Paul Cravath and the seeds of Earth In Flower
>>Go to photos by Paul Cravath
On 11th January 1975, a curly-haired gentleman by the name of Paul Cravath arrived in Phnom Penh to begin a belated study of Khmer classical dance. He had been invited by Hang Thun Hak, at that time the most respected authority on the classical dance form in Cambodia. The fact that Paul made his entrance just in time for the fall of Phnom Penh, when other foreigners were leaving in droves, plus his boundless and single-minded enthusiasm for the classical dance, quickly made us firm friends. Paul had had polio when he was a child, so he was lame and walked with difficulty. But, as Kent Davis later observed, “his mind danced”.
Epic Odyssey
Paul left Phnom Penh on 5th April 1975, as the Khmer Rouge stranglehold tightened, with nothing but a bag of documents, notes and photographs. For the next ten years he continued his research in Thailand and Hawaii, and in 1987 submitted his doctoral thesis entitled “Earth In Flower”. I contributed a few photographs and a great deal of futile encouragement (and nagging) to get it published. Paul stubbornly refused to allow any editing of his 680-page dissertation, so it hung in limbo. In 1990 I received a letter from him saying that, after keeping it for two years, the University of California at Berkeley had “declined to publish” his thesis. With the letter he sent me a thin booklet, “Apsara: The Feminine in Cambodian Art”.
The very same booklet was discovered fifteen years later by Kent Davis, who found Paul’s name in the notes section with some intriguing observations and references to his “unpublished dissertation”. Kent, an enterprising apsara aficionado, recognised the importance of Paul’s work, thirty years after its genesis, and in 2007 he published it as a monumental volume. The print run was projected at 1000, but somehow only 886 were produced. It was printed in hardback on 514 pages of fine paper, and the cover was bright red with bold yellow lettering. You would notice it on any bookshelf. Many copies of the First Edition were donated to libraries. Although they spent many hours on the phone discussing the book, Kent Davis and Paul Cravath met only once.
Out of the Ashes
On April 17th 2008, the 33rd anniversary of the Khmer Rouge’s triumphal entry into Phnom Penh, Kent’s house was devastated by fire. His valuable collection of over 2000 rare books was destroyed, and with them some copies of “Earth In Flower”. In 2014, EIF came out in an elusive revised paperback edition (which I have never seen). On 23rd December 2020, Dr. Paul Cravath died peacefully in New Mexico at the age of 76. In September 2024, storm surge from Hurricane Helene swept through Kent’s house in Florida and 68 remaining copies of the First Edition were irreparably damaged. Only 56 remained.
As he told me of this disaster, Kent mentioned that luckily he still had some undamaged photos taken in 1975 that Paul had given him for the book, and he sent me some scans. This was an exciting discovery, because they are in colour (though reproduced in monochrome in the book) and are only a sample of more to come. They were probably the last photos of the Cambodian classical dancers taken by anyone before the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh.