Beyond the Coral Sea: Travels in the Old Empires of the South-West Pacific. Michael Moran
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technically an ‘enemy’, he was given financial support to proceed with his work in New Guinea, first at Port Moresby and then on the island of Mailu. He also made two long trips to the Trobriand Islands from 1915 to 1918 where he followed the example set by the great Russian pioneering ‘ethnologist’, Nikolai Miklouho-Maclay, and formally introduced the concept of extended contact and methodological fieldwork into anthropology. The complex rituals of yam cultivation, the kula trading ring and, most notoriously, the liberated sexual practices of the Trobriand islanders, gave rise to a series of remarkable publications. His works became seminal studies of their kind, controlled, objective, classical and charming accounts of remote peoples. But his private diaries, written mainly in Polish,1 reveal a more complex figure, a man riven by doubt and boredom, a hypochondriac besieged by dreams and fantasies, a puritan wrestling lecherous demons nightly under the mosquito net. At a particularly low point he wrote, ‘On the whole my feelings towards the natives are decidedly leaning towards, “Exterminate the brutes.”’2 They reveal a man who had embarked on a painful journey of self-revelation. This contradictory character read novels of contained passion such as Vilette, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, classical French works such as Phedre and the rhapsodic Lettres Persanes, even Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in the midst of a Trobriand pagan paradise. On bad days, unable to work, he would leaf through the naughty caricatures in old copies of the French magazine, La Vie Parisienne.
Constructively sublimating his eroticism was difficult. He became infatuated with the owner of The Samarai Hotel, the soon-to-be war widow Flora Gofton, and accused himself of libidinous thoughts:
… on the one hand I write sincere passionate letters to Rozia [his fiancée Elsie Masson], and at the same time am thinking of dirty things à la Casanova.
He felt he was betraying the ‘sacramental love’ of this nurse from Melbourne. In his mind he undressed and fondled the wife of the island doctor, calculating how long it would take him to persuade her into bed. He punished himself with work and exercise. Urging himself to ‘stop chasing skirts’, he cultivated a solitary passion for making tortoiseshell combs for Elsie, spending hours at this odd task, accusing himself at one point of ‘turtleshell mania’. His controversial and explicit work The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia was published in 1929 with a preface by the sexologist Havelock Ellis. Not altogether surprisingly, it celebrates the magic of pagan love free of Christian guilt.
Despite his scientific training he had a creative temperament, beset by the demons of sensual temptation and metaphysical alienation:
… I have got the tendency to morbid exaggeration … There is a craving in me for the abnormal, the sensational, the queer …
In his diary he wrote descriptions of the Samarai landscape that possess the intensity and heightened feelings of German Expressionist painting:
The evening before: the poisonous verdigris of Sariba lies in the sea, the colours of blazing or phosphorescent magenta with here and there pools of cold blue reflecting pink clouds and the electric green or Saxe-blue sky … the hills shimmering with deep purples and intense cobalt of copper ore … clouds blazing with intense oranges, ochres and pinks.
He wrestled with language and culture like his compatriot and friend Joseph Conrad, a similarly-displaced Pole. Some commentators spoke of him, rather inaccurately, as the Conrad of anthropology. This he never was, possessing more of the Nabokovian ‘precision of poetry and intuition of science’, qualities the great enchanter impressed on his literature students at Cornell. But the prose of the diary, written partly in the Trobriand Islands, does share similar unsettling qualities to those we find in Conrad’s tale Heart of Darkness set in the Congo. Both writers pressure language to its limits. Malinowski was seeking a cultural truth, the resolution of an identity crisis.
‘Bronio’ felt that islands symbolised the imprisonment of existence, yet, ‘At Samarai I felt at home, en pays de connaissance [in the world of knowledge],’ he writes. His fastidious nature was repelled by what he considered the inhospitable, drunken and wretched representatives of European humanity he found on Samarai, how they contrasted so depressingly with the natural beauty surrounding him. The ‘part-civilised’ local villagers he found there offended him equally. He would compulsively circle the island on this path like a caged panther. He sometimes felt he was merely exchanging the prison of self for the prison of cultural research. Yet Malinowski redefined the role of the ethnologist, his work expressing a romantic love for non-European cultures. Here was a man driven to seek his own philosophical nirvana. He subjected his own psyche to as close an objective scrutiny as the Trobriand villagers he studied. One of the great journeys of the modern European mind began on this tiny island of Samarai in 1914.
Campbell’s Walk continued along the tropic shore, past rocks defaced by graffiti at the most easterly point but giving way to views of enigmatic Logea island shaped like an oriental hat, and chains of islets married to the sea by golden rings of sand. Clumps of hibiscus with miniature flowers suspended like drops of blood grew abundantly. Arching over the water, a strangely-shaped frangipani tree emerged from a wall, branches loaded with yellow and cream blossom, a canoe silently passing beneath. Almost hidden among the palms were the police station and the modest hospital, a moloch for patients in the early colonial days.
The heat was monstrous. I envied the village boys swimming among the tropical fish in the crystal water. I leant on a broken rail at the end of the wharf.
‘Those two are my sons,’ a voice behind me said.
I turned to see a tall, elderly ‘whiteskin’ in a baseball cap. The ubiquitous shorts and plasters decorated his legs, flip-flops on leathery feet, but it was the fathomless melancholy in his eyes that struck me. They were the bloodshot eyes of a hounded man given over to alcohol and grief. The lower lids drooped to catch his many tears.
‘Oh! They seem pretty happy. Wish I was a bit younger.’ I smiled pleasantly.
‘Well, I buried my wife a few days ago in the Trobriands. On Kitava. Died of cancer.’
‘I’m terribly sorry.’
‘We took her by boat. That’s mine over there. The Ladua. She was built on Rossel Island in the Louisiades.’ I glanced over at an attractive, wooden trade boat painted ochre and grey.
‘Why didn’t you bury her here on Samarai?’
‘I can see you haven’t been here long! Her soul must go to Tuma, the erotic paradise in the Trobriands where departed spirits dwell. It’s a pláce where you stay beautiful and there’s no old age. You might call it Heaven. You can hear the spirits crying there at night. It’s the mirror of the world.’ People so rarely speak in this way I lapsed into silence for a time, turning over these poetic images.
‘Is sorcery still strong?’
‘It absolutely rules the lives of everyone living on Samarai, particularly the women! Everything is explained by sorcery, particularly losses at sea – people taken by sharks or crocodiles. Dinghies often sink in the savage currents. We lost six drowned over there a few weeks ago, and four over here the other day. They try to take the boats as far as Port Moresby!’
I reflected grimly that all my travels through these infested waters would be without a life jacket or radio.
‘There’s a launch pad for yoyova just along the path. Did you see it?’
‘No. What are yoyova? Strange word.’
‘They’re the flying witches. They spread destruction and flame from their … well, you know! They can change shape into birds or flying-foxes, even appear like a falling star or fire-fly.’
‘But they aren’t real, surely. What’s this launch pad look like?’
‘A frangipani tree sticks out from the wall over the sea. It’s an odd shape. You can’t miss it.’
‘Yes!