A bedside book
pp. 97-98 · Read in the full issue
of South Seas stories
One of the most readable Pacific books to appear on the market in recent months is an anthology entitled True Tales of the South Seas , selected and edited by A. Grove Day and Carl Stroven, of the English Department at the University of Hawaii.
The book contains two dozen stories by a score of authors, set in a wide variety of islands throughout Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, They range in time from the marooning of Alexander Selkirk on Juan Fernandez at the beginning of the 18th century to the capture of a Japanese pilot on Niihau Island, Hawaii, at the time of Pearl Harbour.
The stories have been arranged so that the reader (if he reads them in
order) will progress from the recent past into the increasingly distant past.
The recent past is represented by such authors as Eugene Burdick, Blake Clark, Sir Arthur Grimble, James Norman Hall, Charles Nord hoff and W. Somerset Maugham.
Of somewhat older vintage are the stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Becke, Mark Twain and Thomas Henry Huxley.
And from an era even more re mote are the tales of Commodore Charles Wilkes, Owen Chase (whose ship was wrecked by a whale), Peter Dillon, John Martin (who recorded the memoirs of Will Mariner, of Tonga). William Bligh, David Sam well (who witnessed the murder of Captain Cook), George Robertson (master of the ship that discovered Tahiti), etc.
In making their selection of stories, the editors say that their first con sideration was that the stories should be true.
With one exception, their choices do have a genuine ring about them.
The exception is Somerset Maugham’s story “My South Sea Island”, which the editors say proudly has never previously been collected.
“My South Sea Island”, which is based on notes on Tetiaroa published in Maugham’s A Writer's Notebook, is so obviously phony and so feeble that Maugham no doubt had good reason for not publishing it among his collected works. It is a pity that the editors of True Tales of the South Seas marred an otherwise excellent
selection by reprinting it.
RL.
(True Tales Of The South Seas.
Souvenir Press. London. $3.85).
Will Mariner