I’ll admit one of my favorite authors, and one of the inspirations behind why I do what I do is James A. Michener. He’s one of the few authors I get exhausted reading because it is somehow dense with content and a breezy read. I’m intimidated by some of his longer works because I know it’ll take such a long time to get through them, and I know I’ll have to go back again to catch everything.
I’m still a fan despite what he did to Erroll Lincoln Uys and Joe Avenick, who I discovered reading Stephen James May’s biography of Michener. Joe Avenick ghostwrote Michener’s books “Sports in America” and “Chesapeake,” and also did editing work on “Centennial,” for the most part without credit. Michener gave him a copy of his unfinished work “Matecumbe” in 1987, which was published in 2007 after a publisher expressed interest in light of May’s book. From what I’ve seen Avenick has no hard feelings about what happened.
Erroll Lincoln Uys was a bit more prickly about his lack of credit on Michener’s book about South Africa, “The Covenant.” Uys, a native of the country, came from a newspaper/magazine tradition where credit was properly given for work. Uys’ website walks through how he wrote “The Covenant” with Michener, and Michener’s changes to Uys’ original drafts. To keep Uys quiet, Michener offered to put in a good word to his publisher, Random House, and provide a one-page credit for Uys thanking him for his assistant in “The Covenant.” Michener kept his word and Random House offered Uys an advance to write his own Michener-esque novel, “Brazil,” which I’m currently going through at a snail’s pace, due to Uys’ own dense style and the extensive notes on creating the book available on his website.
The story is very similar to what happened to me with my own publisher. I wrote almost the entirety of a book he wanted co-writing credit on, since it was his idea and he wanted an essay at the beginning. I did not ghostwrite it, I wrote it. We had a major falling out and now every later edition of the book has his sole name on it, just as he probably always wanted anyway.
May called Michener’s actions a “scarlet literary crime and used his celebrity status in publishing to get away with it.” My publisher didn’t have the same celebrity status to get away with what he did – Michener had a Pulitzer Prize, for his book “Tales of the South Pacific,” which Rodgers and Hammerstein adapted into their very successful musical “South Pacific,” which itself won a Pulitzer Prize and its original run on Broadway won ten Tony Awards, including “Best Musical.” My publisher has no awards to the company’s name, no adaptations, no influence, no cultural currency of any kind. As far as I’m concerned, they can slouche into obscurity, and the only reason I think they’re known at all is I’m talking about them.
So why am I still a fan of Michener after knowing all of this? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because I can’t dismiss inspiration, nourishment, or stimulation even if it comes from someone I later found out has done something unethical. It’s one thing to say “nobody’s perfect,” and accept a person with their flaws, but when someone inspires me down my path I can’t ignore the reasons they inspired me, even if they turn out to have committed unethical acts.