Review: King Doctor of Ulithi and the King of Fsmsaria
Wees, Marshall Paul (April 1950). "Review: King Doctor of Ulithi and the King of Fsmsaria". Saturday Review. pp. 16–32.
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Abstract: A LEGEND appears to have sprung up in the Pacific theatre of the war about the person of Dr. Marshall Paul Wees and his mission on the island of Fassarai, Ulithi Atoll, formerly part of the Japanese Mandate. Out of it have come two books, one of them a straight, factual account by Dr. Wees and a collaborator, the other recast as fiction. They have, one of them in particular, the inherent interest of their subject, but over and beyond this the two, set side by side, make a singularly interesting literary study. Dr. Wees, being himself The Man, should get the first hearing. He is not a literary fellow and so, though he had preserved notes, records, diaries, he had done nothing about telling his story until, after the war, he met Father Thornton. The priest, convalescing under Dr. Wees's care, undertook the writing task. The result is a brief book, unpretentious, largely proof against any temptations to get coy or gooey with the material, sincere, and now and then profound. It is the "plain, unvarnished tale" par excellence. Dr. Wees was sent by the U. S. Navy to cope with a terrible scourge of yaws w^ith w^hich the people of Ulithi were afflicted. He explains: "Yaws were syphilis in its old age." The spirochete, generations removed from its original forms of attack, produced a suppurating disease of skin and bone, contagious through contact and filth. With a minimum of medical supplies and no assistance but the aid of a pharmacists' mate. Dr. Wees accomplished his mission and eliminated yaws. In the process he came to perceive the qualities of a splendid and dignified Christian people. If their life had known only primitive sanitation, it knew some highly civilized virtues. He ministered to their bodies, found himself drawn ever more deeply into their communal life, and as a crowning achievement, built for this deeply religious people a new church. Just before he was transferred, in a scene related with eloquence and sensitivity. King Ueg of Fassarai and his assembled people declared Dr. Wees to be their King. This minor miracle was wrought under the noses of an indifferent high brass, and frictions and frustrations from petty authority. The portrait drawn by Dr. Wees and Father Thornton of the ethical life and inherent chastity of these people is a relief from the f&miliar Malinowski-Mead patterns. From the old Polynesian mores there had come about what Dr. Wees saw as a genuine reorientation: ". . . to the Ulithians the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. And sex itself is an expression of the creative power of God. As such it must never be indulged in any way that might stain or coarsen that concept . . . infidelity is virtually unknown. . . In everything they do the physical and the spiritual are bound up one with the other." Mr. Divine's "The King of Fassarai," hitherto abbreviated in the Satevepost, stands unhappily as a prime example of what not to do in working fictionally directly from the living model. There are those who deprecate such enterprises under any circumstance. I am not one such, believing that fine fiction can be wrought by this means. "The Wooden Horse," now current, is in part an instance, and there are many others. But, first of all, "The King of Fassarai" is a weak novel unto itself. To juxtapose it to the simple eloquence of the Wees-Thornton chronicle becomes a disaster. More than half of it is a complicated, confusing preparation that was not necessary and that does not budge dramatically. The most interesting aspect of this story, the quality of these people, he chooses to ignore, misguidedly preferring to cast them in the traditional South Sea mold for the sake of a little meretricious near-sexual by-play. He assumes, evidently, that the morality of these people would not be "interesting." In substance he patronizes them w^ith something of the "colonial" psychology..
