Associated Press
Author James A. Michener, left, shown in this
file photo in Alaska, guided millions of readers to
Hawaii and the South Pacific with his best-selling
novels. He died yesterday in Texas at the age of 90.

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‘America’s storyteller’
James Michener, dies

Author came to love isles
while writing 'Hawaii'

By Gregg K. Kakesako
Star-Bulletin

James Michener worked seven days a week from 7:30 in the morning to noon in a Waikiki apartment for 10 months in 1958 to complete his 12th book: "Hawaii."

In the afternoons, after a swim at Waikiki, Michener would work on research for his book at the Bishop Museum, the Mission House's Children's Library, the public library and the University of Hawaii with his assistant, Clarice Taylor, a Star-Bulletin columnist.

Michener died yesterday in Austin, Texas. He was 90.

It was Taylor who referred Michener to Ethel Damon's "Kaamalu," which told of the adventures of Mary Rice, a missionary and mother, who during her eighth month of pregnancy in May 1844 walked 40 miles across an island just so another missionary could deliver her baby.

Michener used that incident to show the racial and religious prejudices that existed in Hawaii, where no ethnic group would ever trust their pregnant wives to the midwives of another ethnic group.

There is a parallel scene in "Hawaii," where a young missionary and his pregnant wife walk 40 miles on Maui to find Abner Hale, the missionary hero of the book.

Despite Hale's lack of experience in delivering babies, the couple trust no one else.

The exertion of the trek triggers labor and the baby dies while a group of Hawaiian midwives -- considered heathens by the missionaries and unfit to deliver a white Christian baby -- stands by idly.

Michener, along with Norman Mailer and Irving Stone, pioneered the mixture of fiction and facts to tell a story of a particular place through fictional characters and documented historical events.

When the book was published in 1959, there were criticisms in Hawaii from those who looked at it as a work of history.

The late Rev. Abraham Akaka said: "It is unfortunate that a historical novel often passes as the truth. People ... think about it (and) start believing how it really was."

But there were those who supported Michener.

University of Hawaii Professor A. Grove Day urged critics to look at the larger picture.

"Paradise is not an existing spot at which one may arrive," said Day, a longtime Michener friend, "but rather an empty stage to which people of many groups may come, bringing with them their maternal and cultural aspects, by which an Eden may be built."

Steven Goldsberry, a creative writing professor at the University of Hawaii and author of "Maui the Demigod," which won the James A. Michener Fellowship Award in 1981 from the University of Iowa, said: "As a young writer learning the profession, I owe him a tremendous debt."

Though he was never a big Michener fan, Goldsberry said the author "certainly popularized history. That was his strength as a writer."

Michener's influence on the islands also can be seen in the $20 million collection of 8,000 Japanese ukiyo-e or wood-block prints that he and his first wife, Mari, donated to the Honolulu Academy of Arts over the last 20 years.

George Ellis, Academy president and director, described the collection as "one of the finest in the world," complementing the institution's Asian art collection.

Ellis said Michener's reason for making such a generous donation was because "the people of Hawaii were so friendly."

The story Michener told was that when he was living here he asked directions to the Art Academy, Ellis said, "and someone went as far as taking him there."

Ellis described Michener as "an extraordinary man who was not only a great writer but someone who felt very strongly about the value of art in our lives. He was one of the country's greatest philanthropists."

But even Michener at one point became disillusioned with Hawaii.

In 1961, he blamed his disillusionment on racial restrictions against Asians. He said that he and his wife, a mainland born nisei, wanted to buy a home in Kahala, but found that it was restricted to whites.

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Excerpts from his 'Hawaii'

Some excerpts from the novel "Hawaii," one of James Michener's best-known works:

"For us there is only one name," the old man insisted in a burst of rhetoric. "Havaiki of the manifold riches, Havaiki of the brave canoes, Havaiki of strong gods, and courageous men and beautiful women, Havaiki of the dreams that led across the endless oceans, Havaiki that has lived in our hearts for forty and fifty and sixty generations. This is the island of Havaiki!"

And his prayer must have had power, for the trembling stopped, and the horrified voyagers huddled together to decipher this mighty omen.

They did not succeed, for a much greater was about to envelop them. From the mountain that reached high above their heads volumes of fire began to erupt, and rocks were thrown far into the air. Scattered ash fell back onto the earth and settled on the king's head and on the newly planted banana shoots. All day the fires continued, and into the night, so that the undersides of the clouds that hung over the islands shone red, as if even they were ablaze.

It was a night of terror, fearful in its strangeness and paralyzing in its power.

In one sense Abner did profit: he got each of his parishioners properly dressed for the opening of church, and on the Sunday when the sprawling edifice was consecrated, curious processions from miles around marched through the dust in their unaccustomed finery from Captain Janders' store. . . . Had Abner studied the climate for even a moment, he would have built his grass walls only a few feet high, leaving open space between them and the roof so that air could circulate, but churches in New England were built foursquare, and so they were in Hawaii, with no air stirring and the congregation sweltering in the natural heat, plus the radiation of three thousand closely packed bodies.