"The 'eighties'," he sighed. "Hawaii was Hawaii then. Unspoiled, a land of opera bouffe, with old Kalakaua sitting on his golden throne." ... "It's been ruined," he complained sadly.
It is mandatory for anyone who has visited Hawaii more than once to tell everyone within earshot, "It was so much nicer [or "uncrowded" or "romantic" or "authentically Hawaiian"] last time I was here!"
You won't be cured of such comments -- for of such is human nature -- but you may gain a little perspective from reading Earl Derr Biggers's 1925 detective novel, The House without a Key. The novel, ostensibly about the solving of a Honolulu murder, is interesting to us today primarily for its extensive description of the physical and social world of Honolulu in the 1920s.
Parenthetically, the novel also introduced to the world that master detective for the Honolulu Police Department, Mr. Charlie Chan. Detective Chan's role in the novel (and in the following year's movie) was somewhat minimal, but his character spawned a series of five more Charlie Chan novels, a large number of Hollywood films, radio series on four different radio networks, a television series in 1956-57, and several series of comic books. A cultural icon, obviously, but one largely forgotten today.
Biggers wrote his novel at the Halekulani Hotel on the beach at Waikiki. The hotel's famous indoor-outdoor restaurant and bar has been named for many years the "House without a Key." I haven't been able to determine whether it was named after the book -- a best-seller in its day -- or vice versa. The murder and much of the plot takes place in the Waikiki mansion of a Honolulu businessman, an estate that seems to be located at or near the present location of the Halekulani. The novel makes a point of the fact that the house -- like almost all Hawaiian houses at the time -- was never locked.
The novel reminds us that the 1920s were an era untouched by today's mass tourism. Honolulu was reached by a week-long voyage by ship from San Francisco. Everyone knew the arrival times of the next ships.
Waikiki was a romantic stretch of beach, occupied by only a few hotels catering to the upper crust of American society -- primarily, in this book, at least, New England society. Waikiki -- today merely a district of Honolulu -- was separated from the city proper by about three miles of rice paddies and other farmland. A streetcar connected the two areas, and is frequently used in the book, even by the wealthy who owned their own cars.
The hero -- John Quincy Winterslip, an impossibly young, strait-laced, and naïve thirty-year-old Boston banker -- has come to the islands to visit his Aunt Minerva, a middle-aged woman who the family fears has stayed too long in Hawaii and has succumbed to its lotus-eating charms.
Her mind strayed back to the Honolulu she had known in Kalakaua's day, to the era when the Islands were so naive, so colorful -- unspoiled. Ruined now, Dan had said, ruined by a damned mechanical civilization.
Her wistfulness is a theme that runs throughout the book, a longing for a lost Hawaii, a longing that seems so strange to us now, living in an over-crowded era when Honolulu in the 1920s itself represents a long-lost paradise.
A reporter covering the murder investigation sounds the same theme, discussing the harbor:
"As far as I'm concerned, the harbor of Honolulu has lost its romance. Once this was the most picturesque water-front in the world, my boy. And now look a at the damned thing!" The reporter relighted his pipe. "Charlie can tell you -- he remembers. The old ramshackle, low-lying wharves. Old Naval Row with its sailing ships. The wooden-hulled steamers with a mast or two -- not too proud to use God's good winds occasionally. The bright little row-boats, the Aloha, the Manu, the Emma. Eh, Chan? ... oh, well, those days are gone for ever now. Just like Galveston or Seattle. Yes, sir, this harbor of Honolulu has lost its romance."
This is a book you can read and enjoy for its atmosphere, and for its sense of history. You can ignore the rather dull and formulaic "mystery," as well as the controversy over the "racist" portrayal of Charlie Chan's smiling, outward appearance of passivity and his "ah so!" use of the English language. Enjoy it for its atmosphere, and also for its striking reminder that the golden age always exists a generation or so earlier.
To Biggers's characters of the 1920s, the golden age of Hawaii was that of the 1880s, just as the golden age of Paris for the young hero in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris was that of the 1920s. And as a character in that film reminds us:
Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in.
We know this to be true, as did Earl Derr Biggers in 1925. But we don't care, because nostalgia for a golden age is so bitter-sweetly satisfying and fulfills so well an apparent human need to believe that a better world is not only possible but was once, "for one brief shining moment," actually achieved.
Indulge yourself. Remind yourself of a forgotten Hawaii. It's a fast read.
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