Interview

I had watercolors and a pad with me. I did a terrific watercolor of Hong Kong from my hotel room. It took me a day or two to do it, because it’s a clutter of things, and thousands of buildings. I also did a very charming ink sketch of the city. I would do illustrated letters and send them home to my sisters, and I kept my artwork going. I was having a good time. I was seeing the world — or parts of the world. Then after Hong Kong I went to Singapore and checked it out. I took a bicycle ride up the lower Malay Peninsula, and then I bought a passage to Ceylon – now Sri Lanka.

I took a boat over to Ceylon. I absolutely fell in love with Ceylon, and I had my visa renewed. I think it was three weeks, and I got another three weeks, so I was there a little over a month. I bicycled all over Ceylon. It was fabulously arranged by the British. There were dozens of “rest houses” all over the island, where for a very low rent you can get a good night’s sleep and good food. They were established when the British occupied those islands. They liked their comforts. So they built these Dak bungalows all over India and Ceylon.

I liked the people there. I liked the tropical fringes of the island. I liked swimming in the ocean. I liked the long deserted beaches, and the palm trees. They had wonderful elephants. I lived up in the holy city of Kandy, and I was there for Perahera, which is a seventeen day festival where hundreds and hundreds of elephants come, and handsome black guys roam through the streets with giant torches at night. It was an incredible scene. I lived in a funny little hotel right across from the sacred Temple of the Tooth. It was a tooth-relic of Buddha supposedly enshrined in this temple, and all day long you can hear chanting and music from the temple.

David: They had his tooth on display?

Edmund: Yeah. I made drawings of the temple, of women’s fashions, and people I saw in the street. I’d do something, like drawings of what the men and women wore, and then I sent them on home.

Woman in Costume

David: As you would do drawings you would send them home?

Edmund: Yes, I would write letters and send them home. Then I crossed over into India. It’s a long ferryboat ride. And I traveled through the south of India to see the Dravidian art, and temples that are located around southern India.

David: What was your impression of India?

Edmund: It’s mind-boggling, and it’s beautiful. I liked the temperature. It’s an endless cacophony of sounds. There’s an endless flow of humanity. I got up to Bombay, and it’s a fantastic city. But I found the poverty, the condition of people’s lives, and the endlessly crowded streets to be overwhelming. I mean, you just

can’t get away from it. So after about two months there I had to get out, as I just couldn’t handle anymore. It was too intense. You can’t find peace, unless you’re a highly trained yogi. (Laughter)

David: So you’re still on your bike?

Edmund: Yes. I bought passage on a luxurious English liner that was coming from Australia and going to London. I bought a ticket from there to Marseilles. When I was in Yucatan, in Vera Cruz, I had met a charming woman named Christine Brown. She was going to Yucatan, and I was returning from it. We met in a bicycle shop because I had had my bicycle smashed by a truck driver, and she had bicycled from Canada to Yucatan. She was a physiotherapist, and she had worked on children in Canada. She was determined to see Yucatan before she went back to Europe where she lived. So we had lunch together, and we liked each other very much. It was a terrific rapport, although it was just a very short three hours that we were together. She told me if I was ever in Europe to call her.

So I wrote her from Bombay, said I would be arriving in Marseilles, and I hoped that she could meet me. And she did meet me in Marseilles. We bicycled the entire Riviera together, from Marseilles to Mentone – that’s the border of Italy, and then we bicycled up to her home in Megeve and Chamonix, up high in the French Alps. We stayed at her cabin, in a place called Meribel Les Allues. Then we bicycled over into Northern Italy together, and visited her mother at Lake Como and the city of Lugano. Then we went back to the chalet, and I spent another week there.

She began introducing me to her friends, and these French people. I didn’t speak French, and French men are famous for not bothering with you if you don’t speak their language. (Laughter) So I saw the difficulty in thinking about living in a foreign country. I realized that wasn’t for me, that my life was in the United States, and my parents had struggled so to get there. (Laughter) I’d better go back and fulfill their dreams. So I went back to New York by boat. I bicycled down to Canne, and bought a boat passage for New York. And that ended my trip.