There is some relationship between Jean Shepherd’s intertwining truth and fiction and James Michener’s works–especially in his long novels, in which he envelops the reader in true descriptive information regarding the people and locations of his fictions. I’ve just become aware of, and begun reading, Michener’s novel titled The Novel (1991), which is written about the process of writing, publishing, and surviving the critics’ reactions. One suspects that this novel especially, narrated by a fictional writer, has some resemblance, in his musings and reactions, to the truths and fictions of Michener himself. One is tempted to think of many creators, including Jean Shepherd, in that regard.

Michener’s narrator/author comments: “..if I were starting over tonight as a beginning writer I wouldn’t dream of doing it the way I did. I would be adventurous. I’d use new styles, new forms, new discoveries in psychology, new approaches to the reader, new everything. I am addicted to constant change in all things.”

I, snob that I am, have always thought of James A. Michener’s novels as “middle-brow,” even though I’d never read any of his enormous tomes—only his Tales of the South Pacific, short stories upon which the musical “South Pacific” is based. However, my wife, whose knowledge and perception of literature is far superior to mine, tells me that he writes extremely well and is fair-minded in dealing with people and their historical settings; one cares about his characters; his descriptions of setting are dense and transport one to a place; one learns a lot about people and the settings they’re in; Michener’s novels deal with morality in a league with the best fiction—that, indeed, he is on a level with the best of them.

My main contact with his work is through two of his lesser-known books, which express his deep and abiding knowledge and love of traditional Japanese woodblock art. He amassed an enormous and important collection of it and bequeathed it to a Hawaii museum.

Click on images to enlarge.

Read these books to enlarge understanding.

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His overview of that art, The Floating World, written in 1954, I find the most interesting and accessible book on one of my favorite artistic subjects. In his foreword he calls “An Explanation,” he writes:

It is the ambition of this book to accomplish four things: First, it tries to provide an account of the life and death of an art….

Second, this book tries to identify the relationship of certain great individual figures to the ebb and flow of a total art….

Third, this book tries to explain what happens to an art when a powerful and practical civil government begins to regulate all aspects of that art….

We Americans need to be reminded that a man with the mind of a mouse can lay down completely reasonable laws to govern the artistic process or any other social process. An idiot can propose such laws and make them sound logical. But of course, the social process thus regimented will always wither….

Furthermore, the Japanese print is fun. It comprises one of the most totally delightful art forms ever devised. Its colors are varied, its subject matter witty, its allurement infinite.

Fourth, this book endeavors to bring home to the American people the stunning fact that our museums contain the world’s finest collection of Japanese prints….

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Michener’s other book about Japanese woodblock print art concerns a fractional part of my favorite Japanese artist, Hokusai (best known for his “Great Wave” print). I own numerous books about Hokusai, and own several early editions of his art in book form, including an original of his extraordinary artists’ book–woodblock-printed volume, done circa 1805, Views Along the Sumida River.

During many of the later years of his life–and posthumously–Hokusai published fifteen individual volumes referred to as “sketchbooks” or “manga.” These books were possibly lessons for his many students/assistants and include exuberant depictions of major and minor images of Japan, its peoples, customs, and land. I have a late, non-first-editions set of the fifteen (1878).

The Michener book has special interest because of his opening essay/foreword:

Hokusai’s Manga is a work of such Gargantuan proportions that one’s reactions to it are apt to be more personal than objective. Some critics have condemned its fifteen crowded volumes as “an out pouring of sketches lacking organization or meaning.” Others, impressed by the art and vitality of the sketches, have judged them to be “a major art treasure.”

My own reaction has certainly been subjective, especially since the airplane in which I was carrying the completed manuscript for the book from America to the publishers in Japan crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately, all passengers and crew were saved, but my manuscript and the make-up pages illustrating it were lost, and that was a grievous blow.

But there could have been no finer therapy for me, in the days following the accident, than the reconstruction of this manuscript, because it dealt with Hokusai, and if there is any artist in the world who has caught the exact emotions that possessed me when I looked out of the door of the ditched plane and saw the friends who had preceded me struggling in the ocean—if there is any artist who has depicted men and women tangled up in life—it is the man who drew the teeming, tangled pages for the Manga sketchbooks.

Losing the completed manuscript and all the ancillary work that went into any major book–and picking up and recreating it–is extraordinary, and undoubtedly beyond my picayune, emotional capabilities. (I hate repeating myself in any such re-workings of my energy.)

Beyond Michener’s recreating the text and illustrative material of the book for print,

the peculiar and loving form in which the book was produced

requires my following description.

Traditional Japanese woodblock printed books are constructed with thin, translucent rice paper that, if printed on both sides, would allow the back sides to bleed through and corrupt the front images. Thus, double-width sheets were printed on only one side and folded over. An open double-spread, on its left side, has the right-hand-half of the previous fold-over sheet–and its right side has the half of the following fold-over sheet. The inner blank sides buffer, preventing an ink and visual bleed-through.

At obvious additional cost, Michener’s book is bound and printed by replicating this more intensive/expensive process of folded sheets. In addition, to help express printing subtleties distinguishing his book’s modern, mechanized, photo-lithographic printing and the Manga’s traditional woodblock printing, an actual woodblock printed example is bound into the book:

As a further expression of Michener’s fulness of mind and heart–his intense exuberance to express every last aspect of what he knows and feels–finding that some of the captions for his illustrations would not fit in their rightful places, rather than make all the illustrations smaller, or edit-down (cut short what should be said), at his book’s end he placed the location-deprived information in a special position of its own.

James A. Michener, you are an artsy man worthy of high esteem,

and indeed–awe!

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