BOOK REVIEW : The Michener Book That Almost Wasn’t : MY LOST MEXICO : The Making of a Novel by James A. Michener . State House Press: $24.95; 176 pages.(Signed limited edition, $125)

The premise of this short book is this: In 1959, after he had finished his blockbuster novel, “Hawaii,” James Michener, as he writes here in his first paragraph, “cast about to decide what subject I should tackle next.”

It would either be Scotland, which he decided against, or Mexico, which he went for.

The narrative here is about his research, his work on the novel and a chance remark in 1961 by Bennett Cerf, then editor of Random House--a few words of criticism that depressed Michener so much that he stopped working on the novel and bundled up the manuscript to send it off to the Library of Congress. But the manuscript got lost.

Michener took up the strands of the narrative 30 years later, after a relative found it stashed away in two cardboard boxes.

This book, perhaps more than the actual gigantic novel “Mexico,” will be invaluable to any aspiring or working writer. It should be read, if possible, in tandem with another just-published work: “Writing for Your Life,” by Deena Metzger.

Each volume shows, in vivid and interesting detail, how a certain kind of writer writes. The key comes in the verb Michener uses in his first sentence quoted above. Writers like Michener “cast out” like trout fishermen; their scale is vast. Writers like Metzger look in; their work is spiritual as well as aesthetic. Maybe our geniuses combine elements of both.

When Michener decided on Mexico for his theme, he and his wife began moseying and gallivanting; researching locations, taking pictures of people with great-looking faces, deciding that the structure of the novel would center on a three-day bullfighting festival.

(Michener never mentions Hemingway, not once, or the earlier impact of “The Sun Also Rises” or “Death in the Afternoon.” It’s as if the idea of bullfighting just came to this author, and maybe it did.)

Michener decides on the very beautiful city of Guanajuato as the location for the novel, except that he will name it Toledo. He spends time with people who raise bulls, he goes to endless fights, he makes sketches of the town, he addresses the odious practice of shaving the bulls’ horns. All this is wildly evocative if you are of a certain age.

In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the literary thing to do was to hit the bullfights, in Tijuana and far down into Mexico, and across the Atlantic, in Spain. What a perfect external metaphor for the writer’s art. Michener researched it. He “cast out” for it. He enlarged the scope of the novel from AD 500 to 1960. He was not small in his ambition.

But he took a wrong turn and put a Hollywood couple into his novel, a pair modeled on Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. That’s when Bennett Cerf asked him what he wanted to do a dopey thing like that for.

Michener said adios to almost three years of work, boxed up the manuscript and managed to lose it for 30 years.

(There’s something very strange about this account.

The normally straightforward Michener talks of this in terms of silver strings, his precarious sense of himself. His identity as a writer was so squashed that he just couldn’t go on. He alludes to the question of writer’s block.

He says he never has it, except in cases like “Mexico.” He says that he never reads reviews and never drinks or does drugs because a novelist has to keep his identity intact and be “forward-moving.”)

All this is invaluable in what it implies about writers and writing. Some are external and love to go jaunting around the world and keep pushing on their plots as if they were trucks stuck in muddy Mexican roads.

Other writers don’t care if they go anywhere. Their research, if they do any at all, consists of napping, drinking, sex, drugs and indolence. Both roads can lead to success, different as they are.

Michener is nothing if not chipper and matter-of-fact. He reminds the writer to always go into bookstores and say hello to the clerks. He reprints his scrabbly hand-written notes that hold up his plot; all the chronologies, all the names of his characters, he goes on forever about changing “Gomez” to “Lopez.”

With all his success, he’s as goofy and obsessive as any other writer.

But also, with all his success, he recounts chillingly that when--during a skirmish with Random House--he tried to move to other publishers, three separate outfits turned him down.

“The beginner can take comfort from my experience,” he reminds us sardonically. “When he was 85, Jim Michener could not give away his manuscripts. They said he was too old, too out-of-date. But they became bestsellers in languages all over the globe.”

Marvelous, really! The madly successful, madly normal James Michener sounds as touchy, irritable and insecure as the most obscure and crabby avant-garde poet.

Maybe that’s the real lesson here. Inward-looking or outward-looking, succeeding or failing, all writers are alike as they pursue what Stephen Spender once called, without irony, the “sacred, cloaked profession” of the writer.