In returning to books I had read long ago, which are in the shelves in the bedroom downstairs I occupied until 2015, I found on the flyleaf in one of the first I read the date and place where I had read it. Recorded in Myra Breckinridge, which Gore Vidal had written in 1968, is ‘Malaysia-Singapore, so I assume I took it with me when I went to join the American university ship on which my parents had been interport lecturers for several years. After my Ordinary Level Examination finished, in December 1969, they asked if we three children could join them. We paid our outward fares of course, but the return on the ship was free, including accommodation and food for five days.
And I left early, some days before the rest, so I could explore something of Malaysia and Singapore. In Kuala Lumpur I stayed with my mother’s friend Jean Viswalingam, and had a day trip too to Penang, and then I left her before the rest of the family arrived and had a few days on my own with their friends the Kulasekarams in Singapore.
And there was another connection between the book and the ship, not just place but also provenance, for it had been sent me by Mickey Raynor, a member of the ship’s faculty who was I think the closest to my parents of the many hundreds they interacted with over the years. As Sports Director she had done the trip quite often, and when in Colombo she stayed at home, and once indeed in the early eighties she stayed on for she was not well. And I had stayed with her in California, when I travelled in America in 1979, and she was the most wonderful of hosts.
Soon after Myra Breckinridge was published I had I read about it as also about Portnoy’s Complaint, both of which dealt with sexuality in ways that had not been written about previously. Naturally I wanted immediately to read both given their obvious appeal to an adolescent faced with unfamiliar sexual urges. I mentioned this to Mickey Raynor and she promised to send me the Vidal, which I assume arrived just before I set off on the trip.
I explored to my heart’s content, having started on such sightseeing in Novermber 1968 when I went with my mother to Madras and stayed there with a family friend while she took a train to Bombay. But I also enjoyed, as I had done there, reading in the new cities I was in, in Jean’s quiet house in Kuala Lumpur, in the palatial judge’s bungalow the Kulasekaram’s occupied in Adam Park. Oddly enough it was in the latter place that I finally found and read Portnoy’s Complaint when I visited the Kulasekarams there for the last time in 1981.
I did not think very highly of that book, but I hugely enjoyed Vidal’s about a woman who turns up in Los Angeles to claim the half share of an invaluable property that had belonged to the mother of Myron Breckinridge whose widow she claimed to be. The mother’s brother is not pleases about this, and thIt had been wholly used by the mere are little passages in the book of his musings on how to deal with the problem.
But the bulk of the book is Myra’s account of her sexual aspirations, for she is determined to destroy the concept of male supremacy. Her antics in this regard make for entertaining reason, as do her constant references to the magic of films and stars of Hollywood’s golden era.
There is a memorable supporting cast, a handsome aspirant actor and his winsome girlfriend, a greedy New York psychologist and a self-indulgent gossip columnist. Though I suspect the book is not widely available now, it would be unfair to explain how Myra asserts her claims. Suffice it to say that Vidal never wrote anything better, nor more cynical in its subversion of what he would term sexual myths.
The first two pictures are of Malaysia and then, after a youthful Vidal and the book, there are three of Singapore, pictures I used too in Off the Beaten Track, which indulged fond memories of that early journey.