The Three Sirens Read online

  According to my jottings taken from Courtney’s explanation, similar compromises were effected all down the line—the best of the Polynesian system here, the best of Wright’s visionary ideas there, and sometimes two ideas were blended. Compromises were reached on education, religion, recreation, and other important matters. Wright would permit no two systems, pertaining to one subject, to exist side by side. He felt that this might invite conflict. Always, it had to be the Polynesian practice for all, or his own practice.

  There was much bargaining, of course. To control population against future famine, the Polynesians practiced infanticide. If a woman had more than one child in three years, the other children were drowned at birth. Wright found this abhorrent and got Tefaunni to make the practice tabu. On the other hand, in return Wright had to make certain concessions. He had hoped to impose halters and skirts on women, trousers only on men, but was forced to forego modesty for the more sensible Polynesian short grass skirt, without any undergarment, and bare breasts, for women, and the penis-wrappers or pubic bags, and nothing else, for the men. Only on special occasions did the women wear tapa skirts and the men wear loincloths. Courtney spoke with amusement of passages in Wright’s old journal when he recorded the embarrassment of his wife and daughters on their first appearance in the village compound, with their breasts uncovered and their twelve-inch grass skirts lifted high by the wind.

  There were numerous other compromises. The Polynesians defecated wherever they might be in the brush. Wright opposed this as unsanitary, and sought to introduce communal toilet huts, two on either side of the village. The Polynesians considered this innovation as elaborate foolishness, but humored Wright by permitting it. In turn, Tefaunni demanded that his system of punishment for crime prevail. Wright had desired to introduce banishment to a restricted ravine for all crimes. The Polynesians would not have it. For the crime of murder, they sentenced the lawbreaker to menial slavery. This meant the criminal had to become a servant in the home of the victim’s family for the difference of years between the victim’s age at the time of death and seventy years. Wright had some misgivings about the harshness of the punishment, yet saw the justice of it also, and submitted. I might add that, according to Courtney, this punishment is still being practiced on The Three Sirens.

  However, all that I have outlined heretofore are relatively minor practices as compared to the customs of sex and love and marriage that were agreed upon by Tefaunni, and his tribe of forty, and Daniel Wright, on behalf of his eight. Here, the Polynesians and the progressive English had less to disagree about, and compromises were few. Wright found the sexual practices of this tribe not only unique but superior to any that he had ever learned or imagined. They suited his own philosophy in almost every way. Above all, they were practical. They worked. Since many of these ideas represented almost exactly what Wright had dreamed to introduce, little readjustment or modification was necessary. It was Courtney’s estimate that of the sexual customs practiced on The Three Sirens today, about seventy percent were predominately Polynesian in origin, and about thirty percent were dictated by Wright.

  I might interject here that the present-day descendants of Tefaunni and Wright are one people, one race. For some years, Tefaunni and Wright ruled jointly. When Tefaunni died, Wright became the sole Chief. When he died at an advanced age—his son had already passed on—his eldest grandson, the product of an English and Polynesian marriage, became the new Chief. Through the years, intermarriages continued. Today, there is no division between Caucasian and Polynesian. There survive only the people of the Sirens. These people, without dissent, practice the exact system of love agreed upon by the founders more than a century and a half ago.

  As to this system of love, I am sorry to say that Courtney would not elaborate on many of the current customs, but what he volunteered to tell me seemed provocative enough for any anthropological study. Some of the practices he reported are as follows:

  Adolescents between the ages of fourteen and sixteen are given practical sex education. As I understand it, they learn about sexual intercourse in theory. Before graduation, they observe and participate in actual love-making. The approach, Courtney insisted, is entirely wholesome.

  In adolescence, the Sirens male undergoes an incision of the penis, similar to circumcision, in order to expose the glans. When this has healed, he loses the scab by enjoying his first intercourse with a slightly older female, who guides him and teaches him sexual technique. The adolescent female, on the other hand, has her clitoris stretched over a period of years. When it is extended at least one inch, she is considered ready to be taught sexual intercourse by actual participation. This enlargement of the clitoris has no magical connotation. The motive is simply to increase pleasure. Virginity, I might add, is regarded on the Sirens as an infirmity and a defect. However, from my own observations in the Society Islands and the Austral Islands, these practices are not unfamiliar.

  There is a great house on the Sirens called the Social Aid Hut. Its function is twofold. It is used by bachelors, widowers, and unattached women for courtship and love. The second function, merely hinted at, is one that I can only deduce to be more unique, even startling. It concerns some means of—I repeat Courtney’s exact words from my notes—“providing fulfillment, at all times, for married men or women who request it.” Whatever this implies, it is, apparently, not as abandoned and orgiastic as one might imagine. Courtney said this “service” of the Social Aid Hut was sensible, logical, and that there were strict rules. He would not expand upon the subject, except to remark that on The Three Sirens there were no physically repressed or unhappy men or women.

  Marriages are arranged by common consent of the individuals involved. The ceremony is performed by the Chief. The groom invites the male and female guests. On entrance to the ceremony, the groom steps over his mother-in-law, who is prostrated, symbolic of his ascendency over her. After the ceremony, the bride lies down in her husband’s arms, and each male guest invited by the groom, except a blood relative, is solicited to enjoy sexual intercourse with the bride. The groom is the last to participate. This latter rite of incorporation, if memory serves me, is also practiced on several other islands of Polynesia, especially in the Marquesas group.

  The initiation of divorce, according to Courtney, is among the most progressive of practices on The Three Sirens. Courtney was extremely reticent to give me any details. He did mention, however, that a panel of elders called the Hierarchy did not grant divorce merely on request of either party or on hearsay evidence. He said only that divorce was permitted after “long observation” of the parties concerned. My interest was aroused, but Courtney would go no further.

  Courtney and Moreturi both spoke of an annual festival held in late June for one week. Although both men referred to sport competition, a ceremonial dance, a nude beauty contest, neither would speak at length of the primary purpose of the festival. Courtney said, “The ancient Romans had their annual Saturnalia, just as the natives of Upolu, in Samoa, still do. The festival on the Sirens is not precisely the same. Still, it is a form of release, in certain areas, affording license to long-married couples as well as unmarried people. There is simply too much adultery and divorce in America and Europe, don’t you think? There is hardly any on the Sirens. Back home, married people are often too miserable and restless and bored. That is not so here. The so-called civilized world outside might learn a lot from these supposed primitives.” That was his only oblique reference to the enigmatic festival.

  More about love customs on the Sirens neither Courtney nor Moreturi would tell me. In summing up, Courtney said that nowhere else on earth, as far as he knew, was love practiced with less embarrassment, tension, fear.

  There you have all that I have learned, Dr. Hayden. You may be curious to know more about this Thomas Courtney, but I cannot oblige you. Except for admitting that he had been an attorney in Chicago, and had come to the Sirens by accident, and had chosen to remain and been allowed to remain, he would
say nothing. I found him attractive, learned, often cynical about society on the outside, and devoted to his adopted people. It is a great advantage, I think, that he knows of you and your work and respects it. I felt that he would trust you, and I believe he himself is sincere and honorable, although our meeting was of short duration and I cannot be positive.

  This is the lengthiest letter that I have ever written. I can only hope the cause justifies its length. I do not know your present situation, Dr. Hayden, but if you are still active, then the door to a fresh and daring culture is wide open to you, within the limitations stated.

  Please reply at your earliest convenience, but do not delay. You have four months for preparations, yet on this end, apparently, the time is all too short. If you intend to come here, tell me so and inform me of the approximate date. Let me know, also, the size of your staff. All of this I will promptly relay to Captain Rasmussen, who will transmit it to Courtney and the present Chief, Paoti Wright. They will then make arrangements for your arrival and accommodation. If circumstances make this undertaking impossible, let me know this, too. For I shall then attempt, with reluctance, believe me, to pass this information on to another anthropologist or two of my acquaintance.

  The cost of this expedition, excepting transportation, should not be excessive. The people of the Sirens will furnish you both lodgings and food. The fee for Rasmussen’s services will be minor. For my part, I ask nothing of you, except your good will, and, of course, reimbursement of the $3,000 fee I forfeited by not passing this information on to Mr. Trevor of Canberra.

  Hoping this finds you in good 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 people eliminated sexual hostility, aggression, tension. Overnight, Margaret Mead had made a success, for the Western world was always curious about the forbidden and held forth a begging hand. And that was it, finally, Maud told herself. The Western world wanted self-help and Instant Wisdom. Whether or not the Sirens represented Utopia was not the point. Whether the Sirens society could teach civilized man anything or not was not the point, either. The real point was now illuminated for Maud: it was not what the world needed that was exciting her, but what she, herself, desperately needed.

  She recalled a letter Edward Sapir had written to Ruth Benedict, when Ruth was planning to apply to the Social Science Research Council for money. Sapir had warned Ruth about her subject: “For God’s sake, don’t make it so remote and technical as last year. Pueblo mythology doesn’t excite people any more than Athabaskan verbs would … come across with a live project—and you’ll get what you ask for.”

  Come across with a live project—and you’ll get what you ask for.

  Maud sat up sharply, the leather soles of her flat shoes thudding on the floor beneath her desk. She dropped the letter on the blotter in front of her, and, hands clasped before it, she considered the remarkable find in the light of her present situation.

  She had not been handed an opportunity like this since she had been on her own. It was like a gift of years. The culture of The Three Sirens—some of it known to her from other field trips, some refreshingly new—was precisely her kind of subject. She had always avoided the worn, the used, the mauled-over. She had always rejected the dull familiarity of parallel studies. She had—she would admit this to no one but herself—a nose for the extraordinary, the marvelous, the fantastic. And here it lay at her fingertips, known to no anthropologist but herself. Everything about it was favorable: instead of the usual year in the field, the limitations were six weeks, so she could have no uneasy conscience about deliberate superficiality; a subject, by its nature, that begged to be written and published, not only scientifically but popularly; and—yes—an easy solution to the problem that had vaguely oppressed her so long.

  Her mind went to the letter that Dr. Walter Scott Macintosh had sent her two months ago. He had been her late husband’s college companion and her own good friend in the years after. Now, he was a Gray Eminence, an influence, less for his physical anthropology attainments than for political power as president of the American Anthropological League. He had written her, as trustworthy friend, as admirer, and as strictly between them, to whisper of a magnificent, well-paying position that would be open in a year and a half. The job was that of executive editor of Culture, the international voice of the American Anthropological League. The present executive editor, in his eighties and
ailing, would be retired. The lifetime post would be open, with its unmatched prestige and security.

  Macintosh had made it clear that he would like to nominate Maud for the job. On the other hand, several of his colleagues on the Board leaned toward a younger person, Dr. David Rogerson, whose recent papers had spectacularly reflected two field trips to Africa. Since seething Africa was in the news, so too was Dr. Rogerson. At the same time, Macintosh had written, he personally did not feel Rogerson had Maud’s wide experience in many cultures or her contacts with those in the field around the world. Macintosh felt that she was right for the position. The problem, he intimated, was to make the Board members also feel she was right, more capable to fill the job than Dr. Rogerson.

  Macintosh, in his delicate way, had hinted at the obstacle. Since Adley’s death, Maud had done little on her own. She had remained stationary while the younger Turks moved ahead. Beyond several papers, rehashing old field trips, she had not published at all in four years. Macintosh had urged Maud to go once more, one last time, into the field, and to return with a new study, an original paper, that she might read before the League at its next three-day convention. It would be in Detroit, shortly after the Thanksgiving holiday, and would precede the Board meeting to select the new executive editor of Culture. If Maud had any plan for a trip and a fresh paper, Macintosh had written hopefully, he wanted her to advise him promptly so that he might schedule her to address the conclave.

  Macintosh’s letter had given her a great lift, a hope, for the position was exactly the one she needed in this time of her life. With such a position, at her age, she need no longer suffer the rigors of toil in the field, she need not exhaust herself in the monotony of teaching callow students, she need not suffer the demands of writing papers, she need not worry about security or worry about any dependence, in years to come, on Marc.