Fatal Glamour (41 page)

Robert Louis Stevenson had died in Samoa, and Rupert made his pilgrimage to the grave on the hill above Vailima. Its epitaph, “This Be the Verse,” was another boast about embracing death:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die

And I laid me down with a will.

After following in Stevenson's footprints, Rupert wanted to follow Gauguin's, having seen an exhibition of his paintings in London in December 1911. One of them,
Manao Tupapau
, shows Gauguin's thirteen-year-old mistress lying nude on a bed as an evil spirit watches her. Rupert might have liked the idea of re-enacting the picture, though his ostensible motive for the voyage to Tahiti was to snap up any of Gauguin's art that might still be lying around. He could not get a direct ship from Samoa, so after a month in Fiji he left for New Zealand, where he had to spend three weeks waiting for the
ss
Tahiti
to take him to Papeete. He found New Zealand a “desolate place,” but also “almost exactly like England.” The difference was that they had “got all the things in the Liberal or mild Fabian programme – eight hours' day (or less), bigger old age pensions, access to the land, minimum wage, insurance, etc. etc. – and yet it's not Paradise. The same troubles exist in much the same form . . . I suppose there'll be no peace anywhere till the rich are curbed altogether.”
³⁹
One item was missing from this list. New Zealand was the first Western nation to have female suffrage, in 1893. Rupert was writing to his mother, so we can assume that she would not welcome fulminations about women having the vote. New Zealand also had Maoris, who had come from Tahiti about nine hundred years earlier, and still spoke a similar language. But, in the absence of a Gauguin, they had no sexual mythology that might entice Rupert.

Practical Fabianism mattered little to Rupert when he was eager for the climax of his travels, Tahiti. He left New Zealand on 7 January, arriving in Papeete a week later. There was one obvious place for a European to stay, the Hotel Tiare Tahiti (Tiare was the Tahitian gardenia flower). It was a ramshackle bungalow with a large veranda and various outbuildings. The rooms had curtains rather than doors, the better to pay visits without knocking. The proprietress was a well-known and loved figure, Lovaina Chapman. Her ancestry was one-quarter Tahitian, three-quarters American. She weighed three hundred pounds, and ran the hotel with a set of strict rules that were often broken. She would die in the 1918 flu epidemic. After a few days at Lovaina's hotel, Rupert wanted to live more freely in the countryside, away from the beachcombers of Papeete. In Auckland, he had heard that someone had just found some Gauguin paintings on glass and carried them off.
⁴⁰
Why not go to Gauguin's old haunts, and see if there was anything left, whether of the paintings or the way of life?

Gauguin's account of his life at Mataiea,
Noa Noa
, was published in Paris in 1901, but Rupert probably never saw it. He was following the same impulse, though: to flee the half-European capital and live in a purely Tahitian culture. Gauguin had rented a thatched hut between the sea and the mountain. For Rupert there was a substantial guesthouse belonging to the village chief, Tetuanui, and his wife Haamoeura.
⁴¹
They were childless but had adopted twenty-five children from local families who hoped to benefit from the chief's patronage. Tetuanui spoke French fluently and was in favour with the authorities, who had rewarded him with a trip to Paris in 1889. He had met Gauguin in Papeete and invited him to Mataiea, where he stayed for two years from 1891 to 1893. The chief lived in another house nearby, and the guesthouse was run by a local man who had married an Australian woman. Rupert would sit on the broad veranda overlooking the turquoise lagoon, with the surf breaking on the distant reef. Behind were the mountains, in their endless different shades of green. On the veranda Rupert wrote “The Great Lover” and “Retrospect,” both nostalgic poems about England, on the other side of the globe. But he spent most of his time with the locals, swimming in the lagoon, fishing, gathering fruit.

Frederick O'Brien was there too, and wrote about it in
Mystic Isles of the South Seas
. He and Rupert would paddle a canoe out to the reef to fish or just watch the creatures that lived in the coral:

Brooke and I swam every day off the wharf . . . The water was four or five fathoms deep, dazzling in the vibrance of the Southern sun, and Brooke, a brilliant blond, gleamed in the violet radiancy like a dream figure of ivory. We dived into schools of the vari-colored fish, which we could see a dozen feet below, and tried to seize them in our hands, and we spent hours floating and playing in the lagoon, or lying on our backs in the sun . . . We remarked that while we plunged into the sea bare, Tahitians never went completely nude, and they were more modest in hiding their nakedness than any white people we had ever met.
⁴²

Both men and women wore the
pareu
around their loins at all times. When Gauguin was there, the local gendarme had threatened to arrest him for swimming nude in the river.

O'Brien and Brooke went to a wedding where the bride had a dress from Paris and the groom a frock-coat. After a Christian ceremony, everyone went to a traditional feast that ended in a pagan orgy of drinking and sex. “We are on Mount Parnassus,” Rupert whispered to O'Brien, “The women in faun skins will enter in a moment, swinging the thyrsus and beating the cymbals.” Another day, O'Brien and Rupert went back towards Papeete to see the Marae, the ruins of a great pyramid that had been visited by Captain Cook. Once a place of human sacrifice, now it was fallen and overgrown. The chosen victims were killed, but not eaten. When the first white men came and asked the Tahitians if they ate people, they replied, “Do you?”
⁴³

O'Brien is tantalisingly reticent about love affairs between European men and Tahitian women. He does record a visit by Atupu to his bedroom at Lovaina's hotel: “Seeing me alone in Tahiti, and kind-hearted, she said, she had thought to tell me of the Tahitian heart and the old ways of the land. She had robed, perfumed, and adorned herself, and entered my sleeping-place, as she said was the wont of Tahitian girls.” When O'Brien turned down the invitation, he was waited on by a tear-stained Atupu at breakfast. A Tahitian princess explained to him the local rules of love:

The woman of Tahiti exercises the same sexual freedom as the average white man does in your country and in England or France. She pursues the man she wants, as he does the woman.
Your women pursue, too, but they do it by cunning, by little lies, by coquetry, by displaying their persons, by flattery, and by feeding you.

The Tahitian woman makes the first advances in friendship openly, if she chooses . . . She does not take from the Tahitian man or from the foreigner his right to choose, but she chooses herself, too.
⁴⁴

In her travels, the princess had told the feminists of London and Washington that the women of Tahiti were in advance of them. Eventually the rest of the world would come around to loving in the same way. If it did, that would be Rupert's worst nightmare; yet in Tahiti he felt that he should do as the Tahitians did.

In early February, when he was at Mataiea, Rupert told Eddie that he was having “astonishing medieval adventures with Tahitian beauties.”
⁴⁵
The plural is significant, and has created confusion for biographers. Rupert's great love poem, “Tiare Tahiti,” is addressed to “Mamua.” This is not a recognised word or proper name in Tahitian; most likely it was Rupert's transcription of “Maimoa,” which means the favourite or chosen one. Robert Keable went to Mataiea in 1923 and said that Mamua's correct name was Maaua, and that she was an adopted or illegitimate daughter of the local chief, Tetuanui.
⁴⁶
But Maaua is not a recognised name either. In any case, by the time Keable arrived, she and her father were both dead, Tetuanui in 1916 and Mamua probably in the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 20 percent of the Tahitian population. Eight people died at Mataiea in 1917 and thirteen in 1919. In 1918 there were 199. More people died of disease from 1914 to 1918 than in battle, so both Mamua and Rupert could be thought of as indirect casualties of the war.
⁴⁷

Gauguin left the world his paintings; Rupert's “Tiare Tahiti” gives us the best of his poetic legacy. It follows the greatest
carpe diem
poem in English, Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress”: first the philosophical statement, then the demand to seize the day of sensual fulfillment. But Marvell's poem attacks the beloved's reluctance head-on, while in Rupert's we know that Mamua won't need persuasion to plunge into the lagoon. The poem first describes the Platonic paradise that the “ungainly wise” believe in:

Songs in Song shall disappear;

Instead of lovers, Love shall be;

For hearts, Immutability.

Everything particular to the here and now will fade into the eternal types of Plato's dream. Part of the poem's humour is the impossibility of explaining Plato to Tahitians, for whom the world of the senses is the only one that counts.
⁴⁸
Mamua never left that world, and it is the poet who is seduced at the end into abandoning his search for the ideal:

Tau here
, Mamua,

Crown the hair, and come away! . . .

Hasten, hand in human hand,

Down the dark, the flowered way,

Along the whiteness of the sand,

And in the water's soft caress,

Wash the mind of foolishness,

Mamua, until the day . . .

Well this side of Paradise! . . .

There's little comfort in the wise.
⁴⁹

The poem succeeds wonderfully in refuting Plato, or Platonic love at least, and it leaves behind the puritanism and misogyny that had poisoned Rupert's relations with Noel, Ka, Elisabeth van Rysselberghe, and Phyllis Gardner. With Mamua he was able to live in the moment, and make fun of Western philosophy; what he could not do, though, was reconsider the values that caused his string of erotic disasters before he came to the flowered way of Mataiea. The sensual lagoon of Mataiea had been left behind when, ten months later, Rupert wrote his most famous poem about the cleansing leap into war.

By the middle of February, Rupert had a bad case of sunburn and coral poisoning, and had to go back to Lovaina's hotel to have it treated. “Tiare Tahiti” is dated “Papeete, February 1914,” but it was already an exercise in nostalgia for Mataiea and Rupert's beloved there. Lovaina's hotel was in the middle of a bustling city, with no “flowered way” to nighttime swims in the lagoon. It was here that “Taatamata” entered the plot: “I have been nursed and waited on by a girl with wonderful eyes,
the walk of a goddess, and the heart of an angel, who is, luckily, devoted to me. She gives her time to ministering to me, I mine to probing her queer mind. I think I shall write a book about her – Only I fear I'm too fond of her. Oh dear, its a relaxing place and I feel alarmingly out of track with Europe.”
⁵⁰
Frederick O'Brien adds a snippet of information: “Taata Mata, the name of a charming Tahitian woman I knew, signifies ‘Man's Eye,' her own large eyes, perhaps, explaining the name.”
⁵¹

At Lovaina's, Rupert experienced both pain and pleasure: “I've been lying on my back for eight or nine days suffering intensely while I swab my skinless flesh with boiling disinfectant. However, I've got over it now, and have started hobbling about. At first I had a bit of fever: but I feel very spry now, I think I've been doing too much fucking. Shaw says its bad for one's work. Do you think that's true?”
⁵²
Eddie Marsh's opinion on Shaw's warning has not survived. Once Rupert was well enough, he and Taatamata went back to Mataiea together, and he took a blurry picture of her on the verandah of his guesthouse. In March he described his life as “knocking about with Conrad characters in a Gauguin
entourage
.”
⁵³
When Gauguin first arrived at Mataiea, no local young women were willing to share his hut. He went back to Papeete and picked up Titi, who returned with him. That did not end well, and Gauguin went further south, to the back country of Little Tahiti. He brought back the thirteen-year-old Teha'amana, his temporary bride, model, and muse.

Who was Rupert's Taatamata? Her name was Tumatataata Tapotofarerani, and she was two years older than Rupert. When she took him under her wing at Lovaina's she already had four children; no father was recorded for any of them.
⁵⁴
Her family was an important one in Moorea, the storybook island facing Tahiti. In the 1920s she returned to Moorea and became the common-law wife of an American musician and beachcomber from San Francisco, Mike Fogel, with whom she had two more children. She died in May 1947.

The occasion for Rupert's third Tahiti poem, “The Great Lover,” was his imminent departure from the island. It starts, again, with a philosophical question: How can the things we love resist change and death? With Mamua, the sensual moment overwhelmed any other anxieties. In “The Great Lover” sexual love gives way to a catalogue of Georgian and Neo-pagan minor pleasures – some of them so minor as to be bathetic. “The comfortable smell of friendly fingers”(?); “The rough male kiss of blankets”(??); “Holes in the ground”(???!). Rupert prepared himself for
going home with an all-too-English pipe dream of woodsmoke and crusty bread. He was running short of money and scraping together loans from his American friends. His mother might rebel against subsidising a beachcombing son, and King's was going to expect something from him in exchange for his fellowship stipend. “I'll never never never go to sea again,” he told Eddie, “All I want in life is a cottage and the leisure to write supreme poems and plays. I can't do it in this vagabondage.”
⁵⁵
It was time to set his course for the land of horse chestnuts and wet roofs.