The World Is My Home: A Memoir (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
I adopt James Michener as my grandfather for he has given me a rich inheritance in the things that matter most. I read Michener extensively from high school and throughout my twenties. Eventually, I developed a taste for the classics and was influenced by literary aesthetes who considered Michener middle-brow, so I neglected him (as grandsons will do their grandfathers). I now reappraise my “grandfather” from a distance of 16 years and proclaim my kinship because he helped me to become a better person. He taught me tolerance, openness, moderation, decency, gentleness, and the broad view. Michener was an optimist who avoided misanthropy, pessimism and cynicism, which are uncongenial and wearying to my spirit. Michener is one of the reasons that I am one of those blessed people who tend to genuinely like most people, cities, countries, foods, books, music, and films. Michener describes himself as “a citizen of the world” and radiates graciousness, good will and empathy for all cultures, races, religions, geographies, and types of people. “I had always loved people, their histories, the preposterous things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them.”(297) Michener believes he acquired his attitudes from his wide reading (as a boy he read 80 novels of Balzac) and his travels (he hitchhiked his way across America during the Great Depression). His peaceful tolerance he credits to his Pennsylvania Quaker heritage, and he modeled that behavior by marrying a Japanese woman shortly after he served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II, and he remained married to her until her death 50 years later.Michener organized his grand epics around one geographical location and then he traces the different generations (from prehistoric times to the present) inhabiting that geography. His novels gave me a long view and a broad context that has helped me to develop patience and a willingness to suspend final judgment. Like Steinbeck, Michener shows solidarity with and gives voice to the poor and marginalized. I have inherited much from my grandfather, and like him I am a citizen of the world even though I rarely leave my reading chair. I hope to make the time to resume my place at his feet and say, “Grandfather, tell me again a story about the old people.”August 15, 2013QUOTATIONS*******Here are a handful of representative selections from “The World is My Home” that interested me most. Michener on His Writing. I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of the storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation. (6) Having wrestled all my life with the English sentence, I realize that I have not conquered it; but I believe I have wrestled it to an honorable draw. (309) I may not be the world’s greatest writer, but I’m certainly one of the great rewriters.(311)Michener on His Intellect. My intelligence was acquisitive rather than speculative. (300) I had what was essentially a Germanic type of intellect, the kind whose owner plods along year after. I found I was more of a pachyderm than a hummingbird. Convinced though I was that I would never have a flashy intellect, I knew with equal certainty that I possessed a sturdy one, well qualified to grapple with the kinds of books I would want to write. (304-05)Michener on EdificationOf his famous dicta [St. Paul’s “Whatsoever things are pure... think on these things], I took as my permanent touchstone-- “whatsoever things are pure.” I tried to live a pure life by not worshiping false gods, or satisfying myself with sham, or seeking cheap goals. I tried always to engage in tasks that had some significance and to associate with people who were trying to accomplish worthy ends. To adopt a less lofty tone substitute for pure the word clean or simple. I have taken major steps and sacrificed much to lead a simple life cleansed of extravagances in either action or thought. (233) I had observed that certain men and women lived as if they had shorn away the inconsequential and reserved their energies for serious matters, and I decided to pattern my life after theirs. (264)Here are links to my two Michener reviews:Hawaiihttp://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...Centennialhttp://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...August 15, 2013
With undiminished affection for Michener and his work, I admit I only skimmed the last parts of this one–the constant digressions got to me a bit. But at some point it will worm its way back for true completion.Let’s remember, Michener originally had no birth certificate. No one could tell him when, where, or to whom he was born. As they say, not an auspicious start. He grew up with a number of other abandoned babies in the home of Mabel Michener, whose husband died young, and the broader, real Michener family, never shied from reminding him he was not one of them. Now, recall that he lived or spent substantial time in over a hundred countries, including Afghanistan, Indonesia (Java), and Singapore. He particularly loved islands, dozens of them, including Barra in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland and Bora Bora, his favorite, in the New Hebrides of the Pacific. He thought he was the only man to have spent a Christmas on Easter Island and Easter on Christmas Island. He really did make the world his home. And you can say it did not even stop there. He was one of the first champions at NASA of sending a civilian into space, and never quite got over the Challenger disaster that killed the first to be sent up. Although he did not publish anything until he was 41 (Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948), before he died he published over forty major works of both fiction and non-fiction, probably capturing forever the title of most prolific producer of long sagas. And still, writing was not one of his greatest passions, which were travel, literature, music, and painting. Just one of many possible anecdotes shows, perhaps most important of all, he was an honorable man. As a Quaker he was exempt from military service but volunteered anyway.Three things especially stand out. First, he goes to some length to prove he was just plain lucky, citing his having survived three plane crashes (one of which involved fatalities), and that if Tales of the South Pacific had been published a year earlier or later it could not have won (against All The King’s Men in 1947 and Guard of Honor in 1949). Second, success was not unmixed. A few examples: Hungary, Spain, and South Africa banned his books, Afghanistan and Israel threatened him not to return, and Israel, Hawaii, and Texas denigrated the books about them. Third, he did not allow his unabashedly liberal politics to either bias his writing or to keep him from friendship with conservatives.How he came to be a writer is here in a beguiling way. He treats you with what he saw in the Pacific in the form of stories of his wartime experience and warmly tells why they were so important to him. At some point, you realize that, of course, this is the real thing behind Tales of the South Pacific. He later explains why he chose to be a writer (he avoids “author” as pretentious). Over-simplified, he did because it was the way in which he could make a difference. And he gives his thought process for choosing what he would write. He chose things big enough to show that all of humanity are brothers.Of Michener, “you couldn’t make this up, no one would believe it” is really true.
What do You think about The World Is My Home: A Memoir (2007)?
His memoir was too long! In the edition I read, it ran 512 pages, there were so few times that I found myself quickly turning pages to read what was next. If he had written his novels in this fashion I would never have read more than one. I rate him as one of my favorite writers (he prefers this designation than "author"), but I just wish I had never read this book. I also found it frustrating that he never mentions how he came to live with the woman whom he would later think of as his mother. He describes how she took in foster children, and how he thought of himself as a "Michener," however, was he actually adopted by her? He noted that at the time he joined the Navy he had a problem due to the fact that he did not have a birth certificate; and he never tells the reader anything about her as he grew older! That annoyed me.
—Cynthia
Fascinating, though sometimes rambling, autobiography of James A Michener, arguably one of our greatest 20th century authors and certainly one of my top five. Abandoned by his biologic parents whom he never knew, he was raised in poverty by a woman whose name he adopted. He had no birth certificate. Certainly his description of writing is worth reading, but more fascinating is his accounting of his life. Raised in a Republican environment, he quickly became a flaming liberal. "In general, governments have spent their share of my money more wisely and with better results than I have spent my own funds, and one aspect of my life about which I am most ashamed is that I spent most of a decade living in three states that had no state income tax..." Yet at the end of his life, he brags about all the money he and his wife bequeathed to universities and libraries and other pet projects, yet none to government. He talked like a liberal, but when push came to shove, he acted like a self reliant American. I will miss his writings.
—Paul Parsons
My Dawg, but I'm glad I finally finished reading this one--five hundred pages, all of them pretentious, in which he explains over and over and over again why he's not pretentious. GAH!Michener has long been one of my favorite authors, but if the man himself was anything like he presented in this memoir, he had to be the most annoying person in whatever room he walked into, and in whatever city he chose to live. I gave this two stars only because he was a veteran of WWII and I have much respect for that service. But unless you enjoy reading the babbling of an octogenarian, you probably want to avoid this book. As for me, I'll forget this one and instead focus on books like Chesapeake, Centennial, Alaska and Hawaii.
—Haggis Chihuahua
