health and high enthusiasm, and looking forward to your reply, I remain as ever,
Yours sincerely,
ALEXANDER EASTERDAY
Maud Hayden lowered the letter slowly, as if hypnotized by it and left in a trance, so absorbed had she been through the reading. Yet, inside herself she felt the heat of rising anticipation and excitement, and close to the skin her nerve ends tingled and vibrated. It was the feeling of aliveness—all senses engaged—that she had not known in the four years since the death of her husband and collaborator.
The Three Sirens!
The lush green words, as wondrous as “Open sesame,” and the imagery they evoked, required no acceptance and approval from her intuitive second self. Her outer self, that was cold logic (with its invisible scale weighing what is good for you, what is bad for you), knowledge, experience, and was objectively professional, embraced the invitation in one enormous hug.
Presently, when she had calmed down, she lay back in the swivel chair and thought about the contents of the letter, especially of the practices that Courtney had related to Easterday. Marriage behavior in other societies had always held a fascination for her. The only field trip that she had even considered, since Adley’s death, had been one to South India to live with the Nayar tribe. The Nayar woman, after formally marrying a man, sent him from their house a few days following the ceremony, and then took on a host of nonresident lovers, one after the other, depositing subsequent children with kinfolk. The custom had appealed briefly to Maud, but when she realized that she would have to be interested in the whole pattern of the Nayar’s social behavior, not just in their marital ways, she had dropped the project. But then, she knew, that was not why she had dropped it, really, not really. She had not wanted to travel as a mourning widow to the remoteness of South India.
Yet, here was Easterday’s letter, and she was alive, and there was a caroling inside her. Why? The Gauguin stamps on his envelope sent her memory to Noa Noa and its author’s reminder, “Yes, indeed, the savages have taught many things to the man of an old civilization; these ignorant men have taught him much in the art of living and happiness.” Yes, that was part of it, the easy ways in the South Seas. Her visit there had been one of the happiest periods of her entire life. She thought of the place: the temperate trade winds, the tall, sinewy, bronze people, the oral legends, the orgiastic rites, the smell of green coconuts and red hibiscus, the soft Italian-like intonation of the Polynesian tongue.
Nostalgia was what was moving her so, these moments, and immediately, she swept sentiment aside. There was a higher purpose, as Gauguin had indicated. Savages could teach the civilized visitor much. Yet, in truth, how much? The curious beachcomber in Easterday’s letter, Courtney, had made life on The Three Sirens sound idyllic to the point of Utopia. Could there be a Utopia on earth? The word Utopia was derived from the Greek, and it meant, literally, “not a place.” Promptly, Maud’s ruthless anthropological discipline cautioned her that the regarding of any single society as Utopian involved a set of value judgments based on one’s own preconceived conceptions of what is an ideal state of affairs. No real anthropologist could pretend to seek a Utopia. As an anthropologist, she might come up with some prescription of what might be a good way of life, or what might be a most satisfying culture, but she could not define one place as Utopia and another as not.
No, she told herself, she was not after some questionable Graustark. It was something else then. Her colleague, Margaret Mead, when in her early twenties, had gone to Pago Pago, briefly stayed in the very hotel where W. Somerset Maugham had written “Rain,” lived with the Samoan women, and reported to the world how absence of sexual restraint among those
Yours sincerely,
ALEXANDER EASTERDAY
Maud Hayden lowered the letter slowly, as if hypnotized by it and left in a trance, so absorbed had she been through the reading. Yet, inside herself she felt the heat of rising anticipation and excitement, and close to the skin her nerve ends tingled and vibrated. It was the feeling of aliveness—all senses engaged—that she had not known in the four years since the death of her husband and collaborator.
The Three Sirens!
The lush green words, as wondrous as “Open sesame,” and the imagery they evoked, required no acceptance and approval from her intuitive second self. Her outer self, that was cold logic (with its invisible scale weighing what is good for you, what is bad for you), knowledge, experience, and was objectively professional, embraced the invitation in one enormous hug.
Presently, when she had calmed down, she lay back in the swivel chair and thought about the contents of the letter, especially of the practices that Courtney had related to Easterday. Marriage behavior in other societies had always held a fascination for her. The only field trip that she had even considered, since Adley’s death, had been one to South India to live with the Nayar tribe. The Nayar woman, after formally marrying a man, sent him from their house a few days following the ceremony, and then took on a host of nonresident lovers, one after the other, depositing subsequent children with kinfolk. The custom had appealed briefly to Maud, but when she realized that she would have to be interested in the whole pattern of the Nayar’s social behavior, not just in their marital ways, she had dropped the project. But then, she knew, that was not why she had dropped it, really, not really. She had not wanted to travel as a mourning widow to the remoteness of South India.
Yet, here was Easterday’s letter, and she was alive, and there was a caroling inside her. Why? The Gauguin stamps on his envelope sent her memory to Noa Noa and its author’s reminder, “Yes, indeed, the savages have taught many things to the man of an old civilization; these ignorant men have taught him much in the art of living and happiness.” Yes, that was part of it, the easy ways in the South Seas. Her visit there had been one of the happiest periods of her entire life. She thought of the place: the temperate trade winds, the tall, sinewy, bronze people, the oral legends, the orgiastic rites, the smell of green coconuts and red hibiscus, the soft Italian-like intonation of the Polynesian tongue.
Nostalgia was what was moving her so, these moments, and immediately, she swept sentiment aside. There was a higher purpose, as Gauguin had indicated. Savages could teach the civilized visitor much. Yet, in truth, how much? The curious beachcomber in Easterday’s letter, Courtney, had made life on The Three Sirens sound idyllic to the point of Utopia. Could there be a Utopia on earth? The word Utopia was derived from the Greek, and it meant, literally, “not a place.” Promptly, Maud’s ruthless anthropological discipline cautioned her that the regarding of any single society as Utopian involved a set of value judgments based on one’s own preconceived conceptions of what is an ideal state of affairs. No real anthropologist could pretend to seek a Utopia. As an anthropologist, she might come up with some prescription of what might be a good way of life, or what might be a most satisfying culture, but she could not define one place as Utopia and another as not.
No, she told herself, she was not after some questionable Graustark. It was something else then. Her colleague, Margaret Mead, when in her early twenties, had gone to Pago Pago, briefly stayed in the very hotel where W. Somerset Maugham had written “Rain,” lived with the Samoan women, and reported to the world how absence of sexual restraint among those
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