It should be noted, for proper context, that Michener’s gift to me of the Matecumbe manuscript did not occur in a vacuum. Throughout the years, Michener also gave me a number of short works that he wrote and then decided not to have published—for various reasons.
According to Michener, the ten short features on Russia, based on his visit there in 1974, were “mere reflections on conditions in the Soviet Union at that time.” Michener added that “the Russian stories can’t really be packaged successfully to address a viable target audience of readers.”
The series of twelve connected stories he wrote about life in Florida were not mere reflections but were cultural analyses of the people in that state. Michener worried, though, that these Florida stories would be received as politically incorrect and might infuriate some readers. Criticizing and making enemies of northern Florida rednecks, Cubans, and Haitians doesn’t leave room for many friends. (For example, one story is titled When the Last Real American Leaves Miami.) Thus, the mothballs.
Finally, his haiku poems, about historical figures and locations in America, were scrapped in favor of his book of sonnets, which was published shortly before he died.
One other gift from Michener was an apparently innocuous two-page outline.
I had told Michener that I was working on a novel about racism in the United States, set in Florida and New York. To date, I am still engaged in creating this work of fiction, which attempts to define the sensibilities of our age.
When I explained that several of my characters would be neo-Nazis pitched against the Mafia, and that I was debating how to organize and outline my novel, Michener remembered an outline he had written for a book that he never wrote about Austria in World War I.
“Use this if you want,” Michener told me, referring to his outline. “I boosted structure guidelines from Honoré de Balzac and others. This outline will show you one way that you can intersperse events to justify your characters’ acts, whether you write about Austria, China, heaven, or hell. Good luck with it.”
I then promised Michener that I would continue to write my racism novel.
Sometime in the near future, I’ll know whether Michener’s outline works.
If what I produce is as good as Matecumbe, I’ll be satisfied.
James A. Michener (1907–1997) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948 for his Tales of the South Pacific and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977. He was the author of nearly forty books including Centennial (1974), Texas (1985), and Alaska (1988). His novels have sold in excess of seventy-five million copies worldwide.
* The publisher has corrected typographical and compositional errors and errors of fact or meaning.
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