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 John
Balaban
Poet John Balaban participated
in a week long residency at Lenox Hill Settlement House
as part of the foundations' Settlement House Program.
James A. Michener's Tales
of the South Pacific
I grew up in a rough housing project outside of Philadelphia.
This was the 1950's. I don't think we had a tv at the
time. There was nothing like a local swimming pool,
or organized sports. Kids were just let out of school
to spend the summer roaming in packs. If we wanted to
play baseball, we would flatten the tall weeds in the
field behind the project. When I was about 12, bored
and fidgety as the summer wore on, I was allowed to
walk the four miles to the nearest public library, the
Union Library, built during the Civil War and looking
very Southern and classical with its huge porch and
Corinthian columns. I remember the screech of its long
screen door, the damp cool air as one stepped inside,
the musty smell of the books, and the small, round woman
at her desk facing the doors.
At first, she was skeptical. But it turned out that
the only people from our project who had taken out books
before were my older sisters, and they had returned
them, so I was allowed to take out one, me, a sweaty
little boy, but just one book, as an experiment. If
that first book wasn't Michener's Tales of the South
Pacific, it was this book that struck me that first
summer of reading, opening up a world beyond my tiny
world. I was deliriously excited by my adventures in
the South Pacific, but when I returned the book two
days later, the librarian thought I hadn't read it.
"Didn't you like it?" she asked. And then
I started to tell her about it.
Soon I could take out six books at a time, and she
no longer kept an eye on me as I spent hours combing
the shelves, picking out books, although once or twice
she took away a book as too adult for me. Once I found
a book that made no sense at all and took it her and
she told me that these were the poems of Horace and
that I could read them if I learned Latin. Years later
I did just that. I think my abiding love of books began
in the cool dark quiet of the Union Library, with its
the big shady elms outside, and its providential librarian,
my first guide to books and their wonderful emancipation.
Some forty years later, as director of a creative writing
program to which Michener had given a large endowment,
I visited him at his St. Petersburg home, along with
my Dean and department chairman. After our visit, we
had a half-a-day to kill, so the three of us chartered
a boat and went fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. As the
boat pulled away from shore, we were talking about Michener.
Then in his 80s, he was incredibly sharp and engaging.
As a young man, he had taught history at Harvard; later,
he had run for the Senate. He had been advisor to several
Presidents and he still kept a close watch on contemporary
politics. By this time, he and his wife Mari had given
away something like $80 million dollars to various universities.
Ours was just one of them. So we were still commenting
on our visit when the charter captain cut the engine
and leaned down from the upper deck to ask, "You
guys talking about James Michener, the writer? You mean
I might have had James A. Michener on my boat?"
Then he launched into descriptions of Michener's books
and why he liked them. He had read just about everything
Michener had written. Like me and, I suppose, a lot
of other people, he seen his first glimpses of other
worlds through the lens of Michener's prose.
Best,
John Balaban
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