Author Robert Elegant Fulfills His ‘Destiny’ : Books: A former foreign correspondent tackles the challenge of summing up the nature of Asia.

The handsome 300-year-old Manor House at the end of the gravel drive in the manicured greenery just outside the city is quintessentially English.

The cherry blossoms nod in the light breeze--”candy floss trees,” as author Robert Elegant, whose home it is, calls them. Daffodils beam in the spring sunshine and weeping willows droop peacefully into a small lake.

There’s a mulberry tree that, local legend has it, was planted by the first Duke of Marlborough. “It may even be true,” chuckles Elegant.

The surroundings bespeak the very successful author of 13 books. Antiques and carefully chosen pictures acquired during a globe-trotting marriage fill Robert and Moira Elegant’s handsome drawing room, a light, spacious salon with pale lemon walls and cream chintz curtains and sofas. A painting by Clifton Pugh--one of Elegant’s favorites in the house--dominates one wall. A work by another Australian painter, Sydney Nolan, hangs over the mantelpiece in the wood-paneled dining room.

Guests at the couple’s chic dinner parties are a cosmopolitan mix that might include best-selling thriller writer Ken Follett, Asian diplomats, politicians, journalists, American visitors and the Elegants’ daughter Victoria, a doctor, and her contemporaries.

This gracious Queen Anne house in Buckinghamshire is where Elegant thought out his latest book, “Pacific Destiny,” about a diametrically different part of the world thousands of miles away: Asia. He did much of the writing at the Italian farmhouse he and his wife, Moira, own in Todi, a Tuscan village of 65 inhabitants that enjoys a panorama over countryside and olive groves. The book is due out from Crown this month.

The book is a trawl through and around a dozen countries--Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Indochina. The content is a mix of political, cultural and historical information, anecdotes and observation, as well as Elegant’s own experiences in Asia from the perspective of a journalistic and literary career that has spanned 40 years.

Elegant, who was born in New York City in 1928, had wanted to become a foreign correspondent since he was a 17-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Some knowledge of an exotic language and culture would obviously be an advantage,” he wrote. “Leafing through the university course catalogue, I found that Arabic was taught at 8 in the morning and Chinese at a civilized 4 in the afternoon, I chose Chinese.”

A spell in the U.S Army added Japanese to his linguistic repertory, and in 1951 he was appointed the Far Eastern correspondent of the Overseas News Agency on the rather less than grand salary of $60 a week.

Elegant was a full-time roving correspondent until 1976, working on assignments that included the Korean and Vietnam wars. During this period he became an expert China hand. There was spell with Newsweek (1956-65) in Asia and Germany after which he joined the Los Angeles Times as bureau chief in Hong Kong, working later as a foreign correspondent.

When he swapped a correspondent’s career for an author’s existence, Elegant already had six nonfiction books on Asia and three novels to his name. The book that rocketed him into the big time was “Dynasty,” in 1977, the saga of a fictional Eurasian family in Hong Kong in the early part of the 20th Century. The novel reached No. 2 on the New York Times bestseller list and sold 150,000 hardcover copies and nearly 2 million in paperback.

Sitting in his library, a high-ceilinged room with terra cotta-colored walls and crowded bookshelves, Elegant discussed his aim when he started on “Pacific Destiny.”

The goal was “to tell it as it is. I hope for the recognition that this is a very complicated subject, but that it is not impenetrable; that Asians are very different from us and we have to deal with them. There’s no point being frightened and no point being haughty. I hope people will get the message and the fact that it’s a very interesting part of the world.

“The Asians are very different from us. They’re from a totally different background and everything--what they expect, the way they behave, work ethic, status of women and philosophy--is conditioned by their culture. Whereas the psychologists in the West are debating the decline of values and its cause, in Asia religion and the family still hold sway.

“It is impossible to comprehend present-day events in Asia without some idea of their origins. We Westerners simply do not have the same basic acquaintance with Asian civilization that we do with European culture.”

The figures Elegant quotes in the book emphasize the importance of rapidly developing Asia on the international stage. Asia’s 2 billion human beings are 40% of the world’s population and produce half of the world’s manufactured goods. Travel to the Pacific and Asia will be one-third of worldwide air traffic by 1992.

Qualified as he is, Elegant admits to having been daunted at times by the vast scope of his subject.

“Halfway through I started screaming and suggested we just do the ‘miracle countries--the five tigers,’ Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; but the editor said that wasn’t good enough.”

Elegant sets the tone of his book early, announcing “I shall write as if I were talking over a drink after dinner.”

He describes the desperate plight of some of the refugees in Site 2, a camp of 160,000 on the Thai-Cambodian border, but their humble, grateful relief at being alive comes through. He sees the underpaid doctors in action in the primitive conditions, and also records the medical director’s more complex perspective: “The big problem is their good-heartedness. It takes the new ones a while to learn that every refugee is not a saint just because he’s suffered.”

A planet away is the scene in a designer boutique in a fashionable part of Tokyo where a salesgirl has sold a $12,000 Louis Vuitton trunk. “But he was very rich,” she says of the purchaser.

Another anecdote concerns a rumpled and sweltering Nikita Khrushchev on an official visit to Indonesia in 1960. The Soviet VIP was bored by a demonstration of local craftsmen and artisans at work.

“He yawned at the silversmiths with their tiny hammers, and he frowned at the weaver’s handlooms. In exasperation he spat out a few sentences. . . . I asked Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko what his boss had said. He replied, ‘The first secretary says Indonesia must get rid of all this handmade rubbish. Instead it must have machinery. All that counts is production.’ ”

The Elegants journeyed more than 75,000 miles to research the book, often in primitive conditions. Grimy is an adjective Elegant uses frequently. The couple crisscrossed thousands of miles of China in filthy trains. The author’s intention, there as elsewhere, was to get off the beaten track, away from the tourist route on a true voyage of discovery.

“At the end of two years, we were tired--and exhilarated by what we had found. It was tremendous emotional experience. I met Moira in Tokyo. (He married his Australian-born wife in New Delhi in 1956.) I’ve only been back to Korea twice since I left. Japan was very evocative, I’ve spent a lot of time in Taiwan and I happen to be very fond of Indonesia, which I find fascinating. It was a feeling that this was our part of the world. Hong Kong really is more important to me than anywhere else. We were exhilarated to discover the changes and find out how wonderful it was.”

The narrative swings back and forth from the ‘50s and Elegant’s assignments and impressions as a young reporter to the present. The transformation he describes underlines the accelerated pace of change that has swept Asia.

Where there had been impoverished emptiness, Elegant found cities with skyscraper skylines. “When I left Seoul in 1953 at the end of the Korean War, there were only about six buildings still standing. Now it’s a major world metropolis. Japan then also had vast bombed-out areas, and the people, though still proud, were broken. Now Japanese self-confidence borders on arrogance.

“In Indonesia in 1960 at the height of the Sukarno era, there were emaciated and ill-clothed children on Java, one of the richest islands in the world. Although the country isn’t a world economic leader like some of its neighbors, it has made a rapid transition from near hopelessness to relative abundance.”

Elegant warns America that it ignores the rise of Asia at its peril. “The Western policy-making Establishment has always looked to Europe because Europe is easier, and we know it. It’s so simple in comparison with Asia: a Turk and an Icelander are much closer together than an Indonesian and a Japanese. It’s the extraordinary diversity that puts people off because it’s difficult to understand.”

In “Pacific Destiny” Elegant has the ultimate challenge for a man who has spent most of his working life giving people an idea of the nature of Asia, “a chance,” as he puts it, “to sum up a lot of things. I don’t think I’ll ever write my memoirs--correspondents’ biographies are all the same--so this was an approach to it.”

He confesses to occasionally missing the immediacy of communication being a foreign correspondent offers now that his old professional stamping ground is hot news, but he doesn’t hanker to return to the fray.

“I don’t think I’d like to try and earn my living by journalism again--stories do tend to repeat themselves.”

Elegant agrees, though, that his life has been as exciting as he’d hoped when he first hatched those dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent. “I used to get paid for going where I wanted to go and asking people rather impertinent questions, then writing what I though about them. What more can you ask?”