Martin Rubin Reviews: ‘Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters’ by Philip Eade
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-sylvia-queen-of-the-headhunters-by-philip-eade-1402869695
With her husband, Sylvia presided over a small realm in Borneo, returning at times to London society and writing candid memoirs of her life.
One of the stranger corners of the British Empire was Sarawak, a stretch of land on the island of Borneo in southeast Asia. In 1841, the Sultan of Brunei had handed Sarawak over to Sir James Brooke, a British adventurer who had helped the sultan put down an insurrection. Brooke declared himself and his ruling descendants rajahs, the only Europeans thus titled; hence their sobriquet, the “White Rajahs of Sarawak.” By 1911, when Brooke’s grandson Charles Vyner Brooke, the latest ruler of Sarawak, married the aristocratic Englishwoman Sylvia Brett, these potentates and their wives possessed the title of “Highness.” It had been bestowed by the British crown, which looked after Sarawak as a protectorate.
Sylvia was officially the royal consort—the “ranee” (or rajah’s wife)—but she became the most notable figure in the dynasty thanks to the life she lived and the books she wrote about it. When the critic Anatole Broyard reviewed “Queen of the Headhunters” (1970), the final volume of her florid and candid autobiography, published a year before her death, he compared it to the novels of Evelyn Waugh, adding: “Even Mr. Waugh could not have imagined a life like hers, which resembled an antique fairy tale in a modern translation.”
Philip Eade’s exhaustive, penetrating study of this remarkable woman, “Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters,” shows that her life did indeed resemble a fairy tale, even one by the Brothers Grimm. There were true headhunters in her realm; one of her husband’s duties was to lead expeditions against them. But there were monsters in her life long before she had heard of Sarawak or reigned over its swampy jungles.
Sylvia was the youngest child of Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher, a confidant of Queen Victoria and Edward VII. She grew up surrounded by eminent visitors and houseguests but was most in thrall to her father, whom she worshiped and was keenly aware of disappointing.
Esher was so devoted to his adoring wife during a marriage of more than a half-century that all four of his children suffered from feeling excluded. But he also pursued an active love life involving good-looking male teenagers. He even encouraged his son Maurice toward lovers at Eton, an embarrassment for the determinedly heterosexual young man, who invented dalliances to play along with his father’s fantasies. Esher’s friends could be little better behaved and sometimes worse. Lewis “Loulou” Harcourt, Britain’s colonial secretary and a notorious predator, was a frequent visitor to the Esher estate; he molested Sylvia’s sister Dorothy. Sylvia herself was molested by her father’s secretary and tried to commit suicide twice as a child.
It is clear from Mr. Eade’s account of the Esher ménage that all the children were damaged psychologically and came to live off-center lives. Dorothy, after a late sexual awakening (in her 40s) with the critic John Middleton Murry, became a passionate if chaste acolyte of D.H. Lawrence, whom she followed to Taos, N.M. Sylvia’s union with Charles Vyner Brooke lasted even longer than her parents’ but was marked by flagrant infidelities on both sides. Mr. Eade suggests that Sylvia’s odd upbringing, as well as her husband’s deficiencies—”he made love as he played golf,” she said—made sex rather inconsequential to her. She was perhaps more flirtatious than promiscuous, though she was certainly both.
The Brett-Brooke marriage was a classic attraction of opposites: the voluble, emotionally labile Sylvia and the dutiful, tongue-tied Vyner. Well before Sylvia met him, she was writing stories and novels and had attracted the admiration, both personal and literary, of such luminaries as Bernard Shaw, W.H. Hudson and J.M. Barrie, to whom she proposed (unsuccessfully) following the breakdown of his long, unconsummated marriage.
Vyner was anything but literary, but his realm was the stuff of fiction: Two of the best of Somerset Maugham’s short stories, “The Yellow Streak” and “The Outstation,” were set in Sarawak (thinly disguised as Sembulu). Mr. Eade notes that, given Maugham’s habit of using real-life characters in his fiction, “Sylvia and Vyner could perhaps have counted themselves lucky to have missed his visit.”
The Rajah and Ranee ruled Sarawak benevolently, on the whole. As Mr. Eade notes, they did not exploit their realm’s riches excessively, though they enjoyed a grand lifestyle there and a comfortable life in Britain on their extended visits. Their unusual status—monarchs from a far-off land—made them the stuff of tabloids, but much of their everyday existence was a mixture of the exotic and the humdrum.
Enthusiastic royal though she was, Sylvia’s enduring dynastic legacy, oddly, was her failure to produce a male heir. When her efforts to make her eldest daughter the heir-apparent failed—perhaps inevitably in a Muslim country—she used her considerable powers of intrigue to block Vyner’s brother and brother’s son from succeeding to the throne. Thus she helped transform Sarawak from a protectorate into a British colony in 1946, ending Brooke rule. Eventually, with the dissolution of Britain’s empire, Sarawak became part of Malaysia.
Unlike the historian Steven Runciman, who could say little about the still-living Sylvia in his 1960 study “The White Rajahs,” Mr. Eade makes no attempt to sugarcoat her unattractive traits. She could be a malicious gossip and plotter and was waspish about her own and her husband’s family, earning the enmity of her husband’s nephew, still alive today and still not a fan of his aunt. As Sylvia flits back and forth between England and Sarawak, with forays elsewhere, Mr. Eade’s narrative can be at times a challenge to follow. But the details are reliably enthralling. We see Sylvia dancing in her palace in a distinctive Sarawakan sarong and wearing the same costume in London society. It is hard not to feel affection for her—for the sheer gusto with which she embraced her singular role.
Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.
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