“Isles of Illusion”

It hardly does justice to the range of Fletcher's preoccupations (still less to the exuberance of his style) to offer a mere handful of sample quotations. But the following passages give some flavor of what was, in 1923, an unusually forthright and introspectively “modern” text. In its literary merit also it greatly outpaced the humdrum run of covertly sensational adventure tales told by bluff colonial officers and greatly outshone the pious memoirs of humorless missionaries. The passages focus on lotus-eating and Fletcher's Janus-like predicament of love and disgust, but they serve to highlight some of his opinions on race and miscegenation—topics relevant to the theme of this essay.

First, however, let me establish that Fletcher was not simply a homesick aesthete, haughtily aloof from the colony's culture of terror. Passages from a letter written on 24 May 1914 from a surveying camp on the coast of Malekula reveal a mock heroism, a boy-scout bravado, as he reports his first (and last) engagement in the common colonial sport of “nigger hunting.” His account verges on parody—of C. A. W. Monckton's New Guinea Resident Magistrate and any number of other swashbuckling colonial officers who relished punitive raids.

“Why weren't you here yesterday? I have had such fun,” Fletcher wrote to Lynch. He had learned that “bushmen” had attacked a tradestore on the coast, wounding the French owner. (“He had a bullet in his thigh which I skilfully [he will probably die] extracted, and having put him within reach of his Pernod Fils we started off for the bush village.”) His party comprised just three natives and himself, armed with “two Winchesters, two Colts Police Positive Special revolvers, two Browning automatic pistols.” After floundering through the bush for six hours they reached their destination. “We crept

in, but it was no good; the birds had flown. They had probably heard us for hours.” Exhausted, Fletcher “turned into the least filthy of the huts and slept till daybreak.” Still enraged, “We burned their village, cut down their ‘God’ tree, and then found their gardens and uprooted and stole all their yams. That means that they will starve during the winter.” If the villagers had not driven off their pigs he would have slaughtered them too, and he “naturally” purloins the chief's dancing mask (“garnished with real human teeth”), which he promises to send to Lynch. Fletcher concedes that what he has done is illegal (“if the Government get to hear of my goings on there will be a row”), even foolhardy (“every tree might hide a dozen cannibals”), but he is far from remorseful and wishes Lynch could have been back there to join the fun (“we would have hunted the swine”). Back at the coast, Fletcher's assistant, a Scotsman, is furious at what he had missed and wants to return and “massacre some of the beggars”; but “20 hours' walking inside 36 hours” had left Fletcher feeling rather weary. As for the wounded Frenchman: “I feel no sympathy at all with the man. He sells the niggers grog and Winchesters, and then wonders that he gets shot” (1923, 112–114).

The letter goes on to revile “beastly” England and its suffocating conventions, to wax nostalgic about “the joys of a wandering caravan life,” to quote (from memory) Dante's Inferno, and to conclude with what he had eaten for dinner: “I have filled my belly with duck and finished the repast with wild honey which I like to think came from scarlet hibiscus” (ibid., 118).

The wild and woolly aspect of life in the New Hebrides was part of its dubious charm for Fletcher, but this letter is one of the last from the wilderness. He went to Sydney to visit a dentist, and had returned by October 1914 (possibly on the same boat that brought anthropologists W. H. R. Rivers and John Layard to Malekula), and by the beginning of 1915 he is established on a cotton plantation in Epi as his own master, quite alone, with a hundredodd “servants” (i.e., male and female labor), nine horses, and two cows. He works from sunrise to sunset on the plantation and spends two hours a day in his small surgery, “treating many things from malaria to elephantiasis.” In the evenings he reads “of pleasant things pleasantly written in a pleasant tongue.” On Sundays he writes to Lynch. The “happy hedonist,” as he referred to himself on one occasion, had begun to create a lotus-land that would need an effort of will to sustain. The quotations that follow plot the zigzag course of his journey into this new colonial self.

October 26th 1915. I found out many things at first hand, and you have the better part in that you only imagine them…. My valuation of coral islands would be brutal but correct…. Of such things as O_____ns [i.e., Australians], tropical diseases, niggers, half-castes, iron houses in the tropics at midday, tinned food, scabies, fleas in herds, nerves and jumps, and the wonders of solitude, I can speak in an authoritative manner—and I wish to God that I couldn't. (Ibid., 137)

Fletcher confects his imaginary idyll: “A return to the beast” on “Muller's island.” He builds it to a dreamy perfection, then without breaking rhythm turns the idyll over and inspects its underside:

And the flies would crawl over my sores and feed on the crust around my eyelids. And the sea would boom on the coral reef outside and the palms would wave gently in the trade wind and the brown folk would laugh and chatter and scratch themselves quite in the proper R.L.S. way. And I would get up and look lovingly at my dear little Webley and Scott and wonder when I would have the pluck to do it. And I never would. Sperat infestis, metuit secundis. (Ibid., 138)

He disarms the shocking import of this suicidal temptation with a casual aside, followed by the bathos of another anticlimax:

I got a “prize” for translating that into English verse…. just think of it and laugh. And about an hour ago I was scraping dirt off a tuberculous Kanaka in order that I might lance an abscess and prolong his beastly existence for a few weeks. La diddle di iddledy, umpty i. (Ibid.)

Loneliness gnaws and the climate enervates. An outbreak of dysentery on the island stretches his resources to the utmost: “This week I have tended single-handed 28 cases and buried five under conditions which even war could not beat…. The filthy things that I have had to do would be nauseating in a cold climate and among civilized creatures. Here they are unspeakable” (ibid., 144)

A few months later he consoles himself by taking a native mistress, a fifteen-year-old Aoba (a later name for Omba) girl he names Topsy. The tide of disillusionment ebbs for a while, but it is not long before he resumes the tone of a cynical, clinical realist lancing romantic illusions:

No, you are a sentimentalist who invests the unknown with charms which exist only in your imagination. What have I said before? I repeat it. Touch not, taste not, handle not. Keep your distance and you will keep your enchantment. (Ibid., 165)

Lotus-eating begins to give him moral indigestion:

September 1916. I am afraid that I have eaten too much lotos already. The effects show in the deterioration of one's morals and one's mentality. I realized the other day when she [Topsy] was ill, how absurdly and disgustingly attached I have grown to my little brown woman. And what is she? A little nut-coloured savage less than five feet high. Her body certainly is beautiful in its doll-like tininess. Her face and hair are quaint. She behaves to me just like a very nice Persian kitten or a terrier pup would behave…. It is only when I find that she has stealthily filled up my shoe with sugar … that I realize what an absolute baby she is…. She spends the whole afternoon in the sea swim-

ming and diving, and in every way is much cleaner than a good proportion of the white women I have “met.” And yet six months ago I was lampooning her to you as a savage beast….

But do you think I could tolerate her in civilisation? Not for a week. That is the difference that the islands make. (Ibid., 166 and 167)

Some months later:

January 9th 1917. I simply must shift from here. I have miscalculated the effect of lotos eating; I mean of my last meal. That wretched little brown slut has tied me up a dam sight tighter than I could ever have imagined…. If I were to give way now, it would mean the renunciation of all that I really love. And I'm not such a fool as that. (Ibid., 179)

The dilemma becomes acute:

May 1917. I saw the absurdity of what I had proposed to myself. I was going to be worse than a missionary. I was going to say to a quite primitive savage: “You are fit mate and equal for complex twentieth century me.” It would have been hopeless…. It's true that plenty of “white men” here have lived happily for many years with Aoba women and have brought up half-caste kids. But, to begin with, the white men were the mental and physical inferiors of their brown wives and, to end with, their kids were unspeakable. That was no use to me as comfort. I could never grow native. (Ibid., 204 and 205)

He devises a painful solution:

The Topsy and Man Friday question I can solve by sending them back to Aoba. She will weep her heart out until the anchor's up and perhaps have wistful half regrets for even longer. There is a quite nice French half-caste who lives close to Topsy's passage. I shall arrange with him to take the pair into his ménage. Then if after a year or two Topsy forsakes the kid—as Aoba women generally do—Monsieur Métis will adopt him and he will become a citoyen francais. If Topsy sticks to him and he grows up to be a “man Aoba,” he will probably be much happier. I am afraid that I have spoiled her, but the spoiling is less than skin deep. (Ibid., 205–206)

Fletcher's ethnographic observations on New Hebrideans are infrequent but trenchant. Marcel Mauss would have appreciated this one:

Of course their [Aobans'] code [of manners] is not the same as ours, but they are very strict. I used to be annoyed at the way Topsy received gifts, I looking for the “Oh, thank you so much, darling; where did you manage, etc.” That was my ignorance. Gifts should be presented in the most utterly careless manner and received with the most stately indifference. It is only the vulgar, ill-bred, missionaries who deviate from this rule. The inner meaning of the manner is that friendship ought to be quite independent of gifts. And gifts must be returned strictly ad valorem. (Ibid., 226)

On his frank Orientalism and the canker in the rose:

November 25th 1917. Having viewed these last three years of Europe from a leisurely remoteness, I must say that I prefer Cathay. That is the fact of it. It is hard to express in words, but I am possessed with a loathing for civilisation and its humbugs and mockeries. Here I have practically no contact at all with the sham. Here I have what elemental man needs, a woman (who is not a lady), a man-child (who has doubtless enough of his father in him to make an interesting subject for experiment, and most certainly has not inherited any love of convention), food, shelter, earth to be buried in. Do I want anything more? Yes, I do. I want friendship—with my intellectual equal. (Ibid., 215)

Fletcher's yearning is also for fatherhood, to rear a child who will not “from babyhood be loaded with the barnacles of convention.” He defends his way of life, his mixed ménage, and his anarchic freedom:

My own individual existence is bound to be less hampered here than in, say, London. Why should it necessarily be brutish because it is not British? … Topsy is far less of a bore to me than would be a white woman. She does not expect “attentions,” and would not understand them if she got 'em. The thought of the upbringing of the child in my own free way pleases me tremendously…. My fear is due to my ignorance of what really composes Friday's distaff half. I know little enough of my own congenital gifts; naturally, I know still less of Topsy's. Of some things, however, I am quite certain. From his ma Friday will not have inherited snobism, gluttony, Christianity or any other of the sweet legacies to which we are victims. At present he shows rather frightening precocity both of mind and body. The clay is very promising. I am itching to have it on the wheel. (Ibid., 218 and 219)

His growing love of Man Friday (baby Bilbil) brings agonizing indecision:

October 1st 1918. My wretched mind simply will not be quiet about Bilbil. I get him and his future nicely settled—and then comes a shock. It is literally and lamentably true that I love him now. But shall I always do so? (Ibid., 244)

Fletcher is “physically repelled” by the French métis he meets, despite their being well educated, well behaved, and well dressed. He laments:

You see I am absorbed in my little Kanaka world; I very rarely meet any whites and those only such people as are very little better than Kanakas. You don't know how the island blight eats into one…. I tolerate the happy-go-lucky kind of life, but I am more than ever resolved not to give way to the soiled-lotos temptation. I am so afraid that, if I take Bilbil away and get him among whiter things, I shall straightaway begin to hate him. (Ibid., 245)

Later he broods, “I have sinned against nature … and I am going to pay the price” (ibid., 260). His last reference to his son is made from the distance of French Polynesia:

September 18th 1920. Bilbil. Cold logic can't cure that wound. I fear that it is incurable. Another case of the great wisdom of keeping well away from one's ideals. I cherish only the reality that I knew and that was charming. The ideal that could never, never have been realised exists with me. (Ibid., 302)

Fletcher is not without hypocrisy himself:

Although I pine for that savage simplicity which, as you may remember, I once agreed spelt degeneration, I simply can't stand the sight of it in other white men. There are plenty here, both British and French. They are quite decent folk—but they have gone native. They wear a wreath of tiaré round a nativemade straw hat. They go bare-footed except on Sundays. They sit more easily on their “hunkers” than on a chair. They expectorate when and where the fancy dictates. When they are frightened they say so. That is the complete gone native. (Ibid., 291 and 292)

So in the last analysis he was compromised by his ideals. He confesses that he is not cut out for the half-life of going native:

But there can be no half-way for me. For that reason the sooner I am out of the S.Seas the better. In my quality of white man, and educated white man at that, these Tahitian women do not appeal to me at all. I should have to give free play to the savage that is in me. And … that game does not seem worth the candle. (Ibid., 302 and 303)