Legends Of Polynesia

Just at the end of World War 11, when many people round the world were yearning to “get away from it all”, an American writer, William S.

Stone, produced an evocative and amusing book about Tahiti and Huahine called Tahiti Landfall.

The book was the fruit of a decade of residence in the Society Islands; and just as Frederick O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas caused a minor exodus to the Pacific after World War I, Stone’s Tahiti Landfall probably did the same in the late 19405.

However, whereas O’Brien fol lowed up White Shadows with a couple of other South Seas best sellers, Stone was little heard of again in the Pacific literary world.

It seems, though, that Stone kept up writing on his adopted islands, for the University of Hawaii Press has now brought out an attractive volume of tales by him entitled

Idylls of the South Seas. It is a posthumous work, as Stone died in Honolulu in January, 1970 (PIM, March, 1970, p. 157).

The tales are based on legends from a variety of Polynesian islands.

They are told through the mouth of an old Tahitian called Tetua, who was also the narrator in a previous volume. The Ship of Flame (New York, 1945).

“The intention here,” the author said in a preface, “has been to pre sent a group of legends in such a way that they might have living reality for a reader who had little or perhaps no personal familiarity with Polynesian peoples or Polynesian islands. . . .”

Because of his fine gift for evoca tive writing, Stone has probably succeeded in his aim as well as any popaa writer ever could.—RL.

(Idylls Of The South Seas. By

William S. Stone. SUS6.SO).