Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor
From 1985-1991 I taught at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. The poet and critic D. J. Enright had been British Professor of English there during 1957-1959, and I have borrowed the title of his excellent and witty Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor for this page of my own journalism.
In those years I contributed to The Bangkok Post, Living in Thailand, The Irish Times, The Irish Press, The Sunday Tribune and to the airline magazines. The Bangkok Post paid one baht a word, encouraging the verbose. Photos were more lucrative and so I bought a secondhand camera on Sanam Luang and put together features for the Sunday supplement on anything that took my fancy.
It was that rare opportunity in journalism to write about what one liked - and what I still like - art, food, travel, literature, photography and education. It was also an excuse, if one were needed, to become a flâneur in Bangkok, a city that literally grew up around me in those far-off Eighties.
On a couple of articles I collaborated with French photographer Jean-Leo Dugast. I would also like to salute here two warriors of freelance journalism, both old Bangkok hands, Wayne Burns and John Clewley.
Included here is my first book review, of Ian McEwan’s first novel The Cement Garden, which appeared in Hibernia in Ireland in 1979, and a review of Jean Rhys’s autobiography which appeared in The Irish Press in 1980, both papers now defunct. David Marcus (1924-2009), then literary editor at The Irish Press, published my first short stories in New Irish Writing and started me on my career as a reviewer.
While in Rome during 1998-1999 I wrote two pieces on James Joyce and Oscar Wilde for the magazine Wanted in Rome.
I thought it would be fun to resurrect these old articles and to give them a second, digital life.
Blowin' in the wind
 |
The ideal kite-flying age must be ten or thereabouts. The ideal country must be back of the north wind with acres of rolling uplands and not a car, telephone line or hedge in sight. Preferably you should have made your kite yourself, from ‘sally rods’ – thin, supple willow switches cut from roadside hedges – and covered with drum-tight papier mâché, the glue made from flour and water. |
The Bangkok Post April 3 1988 | Full Story |
Jean Rhys: Smile Please, an unfinished autography
 |
Jean Rhys died earlier this year, in her late eighties, after a lengthy and painful illness. Her reputation as one of the greatest novelists of her time, and the only major writer to come out of the West Indies, rests on a small cluster of novels published in the Twenties and Thirties, and principally on Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, and hailed by the critics as a masterpiece. |
The Irish Press 1980 | Full Story |
If their fathers could see them
 |
We’re walking through the dripping trees under my shared umbrella: P. J., the girl with fair hair from Korat and David, half in and half out of the driving monsoon rain. We’re singing what we know of ‘We are the World’. My helpers peter out after the rousing chorus and I’m left alone with the banal verses. The hard rain falls on the stocked fishing ponds and dense jungle. |
The Bangkok Post December 15 1985/ The Sunday Tribune May 18 1986| Full Story |
A school in the woods
 |
The Children’s Village School in Kanchanaburi province is a welcome and lively departure from traditional ways of thinking about education. Situated 37 kilometers north of Kanchanaburi town, on the banks of the Kwai Yai River, the setting must be every child’s dream, and every adult’s for that matter. |
The Bangkok Post January 25 1987 | Full Story |
A literary journey through Thailand
 |
‘Mr. Somerset Maugham likes his martini served in a very chilled, long-stemmed glass. The Vermouth should be Noilly Prat, the gin must be Tanqueray. There is also a little secret to Mr. Maugham’s martini. You should first pour a small amount of Benedictine into the empty glass and swirl it about, creating a lining. This adds a subtle taste and aroma to Mr. Maugham’s liking.’ |
The Irish Times September 27 1986 / The Bangkok Post February 7 1988 | Full Story |
Last days of a beer-hall agitator
 |
Adolf Hitler started out in life as a casual labourer and a third-rate commercial artist. He rose through the ranks of the beer-hall agitators to command an empire which stretched from the Caucasus to the Atlantic. He ended his days with a self-administered bullet through the mouth in a bunker fifty feet under the grounds of the Chancellery in Berlin. That was on April 30, 1945 |
The Bangkok Post April 1989 | Full Story |
The writing and the blood on the wall
 |
Earlier this year saw the first appearance in the Soviet Union of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, originally published in the West in 1957, and for which the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. |
The Bangkok Post 1987 | Full Story |
Bleak house: Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden
 |
To readers of Mr. McEwan’s previous two books, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets, the territory covered by this, his first novel, will be somewhat familiar. There is a crystallisation of his preoccupations in the stories – guilt, incest, urban waste – in a tightly controlled narrative and setting, at once contemporary and bizarre. |
Hibernia November 9 1979 | Full Story |
The Picasso Museum in Paris
 |
It’s thirteen years since Picasso died, in April 1973, at Mougins in the South of France. It was my last year of school and I turned up for class that day in mourning, dressed head-to-toe in black. |
Living in Thailand August 1986 / Humsafar Volume 8 Number 1 | Full Story |
Ronald Searle: to the Kwai and back
 |
There is an often-told anecdote about the SS guard or camp commander in Auschwitz or Dachau who played Bach in the evenings while the ovens were loaded. The idea behind the telling is to debunk the view that art is somehow ennobling. |
Living in Thailand October 1986 | Full Story |
Images of a night person: Jerry Burchard
 |
It is always a good maxim to take ‘official’ culture with a pinch of salt, to remove oneself from the generality that “what most people like most of the time” is in fact a country’s culture. Very often it is some fabrication of a ruling class, or an offshoot of tourism, or the mere vanity of an era. |
The Bangkok Post June 22 1986 | Full Story |
Purple hours: Oscar Wilde in Rome
 |
In 1875, during his first summer vacation from Oxford, Oscar Wilde travelled to Italy. He was joined in Florence by his old professor of ancient history at Trinity College, Dublin, Rev John Pentland Mahaffy. They toured Florence, had supper in Bologna and took in the sights of Venice... |
Wanted in Rome September16 1998 | Full Story |
James Joyce's exile in Rome
 |
“We want somebody completely dedicated to our firm, so you must not ask for a timetable that allows for extra jobs.” Thus the private bank of Nast-Kolb and Schumacher in Rome sought to put the screws on its prospective employee, the 25-year-old Irish writer James Joyce. Joyce had other ideas: “I hope to find time to finish my novel in Rome within the year |
Wanted in Rome December 9 1998 | Full Story |
Simone de Beauvoir 1908-1986
 |
When I was going to school, in Ireland in the early 1970s, young girls of good family attended the local convent and wore their uniforms just below the knee. They read what they were told to read and got moony-eyed gazing at American magazines with pin-ups of David Cassidy and T-Rex |
Living in Thailand October 1986 | Full Story |
Sojourn in Sri Lanka
 |
I woke in the dark with the bottle of Beefeaters gin considerably lower and a fierce thirst. Ever since Don Muang Airport, where the security guard took the battery out of my alarm clock, I’d been at sea about time. I went down through the empty Palm Beach Hotel, its only guest, along the edge of the pool and out into the street. |
The Bangkok Post August 28 1988 | Full Story |
Knobbly Chanel suit: Mary McCarthy 1912-1989
 |
Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963) was one of those paperbacks, along with The Little Red Schoolbook and Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which circulated under cover of darkness in St. Louis’ Convent in Monaghan, Ireland. |
The Bangkok Post November 26 1989 | Full Story |
The Thai Cookery School at The Oriental
 |
In a quiet, cool room by the river the gentlemen from Japan are bending low to smell the jasmine-scented water. They turn appreciatively towards their translator who explains the process. The jasmine flowers are marinated in the water for two or three days, the petals changed every eight to ten hours so that only the freshest essence is extracted. |
The Bangkok Post December 1986 | Full Story |
Waiting by the wall
 |
If you go down the quays and turn right you can’t miss it. There’s a pub on the corner. Just follow the girls.’Those were my directions to Windmill Lane Studios on a very windy, rainy day in Dublin. The studios have become synonymous with the Irish rock band U2 and latterly with such rising novae as Hothouse Flowers. |
The Bangkok Post November 27 1988 | Full Story |
Quest to the Kwai
 |
These days the death railway, as the Allied prisoners of war gruesomely called it, has a new lease of life. You can take the small diesel train from Thonburi station in Bangkok. It travels right up to the end of the line, where it peters out in a patch of nondescript jungle at Nam Tok, three hundred kilometers northwest of the Thai capital and near the closed border with Burma. |
The Irish Times July 12 1986 | Full Story |
Thai break
 |
There’s an inscription on one of the many headstones in the Allied War Cemetery just outside the small town of Kanchanaburi, the fording point of the River Kwai in Western Thailand. It’s in Irish: Go ndéanfaidh Dia trócaire ar a anam I came across it by accident while rambling through the neat rows of war dead. |
Cara (Aer Lingus) 1989 | Full Story |
Chakrabhand: Thai puppet master
 |
Even a cursory glance at Thai art – be it the scrolled tomato skin masquerading as a rose on your dinner plate, or a masterpiece of mural painting – reveals its magnificent bias towards detail and exactness. |
Living in Thailand April 1986 | Full Story |
Ritual of the topknot
 |
One morning, Lord Shiva, rising from his couch on the summit of Mount Kailaca, bathed and dressed his streaming hair and announced: 'Now it shall be our pleasure to institute a propitiatory rite that will in future be adopted by all and drift into permanent custom.' This Brahmin custom, which subsequently became widespread among the peoples of Asia, is the tying up of the hair into a topknot. |
South-East Asia Traveller | Full Story |
Oh East is East and West is West
 |
This is a special year in Thailand for two reasons. It has been designated by the Tourism Authority here as ‘Visit Thailand Year’. Extra efforts are being made in many of the tourist services to ensure that the country will show its best face and thereby boost an industry that, after rice, is its chief revenue earner. |
The Irish Times | Full Story |
The novel is alive and kicking
 |
It used to be said that the novel was dying. Then it was reported to be dead. A wake was held, drink taken, and a big funeral wound its way through the libraries and the groves of academe. It made a beautiful corpse. The Commonwealth countries sent a wreath. The developing world breathed a sigh of relief – now they could concentrate on their TOEFL and forget about those ideas upsetting the applecart. There were speeches by old fogeys. We were to go back and watch the viddyscreens and forget about this business of reading. |
The Bangkok Post | Full Story |
All you ever wanted to know about an Irish Christmas
 |
One of the moral dilemmas of late childhood that everybody worries over is: where do babies come from? In Ireland, 25 years ago, this would be answered with the equally perplexing: why don’t you go and play football. |
The Bangkok Post | Full Story |
Ireland: the end of the world
 |
On early maps of the world cartographers inscribed ‘here be monsters’ above the amorphous island of Ireland, floating in the Atlantic on the westernmost edge of Europe. It was considered the end of the known world. |
The Bangkok Post April 3 1988 | Full Story |
From stones to Shakespeare: a history of computing
 |
Two experiences led me to think that the computer had made its mark on the way we think. A few years ago I taught a bunch of six-year-olds how to tell the time. I drew a big chalk circle on the blackboard and started marking off twelve segments to represent a watch. No matter how many times I went over the half hours and the quarter pasts, the little hand and the big hand, the kids never got the point. They could all read numbers. ‘Watches aren’t round anyway,’ a little girl at the back of the class informed me, ‘they’re square. |
The Bangkok Post | Full Story |
Bill Bryson: Neither Here Nor There
 |
Bill Bryson’s love affair with over here began back in the heady days of Europe on $5 a day, in the company of Katz, the frat-man who barfed and bonked his way out of middle America. Twenty years later, Bryson is on the road again, wisely solo this time, taking us on an irreverent romp around all the watering holes and a few dried-up puddles. |
The Irish Times November 23 1991| Full Story |