rude awakening

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Isles of illusion: A gentleman’s rude awakening

“Asterisk”: Isles of Illusion: Letters from the South Seas: edited by Bohun Lynch with a new introduction by Gavin Young. 334 pp, Century Hutchinson, 1986. £5.95 0 7126 9468 4.

The Santo rebellion of 1980 attracted world-wide media coverage, bringing Vanuatu to the attention of countless people who had never heard of that archipelago, or, in the words of the rebellion’s his torian, John Besant, * of the “Siamese-twin” system of colo nial government which the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides conferred on the indigenous Melanesians in 1906.

Of islands which attracted successively whalers, san dalwooders, “blackbirders” and finally traders and settler-plan ters, two Englishmen familiar with conditions in the early days of the Condominium have left lively records.

Edward Jacomb’s “France and England in the New Heb rides” (1914) and his play “The Joy Court” (1929) have never been reprinted but the re publication of the letters of his friend, R. J. Fletcher provides a welcome opportunity to recap ture the atmosphere of those early days.

The travel writer James Nor man Hall predicted in 1929 that “Isles of Illusion”, an “extraor dinarily human” book sucked under and lost in the ever increasing stream of books, would reappear further down the stream.

The first reissue in English for nearly sixty years of the 1920 s

best seller rewardingly fulfills Hall’s prophecy. When these very readable letters were ori ginally published by Constable in 1923, Lynch’s South Seas correspondent, a friend from Oxford days, was identified merely as “Asterisk”.

“Asterisk” was later revealed to be R. J. Fletcher (1877- 1965), a paternal uncle of the novelist Penelope Mortimer whose autobiography “About Time” (1979) offers a shrewd, sympathetic pen-portrait of her eccentric relative.

Fletcher started adult life as a schoolmaster but soon sought

to escape civilisation and con vention in exotic places. Fired with enthusiasm by the writings of R. L. Stevenson, he sailed in due course from South America to the “land of the lotus” in the South Seas.

He spent seven years in the New Hebrides, working variously as court interpreter, land surveyor and, principally, as coconut plantation manager.

Most of the letters selected for publication by Lynch, himself a prolific author, were written to him in England from that archipelago. Fletcher finally ex tricated himself from the New

Hebrides in 1919 to spend happier days in the French Tuamotu islands near Tahiti.

The leitmotiv of “Isles of Illusion” is, as the title suggests, disillusionment: “No one could have been more sentimental than I in my quest of lovely tropical nature” .. . “three weeks sufficed to show me what a fool I was” . . . “keep your distance and you will keep your enchantment” ... “I have paid in hardish coin for dallying with the lotus plant ...”

Fletcher, while examining acerbically external realities, chronicles the interior self and the principal value of “Isles of Illusion” arguably lies in its self-portrait of a highly complex and articulate middle-class Eng lishman in tropical exile.

The letters are, to quote their author, “the confidential whimpering of a loquacious man condemned to months of intolerable silence”, trapped in an unhealthy environment in which Fletcher, sensitive and cultured, lacked congenial com panionship and sought solace in a native woman by whom he had a son (the liaison provides the theme for his auto biographical novel “Gone Na tive” 1924, occasionally in whisky and always in writing letters, his “safety valve”.

He memorably conjures the physical lure and rigours of the islands. His observations on the human fauna of the New Heb rides officials, traders, plan ters, missionaries, the indi genous Melanesians are as caustic as his examination of himself is frank.

A man of his time, he profes

A skirmish between seamen and marines of HMSS Curacao and the villagers at Port Resolution, August 12, 1865-from a sketch by Midshipman W. V. Bailey

ses no love for the Christia nised, as opposed to heathen, “Kanakas”. Yet he doctors his Melanesian charges as consci entiously as any of the Pre sbyterian missionaries who, with Australian settlers and Condominium officials, are among the prime targets of his mordant wit.

Edward Jacomb’s brother Charles, the author of “God’s Own Country: An Appreciation of Australia” (1914) and as sharp a critic of Australia and Australians as Fletcher himself, described him as a “brilliantly clever fellow.”

A former pupil has recalled him as a “mysterious personal ity” ... “almost frightening to us school-boys, but patient, un biased and kind. ” a fellow schoolmaster remembers him as a “brilliant individualist” but was never able to penetrate beyond Fletcher’s “rotund facade. ”

Penelope Mortimer says he was cynical, sharp and clever with a waspish wit and a disdain for women. But she liked him.

These first-hand observa tions, which supplement Lynch’s comments in the origi nal introduction, are suggestive of the complexities and para doxes of Fletcher’s highly elu sive character. He appears, very humanly, full of contradic tions amusing and fond of provoking laughter in others but often sad and consistently mysterious, hard to get to know. Sensitive to beauty in poetry and landscape, even tender, but capable of brutality.

Conventional by upbringing but usually unconventional and often eccentric in thought and action.

A misfit, Fletcher fails to reach his goals or to achieve equanimity. He eventually re turned to a bachelor schoolmaster’s life in England, where John Murray published three of his “Gilbert Davison” thrillers at the beginning of the 19305.

Fletcher then lapsed into obscurity. From teaching in Cornwall, he retired to live with a sister in Kent, where he described himself, in a letter to Penelope Mortimer in 1957, as “intangibly alone mentally.”

Gavin Young chanced upon “Isles of Illusion” in Hong Kong

and took the volume with him when he sailed a few years ago from China to the South Seas: it inspired the title of Part Two of his “Slow Boats Home”.

In his very personal introduc tion to the reissue, Young establishes a link with “Aster isk” via Bude, where Fletcher taught and the youthful Young spent his summer holidays.

It Is to be hoped that a future edition of “Isles of Illusion” will include Fletcher’s as yet unpub lished contemporary letters to Edward Jacomb, who appears

as “Mowbray” in the book.

Fletcher’s letters to Lynch are better known in France, where a new French translation of them appeared in 1979 under the impulsion of the celebrated autobiographer Michel Leiris whose intimate diary of an ethnographic expedition through Africa (“L’Afrique Fan tome”, 1934) was influenced by the original 1926 translation.

Leiris was himself introduced to “Isles of Illusion” by his surrealist companion, Jacques Prevert, and in turn, decades

later, inspired the fine preface to the 1979 translation contri buted by his young friend at the Musee de I’Homme, Jean Jamin. A German translation of the new French edition appeared in 1981.

Fletcher was an interesting man and his letters, his best writing, deserve to be read

again.

W. E. Stober.

★ “The Santo Rebellion: An Imperial Reckoning ” published by the University of Hawaii Press and Heinemann (Austra lia), 1984.