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Third World. ‘His upbringing had made him in many ways indifferent to the comforts and
luxuries of this century; it would stand him in good stead, in Asia’ (HW, 69).
When he devotes himself to the search for Ly Keang, it is called ‘religious commitment,
not to be questioned’ (HW, 436), and this application of Krishna’ Supreme Utterance is how
Langford has lived all of his life. His devotion leads Harvey Drummond to wonder about the
motives behind the outer calm and inner power which enable Langford to overcome the fears
and passions normal to men. Drummond says he
soon came to notice two things that weren’t quite ordinary about him: his
unchanging calm and gentleness, and the impression he gave of having a secret
life. I’m sure the air of secrecy wasn’t conscious; he was never pretentious. It
was simply an atmosphere he created around him, probably without knowing
it. (HW, 158)
Searching for the source of his secret life, Drummond mentions Langford’s contacts
with Donald Mills, the ‘resident spook for the Australian Secret Intelligence Service’, and his
relationship with Claudine Phan, the Saigon ‘Dragon Lady’, but especially important ‘was his
preoccupation with the outcast, the vulnerable, and those who were fighting for doomed
causes’ (HW, 159). Others see Langford as ‘fighting for losers’, and his commitment to
Cambodia when the onslaught of the Khmer Rouge is proving irresistible would normally
support such an analysis. Langford, however, has ‘become like a lover: unable to accept that
some final disaster could happen to deprive him of the loved one’ (HW, 260). Yet, Langford’s
true commitment is not for Cambodia or its corrupt rulers, but, he explains, for ‘the men and
the women. They’re what matter. They’re what always matter.’ Harvey Drummond notes
that such a pronouncement from anyone else would be ‘obvious; even innocuous’, but from
Langford, this man with the secret life, whose philanthropy was taking on ever new, greater
proportions, it is taken without question:
Was it something in his voice? Time’s projector has jammed; we’re all fixed
in stillness. I look down at my hand on the table and can’t move it, and look
back again at Langford. His face, in the light of one of the wall lamps, seems
suddenly like a fanatic’s: stony and angelic. (HW, 241-42)
Langford is becoming a sort of saint in the tradition of the Bodhisattva. He is no hero of
imperial or modernist traditions, nor can roots be readily found in other post-modern heroic
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