James Michener Interview (page: 4 / 5) Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist	Print Interview

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think the best example of that is in my novel, The Source, in which I am dealing with the digging of this well in a place like northern Israel. And anybody who is doing that would ultimately come into contact with King David. And so my boy comes into contact with King David, and I try to show David as a troubled king, as a worried king. As a king who, late in his life, told his prime ministers to go out into Israel and find him a couple of nice 17 year-old girls, that he was lonely. A king who sent his prime general into the front lines so that the general would be killed so that David could inherit the General's widow. That's my David. And I'm entitled to do that because I know David intimately. I know everything about him, that a man like me could know, within the limits of my knowledge.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So I will use David to elucidate this whole period, but I will not fake him. I will not give him resounding statements of what we are going to do about the people living out in the desert, when there is no evidence he ever even bothered with that. And that's a tricky gambit, and I have fallen on my face sometimes. As in Centennial, when I wrote about the [parents] marriage of Winston Churchill. His father to this wonderful daughter of a New York jeweler, Jenny Jerome. I have Churchill's father out there looking for Jenny Jerome, I think eight years after he married her. I'm ashamed of that. I'm disgusted with myself. But I don't do it too often.

But even as a writer of fiction, you have obligations, responsibilities.

James Michener: Oh, yes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I decided early on, very early on, that pornography was not for me. That I was able to write books, I hoped, that would be read by enormous numbers of people, without my having to engage in sadism, kinky sex, ultra-violent crime. Anything like that. And I've adhered to that, and I succeeded in that ball game. Now wait a minute. I have to apologize here. What crime is more violent than King David's? Sending his chief general out to be assassinated. Well, I think that some of the things my characters have done have in their own way been comparable to that. But I don't belabor it. I don't seek it out, and I have never cheapened myself in that respect. Would refuse to do so.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

How do you account for the popularity of your books?

James Michener: This is not an idle question. Very few people, maybe none, have had the series unbroken: book club selections, great best sellers, wide acceptance in all languages. Let me say what I cannot do. I am not extremely good in plotting. I really don't care how the story works out. Let it find its own way. I am not good in psychology, and I don't deal with characters who are driven by forces which I myself don't understand. My understanding is rather simplistic.

I am not especially good at humor; I wish I were.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. And, I am certainly not a stylist in English language, using arcane words and very fanciful construction and so on. There is a great deal I can't do but... Boy, I can tell a story. I can get a person, with moderate interest in what I am writing about, and if she or he will stay with me for the first one hundred pages, which are very difficult, and I make them difficult, he will be hooked. He will want to know what's happening on the next story and the next story and the next. That I have. And that's a wonderful gift. That's storytelling. And I prize it. I try to keep it cleaned up. I try to keep it on focus. I am wretched when I fail and feel and sense of terrible defeat.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I believe throughout history, through all of history, way back to the most early days of the human race, when people gathered around the fireplace at night, they wanted to remember what had happened and reflect upon the big events of that day and reassess values and maybe get new dedication to the next day. Well, I'm one of the guys who sat around the fireplace and did the talking.

[ Key to Success ] Passion

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The third thing, I think is, I'm not sure you are ever a good storyteller unless you are a good listener. And I really have traveled the world and listened and loved what I heard and tried to be faithful in reporting what they told me. Just for the fun of it, if I'm on a cruise ship, I want to talk with everybody, to find out what business they are in, how they got there and how they are paying for it, and what their daughter is doing, and what is going to happen in Quebec if the French up there go ape or in western Canada, if the English out there screw things up. I just love that.

I think there is another factor, and this is tough to talk about.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think that some of us have a deep seated sensitive antennae about what is going to happen. And somebody the other day, a fine professor, made an introduction of me, which I had not thought about, but which I had thought about a great deal since. At that time, in the world, there were about a half dozen trouble spots: the Near East, the Jewish-Arab relationships, South Africa, revolution in Poland, the emergence of Japan, the absorption in the United States of two outlying territories like Hawaii and Alaska and four or five other things. And he pointed out that I had written full-length books about all these areas before they came into prominence. And I did! There they are. Look at the dates. Now this cannot be because I was exceptionally brilliant. I am not brilliant. I'm something else. I don't know what the word would be, but it isn't brilliant. And I'm not all-wise. I'm a pragmatist. I learn as I go along. But I did have a feeling through my study of geography and history and people, that these places had to come into prominence. And that when they did come into prominence, people would want to read about them. And they would take my counsel in the years when they were not prominent, and say, "Well, maybe he knows something. Maybe he knows what he's talking about." And if they read the book when it was written, well, then they had a good understanding of what things happened when they happened. And that is maybe the mystery of the whole thing.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It is not the powers of a seer or a prophet or anything like that. It is something else. It is the operation of a real good geographer. And a real good traveler. And a real good thinker about things. Arcane knowledge I don't have, but I sure have ordinary knowledge.

For all of your traveling and all of your research and all of your writing, what feel has all this given you for America?

James Michener: I have lived abroad a good deal of my life, and I have been invited to live abroad. But I never would do that because I have consciously wanted to live within the United States under the protection of the United States flag, pay my taxes here and participate fully in the American experience.

Now it would have been immensely profitable for me in the old days to live abroad because if you did you were exempt from income taxes, as you probably know. That's no longer the case, but it was for a long time. Almost every young man, I don't know too many young women in this, but almost every young man who took that option, did so at great peril to himself. He somehow or other dropped out of the major race. He got a few fast bucks, but he didn't get the good jobs. If he was an actor, and he went to Europe, they wouldn't call him back for the big show that Marlon Brando was going to do. They'd say, "Look, Paul is over here. We can get him for peanuts because he has got to work." And so Paul takes this half-baked job, and the first thing you know, Paul has suffered, suffered, suffered.

It's true with writers; it's true with dancers. Now, the person it isn't true of, and it's very fascinating, is the opera singer because we don't have a lot of opera companies in this country. And if you are a real good tenor or a real good contralto, you can go to Europe, and you can work in those opera companies and do thirty a year! Learn five new roles, and everything good. If I were a tenor, I would be over there right now.

There are some people who, in analyzing your works, try to pull out major or favorite themes. They cite the meaning of being an American as one of those themes and respect for this country as another.

James Michener: Well, I have three or four times given evidence that I really mean what I say. I'm not quite sure why I behaved as I did. I don't think of myself as patriot. Certainly not a super patriot. But I have served this nation in a great many capacities, often at my expense. So at least I have done it. I would think it goes way back to the very earliest cave days, and I think about that a great deal: that you were a part of the particular body of land on which you were born and to which you were hooked and to which you responded and which defended you and gave you sustenance. So let's go way back there. It wasn't our cave against their cave. I have no feeling of that at all. Now when I was a boy, I lived on the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and everything in Pennsylvania was good, and everything in New Jersey was bad. Later I found I liked New Jersey better than I did Pennsylvania! I was in a heck of a stew. I do have a primordial feeling about my land and the mountains that I grew up with and the waterways that I have lived with.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the most memorable experiences of my life is talking with a great geographer who had a map of Australia and a map of the United States, here and here. And he said, "Jim, remember always that these two are exactly the same size -- bar that little bite down there which gives us a few more miles. Distances from here to here are the same; from north to south are the same. What is the difference? I thought, "Well, we are good people and they are not, or we are educated and they are not, or we had the early pilgrims and they didn't." "No," he said, "it's the Mississippi River." If you rip out of the United States the Mississippi River and all its tributaries, you have Australia. Beautiful coast, some rivers here, beautiful coast over here, and not a thing in the middle. And the reason it makes the difference is this: that when you have that river system -- now we are talking about the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Missouri, the Nebraska, fifty rivers -- when you pull that out, you have left a desert. And you don't have enough people to support the industries on the two coasts. You can't grow; you can't have a great airline; you can't have this; you can't have that. And the difference is in the land. And I believe that without any question. I think that the difference between the United States and Australia is we have that fantastic river system, and they don't. And if they had it, they would be better than we are maybe because they are a tough bunch of cookies down there. I think the land is a fundamental with me.

You've taken time out from writing these big novels to be a reporter. You've written about Kent State in 1971. You've written about civil rights. You've written about athletics and values in the U.S. What concerns you about this country?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think that any person who has lived 84 years in a given society is really stupid if, as it draws to a close, he doesn't reflect upon what he did right and what he did wrong and how he messed up and how if he'd only been a little brighter. All that is inevitable. That's a part of the human experience. Well, when you live not only in your own skin, but in your society and in your nation, you also cast up. When I was young and went out on the streets, and I was on the streets more than almost anybody you know, counting country roads, I had hardly a negative experience. Nobody wanted to give me drugs. Nobody wanted to con me. Nobody assaulted me sexually. Nobody wanted me to become an alcoholic. Nobody wanted me to be a gambler. I was supported by my entire society. Not well. I never had any money, but I had moral support, and I knew it, and I felt it. But the young person today doesn't have that. There are a lot of pitfalls out there today for the young kid that I never faced. So I am not going to moralize and say, "Why don't you behave like I did." Because he has no option of doing that. The schools aren't as good for one thing. And maybe the colleges aren't teaching as rigorously as mine were.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. But I do think one thinks back. And the great problems that I see are the fact that we are becoming a consumer nation rather than a producing nation. That we think we can run this great country on hot dog stands and electronics from Japan and shoes from Italy. And what are we making ourselves? What are we producing within our own society that keeps us strong? The second thing is the weakness in education. That terrifies me because my life was saved by education, and I want that same thing to be available for the kid that comes along. And I think that it is in greater peril than it was in my day. The third is that we haven't solved our racial problems too well yet. The reports of the last few days are heartbreaking; that black youths die earlier, often at their own hands. That they don't have the sense of self-respect that whites are allowed to have. That their family pattern is under terrible stress, when we know that they are just as able as we are, and they are just as wonderful.

The great black athletes that I have known are some of the best men that I have known in this country. Now if they can handle themselves as well as Wilt Chamberlain has -- relatively -- and especially Bill Russell and Magic and Jordan, then they are doing better in their fields than I am doing in mine. Should I construct a view and values that say that I'm superior to Jordan or Magic, when they are such magical people? I am good at what I do, but I'm not that good. And that worries me a great deal; it really does. I've lived in areas where this fight is underway right now, in Texas and Arizona, and Miami. And we ought to knock it off.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The other is that I do think we have paid less attention to the values of our society than we should have. Through the church, through great education, through our newspapers, through the agencies that we have. I think that a nation that loses touch with its essential values, the values which characterize it and determine it, is really playing a very dangerous game because the time comes when you forget them. And when you forget them, you lose them. And when you lose them, you may lose your forward impetus. Let me be very frank about that. From what I know, and the wonderful fact that we are a continental country, from ocean to ocean, we are all that that implies. All the great resources. I am quite confident that we are good until about the year 2050. I think we can absorb errors, and we can absorb civil disturbance, and we can absorb defeats as we did with Vietnam. We can absorb a lot of knocks. I think we are safe, but I'm not so sure after that. If there were to be a continuing provision of generations that did not know what America is all about or did not have tough rigorous inner discipline, or did not produce goods that will keep the country rich and prosperous -- we might be in very serious trouble.

[ Key to Success ] The American Dream

Get the Flash Player to see this video. That looms very large in my life right now. That anticipation, that expectation, that supposition. I could visualize a period one hundred years from now -- fifty years from now -- in which Japan was still a well-codified, well-organized state with a central drive and a central intelligence, and Germany could be the same. And when the United States, because of our peculiar structure, might be fragmented. It might be a Northeast; might be a West Coast; might be a Southern Tier. Might be a Mississippi Valley. That's a possibility -- if we make a lot of hideous mistakes. And so I am very strongly imbued towards a sense of a central tendency. I love that in human life. I love that in family life. I love it in a community, and I love it in a nation.

James Michener Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5