Sing Along With Michener : THE WORLD IS MY HOME, <i> By James Michener</i> , <i> (Random House: $25; 512 pp.) </i>

In his new memoir, “The World Is My Home,” James Michener puts to rest the idea that there are no second acts in American lives. As the old saying goes, his life really began at 40, when, during World War II, he sat down in a Quonset hut on Espiritu Santo Island, lit a smoky lantern, and turned out the linked stories that became “Tales of the South Pacific,” which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. This stroke of luck helped to transform him into James Michener, the best-selling phenomenon, and he has continued to live on the grand scale ever since, becoming in the process America’s “best-loved” writer.

Michener’s reminiscences don’t have much in common with the usual literary fare. There are no drunken brawls, no brilliant seductions, no drugs, and precious little animosity. Vice for Michener consists of an addiction to the fine arts. When he discusses writing, he often does it with an eye toward the business end of things, offering cautionary advice to beginners. Above all, he comes across as a practical person, and his book has the flavor of another, pre-Elvis era, when issues of complexity could be mastered through grit, hard work and positive thinking.

In choosing to call “The World Is My Home” a memoir rather than an autobiography, Michener alerts us at the start that he will not be terribly forthcoming about himself. We must ferret out the salient facts from chapters that are arranged according to subject--Travel, People, Health and so on--not chronologically. He jumps backward and forward in time, and while this allows him the leisure to dwell on his strongest concerns, it opens gaps in the narrative that leave a reader scratching his head over the missing parts of the puzzle.

Michener had a difficult, scarring, Dickensian childhood. Orphaned at birth, he grew up in Pennsylvania, bouncing from one foster home to another. The homes were run by Mabel Michener, a caring, intelligent woman who took in the wounded and the abandoned. Others in the Michener clan were not so kind and put it to young James that he was not a true Michener, and this gave him an independence of spirit, as well as an emotional armoring, that molded his character. He became a Quaker and has always had the sturdy, unshakable values of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

In his teens, Michener took to the road, hitchhiking around the country and developing a love of exploration and adventure that never left him. As a scholarship student at Swarthmore, he was a classic high achiever. He enjoyed painting, poetry and music, especially opera, but he showed no predisposition toward writing. Eventually, he went to work in publishing, and as his 40th birthday approached he found himself about to be drafted into the Army. He enlisted in the Navy instead and was stationed in the South Pacific, where the life-changing episodes began.

The chapters that deal with Polynesia are the stars of “The World Is My Home.” Michener’s recollections are sweetly nostalgic and have a simple human happiness that is sometimes missing elsewhere in the book. He fell into an island paradise that was far enough removed from the war theater to pose no serious threat, and he was soon gifted with a writer’s most precious possession--wonderful material. There were honky-tonks, colorful characters, a surpassingly beautiful landscape, and just enough weirdness around the edges to keep everybody on his toes.

Michener admits to being a bit of a Boy Scout, but the South Pacific seems to have loosened him up a little. In a distant, Victorian way, he describes the sexual dreamland in which many Americana GIs were living, invited by their hosts to take up residence with the most gorgeous young girls of the islands. So lubricious was the scene on Bora Bora that soldiers often didn’t want to return to the states. Michener makes Polynesia sound like the Playboy Mansion, but he plays his cards so close to the vest that it’s impossible to tell whether he was only an observer, someone who liked to admire the naked bodies of the natives when they went skinny-dipping at twilight.

Observation has always been central to Michener’s work. He has a vast curiosity, and research and reporting provide the substance for his novels. Yet, by his account, he might never have written a word if he hadn’t almost died in a plane crash while landing at Tontouta Air Base. His brush with death gave him the willies, and during a long night of soul-searching he realized that he was dissatisfied with himself. “As the stars came out and I could see the low mountains I had escaped,” he says. “I swore: ‘I’m going to live the rest of my life as if I were a great man.’ ” It’s the as if that matters here, for Michener is essentially a modest soul. From that moment on, though, he would ask the best of himself.

It takes an idealist to make such vow, and Michener is idealistic to the core. He confesses that he would have made a good minister if he had had more religion. But it was his fate to hole up in his Quonset hut and transcribe as accurately as possible his vision of the South Pacific. When the manuscript was finished, he submitted it anonymously to Macmillan, where he had gone back to work as an editor, and the company published it to scant critical praise and indifferent sales. The cheap, ugly dust jacket remains an object of scorn to Michener. On the basis of his reception, he had no intention of quitting his job, but then, out of the blue, he won the Pulitzer, and his transformation was complete.

Well, not quite. “Tales” went on to sell many copies, but Michener earned his first megabucks from the Broadway adaptation, “South Pacific,” a Rodgers and Hammerstein collaboration. For a time after his success, he struggled with his identity as a writer until he hit on the sort of formulaic “big book” that has become his stock-in-trade. The formula allowed him to travel widely, and Random House provided him with a well-oiled editorial machine geared to getting his manuscripts in shape and between covers in a timely way. Michener views himself as an old-fashioned storyteller and claims not to be affected by critics--a claim his fellow writers might doubt. But there is no doubting another claim of his, that he has pleased a huge international audience.

In a crucial sense, the ability to please readers is only half the battle of literature. To be “best-loved” at anything, you have to dance around the darkness. In “The World Is My Home,” it is the darkness that Michener avoids, seldom delving below the surface. He doesn’t seem comfortable with intimacy or emotions, and one suspects that this must go back to his earliest days as an orphan, when he had to steel himself against the world rather than embrace it. Although he has gone through two painful divorces, he mentions them only in passing. His current wife is barely alluded to, and we get so little information about their relationship that we wonder at the intensity of Michener’s privacy.

His public adventures are much more fully recounted. We are offered glimpses of Michener as a liberal politician, as a goodwill ambassador for the United States and as a fortune-teller whose prescience astounds the residents of Doylestown. He sprinkles the book with famous names, but there is seldom anything revealing in the anecdotes, and we must be content to learn that he has palled around with singer Ezio Pinza, Walter Cronkite and Art Buchwald, and that he lobbied to get Robin Roberts, the old Phillies’ pitcher, into the Hall of Fame.

The portrait Michener draws of himself shows us an honorable, driven, high-minded man who hangs onto his optimism at all costs. His generosity to universities and to other writers are well-known, and he may have no peer as a knee-jerk liberal--to Michener, that’s a term of praise. Where his work will ultimately land is up to posterity, of course, but he has a right to be proud of his output, since writing one book, much less 34, demands a certain respect. In contrast to most immensely popular novelists, he has picked themes and and topics that are challenging and sometimes politically sensitive, and he has never indulged in the cheap shot.

In the end, “The World Is My Home” most resembles a Horatio Alger story, in which all the traditional American virtues lead to a triumph on the grand scale. It is an entirely American document that could not have come into existence without being nurtured by the Puritan taproots of the country. Michener’s memoir is high-strung, entertaining, occasionally funny, and curiously touching in what it omits. We admire the passion and the energy he brings to the task, especially at the age of 85.

Michener fans will surely be delighted, while other readers will find enough interesting material to keep the pages turning.