DATE: Sunday, October 26, 1997              TAG: 9710230664

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   81 lines

MICHENER MADE WORLD HIS FAMILY

A rootless world traveler who grew to maturity without parents, and three times married childless, James Michener came to Hampton Roads two decades back to talk about the future of the American family.

Michener died Oct. 16 at 90 of kidney disease.

I was at the NASA Langley Research Center when the author of best sellers like Hawaii, The Source and Centennial argued that the traditional values of family life were essential for democracy.

``Otherwise you get deracinated people who have no stake and no hope,'' he told me in an interview afterward at the Sheraton Inn-Coliseum. ``I wouldn't want a hell of a lot of people like me around.''

He added: ``Without the saving experience of that woman and her kids.''

Michener was talking of the foster home that took him in as a child in Bucks County, Pa. A foundling, he never knew his natural parents; the woman who offered him a mother's love had little money, and the writer periodically spent time in the poor house.

``Rural poverty is a damned tough road,'' Michener said. ``The scars never heal.''

At 13 he began the restless wandering that was to carry him ultimately across seven continents.

``I was by no means precocious except in my willingness to cut loose,'' he said.

Michener bore the high forehead and bifocals of a bookman but the exotic experience of an explorer. He hitchhiked and rode the rails as a youth, traveling with carnivals and on the old Chatauqua circuit.

``I was - God forbid - the juvenile hero in the play that became the basis for the Andy Hardy series starring Mickey Rooney,'' Michener said.

His casting in that idyllic family scene had its ironies.

Scholarship studies at Swarthmore College and St. Andrew's University in Scotland and the second World War, in which he served with the Navy, left Michener independent and open-minded about other social systems.

He thought the family of the future might well be the communal Israeli kibbutz, ``which comprises 4 percent of the country's Jews who eventually make up 55 percent of its leadership.'' He insisted homosexual and lesbian families were ``not immune from the traditional problems of a relationship that beset heterosexuals.'' He affirmed ``the Pilgrim idea of one man, one woman.''

American marriages, he concluded, would in years to come be ``later and probably better'' - minus ``the nonsensical country-club symbolism of big weddings.''

In 1947 Michener wrote his first book, Tales of the South Pacific. It won the Pulitzer Prize. More books followed: Return to Paradise, The Bridges at Toko-ri, Sayonara.

The books were blockbusters, 1,600-manuscript-page heavies that attempted nothing less than the creation of ``a total world in which the characters move believably.''

``Critics say they're too long,'' Michener said. ``But I get around a thousand letters on a new book, and the readers will say it's too short. They come to live within my little universe, and they arrive at the last paragraph with a sense of grief at leaving it.''

The books took years to plan, years to write. Michener sifted the story about in his head until he achieved ``a big design,'' then he executed that design, largely without resorting to notes.

When I met him, Michener was at work on Chesapeake. Typically he insisted on driving to his speaking engagement here and driving back again - ``by a different route, to see the Capes.''

He wanted to know the territory that was his protagonist.

Home for Michener and his third wife Mari - or the anchor for their journeys out - was Piperville, Pa., a small town in the same Bucks County of his childhood years. Later it became Austin, where he wrote Texas. His work, however, transcended the limitations of political and territorial boundaries.

Nor was he only an observer.

In 1948 and '49, Michener, with author Pearl Buck, helped place more than 250 infants with adoptive parents.

``My wife and I set aside a fair amount of our income for the aid of other people's children,'' Michener said.

Last year Fortune magazine placed him among the nation's top 25 philanthropists, estimating that he gave $24 million in 1996 alone. The man who had no home made a planet his habitation; the man who had no kids helped raise hundreds. Now rests James Michener, of uncertain parentage, member emeritus of the human family. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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