer on the naive. 

For a prime example of this, try to read Sachaverell Sitwell’s The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei.  A member of England’s hereditary peerage and the grandson of an Earl, Sitwell went to Eton and Oxford and was first published when he was twenty-five. This volume of poetry launched a career of writing over fifty more books, almost all devoted to European art, music, and architecture. When he began to age, he turned his attention to other continents, venturing to Japan and Peru, but never deviating from his Eurocentric point of view.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei is a misleading title which desperately needed a follow-up subtitle along the lines of And Other Travels in Asia, since only one brief chapter is devoted to what is now spelled “Banteay Srei.” This is probably a mercy because Sitwell was ill at ease in that lovely place or anywhere else in the Angkor complex. That he devotes only five chapters to Cambodia is a relief but that’s almost enough to sink this book.

Sitwell starts off in a sprightly fashion by falling in love with Bangkok. His time there is brief and comfortable, with a room in the Oriental Hotel and trips to places that aren’t yet tourist cliches--The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, floating markets which are still plentiful and utilitarian in the early 1960s, a night at a Thai boxing match. There he concludes that muay thai is “more serious and less amusing than the Sumo wrestling in Japan” and worries that an injured boxer may never be able to fight again. He’s delighted by the broken crockery that ornaments temple chedis and is impressed by the air-con in a Chinese restaurant that had his wife begging for a towel to use as a shawl during dinner. It’s sweet to see him fall in love with Thailand’s capital, which he explores without comparisons or judgements. Those he saves for Cambodia, where he seems determined to denigrate the glories of Angkor.

Although Sitwell confesses he came to Angkor “after half a lifetime of anticipation,” the heat, “of a kind and degree never experienced before,” and the humidity which “was something excessive,” appears to have flattened his enthusiasm. Although he immediately claims “the approach to Angkor Wat is on a grander scale than anything in the living world” and is later awed by the Bayon’s face-towers, he swiftly begins to describe the “sham buildings” constructed by people who had no conception of how to build a room that offered space. He lapses into memories of blitzed London during World War I and begins to long for the “cooing of doves” and a “wood of bluebells.” If it weren’t for his frequent quotes of Zhou Daguan’s eyewitness accounts of Angkor, there would be no substance to his observations, which conclude with “this is a whole dead city…too big even for poetry.”

Things don’t improve vastly in Nepal, where Sitwell becomes obsessed with the sexual nature of temple paintings. He tears himself away from erotic art long enough to write a detailed description of “a living goddess in Katmandu,” a heavily made-up child of twelve, the sight of whom made him decide she was “wonderfully, and a little pruriently exciting.” Once again he wallows in comparisons to Greece, Italy, and Spain and it’s impossible not to wish for the ability to slap him.

India, since the Empire had left it twenty years before, is a sad disappointment to Sitwell, who mourns that hotel dining rooms no longer serve proper English meals and that Delhi’s “houses with pillared porticos and nice gardens” are no longer inhabited by British families. Except for the brilliant colors of women’s clothing, Delhi is a disappointment but he consoles himself with a visit to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque, which he manages to view without his customary litany of European comparisons. Jaipur’s gardens, however, “did credit to English seedsmen,” and the Italian lakes immediately come into play when he goes to Udaipur. At Bombay he’s thrilled to find streets with English names and statues of British luminaries which might prove to console him when he discovers the Caves of Ajanta “are now too far gone with age to give pleasure.”

At this point anyone who’s persisted in reading Sitwell’s observations would be justified in saying the same of him. It’s a vast relief when he goes to Ceylon and becomes enthralled with its beauty. Perhaps his lack of jaundiced criticisms are because in Columbo he’s able to have a cocktail. “After a sojourn in India the inventor of Singapore Slings deserves commendation.”

Sitwell, sadly, does not--in fact the only way that his book should be read is in the company of several Singapore Slings as anesthesia against pomposity. The reader is warned, as Sitwell’s Victorian forbears used to say--stock up on gin and limes before entering his realm of boring ethnocentricism.~Janet Brown