On the island of Moorea, along two kilometres of beach, there are 19 white men who have arrived during the past six months.
They are all victims of ridiculous, mendacious books about the Pacific islands - such trash as 'Isles of Eden' and 'White Man, Brown Woman', for instance. A year ago there were two whites along this beach, both old residents, men who have a moral right to live in the islands, for they are producers.
But our 19 new whites are a different species. They wander down the beach in such scanty attire that the natives turn their heads and blush; they stick gardenias behind their ears, make love to the native girls, strum ukuleles on the outer beach, and live on a native diet, even though it makes them ill. They are trying to create the atmosphere they expected, but failed to find."
So wrote the now famous Robert Dean Frisbie in an article to the "Pacific Islands Monthly" published in February 1933, by which time Paul Gauguin had already been dead for thirty years. And he continued:
Of course, not everyone can heave himself out of his little mud puddle and head for the blue horizon, to dally on a beach or in a blue lagoon, drink a coconut and let the rest of the world go to the devil. He - and it is always a 'he' - who is left behind, the disspirited clerk, the hen-pecked husband, and the romantic dreamer, can still find solace and escape from suburban reality by way of the South Seas literature.
But beware, because all those books about experiences, impressions, and dreams in the lonely islands of the South Seas are not to be taken for real. Life is not real. It is an illusion, a screen on which we write our own reactions. We are the movie camera, and what we call life is our projection of the world around us - no more actual than the people and events shown on the movie screen.
