Anthony Burgess's cloacal obsession: squat-toilets at the OK Hotel, Brunei Town

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• published: 13 Feb 2014
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Anthony Burgess and his wife stayed at the OK Hotel in Bandar Brunei on their immediate arrival in the sultanate of Brunei. The establishment had Turkish squat-toilets (also known as Nile pans) and featured the sounds of 'cheerful hoicking' and spitting. As H.G. Wells might have put it, 'Mr Burgess has a cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation. Coarse, unfamiliar words are scattered about unpleasantly, and it may seem to many, needlessly.' After living at the OK Hotel for some time, Burgess and his wife 'were given a very strange flat on three floors, access to the two highest of which was by means of a fire escape. The bedroom was as open to visitors as the kitchen and living-room, and curious Ibans and Malays would climb the metal stairway to gawp at Lynne and myself attempting the act of love. There was no bathroom, but there was an outside "tong" filled with monsoon water in which we were intended to sluice, publicly, naked.' After protests, the couple were allocated 'a tiny geometrical public works department structure in which the water supply depended on the rains and the electrical current blazed, dimmed, died, reawoke, dimmed, died. The PWD furniture was full of termites, and the vanished arm of an armchair crumbled at the touch.' Burgess continues (writing in 'Little Wilson and Big God'): 'The little dwelling was one of four, attached one to the others, in a desolate spot....Across the road dwelt...a Malay named Azahari....We were all...white, but we were poor white. Next door was an Australian road-builder living with, or perhaps married to, a girl of the Land Dyaks. Next door to this ménage was another mixed one — a British under-officer of Passport Control genuinely married to an Iban or Sea Dyak....Between [the] two girls there was much enmity and scratching and hair-tearing. The fourth house housed...two Italians from Piombino, father and son, Nando and Paolo Tasca. They had come from Tripoli to cut marble and fit it on the floor of the mosque.' The character Lydgate in Burgess's Brunei novel 'Devil of a State' is similarly resentful about the accommodation that is his lot: '...a row of mean houses....The door of Lydgate's new house swung in a sudden...breeze, swung in a curiously deformed way, as if no longer firmly anchored to the jamb. Lydgate entered and began to weep dry tears...at the cheap insult of the housing board's allocation. No fan, no power-points, termite-hollowed chairs, a table as rough as a butcher's bench, a floor with loose boards, damp on the walls and ceiling. He sat down, his trembling hand on the arm-rest. The arm-rest crumbled like paper.' Anthony Burgess's time in Brunei: After a brief period of leave in England during 1958, Burgess secured a teaching job at the Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin College in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, a sultanate on the northern coast of the island of Borneo. Brunei had been a British protectorate since 1888, and was not to achieve independence until 1984. In the sultanate Burgess sketched the novel that, when it was published in 1961, was to be called 'Devil of a State'. About this time Burgess "collapsed" in a Brunei classroom while teaching history. He was expounding on the causes and consequences of the Boston Tea Party at the time. He was suffering from the effects of prolonged heavy drinking, of the oppressive Southeast Asian climate, of chronic constipation, and of overwork and professional disappointment. As he put it, the scions of the sultans and of the elite in Brunei "did not wish to be taught", because the free-flowing abundance of oil guaranteed their income and privileged status. He may also have wished for a pretext to abandon teaching and get going full-time as a writer, having made a late start. Describing the Brunei debacle to an interviewer over twenty years later, Burgess commented: "One day in the classroom I decided that I'd had enough and to let others take over. I just lay down on the floor out of interest to see what would happen." On another occasion he described it as "a willed collapse out of sheer boredom and frustration". He told the interviewer Jeremy Isaacs in 1987: "I was driven out of the Colonial Service for political reasons that were disguised as clinical reasons." He also alluded to this in an interview with Don Swaim, explaining that after his wife Lynne had said something "obscene" to the UK Queen's consort, Prince Philip, during an official visit, the colonial authorities turned against him. He had already earned their displeasure, he told Swaim, by writing for the newspaper of the revolutionary opposition party the Parti Rakyat Brunei, and for his friendship with its leader A.M. Azahari.