Author ‘creative, not an artist’

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34119, 3 April 1976, Page 16

Author ‘creative, not an artist’

(By

ROBIN SMITH)

Quiet, unassuming, and dressed in a conservative blue suit which looked as though it had travelled a good many researching miles, James A. Michener was curiously 7 out of place amid the shag-pile, wall-to-wall everything of the Chateau Commodore.

The suite was unadorned except for a large bowl of fruit, a stack of hardcover books on the sideboard, and a paperback cony of “The Gulag Archipelago” on the. coffee table. A banana skin lay on the writing table.

“I disappoint a lot of people because I am not an artist.” he said. “That masks the fact that I am a very intense and creative writer.” There was a difference, he said, between an artist and a creative person. An artist like Walt Whitman or Jean Cocteau had a public dimension.

“I sometimes envy the young men who play that role, but it is not for me.” Michener’s books, like “Hawaii,” “The Drifters,” “Caravans.” “Iberia,” and “Centennial” are rooted in months of careful research. He said that it was not a case of completing a lot of research and then suddenh being eligible to write a novel. The research went on all the time, and continued during the writing of a novel. “I can work almost anywhere if there is a quiet room

and enough space. I do demand a working area that is consistent. The idea of the novelist working on the bus or balancing a typewriter on his knee is totally impracticable as far as I am concerned.”

For most writers, he said, the creative process was mixed up with other processes. For Michener it is a feeling of strict discipline; when he starts something he stays with it and denies that this has anything to do with his upbringing. Of Quaker farmer stock. Michener was born in New York in 1907. He considers his home to be a small town in Pennsylvania where he has spent all his life. “I’m not really a New Yorker. It was just an obstetrical accident that I happened to be bom there.” The discipline which Michener applies to his writing is a necessary’ consequence. he says, of being a

free-lance writer. The discipline comes from the occupation of free-lance writing, rather than the other way round.

“When you are a free-lance you do not have to be too bright to know that after a year you have to get down to work. I have no boss, no time-table, no deadline; there just are not very many people in the world like that.”

Was the task of writing like other jobs people have? “No, there is a grandeur, a nobilitv about the arts which is really quite wonderful.” Was the novel dead or dying?

“I have lived all my life with young men saving the novel was dead. We have just come from Australia where four very bright young men told us the novel was dead.

“You might say the novel is dead, but mine certainly are not.”

The critics were right, he conceded, in thinking that, in the age of television, the short, cleverly nut together western or thriller which could be done better on television. were not needed. To that extent he thought that type of writing was dead. Was the success of his novels partly because they could inot he done better, or at all. on television?

“ 1 hat is probably true. Television have tried to huv mv last four books, desperately: so much so that they were trying every day. But there is not a damn’ thing

| they could do with them. I tell them there is nothing 'they can do with them.

“Kurt Vonnegut is the same sort of writer. What would you do with one of his novels in a television series?”

; Did this not leave the (novel as a very specialist I form?

“Yes, but the best novels always have been a specialist form and I think the novel will undergo far more radical changes in the future than it has recently. “I am sure that in 50 years time I could write a novel in whatever form prevails and make it appeal."

Changes in society Had peonle’s reading habits changed? “In the United States, society is splitting 70-30. Seventv per cent will learn entirely by television. 30 per cent will probably learn as thev have always learned in the Aristotelian, Socratic tradition.

“Our charismatic leaders, our Presidents, and our Cabinet members, will come from the 70 per cent. But thev will always need educated neople, the 30 per cent, of which I am one.” But surely bis readership extended outside the 30 per cent?

“No, I do not believe mv readers are outside the 30 per cent and I don’t, think it has ever been any different.”