“He’s out of town, but he asked me to speak with you as soon as I was able.”
“Who is Tallent’s contact?” I asked. But I already knew the answer.
“Gregory Smythe,” said Sereny.18 He looked at me again, and this time he seemed puzzled himself. “He spoke very highly of you.”
The fact that Smythe had suggested me for the job bothered me at the time, and it was not until I was much older and at my own lab that I realized his reasons for recommending me for such a job, one that would take me far away from him, one in which there would be no danger of encountering me on campus and becoming embarrassed upon seeing me — he had, after all, cried in front of me, and served me that strange meal — one in which the only people I could tell about his perplexing behavior would be Stone Age natives, their noses spliced with animal bones. By the time I had determined his motivations, though, there was nothing to forgive for such a self-serving act, and I had only pity for Smythe, his misshapen life and the even sadder turn it had taken. (It will perhaps say everything you need to know about the medical college, and Smythe too, when I tell you that my being offered this assignment was seen — by the Turks and their kind, at least — as a humiliating sort of punishment, and my acceptance as a sort of professional suicide, final proof of either my idiocy or my unacceptability, or both.)
The next few months passed quickly. I was not nervous; I was not anxious: I did my coursework and went home every afternoon feeling light and calm. I began packing weeks early, assembling in a canvas rucksack what were now to be the tools of my trade — a spirometer, a thermometer, a blood pressure cuff and stethoscope, a reflex hammer, and a small portable microscope. I had a cedar-wood container, a little larger than a cigar box, in which I stored various small items — buttons and screws, thumbtacks and rubber bands — and into which I now packed two dozen glass syringes, each wrapped in gauze, and an extra dozen steel needles, and a metal flask I filled with disinfectant from the labs. I had received a brief letter from Paul Tallent, welcoming me to the project and giving me my instructions: we would meet on June 20 (a day after my graduation, it turned out) in Hawaii and from there hitch a ride on a military transport plane, which would detour on its way to Australia to drop us off in the Gilbert Islands,19 from which we would continue to U’ivu. Beyond these details, however, he had provided little useful information: nothing on what to pack, nothing on what I might expect, nothing more specific about the nature of his studies, nothing even about the island itself. Months later, in U’ivu, I would spread my gear before me, marveling at how misguided I had been, how thoroughly I had miscalculated, and before my time there was over I would have left most of it — books, jackets, shoes, even my butterfly net — scattered through the jungles of U’ivu, abandoned as things no more relevant to the islanders’ lives than they would turn out to be to mine.
In part, though, I cannot blame myself too severely, for my ignorance of the situation I was to enter was almost entirely due to the fact that the world at large was ignorant of U’ivu. Directly after leaving Sereny’s office, I went to the library to consult its atlas, and although I had the island’s coordinates, it took me a few seconds to locate it, my finger skimming over pages of blue ocean. And then I found it: three small chips of light green arranged as three points in a ragged isoceles, its topography rendered unspecific and blurry, a little less than a thousand miles east of Tahiti. Further research yielded a small collection of facts, each interesting on its own but which once combined somehow failed to illuminate one another in any helpful way. The country, I read, had never been colonized. Like the Hawaiians, its people were thought to have immigrated from Tahiti five thousand years ago on outrigger canoes. They were a hunting and fishing culture; all children, both boys and girls, were expected to kill (the encyclopedia did not specify how) a wild boar before their fourteenth birthday.20 They had a king, Tuimai’ele, who had three wives and thirty children and who lived in a wooden palace in the capital, Tavaka. It was not a wealthy country, but the soil was rich and there was always food. But once its people had been notorious for their ferocity, and tales of their love of brutality and zest for cruelty had carried across the seas — so far, in fact, that theirs was the lone country that Captain James Cook purposefully bypassed in his 1787 travels through the Pacific. (“The fierceness of the Wevooans,” he wrote in a letter to a friend the year prior, “makes the crew uneasy, and as it is difficult to sail, we shall not be anchoring there.”)
I read this in the encyclopedia, but I could not believe all of it: the wooden palace, the king with thirty children, the wild boar killing — they all seemed somehow familiar, like something I had once read in, say, a Kipling story about some faraway, allegorical land. But although I had not enough experience in the world to prove this, I suspected even then that the strangest details were the most mundane, and that what we tell others to shock will only inure them to realizing what is truly remarkable. And in this perception I was not to be proven wrong.
12 Hamilton College, summa cum laude, 1946; Harvard Medical School, cum laude, 1950. Both Norton and Owen received medical deferments from the armed forces in 1944, Norton on the grounds of his flat feet and mild but recurring sciatica and Owen for his asthma and extreme astigmatism.
13 A well-known professor might pick one, or at the most two, of his most promising medical or undergraduate students to work in his lab for anything from one to four terms. These students are usually chosen on the basis of their grades, test scores, dedication, and diligence.
14 It is difficult to overstate Gregory Smythe’s influence and importance to the scientific community in the 1940s and ’50s. Until his theories fell out of favor, Smythe was one of the rare scientists to gain popular appeal and acclaim; Time magazine even featured a drawing of him on the cover of its April 18, 1949, issue with the headline “Harvard University’s Gregory Smythe: ‘We could see the end of cancer in our lifetime.’ ”
15 Norton is being a little sarcastic here. Several cancers are in fact highly associated with viral infections (most notably, human papillomavirus and hepatitis B and C); what he mocks here is Smythe’s insistence that all cancers can be directly attributed to viral infections.
16 After his work was discredited, Smythe fell into disgrace, but it is difficult not to hold him at least partly responsible for his humiliation. Smythe had a reputation for arrogance and had many enemies within the academic world; when the tide began to turn against him, he fought back and insulted his critics instead of simply allowing himself to step into the more dignified shadows of obscurity. Because Smythe was a tenured professor, he remained at Harvard until his death in 1979 of — ironically — liver cancer, although he was less and less present and was placed on what amounted to permanent probation in 1968.
As Norton suspected, Smythe did in fact have a family — a wife and two daughters. Interestingly, it is they, not he, who remain well known today in countercultural circles for leading a small but influential Weather Underground — like feminist group that they founded in 1967. Norton probably had dinner at Smythe’s house shortly after his wife, a poet named Alice Reeve, left him with their children to flee to Canada with her lover, a poetry professor at Radcliffe named Stella Janovic. But that is the stuff of another story.
17 One of the great surgeons and biologists of his time, Adolphus Gustav Sereny (1896–1974) was among the more renowned scientists on the faculty at Harvard Medical School while Perina was a student there. He and Perina would go on to have a fruitful but ultimately contentious relationship, which is addressed later in this narrative.