The World Is My Home: A Memoir PDF
Preview The World Is My Home: A Memoir
ALSO BY JAMES A. MICHENER Talcs of the South Pacific The Fires of Spring Return to Paradise The Voice of Asia The Bridges at Toko-Ri Sayonara The Floating World The Bridge at Andau Hawaii Report of the County Chairman Caravans Caribbean Iberia Presidential Lottery The Quality of Life Kent State: What Happened and Why The Drifters A Michener Miscellany: 1950-1970 Centennial Sports in America Chesapeake The Covenant Space Poland- Texas Legacy Alaska Journey Caribbean The Eagle and the Raven Pilgrimage The Novel James A. Michener's Writer's Handbook Mexico Creatures of the Kingdom Recessional Miracle in Seville This Noble Land: My Vision for America with A. Grove Day: Rascals in Paradise with John Kings: Six Days in Havana "JAMES MICHENER IS A GREAT STORYTELLER.... Like his best novels—and the author himself—The World Is My Home is plainspoken, a little old-fashioned, and immensely informative." —Atlanta Journal & Constitution "The Michener saga is as full of twists as any of his monumental works. . .. His output, his political interests, his patriotic service, his diligence, and the breadth of his readership are matched only by the great nineteenth-century writers whose works he devoured as he grew up—Dickens, Balzac, Mark Twain." —Chicago Tribune "Sweetly nostalgic... The portrait Michener draws of himself shows us an honorable, driven, high-minded man who hangs on to his optimism at all costs." —Los Angeles Times Book Review "Engaging ... There are splendid yarns about his wartime doings in the South Pacific. There are hilarious cautionary tales about his service on government commissions. There are wonderful inside stories from the publishing business. And always there is Michener himself—analyzing his own character, assessing himself as a writer, chronicling his intellectual life, giving advice to young writers." —The Cleveland Plain Dealer "The World Is My Home is as monumental as his novels. ... In a compelling plainspoken style, Michener reveals that he got where he wanted to be through talent, discipline, outsized ambition, and luck." —New Woman "Michener's own life makes one of his most engaging tales—a classic American success story in an almost forgotten mode. ... [The World Is My Home] displays the old-fashioned virtues of modesty, open¬ mindedness, fortitude, and curiosity that have fueled his bestsellers." —Entertainment Weekly "THE QUINTESSENTIAL TELLER OF STORIES ... The retelling of his remarkable and prolific life ranks along with the best." —The San Diego Union "Eschewing traditional autobiography, Michener looks back on his long, globe-trotting life from more than a dozen vantage points— travel, people, politics, health. . . . Michener spins a wealth of marvelous yarns about his years as a teacher, editor, WW II naval officer, omnivorous reader, itinerant lecturer, occasional show-biz advisor, and, more recently, member of government commissions.... Engaging." —Kirkus Reviews "An excellent volume of memoirs ... [They] benefit from a marvelous honesty, a straightforward grappling with the most profound questions any of us can ask." —The Sacramento Bee "This relaxed account, from his gee-whiz days to his ninth decade, reveals an unabashed patriot and die-hard liberal who has never lost his awe at the variety of human emotions and natural landscapes.... Stuffed with bits of folk songs, weather lore, etymological detail, old tales retold, this book is testament to a long life of broad study. His sweeping intellectual curiosity alone, defiantly generalist rather than specialist in focus, makes it worthwhile reading, as does his candor about his weaknesses." —Wichita Eagle "The World Is My Home is splendid!... [A] delightful page-turner ... It is a pepper-upper, an encourager, a challenge to live life to its fullest." —Winter Haven News Chief(FL) "Quite enjoyable reading." The State (Columbia, SC) The World Is My Home: A Memoir James A. Michener RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS NEW YORK 2007 Random House Trade Paperback Edition Copyright © 1992 by James A. Michener All rights reserved. Published in Ihe United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, inc., New York. RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1992. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from Ross and Tom, by John Leggett (Simon and Schuster, 1974). Copyright © 1974 by John Leggett. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. ISBN 978-O-8129-7813-1 Printed in the United States of America www.atrandom.com 246897531 Book design by Carole Lowenstein Contents I Mutiny 3 II Tour 23 III Vice 92 IV Travel 115 V People 144 VI Politics 173 VII Ideas 231 VIII Writing 261 IX Intellectual Equipment 296 X Trios 325 XI Best-seller 360 XII Health 403 XIII Wealth 434 XIV Meanings 475 Index 513 The World Is My Home: A Memoir Mutiny THIS WILL BE a strange kind of autobiography be cause I shall offer the first seven chapters as if I had never written a book, the last seven as if that were all I had done. I segregate the material in this way for two reasons: I want the reader to see in careful detail the kind of ordinary human being who becomes a writer and then to see the complex and contradictory motivations that enable him to remain one. I have been impelled to attempt this project because of an experi ence that occurred eighty years ago when I was a country lad of five, and was of such powerful import that the memory of it has never left me. The farmer living at the end of our lane had an aging apple tree that had once been abundantly productive but had now lost its energy and ability to bear any fruit at all. The farmer, on an early spring day I still remember, hammered eight nails, long and rusty, into the trunk of the tree. Four were knocked in close to the ground on four different sides of the trunk, four higher up and well spaced about the circum ference. That autumn a miracle happened. The tired old tree, having been goaded back to life, produced a bumper crop of juicy red apples, bigger and better than we had seen before. When I asked how this 4 THE WORLD IS MY HOME had happened, the farmer explained: 'Hammerin' in the rusty nails gave it a shock to remind it that its job is to produce apples.' 'Was it important that the nails were rusty?' 'Maybe it made the mineral in the nail easier to digest.' 'Was eight important?' 'If you're goin' to send a message, be sure it's heard.' 'Could you do the same next year?' 'A substantial jolt lasts about ten years.' 'Will you knock in more nails then?' 'By that time we both may be finished,' he said, but I was unable to verify this prediction, for by that time our family had moved away from the lane. In the 1980s, when I was nearly eighty years old, I had some fairly large rusty nails hammered into my trunk—a quintuple bypass heart surgery, a new left hip, a dental rebuilding, an attack of permanent vertigo—and, like a sensible apple tree, I resolved to resume bearing fruit. But before I started my concentrated effort I needed both a ration alization and a guide for the arduous work I planned to do. As had happened so frequently in my lifetime, I found the intellectual and emotional guidance I needed not in the Bible, into which I dipped regularly, but rather in the great English poems on which I had been reared and many of which I had memorized. I was particularly im pressed by the relevancy of the opening lines of that splendid sonnet which young John Keats had penned when he feared, with good cause as events proved, that he might die prematurely, which he did, at age twenty-six: When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, Before high-pilèd books, in charactery, Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain ... How apt those words seemed because there was such a wealth of entic ing subjects about which I wanted to write that my brain, too, could justly be termed teeming. But I was almost eighty years old; much of what I would like to do would have to be left unfinished. Since it took me about three years to write a long work, if I had thirty viable subjects the task would require ninety years. That would make me one hundred and seventy when I finished, and I could not recall any writers who continued working so long, not even the doughty ancients in the Old Testament.
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