Lost Anthropologist
WHEN Pat Noone recovered from a serious illness in the Malayan jungle, his first thought was to give thanks to God.
Later on that morning I played the Interlude from Noel Coward's Cavalcade. The music of Elgar seemed to suit the jungle just then and Coward's own spoken dedication . . . struck a strangely apt note.
This breath-taking sentiment sets the tone at the outset for much that is vague and unaccountable in the man's character and consequently in his work, ambiguities that Mr. Holman's story does nothing to resolve. Noone was an anthropologist who gave up a Cambridge Professorship to return to the Temiar,. a tribe of aborigines inhabiting un- explored mountainous jungle, who, in his idealistic view, had discovered the secret of harmonious co- operation and were free not only from the more brutal tribal customs but also from the ordinary human vices. He settled among them, married a Temiar wife, became a legendary figure there and mysteriously disappeared after the war along with most of his recorded work. The account given here of Noone's observations is an over-simpli- fied mixture of fact and conjecture, and nothing very definite or unusual emerges : it is not un- known for primitive groups to co-exist peacefully, nor for dreams to be the source of their inspiration and the mystical sanction for practical customs. It was the extent and elaboration of their dream interpretations that fascinated Noone, and what we can extract from Mr. Holman's account is tantalising enough. But a red herring, is drawn across the trail by Noone's co-worker, an Ameri- can psychotherapist whose foggy generalisations did much to obscure ascertainable, fact about
Temiar beliefs. Besides this, Noone's fact-finding was disturbingly credulous : he actually checked the truth of the various statements they made about their world by making sure that what they said in their sleep tallied with what they told him they had dreamed at the time—as it always did!
How far were his findings the projections of his own phantasies? We shall probably never know, for the gentle Temiar, exploited by one faction after another in war and rebellion, have noW been won over by Pat Noone's brother Richard, de- tribalised and exposed to the rigours of Western civilisation on the defensive—including a female administrator who put the girls into brassieres. Pat Noone, who turned out to be the victim of a crime passionnel, is as Much a mystery man as ever. But the psychotherapist is doing splendidly —he is back in New York treating patients by methods learnt from a Temiar shaman.
JEAN HOWARD
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