Rice Krispies is one of my favourite junk foods, and James A. Michener is one of my favourite junk writers. He was no disciplined observer with the golden pen of a Somerset Maugham or the silvery resonance of a Joseph Conrad.
As one critic observed, "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 could also be used as doorstops."
One such doorstop was "Poland" which I never quite finished but all the others, from "The Fires of Spring" and "Hawaii" and "Caravans" to "The Source" and "Hawaii" to "Legacy", I read with great pleasure, and several others, but especially "Tales of the South Pacific", "Return to Paradise", and "The Drifters", I read and read again, often in different parts of the world, and each time they gave me new pleasures and new insights.
I guess there's only one autobiography a writer can write, and Michener's 600-page "The World Is My Home" brings it all together. It touches on every book he's ever written and the countless people he met during as travels throughout the South Pacific Ocean, including the famous but now almost forgotten Robert Dean Frisbie. Turn to page 69:
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I had been told that Hall was a friend of Robert Dean Frisbie, the writer, and I regretted not learning what he might know about him. But Lew Hirshorn was able to fill me that gap: 'Everyone in Tahiti knows the Frisbie story. Young American of great promise, came out here penniless and went native. Could write like an angel, even Hall says that: "Great talent. Knows far more about the islands than I ever will, but self-destructive. Doomed." The Americans in Tahiti often discuss what we can do to help Frisbie. He has four or five children, you know, and even though we feel sorry for the way he has to live, we do admire him for refusing to abandon the kids. Where he goes, they go. But he's a cantankerous son-of-a-bitch. Won't let you help him, so we've pretty much written him off.'
'His wife?' 'Dead.' 'If I am able to help him, then what?' 'He'll go on dragging his kids from one lonely atoll to another, pitiful case. Hall told me once: "Because I've found a steady life I've know the paradise that the South Pacific can be. Frisbie knows the hell.'" 'What's he doing on Pukapuka?' 'Dying.'
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A few pages later Michener leaves Tahiti and is on his way to Pukapuka:
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If Bora Bora from the air presented concentric circles with a majestic dead volcano in the centre, Pukapuka showed only a circular lagoon completely empty but subtended by one of the most miserable reefs in the Pacific. At places only a few yards wide and a few feet above sea level, the land of the island turned endlessly until it completed the circle, providing here and there widened-out areas where clusters of mean huts clung perilously to what solid land there was. It was a place of utter loneliness, the end of the world, and all who saw it for the first time in those years had the same thought: Come a major hurricane, such as the one in the movie, this place is a goner.
There was no airport building. Since we were in a hurry, we dropped the ramp quickly and ran down the metal stairs. There, standing with no shade to protect him, stood Frisbie, whose writings about the Pacific were some of the finest on the subject. He seemed old and frail. A man with an immense lantern jaw, as much of it as could be seen under his greasy pandanus hat, he wore torn clothes that had not been mended in years and a pair of soiled sneakers ... Was this the end of the writer, to be dying alone and ill penniless on a remote atoll? It was fearful to see, this wreck of a man once great with promise, the ultimate beachcomber. And then my attention was diverted from the mournful figure of Frisbie to one of the most touching tableaux I would ever see. To the airplane to bid their father farewell had come four of the Frisbie children, all clean and bright-faced and smiling. The oldest daughter, Johnnie, about fourteen, had risen early, so we learned, and had scrubbed her brother and two sisters, dressing them in their best so that they would look proper when they went to say good-bye for what might be the last time. ... In a few minutes we were going to load Frisbie onto our plane and whisk him away to a hospital in Samoa while his four children, only one even in her teens, stood bravely on the edge of the runway to watch him depart. How many children does one know, their mother dead, who are abandoned in such a predicament? How many children could survive on such a bleak atoll? Deeply moved, I collected a handful of bills from our crew, and after we had taken aboard their father on a kind of stretcher, I ran down the steps and gave the oldest girl the money. Embracing her, I whispered: 'We'll save your father and we'll come back to rescue you,' and we were off, but as long as Pukapuka remained in sight I stared down to see those children standing on the coral strand. ... During the flight from Pukapuka to the U.S. naval hospital in American Samoa I tended Frisbie, holding his head occasionally in my lap, and in moments when he felt strong enough to talk he told me of how he had reached the South Seas and of how he had wandered among the little islands, always preferring them to the big ones, and of how he had met his island wife. I think he said that he had lived on both the Pukapukas, but that his preference had been for the one on which I had found him. He had for a brief spell been an agent for the famous Burns Philp line of island stores, a task at which he said he was not very good, and he chuckled when he recalled his inept storekeeping. It was clear to me that his vital energies were failing and I hoped we could get him to the hospital while he was still conscious. |
All that happened in 1943. Frisbie made a somewhat spotty recovery, but he continued to travel, write and publish until his death at age 52, on November 18 (or 19), 1948, in Avatiu in the Cook Islands, from a tetanus infection. He was survived by his five children, who were subsequently raised by friends and relatives in New Zealand and Hawaii.
As for James Michener, suffering from terminal kidney disease, he ended the daily dialysis treatment that had kept him alive for four years. He said he had accomplished what he wanted and did not want further physical complications. On October 16, 1997, he died of kidney failure, at age 90. A life well lived and ended with great dignity!
P.S. With "The World Is My Home" already taken as a title for my own autobiography, I won't even bother to write one, but merely comfort myself with the thought that throughout my working life I had been the author and owner of "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld".
