James A. Michener: life and literary career

¶ … James a. Michener

Open a book and you enter into another world. The names, the places, and even the events, may be familiar, yet they are not. They don't exist. They are the very personal creations of the mind of another - the mind of the writer.

As your eyes move toward that first line of text, you find that you have accepted a very special invitation; an invitation to explore the private thoughts, hopes, and ideals of another human being. It is a rare privilege really. Under normal circumstances, we are locked out of this secret place. Most times, it is closely guarded. A chance word, a facial expression, or a gesture might lend some hint of what lies behind the mask, but we never truly know, do we? On most occasions this world has no voice at all, or else its voice is quiet, so soft, that it is heard only by one. Sometimes, however, a thought - or thoughts - becomes so powerful that it demands to be heard. It breaks out of the prison of the psyche and exposes itself to full view. At last we learn how another individual sees those very same things that we see. How another intelligent being assembles and disassembles, and re-fashions the complex world of which we are all a part. Books possess this special power. And great authors use these "books" to tell us about the world as they see it. James a. Michener wrote many books about his world, once even winning a Pulitzer Prize. Michener had a talent for taking people and events from our world and inserting them into his. We read his words and see things that we never saw before. We understand injustices and hidden motives and realize that these things are. They exist. Not only in his world, James a. Michener's, but in ours as well.

As a writer, Michener is difficult to classify. In his drive to express his point-of-view, and to point up the difficulties and contradictions inherent in our world, he employs widely differing techniques. He fuses together several genres.

Michener writes narratives; he tells what happens to selected people at certain times in certain places. His work does not fit neatly into a category like science fiction, mystery or suspense stories, or psychological novels. Many of his major novels can be called historical in that they reconstruct past ages. However, Michener cannot be identified with historical fiction, which presents exploits that are grounded in fact but rely on extravagant adventures. His historical, panoramic novels are a serious effort to explain or interpret the past by showing how events involve human beings and are influenced by them. He grounds them in great amounts of fact, a tactic that eliminates those readers uninterested in his subject. (Severson, 1996, p. 17-18)

The blurring of the lines between genres, and the careful blending of fact and fiction is essential if one is to convey the complexity of personalities and events. Nothing in the world happens without reference to some other event. No human being exists totally in isolation. Perhaps Robinson Crusoe did, but even during the long years of his solitude, his thoughts and reaction were shaped by all those people, places, and events he had known before. In a sense, Crusoe's "desert island" was, in reality, densely inhabited. Like Michener's South Sea locales, his temporary home was peopled by the shadows of all his other homes - and even of many places that no one would ever consider home.

Standard histories speak of what happened, and often of how these things happened as well. The people that appear in these scholarly histories are something like characters in a movie. We see only what we are permitted to say, and more importantly, are not allowed to see behind the facade. A politician, or a general, is an actor endlessly replaying his role. In James a. Michener's works, we get to see the motivations that lie behind the acts and the decisions. By peopling actual places and actual events with fictional individuals, we are able to learn the answers to questions that were perhaps never even asked of the original participants. or, if they were asked, they did not receive a complete answer. Michener enables us to better comprehend real history by wrapping it in a literary history of his own creation:

Literary history" is a cross between conventional (scientific) history and pure fiction. The resulting hybrid provides access to history that the more conventional sort does not (in particular, a sense of the experiences of the historical actors, and the human meaning of historical events). This claim is demonstrated by an analysis... Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener.

Michener's technique is to] examine the effects of the Second World War and the events of 1942 on the human psyche, and suggest how human beings have always searched for the silver lining despite the devastation and devaluation of values.... [He] resist[s] any kind of preaching, and yet the search for peace, balance, and kindness is constantly highlighted. The facts of scientific history are woven into the loom of their unconventional histories. The sense of infirmity created by the formal barriers of traditional history is eased, and new possibilities for historical understanding are unveiled. (Adhikari, 2000, 41.43-45)

Michener's literary histories bring the realities of history to a level of personal reality that each of us is capable of understanding.

The distant events of a world war, the troubles of a far-away land, and the problems of an "exotic" people form the underpinning of the classic Michener story. His genius is to transport us to all of these places without making us feel as if we have traveled any distance at all. So real are the settings and the characters, that the reader believes himself or herself to have known these things, and these individuals, all of his or her life. Such is the essential role of the psychological realism that he imparts to his new historicist narrative. Michener is fully cognizant of the part played by human psychology in the shaping of world events. Though they may seem larger than life, the great men and women who mold our world are themselves human beings, with their own psychological problems and foibles just like the rest of us. Michener uses these psychological traits to predict actions and situations. He can only weave his tales by closely observing the real actors in the story. In an interview, James a. Michener gave his own opinion of the qualities of a number of world leaders:

Olof Palme of Sweden, Indira Ghandi of India, and DeGaulle of France -- they may have been exactly the people that their countries needed at that time, irritating though they may have been. I found Israel's Menacham Begin an anachronism, and I think Israel suffered a tremendous psychological setback when they chose Moshe Dayan and Begin as their heroes to present on the international stage. But I felt the opposite about Anwar Sadat of Egypt. He had a degree of courage greater than any I've ever exhibited. He had to go up against the kind of volatile opinion that eventually destroyed him.

(Grobel, 1999, p. 178)

His works follow the example of these real-world politicians. In fiction, as in life, their experiences ultimately affect millions around them. Might the world have been a different place if Anwar Sadat or Indira Ghandi had been brought up differently? Had these, and other individuals, not witnessed the events they witnessed - even the most minor, and personal of events? Michener would appear to answer with a resounding, "Yes!"

James a. Michener explores the unsavory, as well as the admirable, sides of the human character. Many of his writings expose the hypocrisy that lies hidden - sometimes just barely - beneath the surface. A devoted defender of human rights, he uncovers discrimination and prejudice in often unlikely places; as when he dug through the mud of American Anti-Catholicism at the time of John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign. In particular, he was shocked to discover how entrenched was this mentality even among the supposedly liberal and open-minded. At a dinner party in 1961, among, "an educated, professional crowd, Michener encountered 'American liberals [who]... had the most serious and deep-seated fears of a Catholic in the Presidency.' " (Carty, 2001, p. 577)

After listening to the virulent explanations of this group of intellectuals, Michener looked into his own soul and saw the great mission to which he had always applied himself.

Likewise, in a 1961 account of the campaign, Michener recalled thinking,

I've fought to defend every civil right that has come under attack in my lifetime.... I've tried to write as if all men were my brothers. In Hawaii I've stood for absolute equality, and it would be ridiculous for a man like me to be against a Catholic for President." (Carty, 2001, p. 577)

Michener realized, and his works show, that people are individuals. Their identities may be to some extent formed by external influences, but nevertheless, they remain individuals. and, as no two individuals can have had completely identical experiences, it follows that no two individuals can view events in exactly the same way. Thus, they will make different choices, and choose different course of action.

So important to Michener are all the minute events that go to make up a life, that prior to undertaking a new narrative, he sets himself the enormous task of finding out everything he possibly can about his subject.

The causal relationship between the characters and the social milieu is complex. In Michener's... novels, this complex interaction between characters and their environment is typically portrayed in finely detailed sketches that beg the question of which causes which. Michener, for example, goes so far as to provide incredible details about the land and environment, reflecting a Montesquieu-like interest in the causal nexus between geography, climate, and history. However, there can be little doubt that these historical novels also stress the critical choices... undoubtedly made. Fortunately for the artist, it is not necessary to resolve the problem of "the hero in history" or to commit to one of several forms of determinism. (Yanarella & Sigelman, 1988, p. 82)

Michener's "pre-occupation" with minor details is a deliberate choice. Nothing he describes is not part of the mix. The sort of psychological determinism that pervades his works fits nicely with all of the other facets of his technique. Realism and New Historicism demand life-like detail. Our world - Michener's world - is a real place. It operates according to fixed natural laws. These laws can be put the test much as a scientist repeats the experiments of his colleagues in order to see whether their conclusions are true. In the case of human beings, fictional or otherwise, it is only difficult to predict the future because the range of experiences available to each individual is so incomprehensibly vast. By providing the smallest and seemingly most innocuous bits, Michener wishes us to see his creations as living beings, and these living beings are themselves placed in an environment that is as solid and substantial as the homes in which we ourselves live; our offices, schools; city streets and fields. The more we absorb of Michener's narrative picture, the more we become a part of that picture. He desires nothing more - or less - than that we empathize with his characters. In fact, we become his characters.