Lily King

Lily King on Margaret Mead, the Inspiration for Her Novel Euphoria

We spoke to Lily King about Margaret Mead, the inspiration behind King’s acclaimed new novel, Euphoria.

BY MEGAN O'GRADY

June 13, 2014

In the June issue of Vogue, I wrote about **Lily King’**s compass-spinningly seductive fourth novel, Euphoria (Atlantic Monthly Press), inspired by Margaret Mead’s experiences in 1930s Papua New Guinea. The novel’s protagonist, Nell, whose brilliant, controversial book on sexuality and Samoan children has made her famous, is adrift and mourning a miscarriage when the book opens. She and her loose-cannon husband, Fen, are looking for a new subject of study when they happen upon a colleague and competitor—an affable Brit who reignites Nell’s intellectual curiosity and shares her haunted sense of loss. Joining forces, the trio encounters a river tribe with thrillingly unconventional gender roles; needless to say, it doesn’t take long for their delicate balance to be upset. King’s stunning feat of historical ventriloquism deviates from Mead’s story in several key aspects (to see how, you’ll have to read for yourself), but the novel’s version of the love triangle culminates in its own inevitable-feeling—and devastatingly romantic—outcome. From Norman Rush to Barbara Kingsolver, the misdeeds of Westerners have inspired their own vibrant literary subgenre; in King’s fresh addition, the work of novelist and anthropologist find resonant parallel: While immersing ourselves in the beauty and cruelty of others, we confront our own. I corresponded with King about Mead—and what continues to draw fiction writers to the intellectual hothouses of yesteryear.

Margaret Mead

What attracted you to Margaret Mead in the first place, and why did you decide to write about her relationships with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson?

I accidentally found myself reading a biography of Mead about nine years ago. I got to this part when she was working in Papua New Guinea with her second husband, Reo Fortune, and they met Bateson and the three of them had this crazy love triangle for five months, and of course I thought that would make a great novel. I never really believed I’d be the one to attempt it. But I wanted to know more about this time in her life, so I read her memoir and her book, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, about the tribes she studied during that time. I found myself taking notes and getting ideas, and when I was done with my last novel, Father of the Rain, I started in.

Each of the three anthropologists has different approaches to their work and the limitations of it: Nell is a meticulous and empathetic observer; Fen, who is talented with languages, is obsessed with breaking down barriers; and Bankson humbly questions whether one culture can, with any objectivity, understand the values that govern another. How would you compare the work of an anthropologist with that of a novelist?

I think they are almost the same thing. Both a novelist and an anthropologist ask the same thing: How do people live? Mead said in a New Yorker interview: “The whole world is my field.” A writer would say the exact same thing.

Marriage, of course, has its own culture and temperament—the unspoken understandings and shared history between two people. Mead is a towering figure, and it’s fascinating to see a more vulnerable side to her. Were there any surprises in your research? Do you have a favorite Margaret Mead quote?

There are so many great Mead quotes, but here’s a surprising one. It’s something she wrote to Fortune after their work in New Guinea was done and she was on a boat home to America without him. “I wish you hadn’t hit me where it would show that night over there. I wouldn’t have had to go away from you.” This line suggests that if he had hit her someplace where people couldn’t see it, she would have stayed. Our image of Mead is a tough, outspoken middle-aged activist, but she was once a young woman far from home who was, on more than one occasion, knocked around by her husband.

At one point, Bankson resonantly asks: “When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?” What made you decide to tell the story from his perspective—apart from the first chapter, and Nell’s journals and letters?

Once I wrote that second chapter in Bankson’s voice, I knew it was his story, not hers. It just felt more natural, more intimate. I could get so much closer to him, to his core. And once I realized it was his story, everything I thought was going to happen had to change.

What are you working on now?

I have exactly 1.5 pages of a new novel. It’s going to require a mountain of research. It feels like something impossible, just as Euphoria felt, which I’m hoping is a good thing.

VOGUE

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King / Review by Margot Livesey

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King

By Margot Livesey
June 7, 2014

In 1933, three anthropologists, Gregory Bateson from England, Reo Fortune from New Zealand, and Margaret Mead from America, converged on the Sepik River in what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. For those who want to know what really happened during those few months, Jane Howard’s 1984 biography, “Margaret Mead,” holds many of the answers. For those who want to read a tale of work, love, and passion of many kinds there is Lily King’s dazzling new novel, “Euphoria.”

“Euphoria” is the story of three anthropologists whose work has echoes of that done in New Guinea in 1933 by Margaret Mead (above), Gregory Bateson, and Reo Fortune.

King, the author of three earlier and much acclaimed works, does not say in her acknowledgements what aspect of Howard’s book particularly inspired her, but she does make clear her debt to that work and her many departures from it. Her anthropologists — Bankson, Fen, and Nell — owe much to their originals; Bankson’s biography is particularly close to Bateson’s. But in King’s expert hands the three soon become richly rendered characters, each with her or his own suspenseful narrative.That suspense is darkly present from the opening sentences. “As they were leaving the Mumbanyo, someone threw something at them. It bobbed a few yards from the stern of the canoe. A pale brown thing. ‘Another dead baby,’ Fen said. He had broken her glasses by then, so she didn’t know if he was joking.”

Relations between Nell and Fen, who’ve been married for almost two years, are already strained — what will he break next? — and in the following pages we learn that she has lesions on her legs, a cut on her hand, and a broken ankle. These injuries are observed by Bankson, who meets her that night at a Christmas party in Angoram. He is startled to discover that this small, frail woman with a thick plait down her back is the author of a famous book. Bankson is the narrator for much of “Euphoria,” but we also get Nell’s point of view, either in the third person or in poignant entries from her final notebook.

Each of these young anthropologists is, for reasons both similar and different, at their wit’s end. Nell and Fen have spent a year studying the boring Anapa and five months studying the murderous Mumbanyo — from whom they are fleeing as the novel opens; Nell has lost a baby of her own. Meanwhile Bankson has been studying the peaceful Kiona, feeling increasingly lonely, increasingly puzzled that the tribe eludes him, and increasingly like he’s failing his mother (who is funding his research, still hoping he’ll become a proper scientist, like his father). Shortly before the Christmas party, he tells us, he tried to drown himself in the river.

No wonder then that Bankson, already smitten with Nell, promises over their first dinner to find her and Fen a new tribe. The two had been planning to leave for Australia the next day, but “[t]hey agreed so quickly, and without even glancing at each other, that I wondered afterwards if they’d been playing me rather handily all along.” After rejecting the first few tribes he proposes, Nell and Fen set up home among the Tam who live on the shores of a beautiful lake. They are, to Bankson’s dismay, almost a day’s canoe trip away from his own tribe.

King is particularly brilliant at dramatizing Nell’s work among the women and children of the Tam. We see in vivid detail her persistence, her powers of observation, her humor, her intelligence, and her empathy as she interviews her subjects, plays with them, and enters into their lives. The title of the novel comes not from Bankson’s growing passion for Nell but from her description to him of that moment in studying a tribe when she thinks she understands them and everything makes sense. “[A]t that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”Bankson has never experienced this, but, by observing her methods, he comes closer and begins to study the Kiona with more success. Nell’s husband, however, is another matter. Handsome, charismatic, preternaturally gifted at languages, Fen feels tyrannized by his wife’s fame and by her discipline; she is, he complains, always working. Nell is observant enough to realize that, “Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to be a native. . . . His interest lay in experience, in doing.” But she fails to notice that, while he seems to be merely hanging out with the men, he is hatching a dangerous plan to redress the balance of power between himself and her.

It would be doing King and her many readers a disservice to describe how this plan plays out. Suffice to say that all the strands of the narrative — Nell’s passion for work, Bankson’s longing for her, Fen’s envy, the customs of the Tam and of the Mumbanyo — come together in a deeply satisfying way. “Euphoria” is an exhilarating novel.

Margot Livesey is a distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College. Her most recent novel is “The Flight of Gemma Hardy.”

BOSTON GLOBE

Lily King / Euphoria / Going Native

Euphoria by Lily King

Going Native

(This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014.)

By Emily Eakin
June 6, 2014

As a public icon, Margaret Mead has grown fusty — more respected than read, scarred by potshots (remember the critic who tried to prove that she’d been duped by her Samoan informants?) and sidelined in anthropology by a new dispensation, fluent in evolutionary biology, that makes Mead’s “culture and personality” approach look quaint. It’s hard to conceive of the shock caused in 1928 by her depiction, in “Coming of Age in Samoa,” of sexual freedom as key to a happy adolescence, or of the scope of her influence, ­decades later, as an unflagging champion of progressive causes, from women’s rights to the legalization of marijuana. For most of us, Mead’s name no longer automatically conjures what one biographer termed “steamy things that happened in torrid, languid jungles.” But her life was rich with incident and, on one occasion at least, may have conformed to this description.

In “Euphoria,” the novelist Lily King has taken the known details of that occasion — a 1933 field trip to the Sepik River, in New Guinea, during which Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, briefly collaborated with the man who would become her third husband, the English anthropologist Gregory Bateson — and blended them into a story of her own devising. The result is as uncanny as it is transporting. “Euphoria” is a meticulously researched homage to Mead’s restless mind and a considered portrait of Western anthropology in its primitivist heyday. It’s also a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace — a love triangle in extremis.

For King, whose three previous novels, all expertly crafted, rarely strayed far from late-20th-century, New England WASP culture, “Euphoria” represents a departure and arguably a breakthrough. The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic (for Mead there seems hardly to have been a distinction), and King’s signal achievement may be to have created satisfying drama out of a quest for interpretive insight.

The threat of violence and death looms from Page 1, as a disgruntled Mumbanyo tribe member lobs what may or may not be a dead baby at Nell Stone, the ­controversial American author of the best-selling ethnography “The Children of Kirakira,” and her envious Australian husband, Fen, who are fleeing the tribe in a canoe. Nell’s glasses are broken (by Fen, in what, it’s implied, was a deliberate act), as is one of her ankles. Both husband and wife are filthy, dispirited and sick with malaria. Nell, who longs to be pregnant, has recently miscarried. “Maybe you noticed — there’s sort of a stench of failure about us,” she tells Andrew Bankson, the English anthropologist they run into upon arriving at the local government station, where a drunken Christmas party is underway.

Bankson, the novel’s narrator, isn’t doing too well himself. Like Bateson, his real-life inspiration, he’s tormented by the deaths of his older brothers, one blown up over Belgium in World War I, the other a suicide in Piccadilly Circus, and for two years has been living with a tribe on the Sepik River, less out of a passion for ­analyzing human social systems than to escape his overbearing mother. Stymied in his work and deeply depressed, he’s fresh from his own suicide attempt — in the river, his pockets full of stones, like Virginia Woolf. On seeing Nell and Fen, it’s all he can do not to fling himself at them: “My heart whapped in my throat and all I could think was how to keep them, how to keep them. I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter.”

The book is rife with such visceral imagery and pungent with the stink of disease, foul breath and unwashed bodies. Bankson, who falls hard for Nell, describes her — much as Bateson did Mead — in a letter to his mother, as “a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin”; in the bush, sentimentality is a luxury, like iodine and Band-Aids. Anyway, it’s Nell’s brain that excites him, her drive and discipline, her easy way with the natives, her scandalously impressionistic field notes, her poetry-laden talk, her naked curiosity, her freedom. “For so long I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating and I needed to see her again.”

“Euphoria” takes the form of unflinching retrospection, interspersed with ­entries from Nell’s journal, as Bankson recounts, decades later, his helpless love for her. King deploys this frame with ­admirable delicacy, casting a shadow of impending tragedy over the narrative and administering the occasional strategic dose of irony or nostalgia. Apart from an early chapter in which Bankson chronicles his painful family history — her only misstep, it comes off a bit pat — she wisely allows the proceedings to unfold mostly as they happen.

Bankson persuades Nell and Fen to take up residence with the Tam, a tribe seven hours upriver by motorized canoe from the one he’s studying. In the bush, this makes them neighbors, and Bankson can’t stay away, at one point falling so desperately ill that he ends up spending a week in their bed. King is brilliant on the moral contradictions that propelled anthropological encounters with remote tribes — a volatile mix of liberal high-mindedness, stoicism, hubris and greed. “If I didn’t believe they shared my humanity entirely, I wouldn’t be here,” Nell tells Bankson loftily. “I’m not interested in zoology.” Yet she and Fen make clear to him that after the loathsome Mumbanyo, who practiced infanticide with clinical indifference, they require a tribe with more savory amenities — a pretty beach and good art. When Bankson visits the couple after they’ve installed themselves among the Tam, he laughs out loud at the sight of their house, with its portico and blue-and-white cloth curtains — “this English tea shop encircled by pampas grass in the middle of the Territories.”

Inside the house, Nell and Fen’s collaboration is dissolving in rancor, along with their marriage. Bankson’s presence temporarily defuses the tension, enabling first an uneasy détente, and then, in an episode King has adapted from Mead’s life, a collective frenzy: Over the course of one sleepless night, the three converge on a framework for mapping the whole of human culture, in all its variations. “We believed we were in the throes of a big theory. We could see our grid in chalk on university blackboards. It felt like we were putting a messy disorganized unlabeled world in order.”

So intense is this communal labor, and the thrill of new apprehension, that the physical romance that follows is almost beside the point. In any case, neither the love affair nor the theory is meant to be. (Mead never formally published her theory, which she called “the squares,” later writing of this period that “it was the closest I’ve ever come to madness.” In the novel, “the Grid” is published to acclaim, but after it is embraced in perverted form by the Third Reich, Bankson has it suppressed.) In King’s exquisite book, desire — for knowledge, fame, another person — is only fleetingly rewarded, and gratification is inseparable from self-­deceit. As Nell observes about the ­moment, typically two months into fieldwork, when a culture suddenly begins to make sense, “It’s a delusion — you’ve only been there eight weeks — and it’s followed by the complete despair of ever understanding anything. But at that moment the place feels entirely yours. It’s the briefest, purest euphoria.”

By Lily King

261 pp. Atlantic Monthly Press. $25.

Emily Eakin, a former senior editor at The New Yorker, is writing a book about contemporary medical culture.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Why Remember Margaret Mead?

Margaret Mead
Illustration by T.A.

WHY REMEMBER MARGARET MEAD? 

December 13, 2017

(Originally Published 12/14/2015)

Photo from Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years with the caption “In Vaitogi: in Samoan dress, with Fa’amotu.” 

To commemorate Margaret Mead’s birthday this month, we’re honored to share a short piece from her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson. Bateson is an anthropologist and the author of many books, including Composing a Life. As she notes below, 2015 marks the 91st anniversary of Mead’s trip to Samoa in 1925, when Mead did her fieldwork resulting in the seminal book Coming of Age in Samoa. Working closely with Mary Catherine Bateson and also Professor William O. Beeman, Berghahn Books republished six volumes of Mead’s writing, with new introductions, in the early 2000’s.

We’re pleased to announce new discounted prices on all titles in the Margaret Mead: The Study of Contemporary Western Culture book series, and we’re offering FREE access to this chapter titled Talks with Social Scientists: Margaret Mead on What is a Culture? What is a Civilization? from Studying Contemporary Western Society for a limited time.

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by Mary Catherine Bateson

Margaret Mead was the most famous anthropologist in the United States in her lifetime and arguably remains the best-known anthropologist ever. She was born on December 16 in 1901 and died in 1978, but many of her writings were reissued with new introductions at the time of her centennial in 2001, including the series published by Berghahn. She was committed to speaking to the general reader, avoiding jargon, writing a column for Redbook, and appearing on talk shows, which produced both envy and scorn in some colleagues. Her interest in addressing the general public was rooted in the conviction that our knowledge of the customs and beliefs of other peoples adds to our sense of human possibility and therefore to our freedom. Unlike other species, human beings survive almost entirely by learning, rather than by instincts. By the time we become adults we have come to regard much of our most basic learning as self-evident and “natural.” Yet, the more we understand about human diversity, the greater the possibility that we can make the choices necessary for wellbeing and survival.

Mead’s work falls into different periods. Her earliest work focused on the effects of childrearing in different cultures, answers to questions like: How does a human infant, capable of learning to belong to any human community, grow up to be Navajo or Japanese or Scottish? Her first best seller, Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928, demonstrated that the emotional conflict and rebellion that many thought inevitable in adolescence might depend on how young people were raised and was indeed absent in Samoan adolescence. Mead went to Samoa in 1925, ninety years ago. From then until World War II, her focus was on child-rearing, but many Americans were affected by her work through her influence on the young pediatrician she chose when she found in 1939, after several miscarriages, that she was going to be able to bear a child. She had seen babies born in the field, emerging wide awake because the mothers had not been medicated, and had watched the behavior of nursing mothers, and she was determined to avoid taking “twilight sleep” during delivery and the rigidly scheduled bottle-feeding that had become customary in American infant care. I was the first breast-fed, self-demand baby that pediatrician Benjamin Spock ever saw – and she made sure that he was present for the delivery, to see what the birth of an undrugged baby looked like, and recognize problems as early as possible. [Ben Spock organized a research study of “self-demand” feeding later, because, of course, a single case was no more than “anecdotal,” but he became known as a physician who listened to what mothers had to say about their experiences and observations. There is now scientific consensus that breast feeding, especially in the early months, is medically best for the child.]

Photo from Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years. Margaret Mead just before leaving for Samoa in 1925. Photographer unknown.

World War II led to a new focus, with the concept that the character of members of modern, industrialized societies could be studied by examining childhood memories and the themes found in art and literature. Ruth Benedict did a study of Japanese character, Mead wrote about American character with its mixture of pragmatism and idealism (the book title was And Keep Your Powder Dry ), and she continued developing techniques for studying how cultural differences affect international relations until the mid-50s.

Gregory Bateson with baby Mary Catherine 1940. Photo by Jane Belo.

Her first postwar field trip was in 1953, back to the Manus people in New Guinea, whom she had studied in the 30s. From this trip on, her focus was on change, particularly on purposive change, for the Manus, unlike many preliterate peoples who were demoralized by contact with outsiders, had chosen to restructure their way of life (the book title was New Lives for Old). She was increasingly concerned about the need for international cooperation, nuclear war, and dangers to the environment.

Mead in the American Museum of Natural History around 1970. Photo by Ken Heyman.

In 1975, she received an award from the Fogarty Foundation that included funds for a conference on a topic of her choice and resulted in a book called The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering, with contributions from a full range of physical scientists. At that time, most scientists were focused on the ozone layer and climate change was called the “greenhouse effect.” Mead recognized that the key issue of the atmosphere and the oceans was the need for a level of international cooperation that has yet to be achieved. The human future had become her primary focus, and is the main theme of the volumes published by Berghahn.

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Mary Catherine Bateson is the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and was the President of the Institute for Intercultural Studies (founded by Mead) from 1979 to 2007 when it was dissolved. She has taught at Harvard, Northeastern, Amherst and George Mason University as well as in Iran and the PHilippines. Her most recent book is Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom.

BERGHAHN

Bateson, Mead and Fortune in 1933

Euphoria by Lily King - the colourful love life of Margaret Mead

Camilla Gibb

Wed 25 December 2014

I

f one anthropologist’s name is known beyond the field, it is that of Margaret Mead, and yet in all my years of studying anthropology I was never taught her work. For scholars, Mead had become both caricature and cliche; her findings had been challenged and her work was largely sidelined as quaintly old-fashioned.

As a woman and a populariser of anthropology, she was bound to encounter fierce criticism. Her major works, Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, challenged the “naturalness” of adolescent angst and gender roles, and the wisdom of restrictive sexual mores. Her provocative claims found a wide audience, from the moment they were published in the 1930s until they fell out of favour in the 1960s.

Lily King’s Euphoria, a fictionalised account of a brief period of field work along New Guinea’s Sepik river in 1933, does not set out to redeem Mead’s reputation, but its humanising portrayal of her as a dedicated ethnographer certainly re-establishes Mead’s remarkable presence in the field.

Love and work were inextricably entangled for Mead. She had three marriages, all to anthropologists; a relationship with anthropology’s other leading lady, Ruth Benedict; and another – her last and longest – with US anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. In every case, these partnerships were also professional collaborations.

King takes as her point of departure an actual encounter between Mead, her second husband, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, the man who would become her third. Nell (Mead) and Fen (Fortune) are about to set sail for Australia after a particularly dispiriting stretch of field work in New Guinea when by chance they meet Andrew (Bateson), a rival anthropologist in the region, at a Christmas party hosted by the colonial administration.

Slight, malarial and injured, Nell appears a much diminished version of the famous anthropologist of Andrew’s imagination. Her apparent vulnerability opens the door to his own. Desperately lonely after two disenchanting years among the (fictitious) Kiona tribe, Andrew has recently tried to drown himself. With self-interested desperation, he insists Nell and Fen do not leave, promising to take them upriver to the Tam, a peaceful tribe of strong women. Therein begins Andrew’s coy courtship of Nell, who reignites his belief in his work.

Fen, meanwhile, has become contradictory and entrenched: resentful of his wife’s success, and at times derisive; he is spurred into action only by the threat of further emasculation. Sexual jealousy and intellectual rivalry become inseparable, culminating in the collaborative drafting of a schema that maps cultures according to particular traits. In one frenzied night the trio put it all down on paper: an exhilarating scene of creative and intellectual gestation that captures all the excitement of discovery, and the promise that we might find a way to better understand humankind. Here is the euphoria of the title; that breakthrough in understanding – a moment of sudden and exhilarating clarity in the life of the artist or scientist. Nell, with her lyrical, near-poetic field notes, is as much artist as scientist, with an infectious capacity for liberating passion in those near her.

That is a good night, but with three robust and competitive egos in the jungle, something is bound to go wrong. Despite no small amount of foreshadowing, King’s taut pacing manages to lead us to a satisfying shock; an outcome so different from Mead’s biography that we could never have predicted it.

King immerses us so fully in the lives of her characters that they remain excellent company beyond the pages of this book. Her research is so well digested that she is able to drop us into the complexities of their work without being didactic. We can forgive the occasional cliche – “the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go” – and recognise the radical value of early anthropology to our understanding not just of the other, but of ourselves.

THE GUARDIAN

Ira Byock / A healed femur

A healed femur

By Ira Byock

Ira Byock / El fémur roto

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fish hooks or clay pots or grinding stones. 

But no, Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken then healed. Mead explained, that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You can not run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. 

A broken femur that has healed is proof that someone has taken time to stay with the person who has fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. ‘Helping someone through difficulty is where civilization starts’ said Mead. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.”

Ira Byock

The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life 

(Avery, 2012).

A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.

Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.