Playboy Interview: James A. Michener

Eons and eons and eons ago, before there was land to make mud pies or plastic to turn into Frisbees, before there was water to make instant coffee, before there was Earth itself—the third planet in the solar system, which revolves around the star we call the sun—there was the primordial nothingness of space, as virgin and pure as a newborn's bottom. And out of that vast infinity of emptiness came a beginning. And in the beginning was the Word.

Who spoke the word? Was it a funny word, like Punxsutawney? Or a serious word, like audit? Was it a spiritual word, like Yahweh? Or a dark word, like Adolf? Was the word spoken or was it sung? What language was this word?

These were questions neither the crocodile nor the Diplodocus pondered as they emerged on the land called Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, before there were caravans crossing the deserts, before there was the hula being danced for tourists on the island of Hawaii, before sailors wore coconut shells on their chests on Navy ships in the South Pacific.

Uppermost in the mind of the vegetarian Diplodocus was how she was going to keep away from the Allosaurus, that savage carnivore who savored the fleshiness of her huge thighs. Allosaurus had a jaw like a cavern, with rows of gleaming teeth and the ability to snap Diplodocus' neck in one chomp, like a Ritz cracker. Now, Diplodocus was not exactly a piece of shrimp. From her lily-padlike feet to the top of her reptilian head, the creature stood 35 feet tall, weighed in at 30 tons and dragged a 50-foot tail behind her. Still, she was a poem of motion, a sonnet of elegance. Her tail moved swiftly to fend off the Allosaurus' attacks, but more often than not, she found it a troubling time.

For the next 135,000,000 years, these dinosaurs would have at one another before the evolutionary scales of justice tilted against them in favor of lesser-sized creatures, like giant mammoths and sloths, wolves and beavers and the Paleohippus, who roamed the earth 53,000,000 years ago, all eight inches of him, and who, as we all know, became Eohippus 13,000,000 years later, growing four inches and developing hooves. Next came Mesohippus, two feet high, and Merychippus, 40 inches tall, and Pliohippus, 6,000,000 years ago, and finally Equus, who would, 2,000,000 years later, inspire a Broadway play.

When Equus appeared 2,000,000 years ago, another character was uprighting himself and beginning to walk like a cowboy. This was Australopithecus, a hominid. While it is uncertain whether or not Australopithecus discovered the lasso to capture Equus, what is certain is that Homo Erectus followed Australopithecus, and early Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man followed Homo Erectus.

What distinguished Cro-Magnon man from his predecessors was that he realized if words were what had started it all, then they'd be worth preserving. And since there were weeds in his garden that bogged up his mind when smoked over a fire, Cro-Magnon man realized he couldn't rely on memory to retain all the words. And so Cro-Magnon man decided to read. Once he learned to read, he needed something to read. So some Cro-Magnons became scribblers. They scribbled on cave walls and they scribbled on parchment and they scribbled on primitive stone typewriters.

These scribblers passed on their narrative traditions to generations of new scribblers. Soon after came the 1000-page novel, which a few scribblers learned to master. Some managed this awesome feat so well they became very wealthy and were offered TV programs on public broadcasting.

Out of this new generation of scribblers came a child of unknown origin, left without a name or a history, except that he had in his blood the history of all men, for this child was destined to record the struggles of men and dinosaurs and islands and continents in books called "Hawaii," "Sayonara," "The Source," "Centennial," "Chesapeake," "The Covenant." He did not know his destiny as a youth, as he grew up in and out of poorhouses, hitchhiking across America at the age of 14, going to colleges on scholarships and earning high grades, going to Europe to study people, places and history, working on a freighter to reach the land he called Iberia, which we call Spain, where young girls threw inviting darts at him from balconies and bulls tried to run him down in Pamplona.

When he returned to his homeland, he became a teacher and wound up at Harvard, but his destiny kept him from remaining there. He became an editor at a book-publishing company called Macmillan; and then the Second World War broke out and he went into the Navy and was sent to the South Pacific. Destiny's finger was about to tickle this man, for he found himself with time on his hands and stories in his head, so he began writing tales to pass the time and these tales were eventually published by the publishing house he'd left and they won him a Pulitzer Prize, when such prizes had credibility. He was 40 years old. The year was 1947, and the world was ready for him. Twenty-seven books would emerge over the next 34 years and each would initially outsell the previous one. The books were thick and full of details and history and spellbinding narration. The critics attacked his poor plotting, his dialog, his lack of characterizations, but the public bought and bought and bought his books and few if any copies of his novels were ever sold as remainders—something no other contemporary author in America could claim.

He made millions and he gave away millions. Presidents appointed him to commissions and made him a roving ambassador; a state legislature invited him to help rewrite its constitution; universities bestowed upon him honorary degrees; the Democratic Party persuaded him to run for political office. Hollywood turned 12 of his works into films and TV series, and a Broadway show based on his South Pacific book ran for five years. At long last, the nameless child's adopted name became synonymous with research and travel and best sellers. There wasn't a reader in America who didn't know the name James A. Michener.

Which is why Playboy sent Contributing Editor Lawrence Grobel (whose last interview for us was with George C. Scott) to talk with him. Grobel's report:

"When I got the Michener assignment, I recalled the first book of his I'd read. It was 'The Source' and I was living in Africa at the time. Although it was 1088 pages long, it look me only three days to read it. I was either very bored in Africa or totally captivated by the man's narrative skills. I couldn't tell for sure and I wasn't able to find any of his other work where I was living, so years passed before the opportunity to put Michener to the test offered itself in the guise of a 'Playboy Interview.'

"This time I got all of his books (including paying $95 for an out-of-print copy of his book on Japanese prints, 'The Floating World') and began an intensive study of Michener's world. But that, too, was not a fair test, since there were so many books and often they were so long and I felt a professional obligation to read as many of them as I could. So when I met Michener at his unassuming condominium in Juno Beach, Florida (he also has homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and St. Michaels, Maryland), I laid it on the line: Reading him the way I did was like cramming for an exam. Twenty-seven books in less than two months is not the way to sit down for some leisurely reading.

"Michener, who proved to be a gracious man, understood. He inquired about my education, which is his way of sizing you up before a conversation begins, and he let me know his, which is, considering the scope of the man's work and his continuing search for knowledge, prodigious.

"His third wife, Mari, a Japanese-American woman who has been married to Michener for 26 years, joined us at the beginning of our talks. They call each other Cookie. Somehow, calling Michener Cookie didn't seem the proper tone for our conversations, so I stuck with Jim. After three days, he stopped calling me Mr. Grobel, and that's when I knew we were getting somewhere.

"Michener's study consists of a bare room with blank walls, a single, mostly empty, bookcase, a desk made up of two small filing cabinets and a lacquered door, a Royal manual typewriter and books on space and aviation, among them 'The Rocket Team,' 'The Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Space,' 'Airplanes of the World,' 'Space Telescope,' 'Cosmos,' 'Apollo on the Moon.' Michener, who at times resembles John Gielgud, sat in a rocking chair and I sat behind his desk, and there we talked.

"We began at 8:30 the first night and spoke for three hours. The next day, and every day thereafter until we finished a week later, we began our sessions at 8:30 A.M., when he was his freshest, and talked for eight to ten hours, breaking only for lunch.

"Michener is a serious, intelligent, concerned man who doesn't waste time. He originally thought he could do this interview in two long days; but when he saw the 50 pages of questions I had prepared, he agreed to put as much time into it as it would take to get through them, plus all the other questions that naturally arise during the course of such dialog. He said he had never done anything like this before, and it's doubtful that he would do it again. As he would say, 'That's done, now let's get on with it.' "

[Q] Playboy: While you're considered to be one of the most popular writers in America, what comes to mind immediately when one mentions your name is the size of your books. They're often more than 1000 pages. Why such long novels?

[A] Michener: When television came along, there was this prediction: It was the end of reading, the end of the novel. I saw very clearly that that was not going to happen. I knew there would always be, in a country as large as this, a residue of readers sizable enough to provide a writer with a base. I also saw, as television progressed, that people would want to read more substantial novels and would be willing to invest the time if they felt that there was a reward. I have bucked the system in every respect—against television, against new systems of distribution, against the literary establishment—and I have turned out to be one of the most widely read writers of modern times.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think most of your readers actually finish your books?

[A] Michener: I suppose a good many readers do not get through them, because my books are rather formidable. In Centennial, there were more than 100 pages before there was any dialog. That's pretty heavy going. I sympathize with the people who drop out, but the fact that so many don't is really quite remarkable.

[Q] Playboy: Anthony Burgess said you don't have to really read a big book like yours; it becomes part of the furniture.

[A] Michener: That's a wisecrack. It has no virtue at all. You're going to dismiss War and Peace and David Copperfield that way.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider yourself a historical novelist?

[A] Michener: No, I really don't, because a good two thirds of the book occurs in the present. I think of myself as somebody who takes in the whole broad perspective. I do have wonderful respect and love for the old days. I try to figure out what people were like and how they managed then, what the big bite was, what agitated them, how they responded to their government, how they foresaw the future.

[Q] Playboy: Is that the beginning of what some consider your formula: taking several families through the history of their country?

[A] Michener: I start out with this high resolve, and before I'm three pages into it, I get swept away by the magnitude of the thing. If that is formula, then I'm stuck with it. It's a formula that Dostoievsky used, that Chaucer and Dickens used. It ain't a bad one.

[Q] Playboy: Is being called a popularizer negative or positive to you?

[A] Michener: That's negative. And it certainly applies to me. Anybody who has a book that stays at the top of the bestseller list week after week has to be suspect. My last few books have all had more than 1,000,000 copies in print on publication. That's unheard of! If a book sells 5,000,000 copies and it's read by maybe four readers per copy, that's 20,000,000 people on one book alone. That's, in essence, one tenth of the population of the country. So you can go to any airport and assume that one person in ten has read one of your books. If you crank in 10 or 15 books, I don't know how it factors out. I don't think it's related to me, per se, but I'm pretty good at what I do.

[Q] Playboy: Is it related to literature?

[A] Michener: That's a very tricky question. I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that. There is some validity to the supposition that anything that is distributed in those large numbers can't be very good. I obviously don't think it applies in my case. But a lot of people believe that. If it's Nabokov's Lolita or Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, you have to suspect that it's because it's salacious. But they're also a heck of a lot more. My case isn't an exact analogy. I don't use sex or violence or sadism. There's a tension and an indication that life is a pretty seamy mess. I would never get far away from that, because that's how I see it. But however you condemn Lolita, you can equally condemn me. If there is a redeeming factor in Lolita, there is a redeeming factor in what I do.

[Q] Playboy: You put yourself in safe company. How do you evaluate your strengths and weaknesses as a writer and storyteller?

[A] Michener: I don't evaluate among my own books. I'm just thankful, almost on my knees, that I've been able to get through one of them and get it published.

[Q] Playboy: That may have been an early attitude, but surely you don't feel that way now.

[A] Michener: Oh, wait a minute, I bleed.

[Q] Playboy: In spite of so many repeated successes?

[A] Michener: Oh, absolutely! And I know my deficiencies better than most of the critics.

[Q] Playboy: What are they?

[A] Michener: I am not very good at dialog. I don't use words as well as Roth, whom I admire enormously. I don't use social structures as well as Joyce Carol Oates. I don't have the quality of touch that Robert Penn Warren has. I do not begin to project myself into the life of another to the degree of somebody like Norman Mailer or Truman Capote, John Cheever or even John Updike. I am not very competent in dealing with sexuality. I'm good at it, but other people are so much better, they set a pretty high standard. I find myself pretty much locked into a 1940 milieu. I certainly have not progressed into the era of Judith Rossner or Portnoy or Cheever's Falconer. I am far less violent than Shakespeare and about the same as Dickens. And I am not very good at plotting; it doesn't interest me at all. I could end my books anywhere and start anywhere. It's of no concern to me. I give a kaleidoscopic view.

[Q] Playboy: But not a psychological one?

[A] Michener: No, because when you look at Marcel Proust or James Joyce or D. H. Lawrence, they do it so much better that I don't think I could ever do that. Some critics have said that I represented middle America, which is not a bad thing to represent, but my mail doesn't bear that out. At least half of my mail is from great scholars and they're almost all writing in search of further knowledge.

[Q] Playboy: After listing all those weaknesses, that's nice to hear. Do you think that what you do is rare?

[A] Michener: I never thought so, but maybe it is rarer than I used to think. I am pretty powerfully grounded in the American system. I suppose you can project that internationally. I know what makes countries tick and I write from that background. But it can't be the sheer brilliance of my writing. It isn't because I am the Charles Dickens of the 20th Century. Nothing like that! I suppose the bottom line is that I know what narration is and I have a gut feeling when it begins to go wrong.

[Q] Playboy: Did you always have that gut feeling?

[A] Michener: I never had great faith in my capacity until Hawaii, really. And I didn't have it on that book while I was writing it. But after it was over, with the tremendous reception it received and the vitality it showed, I realized I could handle things, big themes ... jeepers, creepers! But I am by no means in the blockbuster syndrome. I've produced a lot of them, but I've produced more that fall outside that pattern, like the book on Japanese art, on sports, on the election of a President. I don't hold myself in great value.

[Q] Playboy: Your publisher certainly does. But is it true that you still worry about having enough money?

[A] Michener: That's true, yes. I've handled the money problem about as poorly as any other writer. I've never been easy with it—when I've had nothing and when I've had a great deal. I have lived my life as if the bottom were going to drop out two years from now and I would be a regional director for a Federal writing project. I now live my life as if I had retired at the age of 65 with a small pension from a corporation.

[Q] Playboy: A few years ago, it was estimated that of the $8,000,000 you had earned from your work, you'd given away $6,000,000. Is that accurate?

[A] Michener: The first figure is low and the second figure is about right. We have given away enormous amounts of money to schools and museums. But it's silly to talk about this, because when we die, the whole bundle will go to colleges.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever splurged on anything for yourself?

[A] Michener: I'm a Quaker, so I don't spend money easily on myself. I would say pineapple juice.

[Q] Playboy: You say that with a straight face. You're serious, aren't you?

[A] Michener: Yes. Yes.

[Q] Playboy: Overall, how much money would you say your writing has earned?

[A] Michener: Some years ago, a man calculated that the Government had collected from things I had written—commissions, salaries paid, the vast number of books—$35,000,000 in taxes. Now the figure would be up around $70,000,000.

[Q] Playboy: That's just in taxes. Which means you've earned considerably more.

[A] Michener: Oh, no. We're saying something else. We're saying that South Pacific ran for five years and paid all that money. I didn't see a fragment of that. It's what the Government collected from me and from Mary Martin and from the things that were set in motion.

[Q] Playboy:South Pacific, of course, was based on your first book, Tales of the South Pacific, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948. Is that what first made you rich?

[A] Michener: Rich? No, Rodgers and Hammerstein drove a very hard bargain. But on the evening of the first presentation in New York, they knew they had one of the all-time winners, and I certainly knew it. So they voluntarily came to me and said that they would give me a share of the show—allow me to participate. I said I had no money and they said they would lend me the money, which was quite remarkable. It was $7500. In effect, they gave me one percent. And that has repaid itself many times. It gave me the freedom of a small regular income that a lot of writers don't have. The book never did well, but it's selling as well now as when it was published.

[Q] Playboy: You were the U.S. Navy's historical officer for the entire South Pacific. How did that come about?

[A] Michener: I served a complete, rather arduous, tour of duty in the Navy. I was in on a couple of landings and saw far more in the Pacific than almost anybody else. When I was through, I had orders home. Then their file showed that I was also a historian and had an advanced degree. So the Navy asked me to stay over for another two or three years and take charge of the history of the area. I tried to make believe I was bitter about not getting home, but it was pretty obvious to everybody I was very happy, because it was almost carte blanche to visit the whole Pacific.

[Q] Playboy: Since you were nearing 40 by then, what made you think you could be a writer?

[A] Michener: One of the profoundest experiences I ever had was on the island of New Caledonia during World War Two when I survived, rather miraculously, a near plane crash. Walking that night along the airfield, I realized that I was able to tell a story and write much better than the people I had been editing before the war at Macmillan. I had seen the operation of a great publishing house that had the top best sellers—Gone with the Wind, Forever Amber. And it came to me as quite a surprise that night, years later, because I had never brooded about this very much. I decided then to spend the rest of my time in the islands writing about them, which ultimately became Tales of the South Pacific.

[Q] Playboy: You've had a number of close calls with airplane crashes, haven't you?

[A] Michener: I walked away from three of them. One was a plane that sank on landing, lost some life. One was an overturn at a field in Samoa, no loss of life. And the other was a ditching in the middle of the Pacific the day that Sputnik went off in '57. That was a pretty frightening thing. I was the oldest person there. Christ, we were in deep waves and the plane disintegrated in three minutes. We were in the water, in rafts, for about 18 hours before planes got to us and radioed a Japanese fishing boat.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't that the crash where you lost a couple of manuscripts?

[A] Michener: Yes. The entire book on the Japanese artist Hokusai—and the outline for Hawaii.

[Q] Playboy: So much for the writer's placid life. What other interesting situations have you been in?

[A] Michener: Well, I was almost gored by a bull in Pamplona. It's most extraordinary that there happened to be a group of cameramen there, shooting blindly, when this happened, and a series of really remarkable photographs tells the story. The bull stands with his horn three inches from my belly. The guy at my feet is dead. I remain extremely rigid and the bull passes on. We went out the next day in the same area and, my God, the bulls killed another guy.

[Q] Playboy: And weren't you almost killed in a riot in Saigon in the early Fifties?

[A] Michener: I suppose that hotel in Saigon was as close as I've come to known death. The airplane things, either yes or no; a good deal of military action, you're bombed and it's yes or no. But the Saigon thing, I could have been murdered by a specific individual. Rioters came right down the hall and threw people out the windows, killing some, maiming others. When they got to me, they burst into the room and, for some crazy reason, I stood with my typewriter over my chest, shouting, "You can't do it! Can't do it!" That was a hairy one. I have been in some very dicy situations in riots. I've seen 15, 20 of them.

[Q] Playboy: Mostly as a reporter?

[A] Michener: Yeah. We sought out the rough spots. I have been very close to death a great deal and it has never loomed large to me.

[Q] Playboy: How often have you experienced physical violence?

[A] Michener: When you look at my face, you see that my nose goes around the corner. It's been broken three times. Sometimes when I spoke, I should have been listening.

[Q] Playboy: Were those barroom brawls?

[A] Michener: Yes, once in Spain, twice in America. Oh, and once I got hit right in the face with a line drive in baseball. I thought I was dead. And don't forget when lightning struck my cable car in Buenos Aires. That was awful. My wife Mari and I were on the cable to Sugar Loaf Mountain, right over the deepest part of the chasm, and lightning struck the cable car and knocked everything out, then struck it three more times. There were about 30 of us in the cabin and it teetered there, no lights, no power. It was a heavy wind, the car swayed. We thought we might have had it. Several people fainted through sheer terror. Mari and I were the stabilizing influence in there.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about Mari for a moment. How did you meet her?

[A] Michener: I was doing an article for Life on Japanese war brides. They sent me to Chicago, where they had some very good research people, and they invited this very bright Japanese girl who knew more about the problem than any of them. We met that way. We corresponded for about a year while I was in Afghanistan and Indonesia. After a year, we got married.

[Q] Playboy: Is she as liberal as you are?

[A] Michener: My wife is a Japanese conservative. I am a very strong women's libber. Much more so than my wife. She comes from a conservative Japanese background and I don't think the movement has hit that group yet. Also, it's a difference in personality. My wife has more of an early 20th Century attitude. It makes her quite a wonderful person in many respects. She is rugged and bold and fights the moral battles for both of us, so it isn't a big bone of contention between us. I'm looking more toward the future.

[Q] Playboy: Your wife was among those Japanese-Americans who were put into American concentration camps at the outbreak of World War Two. Was it a bitter experience for her?

[A] Michener: She's not bitter at all, though economically the Japanese-Americans lost everything and they were never compensated for it.

[Q] Playboy: How was she treated in those camps?

[A] Michener: She was treated abominably, thrown into stables 15 to a room. Very harsh for a young girl. She was born in 1920, so she was just 20. There was a fallout that was constructive: It did move the Japanese around. But when Senator S. I. Hayakawa comes on strong with his statements about it, I find it completely asinine, because he doesn't know a damn thing about it. He is a Canadian. He wasn't in on it and it is disgraceful that he says what he does, presuming to tell the American Government what the Japanese-American thought and felt and how they should respond. He says that the people who are asking for compensation didn't suffer and it wasn't half as bad as what they say it was. He is passing moral judgment on their behavior. I find this totally offensive.

[Q] Playboy: Does your wife talk much about that time?

[A] Michener: She is very philosophical about it. She objects when I use the words concentration camp, because she says it was not a German concentration camp at all.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any other words she objects to your using?

[A] Michener: When we married, I was in the habit of using the word Jap, which is a perfectly splendid invention. It's short, it's accurate, it takes up little space in a headline, it's completely definitive. It seems an ideal word to me. She told me, "We don't like that word because of the way William Randolph Hearst used it to crucify us." I kept using it and she said again, "We don't like that word because it was used so pejoratively throughout California to throw us in jail." I used it a third time and she said, "If you ever use that word again, I'm going to take a catsup bottle and knock out the rest of your teeth." Then I understood.

[Q] Playboy: Your first marriage lasted 12 years and your second one, seven. What were they like?

[A] Michener: They were very happy affairs. The first one ended because of World War Two, when we were separated for five years and just never picked up. She was a wonderful girl, daughter of a minister. The second one, I was in Korea for a long period.

[Q] Playboy: She didn't travel with you?

[A] Michener: Not enough. The caravan moves on.

[Q] Playboy: And Mari has joined the caravan?

[A] Michener: She goes with me all the time.

[Q] Playboy: You've never had children, have you?

[A] Michener: It may be because of me. I had a savage case of mumps when I was a boy and that often produces sterility. I had always thought that it was my deficiency.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever consider adopting?

[A] Michener: We did adopt, two children. At the divorce, the courts gave the children to the mother, and then the adoption was voided. The children went back into the pool. This was very much against my wishes. I pleaded with the court not to do it, but that's the way they wanted it.

[Q] Playboy: That almost sounds like something out of your own childhood, which is supposed to have been harsh. How do you remember it?

[A] Michener: I never had childhood ambitions. I was a very difficult child. I don't think I was very likable. I never had any clothes that were bought for me till I was about 14. I was very self-reliant. As an orphan, I was in the poorhouse for two extended spells. One about six weeks, one a long time. It was a very crucial period of my life. I saw a lot of disillusion. In those days, the poorhouse was the end of the line. There were a hell of a lot of men and women in their early 50s where the whole ball game was over. I had very bad moments. We don't have poorhouses like that now. Other kids had spending money, cars, got exotic vacations. I made up for it by the extraordinary richness of my experiences.

[Q] Playboy: In your autobiographical novel, The Fires of Spring, you wrote of the stark, wild terror you saw everywhere in the town you grew up in. For your main character, it was seeing an old woman eat a pile of dead flies. What was your own initiation into terror?

[A] Michener: I knew every house in a town of about 3800 people, because I delivered papers in the morning. When you do that, you become involved in certain tragedies: The leading doctor, who everybody thought had it made, blows his brains out; a teacher is thrown out of school; a girl becomes pregnant and leaves home. Apart from the poorhouse, which was a unique experience, I knew my town pretty well. I saw lives go awry, lawyers put in jail because they got involved in a client's problems. At a very early age, I adopted the policy of attending court, which was right next to the schoolhouse. I watched the dramas unfold.

[Q] Playboy: You also worked at an amusement park, where you learned to become a shortchange artist and a con man, didn't you?

[A] Michener: Primarily shortchanging, accepting a two-dollar bill and claiming it was a one. We played that amusement park like an accordion, finagling the turnstiles, stealing the bloody place blind. I very quickly learned all the tricks of the trade. If I could get a nun to put down a two-dollar bill, con her into thinking it was a one, I was the victor. When I go to the theater now and pass money in, I watch. They're using every trick we used. It's still flourishing. American commerce. As you know, stealing from the boss is just universal.

[Q] Playboy: Were you ever arrested?

[A] Michener: Several times, for hitchhiking. In North Carolina, in Georgia; that's where I got my fear of mixing with the police.

[Q] Playboy: What were you arrested for?

[A] Michener: Vagrancy.

[Q] Playboy: Your childhood sounds like something out of Dickens. But what about Mabel Michener, the woman who became your mother and gave you your name?

[A] Michener: She was a heroic woman, really. She made her living sewing buttonholes in a sweatshop, taking in other people's laundry. Yet she sent four kids through college and quite a few through high school. On her own.

[Q] Playboy: How many abandoned children did she take in?

[A] Michener: Oh, hell, 13 altogether. Every night of my life, starting about five, she would read to us. I suppose I owe all of my basic attitudes to her art in narration and the things she introduced us to. It was an American epic, really.

[Q] Playboy: Were you able to repay her?

[A] Michener: On a rather small salary, I bought a house for her. She never knew I was going to make it.

[Q] Playboy: Who told you she wasn't your real mother?

[A] Michener: A college student. I was a junior or senior in college. It hit with an overwhelming force. I had to face the very difficult problem of what my parentage was and what my place in the universe was.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever search for your parents?

[A] Michener: No.

[Q] Playboy: Did you speculate about them?

[A] Michener: You can't help that. When things were going bad, it was fascinating to daydream that there was a rich parent somewhere who was going to come in a black Buick and save you. But after a very brief flurry with several profound things in my life, I decided I was never going to solve that one.

[Q] Playboy: There is a certain irony that a man with your researching abilities was never able to find out about himself. Do you think a psychologist might interpret your enormous drive to research subjects as a search for your own parents?

[A] Michener: Well, here we're doing some double-doming of a very profound implication. I'm not wise enough to answer that. I'm not good at that kind of psychological thinking. When I was unmarried, I courted several girls who were going through psychoanalysis. In every instance, the psychiatrist told the young lady, "Gee, I would like to get my hands on that guy Michener." The great secret that one of them had was that I would be different if there had been men in my life. Christ, I knew that at the age of two!

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever been in analysis?

[A] Michener: I always felt that this I did not want. There is a great deal about me that I don't want to know. I have stabilized my life. I get by. I have no belief at all that it is as good as it could be, but I sure as hell don't want somebody messing around with it when I am reaching a kind of stabilization, pitiful as it is.

[Q] Playboy: As a young man, what were the books and who were the writers who influenced you?

[A] Michener: Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma and George Eliot's Middlemarch were books that really nailed down my conceptions. Probably the most important book I ever read was by a Dutch writer named Multatuli, Max Havelaar. Of the writers alive during my lifetime, Thomas Mann had more influence on me than anybody else. The Magic Mountain is as fine a philosophical novel as could be written. I'm extremely widely read. At one time, I had read almost everything. Really, I was a Wunderkind. Especially old foreign-language novels, the great historical novels. I've always been a sucker for a narrative. I read all of Balzac when I was 14. It hit me like an explosion!

[Q] Playboy: For a young person today, what books would you recommend to cause such explosions?

[A] Michener: I would be quite willing to sacrifice everything written 30 years before the child was born. With the exception of Madame Bovary, which is as timeless a book as we have on the shelf. You have to be somewhat historically minded to get the best out of Crime and Punishment or War and Peace or even Don Quixote, but Madame Bovary seems to me as great a book as you can get. I would certainly have some of Henry James, like Washington Square, which is an awfully stunning book, or Daisy Miller. Lampedusa's The Leopard. Yukio Mishima to give him a taste of Japan. In American writing, Steinbeck, Saul Bellow's Augie March or Mr. Sammler's Planet, Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome, Sylvia Plath, to show a girl what a woman writer can do with trivial material.

[Q] Playboy: You've excluded yourself. What of Michener's work, modesty aside?

[A] Michener: Either The Source or Iberia. A child from the Midwest might have his mind blown if he read Iberia.

[Q] Playboy: Is that your own favorite book?

[A] Michener: It's the book I'm fondest of. I think it will be around a long, long time. A lot of people are interested in Spain.

[Q] Playboy: When it appeared, weren't you criticized for being too lenient with Franco?

[A] Michener: The book was banned in Spain because I was too harsh on the regime. I was bitterly attacked. Then, just recently, I got The Gold Medal Award from The Spanish Institute for having written "one of the most definitive works on modern Spain," and, the Spanish government itself has published the book with certain emendations. Now that they see thousands of people arriving with the book under their arms, they suddenly realize that it has a vitality of its own.

[Q] Playboy: Which has been your most controversial book?

[A] Michener: All of them have been poorly received by certain segments of the population upon which they were focused. I have been thrown out of Hawaii, Indonesia, Burma. I was banned in Spain. South Africa was just the next in line. In Israel, many scholars felt it was arrogant and quite improper for someone like me to even attempt to write The Source. It turns out later that the Israeli government said that the best advertisement Israel has is the Old Testament or a copy of The Source. I've lived to see it all reevaluated, fortunately.

[Q] Playboy: How did the story of The Source come to you?

[A] Michener: I was all set to write The Source focused on Istanbul and Islam. Then I went to Israel with Leonard Lyons and Harpo Marx to see a castle on the shores of the Mediterranean. We went through the dungeons and in the semidarkness, within the flash of a second, I saw that the novel ought to be transferred there. I borrowed a matchbook cover from Harpo and wrote down the whole novel, 14 chapters. Of the 14 chapters that I noted, 13 stood exactly as I jotted them down.

[Q] Playboy: Both Time and Newsweek were very rough in their reviews of The Source. Time called it a "laborious and interminable book ... an avalanche of unsorted facts and artifacts." Newsweek said the book was "lacking in narrative coherence ... the situations ... absurd beyond belief." How painful is it to hear that?

[A] Michener: Those are modest compared with some. If a man has written 31 books and each of those has been reviewed by, say, 100 critics, you've had some 3000 critical articles. So one is accustomed to a pretty heavy barrage of both positive and negative criticism. By and large, one takes it philosophically. Regarding The Source, when you realize that the book is going to be read by probably 20,000,000 people, praised around the world, used as a text and in synagogs, be a course of study for schools and colleges and a constant source of amazement to Jews all over the world, you have to balance those two, one against the other. There's no great problem. When Jews in Russia got copies of the book, they had them translated in pencil into Russian and circulated chapter by chapter through hundreds of people. To hear those people talk about how they passed the manuscript surreptitiously is quite a moving experience. Time is just an opinion, not the arbiter of what's going to happen.

[Q] Playboy: There are a lot of people who believe you employ a large staff to do your research and that you don't really write your books. How large is your staff?

[A] Michener: My staff is me. I do all the research myself. Now, there are several exceptions to that: Kent State, because we were doing it under the hammer; Centennial, the Reader's Digest turned loose an editor when I was about 50 percent done; and for The Covenant, I sought help, but the whole body had been laid out. In all the other books, nobody. And even in those cases, I did all the research myself. You know, Irving Berlin told me a marvelous story. He said all his life he had been pestered by the rumor that he did not write his own songs, that he had a little guy in a back room whom he paid $28 a week who did all his songs. Then he paused and said, "You know, it's true. But the trick is to find the right little guy." Find the right guys, the right saloon, you're in business.

[Q] Playboy: So you're laying to rest the rumor that you have a little elf in the corner, writing all those books under the name Michener?

[A] Michener: Yes. But when I am through with a book, I employ somebody at my own expense to read it most intimately. I send my material around enormously. In the South African book, at one point, I had chapters out to five different continents. You get a lively debate. A guy will write back and say, "My God, you must have been in a tunnel. You didn't understand what I was saying. However, if you take this out, then it tracks." Whatever I was interested in, I never had any hesitation to go right to the top and I have never been rebuffed anywhere.

[Q] Playboy: Do you enjoy the research more than the writing or the writing more than the research?

[A] Michener: The research is joy. I can't tell you how delightful it is to find material that you're looking for. The amount of reading I have done is staggering. Thousands of books! Really arcane material. That is fun. The only other fun I get out of it is the second draft, when I have it all down and realize that it's viable, now let's see what we can do with it. Sometimes, working on that second draft, I get a feeling of real power. I never do on the first draft.

[Q] Playboy: Can you write anywhere, or do you have a special room?

[A] Michener: I need a quiet room. The view is of no concern whatever. The temperature is of no concern; I've worked in the arctic and in the tropics. I work only in the morning. I need a big work space, so I long ago formed the habit of buying either two small filing cases or a pile of bricks and putting a door across them and that has been my desk. I have written all of my good books on a door.

[Q] Playboy: You use a manual typewriter, don't you?

[A] Michener: Yes. The typewriter dominates me. I can't think sequentially in an outlined form without a typewriter. I type with two fingers and a thumb. When I'm through with a day's work, I have to take a shower; I smell like a horse. The nervous tension on top of that typing is terribly hard work. I perspire more sitting at that desk for five hours than I do when I take a ten-mile walk. I really beat myself to a jelly.

[Q] Playboy: And when the book is out of your hands and with your editor, you're still only halfway home, aren't you?

[A] Michener: When I turn a manuscript in, it is 14 months before it appears in print, because the editors at Random go over it with a fine-tooth comb. I insist upon it. The copy editor, the outside editor, the people I employ after the thing is done—all will knock hell out of it. It's the most meticulous editing for fact and grammatical accuracy and propriety. The average publisher couldn't afford to do this with the average writer, but we've had awfully good luck in doing it that way. They baby me and I think they're very prudent to do so. But, boy, this isn't just done and then, boom!

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever had any falling out with your publisher when a book hasn't promised to be a big seller?

[A] Michener: Sometimes the publisher feels they are failures and communicates that to me in one way or another. I have had some ugly things said that I resented deeply.

[Q] Playboy: A lot of writers are going to be very reassured to hear that.

[A] Michener: Keeping an artistic life alive for four or five decades is a terribly difficult thing.

[Q] Playboy: Especially when the years spent researching a project don't pan out, as has been the case more than once with you.

[A] Michener: Look, you don't terminate three books without knowing what anguish is.

[Q] Playboy: What countries did they concern and how far into them did you get?

[A] Michener: Mexico, Russia and another book. Russia, 300 pages. Mexico, Random House has always been eager to publish just as it is.

[Q] Playboy: Will it appear someday?

[A] Michener: I'm terribly embarrassed; I don't know where it is. I am not a very good custodian. I think it's in the Library of Congress. I couldn't care less. It's past; that's somebody else's problem. I have so many ideas, so many things to do....

[Q] Playboy: Is the rumored book on Islam a dead project as well?

[A] Michener: At five or six different intervals, I planned to do a big summary book on Islam, but for one reason or another, it never materialized. I feel distraught about this, because with every day that passes, it is needed more and more. To think that I might have done it and didn't is a source of great sorrow. I feel the same way about South America and about Central Africa. But one can do only so much. I feel those missed opportunities very painfully.

[Q] Playboy: What about Alaska? Haven't you often been asked to write about it?

[A] Michener: I have received so many invitations to write about Alaska I had to put together a form letter. I'm too old. One would have to have explored the Yukon in the winter and gone through some of the rough times. One could do it, I suppose, from a library, but I would never do it that way.

[Q] Playboy: How frustrating is it for you to recognize that you're too old for certain projects?

[A] Michener: If that were the only great idea I ever had, I would feel, Oh, my God, I missed the dog sled. There is a feeling of regret, that is a physical thing. It's still a possibility. I might get a partner one of these days and give it a fling.

[Q] Playboy: There's a question about aging you ask in The Fires of Spring that might be appropriate here: Do you believe that old men forget what it was to be young and wholly in love?

[A] Michener: I've had the feeling recently that older people do forget. I suspect that the virgin love of a 15-year-old boy is something rather more cataclysmic than I would now remember it to be. I suppose it's the loss of courage as much as anything else. Youth and love are components of that.

[Q] Playboy: You've stated that the older you grow, the more impressed you are with the marvelous force of sex in art.

[A] Michener: I am, really. At various periods in your life, you figure that you have this problem knocked. That now you're 41, you see what the ball game is all about. Then some 42-year-old man at the desk next to you runs off with an absolutely adorable waitress and it perplexes you deeply and you sort of wish you were he. So, at 41, you don't quite have it knocked. But by 48, he's out of your life and this is all settled. And then something erupts with such passion and power that you suddenly realize that the definition of sex that you had isn't quite the one that the guy next door has had. Then, at 56, it's pretty well all put to sleep. But they've been saving the big guns for the latter part of the play. You suddenly realize, Jesus, I wasn't even in the ball park. So now I'm 74 and I've studied this perplexity, and now I have it solved. A new Administration has come in that is going to knock all the morality in the head. The preachers are taking over and they're going to square away everything. And what do we find? Two of the staunchest Republican Congressmen, right-wingers, defenders of family decency, members of the new party that's going to revolutionize everything and take care of magazines like Playboy, movies like The Devil in Miss Jones, are arrested for soliciting oral sex and sodomy within almost a shadow of one of the most sacred institutions of the new Government. So, at the age of 74, I'm just as bewildered as I was at 16, really.

[Q] Playboy: In other words, your sexual drive is still strong?

[A] Michener: I would hate to reach a point when I could pass a tennis court and not at least notice a pretty player. I think the game is over then.

[Q] Playboy: Is age, then, a state of mind or of body?

[A] Michener: I had the difficult job of reviewing Sinclair Lewis' last books. He was leaving the scene just as I was coming on. The books were disasters and he apparently did not know it. I have reluctantly concluded that I would not know that my mental capacity was deteriorating. I am very painfully aware that my physical capacity deteriorates with each five years. Your eyes get weaker, you lose a couple more teeth, you can't run up stairs as fast. You're simply an ass if you don't recognize that. What you can't estimate is your own intellectual capacity and resilience.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think Hemingway was a good judge?

[A] Michener: The Hemingway case gives me infinite problems. Here was a man who lived on the macho image, did everything possible to cultivate it. He gave an outrageous interview two years before his death, saying that he was as good as he ever was and his juices were still flowing and all of this monstrous nonsense. Then, when the going got hard, he blew his brains out. Anyone interested in art has to come to grips with this.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it was the right exit for Hemingway?

[A] Michener: No, I don't at all. I think you stay in it right to the bitter end. I think you do what Hokusai did, what Titian did—you keep going until you're 80 or 90, if you're allowed.

[Q] Playboy: Hokusai is often in your thoughts. You've even said if you could have been anyone else, he'd be the one. What do you most admire about him?

[A] Michener: He did marvelously imaginative work and great art, right through his 80s. He had a very broad perspective of what art was and he was willing to risk it.

[Q] Playboy: Didn't he once say, "At 90 I shall penetrate the mystery of things; at 110 everything I do will be alive"?

[A] Michener: That's the goal. That's a reasonable target.

[Q] Playboy: So your best work is just beginning?

[A] Michener: That is my commitment, yes. Not fatuously, either. I really have some things to say.

[Q] Playboy: And we realize we've only begun to scratch the surface with you. Let's move on to politics, one of your great passions. How far back does your liberalism go?

[A] Michener: I have a very high sense of social responsibility. I was in the forefront of liberal politics in college. I led the fight against fraternities; I said they were crap. I led the fight for Mexican rights in Colorado, because it was perfectly obvious it was going to happen. My books have a certain tolerance because they reflect that attitude. In recent years, I have served as Democratic leader in the Constitutional Convention. I rewrote the laws of Pennsylvania. Then I was the chairman of the very powerful committee that put them into effect. I've served on six Government commissions, three of them presently. It's good and proper to be at the center of things.

[Q] Playboy: In 1962, you were willing to give up your writing career when you ran for Congress. Were you suffering a writer's block at the time?

[A] Michener: A writer doesn't write constantly; there are broad periods of time when he's doing other things. That was apparently one of them.

[Q] Playboy: What would you have done had you won?

[A] Michener: I suppose I would have served my five or six terms and then, in the big election of 1980, I would have been kicked out as being too liberal and I'd be about where I am now. Of course, the critical question is, would I have written those big books? Probably not. I must say I never took refuge in that. I was bitterly disappointed about losing. I wish I had won. I would be willing to sacrifice my writing career to a political career, because I place that very, very high on a scale of values, maybe the highest of everything.

[Q] Playboy: But how many politicians will be remembered as long as your books?

[A] Michener: Perhaps, but America has a very low opinion of its artists. We abhor and are frightened by novelists like Capote and Bellow. We don't trust them and we'd never give them a position of significance, where other countries do. A serious writer in the U.S. occupies a lower position than he does in any other major country. Look at the writers who are exalted by their countries. I don't think any of them compare, let's say, with Thornton Wilder or Robert Penn Warren. But America would be embarrassed to have a homosexual poet like Wilder in a position, or a gruff Southern original like Robert Penn Warren as an Ambassador. Unthinkable.

[Q] Playboy: Original thinkers don't often get elected President of the U.S., do they?

[A] Michener: One has to come to grips with why we pass up the great men to be President. We pass them up because we don't want first-class men in that position: We want somebody who is a stupid bum like us. We really are in quite serious trouble. Mr. Reagan is saying, "Let us turn the Government of this country over to the fine and noble and all-wise industrialists." Not a bad idea, because our nation was built in part upon that. Then I think, with a shudder, Wait a minute: These are the same industrialists who have been running Ford and Chrysler and General Motors for the past 20 years. Are they going to be infinitely wiser in managing the nation than they were in the management of their own companies? I think we're in the position we were when Joe McCarthy was running wild. It was a blessing that a Republican President managed to pull his fangs; Eisenhower, in his very tardy way, did just that. If we had elected Adlai Stevenson in '52, the entire Republican Party would have had to rally behind McCarthy and some very terrible tilings might have happened. So we were lucky it worked that way. It may well be that Mr. Reagan can do things that a Democratic President would not be able to do. But if he models his Presidency on the advice of these 70- and 80-year-old California millionaires or the extreme right, then they will obviously tumble into disaster. I think he's probably too bright to do that.

[Q] Playboy: And if he's not?

[A] Michener: Then we'll continue to fear change: no antigun legislation, no additional freedoms for the blacks, none for women, no concessions to outside powers. The nation as a whole wants to retreat into a kind of fortress and build spikes out against everything. This is a fatuous and fatal hope. The normal movement of society and history dooms us.

[Q] Playboy: Are you predicting a return to isolationist thinking?

[A] Michener: In everything. It's going to be antiscientific, anti-arts, antispeculation. And they're going to have a free run for 10 or 12 years. I have had the dismal thought that if your children wanted to study astronomy in the true sense, they might have to go to either Japan or Germany. I think we're in for very serious pressures. All of us are going to have to unite to combat them.

[Q] Playboy: What are some of the problems that most disturb you?

[A] Michener: The new Christianity of the South, which might engulf us all. The new militarism. The persistent refusal to grapple with the race problem. The peril that publishing is being put in, unless it wants to publish an endless sequence of sensational novels. Things like that worry me very much.

[Q] Playboy: What, specifically, bothers you about what you call the new Christianity?

[A] Michener: We're developing a very able cadre of American Ayatollahs who are going to do this country in the way the Ayatollah Khomeini is doing Iran in, if we're not very careful. There is a place for those people; they obviously serve a need by taking religion, through television, into the homes of people who don't have it. But when they branch out from that and become monitors of public health and public morals, I find it terrifying.

[Q] Playboy: Is Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority at the forefront of this?

[A] Michener: He is a prototype, yes. He and Jim Robison are very frightening. I would give a passing tip of the hat to the great Reverend Jim Jones, who served a very useful purpose in reminding us what can happen when the Ayatollahs go crazy. Scientology is frightening beyond imagination. The Moonies are a very destructive force. I have a feeling that we are exactly in the position that the Romans were about 15 years after the Crucifixion of Jesus, when their sons and daughters began leaving home, going into the catacombs, following a charismatic leader.

Falwell says he's going to drive all these people out of office; he's going to drive a magazine out of existence, books off the library shelves. He's going to reverse the sciences of the past 300 years. He's not only an Ayatollah, he's also a Savonarola. These people interpret the last election as a license to go gunning. They will knock off all the baddies, then the near baddies, then they'll knock off guys like me. We're going to see very soon whether or not they are able in 1982 to drive the remaining liberals out of public life, which they may very well do. They get rid of the political figures in '82 and then they come after us in '84.

[Q] Playboy: Who are the front-line baddies?

[A] Michener: The pornographers; people they don't like, like Jane Fonda and that great singer, Joan Baez. It'll be a fairly large hunting list. If the Moral Majority succeeds with television, then it will go after a whole lot of other targets.

[Q] Playboy: Whom do you place in the second line?

[A] Michener: People like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Judith Rossner, James Baldwin. Movies like Taxi Driver, Playboy. They've decided to exterminate from public life everybody they call a scientific humanist—that is, if you do not believe in God and the New Testament. So the Jews are just gonna be eliminated if these people have their way. Some have said so openly. But at what point does definition become a consensus? If it's a consensus, somehow, maybe, it can be handled. But if it's just some whim of some redneck minister in Georgia, hell, he can identify anything he wants. This has to be very carefully judged and very vigorously opposed.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think it could ever get to the point where liberalism in this country could be completely subdued?

[A] Michener: It happened in Germany. It happened in Spain. It happened in China. It happened in Japan. Why should we think that we are somehow marvelously exempt from what's happened in 15 South American countries? Why are we, north of the Rio Grande, exempt from the great movements of history? We're not at all! We could be next.

[Q] Playboy: You're an avowed anti-Communist. How do you feel about Soviet behavior in the Eighties and the future of that society?

[A] Michener: Russians are very much like us, and it's heartbreaking that we haven't been able to work something out with them. Right now, I see no possibility. The behavior of the Soviet state is monstrous. It's a society of delusion, lies and repression—and it shouldn't have to be that way. I think Russia may hold together for the next 40 years and then gradually begin to fragment.

[Q] Playboy: What do you see as your role in all this?

[A] Michener: I suppose that I will spend the remaining years of my life bearing constant testimony to the dangers of totalitarian action in the field of moral domination. It's going to be a long fight, one that will require constant reiteration. I don't think it will diminish in my lifetime.

[Q] Playboy: On the subject of fanaticism, we've seen a recent attempt on the life of the Pope. He's a friend of yours, isn't he?

[A] Michener: Yes. When John Paul II landed in Alaska, some of my friends went up to meet him. One of his first questions was, "Why didn't you bring Michener?" I have known him for many years and by not the slightest imagination did I have a hint that he was going to become Pope. I hold him not only in respect but in affection. Like many other great men, he's been through fire, he's been hardened, tempered. He has a great sense of humor, wonderful wit. He was great at one-line jokes, many of which were political in nature. I have laughed with him until my sides hurt. And he is keenly aware of the position he's in. I remember after one long interview, he took me by the arm very warmly and said, "Michener, if I get into trouble here"—that was when he was a cardinal—"do you think I could get a job in Hollywood? You know, Michener, I studied for the theater, I wanted to be an actor." And after every session, it was, "How did I do?" I've seen him three times in the Vatican and we've always talked about television and the media.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think when the Pope was gunned down?

[A] Michener: I was heartsick. A man dedicated to peace, a symbol of freedom in a difficult world shot down just for the hell of it. Insanity. My first thought? Last time I talked with him, we talked mostly about health and physical exercise. He said he took great care to keep in shape and I thought if anybody aged 60 can survive a blast like that, it's Wojtyla.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think about violence in America?

[A] Michener: I think it's ingrained, cherished and beyond any possibility of being disciplined. Americans love violence in all its manifestations. With world soccer available, we prefer American-style slam-bang football. With the rich potential of television, we prefer gangster shows and auto chases. With traffic controllable, we seem to enjoy killing 50,000 people a year with our cars. Nevertheless, we manage a fairly decent life amidst the slaughter.

[Q] Playboy: Is America different from the rest of the world on this question?

[A] Michener: Yes. Our history and our legend have deified the gun. It means something quite different to us from what it does to an Englishman or a Japanese. That's why our gun-murder rate is so fantastically higher than theirs. Guns to Americans are aphrodisiacs. Men are macho when they have them. Women go bananas over the gunslinger. I used to argue that if England and Japan could control murder by gun, so could we. Now I see things differently. Americans want their heroes to gun down the opposition, and I'd hate to be the United States Marshal who invaded Texas or Kentucky to confiscate their guns. We've created this myth of the gun and I guess we'll have to live with it. Of course, if we gun six or seven more Presidents, we just might change our attitudes, but I doubt even that.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think America is more militaristic than most countries?

[A] Michener: No, Germany has been number one, but we're a very close second. We idolize our generals to a fatuous degree. Russia is at least sensible enough not to do that, at least not to transfer political power to them. We are hungry for a general to be President of this country right now.

[Q] Playboy: Do you favor the volunteer Army?

[A] Michener: The decision to go to an all-volunteer Army was one of the colossal errors of recent history. It worries me terribly. It has produced a very shabby military.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you think the major trouble spots for the U.S. will be?

[A] Michener: The U.S. should unilaterally give Puerto Rico her freedom right now, because this is going to be a suppurating sore for the next 40 years. I see only trouble there and in the end the dissident groups will probably prevail. I think we will also have very serious trouble with Central America because of population pressures. Several countries there are increasing their populations at the highest rate in the world. The influx that we've seen from Cuba, Haiti and Mexico is merely a foretaste of what we're going to see. That's one reason I feel so strongly about not having education in Spanish. One of the finest things the Reagan team has done so far is try to knock out bilingual education. It simply terrifies me, because bilingual education builds upon our inherent weaknesses. If allowed to continue, it would ensure that we create a situation much worse than in Canada, Belgium, Cyprus or India. In Miami, if you're black and you want a job, you have to learn Spanish. That is insane.

[Q] Playboy: You've stated in the past that Germans make people feel morally inferior. Why?

[A] Michener: I have had a great debate in my life about the nature of God. He's either a Scandinavian, because I'm sure that in heaven every meal is a smorgasbord, or He is a German, because the Germans are superior and are destined to rule the world. It's just that every generation or so they're delayed. If I were to live another 40 years, I would expect to see Germany united and knocking Russia over the head, probably taking over France and Belgium and Holland. I think they're destined to because they're tough, they're well organized, they write far better music than we do, Goethe is better than Walt Whitman, and so on right down the line. They're the world's best travelers, they're intelligent, daring, they spend their money wisely. And they wrote the best guidebooks there ever we're on this earth. The performance of Western Germany in the postwar world is that of insight. All they need is a little push and some luck and they will organize Europe. I view them with awe.

[Q] Playboy: Since you're twisting the knife a bit, we might as well discuss France. Americans often dislike the French; are you an exception?

[A] Michener: In no other country of the world have my wife and I been treated as poorly and as savagely as in France. And we are not arrogant tourists, we are not people who misbehave. But, damn it, we were just kicked in the groin from start to finish in France. You have your unpleasant incidents and they pass in a few minutes; but the French don't let them pass—they want to drive it in. We've been insulted for being Americans, for not being French, for not doing things their way. It gets to be very painful. It got so bad that we refuse to go to France.

[Q] Playboy: So we'll expect no Michener book on France. Skipping around geographically, how did you feel about our recent experiences with Iran?

[A] Michener: American behavior toward the 52 hostages before, during and after was beyond imagination. It was overplayed horrendously. To call them national heroes was to betray any knowledge of history. We allowed Iran to play our public-relations agencies the way a master plays a violin. The taking of 52 hostages is something that could happen to any country at any time. It is part of the modern experience; you ought to react to it that way.

[Q] Playboy: During your travels through that part of the world, you must have encountered drugs. Have you ever smoked marijuana?

[A] Michener: Of course; I've tried everything.

[Q] Playboy: Opium?

[A] Michener: Yes, of course. We tended to do that when we were newsmen in Asia. We were in Phnom Penh and the houses there were run just like drugstores. It's inevitable that you would want to know what it was about.

[Q] Playboy: How did it affect you?

[A] Michener: I was in very good physical condition at that time and the casual experiences I had were not strong enough to induce much of anything. It was an experience, I know the taste and smell and sort of like it; that's all I needed to know. I'm sure that over a three-week or three-month period it would become addictive and it would be an entirely different story. With marijuana there was a general euphoria, a slowing down, like maybe five beers. I have had great difficulty in believing that it was the evil drug people said it was. The harsh sentences by the Texas courts are way out of proportion. Probably everybody in jail under those terms ought to be released right now. I would testify and help in any case.

[Q] Playboy: And acid?

[A] Michener: LSD terrified me, because I did see some horrible examples of it. In Marrakesh, I was fed some without my knowledge and even a little was pretty frightening. Somebody like me is very high-strung to begin with, it doesn't take much to trigger my imagination. I can get high on a Delacroix print, so I don't need LSD.

[Q] Playboy: As someone who's been around the world many times, you must have a list of bests, worsts and mosts. Four years ago, in a magazine article, you said Afghanistan was your most memorable land, the Pali cliff in Hawaii the most beautiful view, Angkor Wat the most compelling sight, Bora Bora the loveliest spot. Let's add to your list of mosts. Most beautiful women?

[A] Michener: Burmese.

[Q] Playboy: Most handsome men?

[A] Michener: Samoan.

[Q] Playboy: Best market place?

[A] Michener: The great market of Barcelona and the sook of Istanbul.

[Q] Playboy: Most erotic place?

[A] Michener: Tahiti. On the 14th of July.

[Q] Playboy: Most repressive place?

[A] Michener: Northern Ireland. The town of Portadown. On a Sunday in February. The bleak bottom.

[Q] Playboy: The ugliest people?

[A] Michener: The native tribes in Africa with the enormous buttocks. They can be pretty unaesthetic.

[Q] Playboy: Most boring people?

[A] Michener: An Englishman who has served in India and doesn't have enough money to go back to England and has settled in the shadow of Gibraltar.

[Q] Playboy: Ugliest architecture?

[A] Michener: Nebraska.

[Q] Playboy: Nebraska?

[A] Michener: Nebraska.

[Q] Playboy: Most unforgettable people?

[A] Michener: The Big Nambas of Malekula in New Hebrides were maybe the most primitive people I've ever worked with. They were cannibals. Cannibals are a delightful people. We were just laughing the whole time. I mean, if they're not eating you, they're a very pleasant people.

[Q] Playboy: Worst cities?

[A] Michener: The nadir would be the Bronx and Harlem. Detroit would be near the bottom. Northeast Philadelphia.

[Q] Playboy: While we're in the mood for lists, let's turn the tables on you. Since your books are so long, do you think you'd be able to come up with, ah, brief summaries of some of them?

[A] Michener: Let's try.

[Q] Playboy: Might as well start with The Drifters.

[A] Michener: A loving visit with young people who are trying to forge a new and dangerous way of life.

[Q] Playboy:Tales of the South Pacific.

[A] Michener: A group of American pilots forcibly marooned on Guadalcanal survive by one device or another.

[Q] Playboy:The Fires of Spring.

[A] Michener: A young boy of no strong central character is surrounded by a host of people with very vivid characters and they modify him.

[Q] Playboy:The Voice of Asia.

[A] Michener: Foot-loose in a rapidly changing world.

[Q] Playboy:The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

[A] Michener: The summary is exactly the same length as the book itself.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't that published in Life in one issue?

[A] Michener: I did that to see whether or not I could write the well-crafted English novel. I satisfied myself that I could. I could have written one of those books every year for the remainder of my life, but I took no great pride in it. It wasn't big enough, it didn't have the complexity I wanted.

[Q] Playboy: Is it your best-written book?

[A] Michener: I would think so. But I take no pride in that at all.

[Q] Playboy:Sayonara.

[A] Michener: Critics have called it Madame Butterfly revisited, but they must have been drunk when they said this.

[Q] Playboy: For those not drunk?

[A] Michener: An intimate portrait of a culture in transition.

[Q] Playboy:Hawaii.

[A] Michener: The real thing is 25 times more alluring than the travel posters.

[Q] Playboy: You once described it this way: "The first 10,000 words are an essay on geography, the next 60,000 are about the launching of a canoe, and there's a change of characters every 150 pages after that. It might make four marvelous movies."

[A] Michener: A very good summary.

[Q] Playboy:Caravans.

[A] Michener: An adventure in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan; a strong, reverberating account of one of the last frontiers.

[Q] Playboy:The Source.

[A] Michener: A summary of many cultures, many vibrant characters and many continuing problems.

[Q] Playboy:Iberia.

[A] Michener: An affectionate ramble through the history and art and contemporary living of a great peninsula.

[Q] Playboy:Sports in America.

[A] Michener: A critical look at the imperial nonsense of sport as it dominates far too much of American thinking.

[Q] Playboy:Centennial.

[A] Michener: A loving testament to the vast empty spaces of the American West and the crazy characters who inhabited it.

[Q] Playboy:Chesapeake.

[A] Michener: I wrote this book with a specific strategy in mind. Every man who owned a boat would have to buy a copy. Then I made the opening chapters so interesting that his guests would steal it and he would have to buy two more copies. The plan worked and the book became a big best seller.

[Q] Playboy:The Covenant.

[A] Michener: Even attempting to write a book like this proves that a man is more courageous than he is bright, but sometimes difficult themes have to be tackled.

[Q] Playboy: Since it's still at the top of the best-seller list, how controversial has it been?

[A] Michener: Very. It was blasted by South Africa and now is being embraced rather widely.

[Q] Playboy: And, finally, Kent State.

[A] Michener: A tragedy of the most somber character depicting the end of a violent period.

[Q] Playboy: In a book like that, or in any of your others, do you worry about being sued for libel?

[A] Michener: Many writers like me are very apprehensive about libel laws. In my lifetime, the focus of these suits has changed dramatically. It used to be libel, which became very hard to prove. Then it became invasion of privacy. Recently, it has become an extraordinary thing: unfair business competition. The most brilliant writer of this century was Howard Hughes, in that he set up a corporation and sold his life story to it for one dollar. That corporation has gone into court and stopped three or four books on Hughes. So we view Hughes with respect and even envy. The son of a gun figured out something that was brighter than anything we had figured out. And he licked the system on that.

[Q] Playboy: What did you think of Clifford Irving's hoax?

[A] Michener: I followed the Irving thing with the greatest delight. I was all on Irving's side. I didn't object too much to the year in the clinker. We all take risks, and that was one he took and I wish him well.

[Q] Playboy: What about Carlos Castenada's books on Don Juan; were they fiction or nonfiction?

[A] Michener: Fiction. I have a strong nose for that, because I have watched it in myself. I have worked in both fields.

[Q] Playboy: A number of your books have been made into films. Didn't Hemingway once tell you he hated what Hollywood did to his books?

[A] Michener: He did. I remember he also said he went to see his movies with apprehension and a bottle of gin. He always got through the gin before the movie, and left.

[Q] Playboy: What has your experience with Hollywood been like?

[A] Michener: I've had a dozen major motion pictures and television series made from things I've written. Some have been superb. They've won Oscars, they've won great nominations. Eight years ago, they had a listing of the top 50 motion pictures and three of mine were in that group. The Bridges at Toko-Ri was the best, almost better than the book.

[Q] Playboy: How many projects of yours are still available to Hollywood?

[A] Michener: At any time, I will have six or seven projects. People want to make a musical of Sayonara. They want to redo Hawaii. I've got three major works that have never been touched: Chesapeake, The Source, The Drifters. People think about them all the time. My life consists of three guys sitting in a bar in L.A. One of them says, "Hey, wouldn't it be great if...." Then somebody says, "I know Marlon Brando and he'd love to work on another Michener book." "Well, if we could get Brando, I know we could get Elia Kazan." Then they call and say, "Jim, have you ever thought of working with Brando again?" Then they go and tell him that I'd be willing. Nothing happens, but they then release the "news" to The New York Times. No harm is done, but if you took it seriously, it would drive you crazy.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of fantasy and fraud, weren't you once a fortuneteller or a palm reader?

[A] Michener: I used to be a professional fortuneteller and made a lot of money at it for charity. The secret is to tell somebody 40 things—of which two come true. Then you're a sensational seer; they forget that 38 didn't come true. I was known as Mich the Witch and played it for comedy. When I was in Egypt, I picked up a system of fortune-telling that was really quite extraordinary. I would answer any question specifically, in considerable detail. It was fraudulent from start to finish. But I would hit so close that it really became quite frightening.

There was one dramatic situation where I became sort of famous. This girl came in and the cards were such and such. I said, "How did the operation go?" She said, "What operation?" I said, "Your sex-change operation." Just out of the blue. And it was a guy in drag! It went all over the county. I got in the habit of saying the most outrageous things—and they were true. I got frightened by it. Once, I said, "Don't leave on the trip West Friday." And she left and a few miles from her home, her family was wiped out. When I was in Hawaii, I became very good friends with Henry Kaiser. He would come to have his fortune told. One day I said, "Henry, the banks are going to call your loan for $450,000,000, you'd better get things lined up." He went through the roof. "How did you know about this?!" What do you say to Henry Kaiser? You don't say ten bucks! I have a manuscript completed that will probably be published after I'm dead, about my experience in this. How it was done and my relation with the woman who taught me the system.

[Q] Playboy: Why must it wait until after, you're dead?

[A] Michener: Well, it's a little undignified. It shows the roots of this mania and how it can be manipulated.

[Q] Playboy: Of all the people you've met in your lifetime, who were the men of genius?

[A] Michener: In my lifetime, I have met only two geniuses, a word that ought to be used with great care. It implies a certain intensity and an intellectual gear that is different from what you and I have. I think about this a great deal. Talent is extremely common, disciplined talent is very rare.

[Q] Playboy: And the two?

[A] Michener: One was Bobby Fischer, the chess player, and the other was Tennessee Williams, who simply looks at life and drama and the human condition differently from the way I do and the way anybody else I know does. I think they are both suffering from the tremendous burden of genius and I'm not sure either of them handles it very well.

[Q] Playboy: Of the two, which one fascinates you more?

[A] Michener: Well, obviously, as a writer, Williams has to take pre-eminence. I had dinner with him in Rome or Spain. We had a long night together. He was just geared into something in a way I wasn't at all. Very impressive. What he said made scintillating good sense. I had a feeling almost of awe that a guy could be so ... well, keyed in. But from the point of view of genius in action, Bobby Fischer is quite compelling.

[Q] Playboy: Another extraordinary individual you know is Walter Cronkite. How did that friendship begin?

[A] Michener: That's a very warm relationship, one of the most rewarding that I've had. Cronkite is an authentic, he really is. I met him on an exploration trip to Tahiti. We sailed over very turbulent seas to the island of Raïatéa. Somebody had wired ahead that we were coming. As we entered this tropical lagoon, about as far away from anyplace as you could get, there was a very beautiful girl at the end of the pier with a violin, playing the Brahms violin concerto. We looked at each other and said, "How would you dare make up a scene like this?" She was from California. When she heard we were coming in, she felt the least she could do was give us an island welcome. One of the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had.

[Q] Playboy: Is Cronkite a solemn man?

[A] Michener: Oh, no, Cronkite is one of the great comedians of America. He's got five or six shticks. The mad race driver at Le Mans is as good as anything you see in vaudeville. His account of trying to broadcast horse races when the Mafia is running the station is terribly funny.

[Q] Playboy: Art Buchwald is also a close friend, isn't he?

[A] Michener: Buchwald is terribly funny. He, Cronkite and I have had a correspondence that at some point should be published. It deals with the invitations we all get to these affairs where we're awarded something. We formed an alliance some time ago that under pain of death, no one of us would buy a ticket to a testimonial for the two others. I initiated this because the people who got to me were especially tough in putting the arm on Cronkite and Buchwald to buy tickets.

For instance, I got a call on a Wednesday. An agitated voice from New York wanted to inform me that this company had picked me as the outstanding living American writer of this century. They wanted to give me an award on Friday night. Fortunately, my calendar was honestly filled and I had to say it would be impossible. They said, "You're not free? Norman Mailer told us you'd be free." [Laughs] Now, Mailer wouldn't know me if he saw me; I've met him only once. I said, "Yes, I was talking with Norman about it and he must have misunderstood." Then a pause. This petulant little voice says, "Do you know any other great American writer who might be free on Friday?"

[Q] Playboy: Are the Nobel Prize and the National Book Award the only two major prizes you haven't received?

[A] Michener: The only ones. I have everything else. A good number of those are recognitions that I've survived. I have more prizes than I feel I'm entitled to. I have to pick and choose very carefully among the many universities that want to give me awards every year.

[Q] Playboy: How political is the Nobel Prize?

[A] Michener: Uh, I ... well....

[Q] Playboy: You mean of all the questions you've been asked here, that's the one you're not answering?

[A] Michener: I don't think I should. I have a form letter that I send to people who write to me about the fact that I have not received a Nobel Prize. It begins: "When I think of the great men of my generation who did not get the prize—Proust, Henry James, Conrad, Tolstoy"—about 15 names—"and compare them with some of the clowns who did"—I'm especially bitter about Knut Hamsun, who turned quisling in Norway during the war and vilified every precept of what a writer ought to be—"I would much rather stand with the former than with the latter." Then I have a postscript saying, of course, I realize the impropriety of some of this, in that if you look at some of the good people who did get it, anybody would be very proud to be with them. It's as simple as that.

[Q] Playboy: Who among your contemporaries deserves the Nobel Prize?

[A] Michener: It was a grave injustice that Thornton Wilder didn't get it. He was good in three major fields: novel, drama, essay. There are other Americans eminently qualified: Edmund Wilson, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud, John Updike. If James Baldwin or Norman Mailer or Joyce Carol Oates dug down and did some really substantial work, the committee would be eager to give them the prize, for not necessarily literary reasons. I'm not sure any of them will do that.

[Q] Playboy: What writer of this generation do you think will be remembered longest?

[A] Michener: Vladimir Nabokov. He's not like anybody else. He bears more resemblance to Edmund Wilson than he does to any novelist. His place is very secure.

[Q] Playboy: And what book of this generation will be most remembered?

[A] Michener: If Capote can ever get Answered Prayers completed, it could be the Toulouse-Lautrec of this period. I found the sections that Esquire published quite corrupt, quite venal, really quite awful and quite wonderful. If he can bring this to a conclusion, 100 years from now I don't know whether people will be writing dissertations on Saul Bellow or Bashevis Singer, but I'm quite sure they will be writing dissertations on Capote and that book, because it's a roman à clef summarizing a period. He has a better chance of being the central figure of our period than any of the rest of us may have.

I have great warmth for Truman. Society, especially our puritanical, rather drab society, needs someone who looks and behaves like an artist.

[Q] Playboy: An image you don't feel you have?

[A] Michener: I've never been taken for a writer.

[Q] Playboy: What is the image of a writer?

[A] Michener: A cross between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The majority of us don't fall into that category. Today the prototype would be Mailer.

[Q] Playboy: A writer you've often been compared with is Herman Wouk. What do you think of his work?

[A] Michener: Wouk and I fall into the same category. I'm very proud to be there with him. He has been underevaluated by critics. His books will be read for a long time, especially The Caine Mutiny and Winds of War.

[Q] Playboy: What about Gabriel Garcia Márquez?

[A] Michener: I love explosive, poetic writing. That's why I'm so fond of D. H. Lawrence, because he does things that the rest of us can't do. And Márquez falls into that category very beautifully.

[Q] Playboy: Hermann Hesse?

[A] Michener: I found him the kind of writer that college juniors are going to go ape about. I don't think he adds up to very much in the long run.

[Q] Playboy: Alexander Solzhenitsyn?

[A] Michener: He's an authentic, a real voice. But I think he's a fascist. Still, brilliant people will be listened to, whether they're Mussolini or Solzhenitsyn or Giinter Grass.

[Q] Playboy: What about T. S. Eliot?

[A] Michener: I have enormous trouble with Eliot. He had a tremendously compact form of expression. But he was such a strong anti-Semite and such a fascist and such a bloody slob that I had the same problem with him that I had with Knut Hamsun. I just have a higher standard of behavior than that. Some things are forgivable, but not the annihilation of one's fellow people.

[Q] Playboy: Thomas Hardy?

[A] Michener: If I stand up and cross myself three times and genuflect, you'll forgive me, but Hardy is so good that I can hardly believe it. The opening chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge should be read by every would-be novelist. I cannot imagine a better opening. I stand in awe of this man, as I do of Dickens.

[Q] Playboy: What about Mark Twain?

[A] Michener: Mark Twain gives me a great deal of trouble. Huckleberry Finn is probably our finest American novel. I prefer it to Moby Dick, because there is more humanity in it, it's more easily apprehensible. But Twain as a traveler was despicable. Whenever I want to write about a foreign country, I read Twain to be sure that I don't do the things he did, the easy wisecracks, laughing at everything that was not Anglo-Saxon, playing the boob. I find it just repulsive.

[Q] Playboy: Cervantes?

[A] Michener: I revere him. It just staggers you that a nation should so adopt a man as its total image—a nation that wouldn't, at many points, have tolerated the son of a bitch. He would have been in jail in Franco's Spain, in Bourbon Spain, in jail nine tenths of the time, as he was. It's somewhat like America and Walt Whitman. We all now agree that he was probably our greatest poet, yet at no point would we have wanted him walking down the main street of Philadelphia or Denver. Cervantes is the great example of the fact that you cannot write these stupendous books in an armchair in a bleak room. You might do something else, but not Don Quixote. I obviously feel an intense personal relationship with Cervantes, because I have worked in some of the fields he worked in and I know intuitively what that son of a gun accomplished.

[Q] Playboy: Let's try two contemporaries. Joseph Heller?

[A] Michener: It would be a very high accomplishment, indeed, for any writer to put a new word into the English language, and he has done so and the rest of us haven't. That's probably the measure of his importance.

[Q] Playboy: And Thomas Pynchon?

[A] Michener: Young people in college ought to be reading him, far more than me, simply to test their ability to understand, just as I cut my teeth on the very best that was being done in my period.

[Q] Playboy: Was Hemingway one who greatly influenced you?

[A] Michener: Yes. The majesty of his sentence structure, his paragraphing, the use of words. I never fell prey to his machoism, I saw that as fake—his desire to be incognito and yet adopt a costume that was at least as flamboyant as Tolstoy's. I loved the guy. He was so shameless. I would be very happy to stand in his shadow.

[Q] Playboy: When you met him, did he give you any advice?

[A] Michener: He said that I wrote about people as if they had to earn a living and he tried to do that as well. And he said, "It's not enough to be known as a good Philadelphia writer, you want to go up against the champions." And that is my credo. I don't want to be known as a good Philadelphia writer, as a good South Pacific writer. Hemingway gave me my attitude.

[Q] Playboy: Music has also been an important influence, hasn't it?

[A] Michener: I listen to music every day of my life. A major factor in my education was opera. I know a dozen of them by heart and can conduct them, if I have a score. A great deal of the storytelling quality I have comes from this.

[Q] Playboy: The work you're researching now, about space travel, sounds like a departure for you. Will that be your next book?

[A] Michener: That's a very good question. I am certainly going forward arduously in the space project, but what I might publish next I am far less secure about. It is of such magnitude and requires so much work, whether something will intrude between it and its publication I really can't say. But I do know a heck of a lot of people ought to be reading it and seeing things the way I see them.

[Q] Playboy: You mean you feel it could be the culmination of all your work?

[A] Michener: Yes, yes, it could well be.

[Q] Playboy: We hesitate to ask—will the space book start with prehistoric birds?

[A] Michener: No, but in space, to go back 15,000 years, you need to start only 20 years ago. We really know very little; we're primitives. We are in an age comparable to that of Copernicus. The discoveries we are making are going to be of such magnitude that we are going to have to rethink a great deal of the universe. I probably want to go forward to about 1990, but the people at Random House will probably collapse and it will be hacked back to 1982. They go crazy because I like to end the book four years after the writing date and they are all appalled by what might happen in those four years.

[Q] Playboy: You obviously feel that the exploration of space is essential.

[A] Michener: Absolutely. If we don't do it, Japan and China and Germany will. If the civilian space program falls far behind, the Reagan Administration will push it all into the military. And military considerations work against space treaties and moon treaties. We're at the period that the world was when the Pope divided the world in 1493. It was just as mysterious to him as space is to us, giving half of it to Portugal and the other half to Spain. We're in that primitive period.

[Q] Playboy: You've testified before Congress on our scientific future and you serve on committees that counsel NASA and Congress on space policy. How much advanced thinking is going on regarding the future of space?

[A] Michener: I attended a meeting with 30 of the brightest men in the world, trying to speculate for two weeks where we are going to be around 2010. A man from Cornell pointed out that in 1938, President Roosevelt convened a similar group to advise him on what might happen in the next decade and those men failed to predict penicillin, radar, television, the atomic bomb and rockets, all of which happened within the next five years! But we are getting some indication with the manipulation of DNA, from what the Russians are doing in space, from what the most primitive types are able to do in urban guerrilla warfare.

[Q] Playboy: OK, just to lighten up, is it true that you couldn't be a close friend of Bennett Cerf's because he was a Yankees fan?

[A] Michener: That's right. I don't see how anybody who is seriously interested in the arts from a humanistic point of view could be a Yankees fan. They are the establishment, the Republican right wing. They represent everything that is conservative and objectionable in life. A really good year for me is when the Yankees are ahead by 11 games in mid-July and then Boston comes on strong and beats them out. That is the way God intended that it should be.

[Q] Playboy: Are you the only writer in America who isn't a boxing fan?

[A] Michener: I'm not only not a fan, I'm quite opposed to it. The way we use boxers is pretty much the way the impresario uses a bull, just for the fun of it.

[Q] Playboy: Still, it's not as violent as goat dragging.

[A] Michener: Goat dragging, yeah, that's the wildest thing I've ever seen in sports.

[Q] Playboy: You've witnessed that in northern Afghanistan. Would you describe it?

[A] Michener: You get about 150 Afghan horsemen who are divided into two teams, with a goal at each end of the field. The field is ten times as big as a football field. You take a goat and put him in the middle of the field. At the signal, the two teams dash in and somebody grabs the goat. He gets hold of one leg and the other team gets hold of the other leg and they fight about it. If it looks as if your team is going to score an early goal and the game is over, you tackle your own man and just beat the hell out of him until he lets go of the goat. After about 12 minutes, the goat has been torn apart. It isn't always identifiable as to which part really represents the ball in this affair. It gets rather messy and everybody gets bloody. After about 80 minutes, with bodies all over the field and horses with broken legs and the goat torn into six pieces, somebody gallops up to the goal and his own teammates are too exhausted to beat him and he scores the glorious victory. It's some ball game! It's not polo the way they play it on the greens of England or in Palm Beach.

[Q] Playboy: Nor baseball.

[A] Michener: Yes, I feel a great affinity for baseball, the leisurely way it unfolds and the way they take time. The analogy with what I do is close. It's drawn out, it can build up some tremendous climaxes and there is a decency about it. One of the greatest crimes against American culture is the designated hitter. Anybody who can support that would probably support child labor and women working in sweat factories and gasoline at five dollars a gallon. It's an abomination and ought to be stopped.

[Q] Playboy: To keep the analogy going, which baseball player is most like the writer you'd like to be?

[A] Michener: Robin Roberts. In his latter years, he had lost his really powerful fast ball, but he pitched for the Phillies, losing one—nothing, two—one, three—two in 11 innings. In other words, he was pitching absolutely superbly and they weren't giving him many runs and he was still winning 19 or 20 games. I would like to be like that. I have great respect for the man who gets completely knocked out of the park and comes back the next day—in control. I see that as an analog to life and I would like to be that way.

[Q] Playboy: So a satisfactory epitaph for you would be: He was the Robin Roberts of the literary world?

[A] Michener: I would not be at all unhappy with it. Theodore Dreiser was that. Zola was that.

[Q] Playboy: Let's end with a note of hope. What has given you hope and pleasure and satisfaction of late?

[A] Michener:Jalapeño jelly with cream cheese. There's still hope for the world if we can come up with something that good this late in the day. Jalapeño jelly has given me more hope than the neutron bomb.

"I have bucked the system against the literary establishment—and I have turned out to be one of the most widely read writers of modern times."

I do have wonderful respect and love for the old days. I try to figure out what people were like and how they managed then."

"My nose goes around the corner. It's been broken three times. Sometimes when I spoke, I should have been listening."

"I've always been a sucker for a narrative. I read all of Balzac when I was 14. It hit me like an explosion!"

I was in the forefront of liberal politics in college. I led the fight against fraternities; I said they were crap."

I think violence in America is ingrained, cherished and beyond any possibility of being disciplined."

"If I were to live another 40 years, I would expect to see Germany united and knocking Russia over the head, probably taking over France and Belgium and Holland."

"I met Cronkite on an exploration trip to Tahiti. As we entered this tropical lagoon, there was a very beautiful girl at the end of the pier, playing the Brahms violin concerto."