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hegira, he had acquired every Literary Guild book club choice of the last thirty years. They are now stacked in the glass-fronted bookcases until my reference books come from Italy…if I decide actually to live in a so-called “homeland” daily grown ever more repressive.

    At work in the La Rondinaia studio with a white cat waiting for me to thank her for the splendid rat that she has just delivered.
    I see that a writer in this morning’s
Los Angeles Times
chides Sontag for not telling
all
to everyone about her affairs with so many fascinating women. Rousseau made the same complaint of Montaigne who was equally reticent about his private life. In the decades that I knew Susan slightly I was dimly aware of her private life and had no interest in it—nor anyone else’s for that matter unless it was, in some way, comical. I was also not particularly interested in her meditations on subjects like photography. What did matter to the non-specialized world was her views on war and peace in the Balkans and on the civil war in the Middle East where she sometimes offended the right people. That’s enough of death for now.
    I’ve just switched off the television with its endless images of the floods in Southeast Asia. I think fondly of all the winters that Howard and I spent in Bangkok at the Oriental Hotel when it was still just a single high-rise building at the edge of a dark Klong. The manager was a young Swiss married to a Thai girl. I’ve not been back for several years but I am told that the two of them are still there, if somewhat emeritus. They also presided over the glamorous remodeling some years ago.

EIGHT

    Outside my windows here, the familiar clatter of rain on palm fronds transports me to Bangkok. The monsoon is early, I think, moving backward in time. I must get dressed for lunch with Crown Princess Chumbhot. Presently—I’m in past time now—I shall leave the W. Somerset Maugham suite where I stay in the old section of the hotel, while Howard is in the new tower. Many suites are named for writers who have stayed in the hotel or its predecessor, starting with Joseph Conrad. Neither of us has ever stayed in the Gore Vidal suite with its view of a series of Klong-side cement factories bedecked with orchids.
    We meet in the lobby. A hotel car takes us to lunch through heavy traffic. My mood lightens. Better to be back there in memory than linger here in fact. “Let the dead past bury its dead,” as my grandfather used to intone with measured glee as he gradually took up final residence in that very same past as I am now trying to do.
    In the sixties, we acquired a new friend in Bangkok, the old Crown Princess Chumbhot, a tiny woman whose palace looks to my Western eye like no more than several highly polished teakwood boxes gleaming side by side in a sunny garden. Since one must never physically tower over a Thai royal, she had placed a series of stone steps beside her front door where she could station herself in a sort of pulpit and thus greet, sublimely, from above, Western visitors. Her father had been Thai ambassador to London where she had gone to school. She spoke with an Edwardian English accent not to mention wit.
    Whenever we arrived at the Oriental, the hotel would alert her and she would then invite us to lunch with various interesting folk both Thai and
farang
, as foreigners are known. Apropos our last lunch I got two advance calls from the Crown Princess (she had married what was to have been a king of Thailand, thus making her Crown Princess; when her husband was passed over for the succession, she retained her title).
    “I was very remiss,” said the cool voice on the telephone. “I had asked a few people to our lunch but then I quite forgot to tell you who they are.” I said I’d be delighted no matter who…
    “Don’t speak too soon,” she said. “One of the guests is a
fellow
author, a Mrs. Barbara Cartland.” I was overjoyed. The ongoing pleasure of Bangkok is that people you