Sometime in the late ’60s or early ’70s, James Michener ceased to be a serious writer, at least in the literary sense, and became something else — an industry, his typewriter a factory upon which, with two fingers pecking, he took history and processed it into best-selling novels that also could be used as doorstops and further processed into movies or better yet TV miniseries.
The pattern was established by Hawaii, published in 1959, Michener’s first best seller. Gradually, he gave up conventional novels and came to specialize in long (1,000 pages more or less), intricate, sometimes plodding fictionalized histories centered around an intriguing locale. Israel, Colorado, South Africa, the Chesapeake Bay, Texas and Alaska all have served as grist for Michener’s relentless mill.
Now it is our turn. Michener, whose 34 books have sold more than 60 million copies, is at work at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, researching and writing a book on the Caribbean Basin. Scheduled for publication in 1989, it could be, considering his advanced age (he is 81), Michener’s last. One of the most remarkable literary careers of the 20th century may well close out in South Florida.
“The locales for my books are selected painfully,” Michener says. “I never select one I haven’t thought about for a long time. Is it big enough? Is the scale of values great enough? Are the characters going to keep me interested for three years? The Caribbean book started 30 years ago and didn’t work. Now, it’s on fire.”
Michener has a reputation as an aloof, hard-to-approach man, and it is true that he grants few interviews. I caught up with him recently in Palm Beach Gardens, where he made a rare public appearance at the north campus of Palm Beach Junior College that belied this image. He spent an hour taking questions, and another hour signing autographs, throughout dazzling the 100 or so admirers with his warmth, mental acuity and wit.
Indeed, it is not enough to say that Michener is alert, the standard compliment paid to the unaddled elderly. He showed that his mind remains what his books haven’t been for a long time: supple, lively, concise. His only concession to age came when he asked if he could continue the discussion sitting down.
“Moving about as I do is risky, and I have done it for 40 years,” Michener says.
“I have survived three plane crashes — and I still love to fly,” Michener says. “I never go anywhere but that I contract the local illnesses — malaria, yellow fever — and have not, I judge, been the worst for it. I just came off two major operations, but I still have all my marbles so far as one can judge personally.”
Public interest in this intensely private man has always been high. In the ’60s and ’70s, newspaper stories regularly appeared giving his views on everything from racial equality (for) to the war in Vietnam (for) to pornography (against).
At PBJC, his fans learned that Michener worries about libel, and runs everything he writes by a raft of attorneys (“I don’t find the ground rules unfair, but they are somewhat restrictive”). They learned that he does all his own research, seldom takes notes (“I try to keep it all in my head”), and blocks out his novels in 150-page sections.
They also learned that he rises early each day to write from 7 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. (“I get it done in the morning, or it doesn’t get done”). His wife, Mari, handles his business affairs. He doesn’t drink or eat fatty foods since his heart attack in 1965. He walks two miles a day. He never watches television before 9 p.m. and is a devotee of old movies.
“Every writer finds his own schedule and conforms to it,” Michener says. “Although most first novels — most first three novels — are written at 4 a.m. You get up at 4 and write for three hours before going to work. If you can’t do that, you can’t be a writer.”
In a sense, that’s how Michener wrote his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific, composed in idle moments during World War II, when he was stationed in the South Pacific. It won the Pulitzer Prize. He was 40 years old, it was 1948, and he had written little before that. He worked at the MacMillan Publishing Co., as an editor of textbooks.
Michener’s own story rivals anything in his books, and in fact, forms part of the basis of his second novel, The Fires of Spring. Perhaps his popularity can be attributed, in part, to the fact that he is the prototypical American success story, a bootstrapper supreme.
Orphaned, raised in grueling poverty in Quaker Pennsylvania, he won a succession of scholarships, wandered from university to university, not earning his graduate degree until nearly 30, thereby gaining credentials both academic and practical.
“I am pre-eminently a child of the American education system, which tries to identify and isolate people like me and give them awards and scholarships,” he says. “After age 14, life was easy for me. I received one scholarship after another.”
In return, Michener has touted education continuously. He also has donated more than $13 million to various institutions, especially Swarthmore College, which he attended on a basketball scholarship, and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He says it was calculated several years ago that he had generated more than $60 million in taxation that the government had collected. “Today the figure must be well over $100 million,” he says.
After his presentation at PBJC, Michener explained to me how the formula for his incredibly popular historical epics had evolved. It was, he says, accidental.
“I had lived in all the places in Hawaii,” Michener says. “Northern Japan, the South Pacific, Hawaii itself, even China for a brief period. I was probably the only person in the world who could have written that book at that time. I love exposition. If you are going to deal with those characters, you are obligated to look into their backgrounds. The reception to the book was favorable, and the others came in a natural sequence.”
Fourteen of Michener’s books have been adapted to other formats — movies, plays or television. “My attitude is to get it written, put it on the shelf and let others worry about it,” he says. Three productions have pleased him, however; South Pacific, The Bridges at Toko-Ri and Sayonara.
Michener concedes that his books are sometimes heavy going, and seems surprised that volumes of such length are widely read. “I have devised a system to write big books in a difficult form and still have my readers stay with me,” he says. “That’s a freak thing. I don’t understand it.”
To young writers, Michener says there is no secret to success. “Writing is very hard work,” he says. “Each time it is as difficult to start as the first one. It is the same for Norman Mailer or Joyce Carol Oates. One is always in love with the next book. Maybe this time you will get it right.”
Three times Michener has started big books and run out of steam. “The ideas weren’t good enough.” Readers often want to ask him about books he wrote 30 or 35 years ago. Had he written only one book, The Source, for instance, he might spend his life replaying it, he says. But now, he hardly remembers it. “It was so long ago.”
Michener professes himself a “women’s libber.” He says the one big book that remains unwritten is the one chronicling the altered relationships between men and women. “I am distraught by some of them, excited by others,” Michener says. “The courtship patterns that prevailed in my time were stupid and destructive. But I would be unable to woo a modern woman. They are so far ahead of me at the same age.”
Although Michener has been dismissed by the critics, there is no doubt his work will live on, entertaining readers for a long time. He has not sold out, I think, but simply made decisions that had the unfortunate consequence of devaluing his work. His historical epics offer neither reliable history nor satisfactory fiction. Readers come away with an uplifting but deceptive sense of having learned something. Yet the author, because it is a novel, need not bother with niceties of historical accuracy.
Why his novels remain so popular in spite of their shortcomings can be attributed to three factors.
The first is that personally, James Michener represents the best that America has to offer — he is hard-working, talented and lucky — and his plucky, down-to-earth humanism pervades his novels.
Second, he has a tremendous narrative gift. His prose voice captures the mind of the reader and buoys it along like a cork on the ocean. His narratives are so much fun to read, it’s easy to accept his one-dimensional characters, to skim the ponderous sections of exposition. It also might be noted that this entertainment value is achieved without pandering to popular tastes for gratuitous sex, violence or scandal.
“There are much better writers than I,” Michener says with genuine modesty. “Some haven’t stayed with it, some have hit the bottle. I have been very fortunate. I am placid and easygoing. I don’t like to think what kind of man I would be had I had no luck. I might be a bitter, complaining man.”
Most significant, however, is his irrepressible optimism. Where others see apocalyptic doom, he sees exciting opportunities. Many of his books end on this characteristically bright note.
“In 1939, President Roosevelt summoned a group of the brightest minds and asked them what lay ahead,” Michener says. “They failed to foresee radar, sonar, jets, penicillin and television — all of which were on the boards already. If we did the same now for the next president, projecting over the next 12 years, we would be just as wrong.
“There is something around the corner that will change it all. What am I interested in for the future? Everything. I can hardly wait to see what today’s kids will do.”
To his credit, Michener faces his critics with a phlegmatic honesty. “If you saw my mail, year after year, you would see the reception (of readers) is so overwhelming,” he says. “Maybe I know something about what I am doing. The critics do serve a useful purpose. Sometimes they are right. But I go my way and they go theirs.”
THE BOOKS OF MICHENER
Not counting technical books written or edited before he became a popular novelist and non-fiction writer, James Michener has published 36 books. In addition to novels, he has written books of reportage as well as volumes on Oriental art. His next book, Alaska, has been finished for some time, but publication was delayed because of the illness of Michener’s editor. It is scheduled to appear this year. His next book, on the Caribbean Basin, should be out by the end of 1989.
Nearly everyone has a favorite Michener book. Mine is The Fires of Spring. Here’s a list. See if you can find yours.
Tales of the South Pacific, 1947.
The Fires of Spring, 1949.
Voice of Asia, 1951.
Return to Paradise, 1951.
The Bridges at Toko-Ri, 1953.
Sayonara, 1954.
The Floating World, 1954.
Rascals in Paradise, (with A. Grove Day), 1957.
The Bridge at Andau, 1957.
Hokusai Sketchbooks (editor), 1958.
Hawaii, 1959.
Japanese Prints, 1959.
Report of the County Chairman, 1961.
Caravans, 1963.
The Source, 1965.
The Modern Japanese Print, 1965.
Iberia, 1968.
America vs. America, 1969.
Presidential Lottery, 1969.
The Quality of Life, 1969.
Facing East: A Study of the Art of Jack Levine. 1970.
The Drifter, 1971.
Kent State, 1971.
Firstfruits: A Harvest of 25 Years of Israeli Writing (editor), 1973.
Centennial, 1974.
About ‘Centennial:’ Some Notes on the Novel, 1974.
Sports in America, 1976.
Chesapeake, 1978.
The Watermen, 1979.
The Covenant, 1980.
James Michener’s USA, 1981.
Space, 1982.
Poland, 1983.
Texas, 1985.
Legacy, 1987.
Alaska, 1988.
