J. Roger Osterholm

SOURCE: "Michener's Space, the Novel and Miniseries," in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 23, No. 3, Winter, 1989, pp. 51-64.

[In the following essay, Osterholm considers alterations of characterization, thematic emphasis, and plot incidents in the television miniseries adaptation of James Michener's novel Space (1982).]

James Michener's 1982 novel Space and its adaptation as a thirteen-hour television miniseries provide excellent material for a case study on the styles and trappings of major productions for the popular American culture. The miniseries cost $32 million and was broadcast on the CBS television network April 14 to 18, 1985, with a nine-hour abridgement broadcast in July 1987, Significant alterations in characterization, plot, and themes for the miniseries reflect popular interests and obsessions, at least as well as the experienced producer, writers, and directors for television could both identify and further popularize them. Michener's novel, although popular itself, is clearly more refined and advanced, more demanding of its audience, than the broadcast version—as the novelist has himself suggested in a letter to this writer.

The miniseries was produced by Dick Berg (who produced the earlier miniseries Wallenberg: A Hero's Story), written by Stirling Silliphant and Dick Berg, and directed by Joseph Sargent and Lee Philips. Silliphant wrote the first nine hours, leaving Berg to complete the script, which had been expanded from a projected eight hours as production neared (Dougan A5). The television characters have a different ranking from those in the novel, with Senator Norman Grant (played by James Garner) eclipsing the role of Stanley Mott (played by Bruce Dern), a brilliant engineer based on Christopher C. Kraft, Jr., (Watson) a noted rocket pioneer. Mott rescues German scientists and manages much of the American space program.

The senator is a Navy war hero turned politician and champion of the space program, a role inflated to suit the stature of James Garner. Penny Pope (played by Blair Brown) is an intelligent small-town girl who marries a man destined to become an astronaut as she becomes the leading counselor to the Senate Committee on Space. Dieter Kolff (Michael York) is a brilliant mechanic and technician who designs much of the equipment for German rockets and becomes the leading American rocket designer. Randy Claggett (Beau Bridges) is a Marine pilot who becomes the greatest astronaut; John Pope (Harry Hamlin) is a "straight arrow" John Glenn-type of Naval aviator and astronaut who marries Penny. Both are based on Richard F. Gordon, Jr., the astronaut who piloted Apollo 12 for the second manned lunar landing, served as a technical consultant on the miniseries, and took an acting role in it (Boxer). These are Navy or Marine Corps pilots, the type that dominates nearly all of Michener's early fiction, from 1947 to Sayonara of 1955, in which the ace fighter pilot is Air Force.

Leopold Strabismus, born Martin Scorcella, is the confidence man (played by David Dukes) who turns from writing plagiarized doctoral dissertations to running a clearing house for information on visitors from outer space and progresses to excelling as a hypocritical television evangelist in an America suspicious of science. Elinor Grant (Susan Anspach) is the senator's gullible wife; Rachel Mott (Melinda Dillon) is the intelligent and sophisticated wife of the engineer; Liesl Kolff (Barbara Sukowa) is the simple wife of the German technician—obese in the novel but trim in the miniseries; and Senator Glancey (Martin Balsam) is an older politician and space advocate who hires Penny Hardesty before she marries John Pope.

In addition to magnifying the role of Senator Grant over Stanley Mott, the miniseries also expands the roles of Randy Claggett and Cindy Rhee (Maggie Han), the Korean New Journalist. The reason for the first two changes is the stature of actors Garner and Bridges; the reason for the third is clearly salacious. Further demands for erotic incidents produce other alterations in the plot and characterizations while many thoughtful and demanding themes are minimized or eliminated.

One critical axiom is that most television productions are popular, not examples of high culture, and most serious novels are less popular. The seriousness of the five-part miniseries of Space as a superior television production is indicated by the media critic Stanley Marcus, writing in TV Guide for April 13, 1985, who avowed that it offers "an acting team second to none. With characterizations that jump out of the screen, they will keep you aloft all week. What more can one say? Order up a dozen Emmys" (A-4). Although it won no awards, the television network repeated the production, omitting four hours, on Saturdays in July 1987. Writing elsewhere, Andrew J. Edelstein notes that the miniseries transcends the "campiness" of similar productions, although television is bound to emphasize "the romantic and family relationships of its characters" rather than action (4). The importance of the novel is suggested by its dominance of the New York Times Bestseller List for six months in 1982 and 1983 and the eminence of the paperback edition the last two months of 1983.

One line to separate popular works from those of high culture may be drawn between the common and the unusual and between the traditional and the experimental. Morse Peckham has established such a distinction in his 1965 study Man's Rage for Chaos (see 72, 261, 285, 291, 311), which he summarizes in his Art and Pornography (77-80, 90-94). Observing that "art has survival value" for the individual and society from experiencing unsatisfied expectations, "psychic insulation," and the inherent resistance or difficulty of the medium, Peckham explains: "The higher the cultural level the greater the discontinuity, the greater the psychic insulation, and the more difficult the problems offered by the semantic aspect and the more uncertain their solution" (Art 79). The form or content or both may be pressed to extremes, but hardly in popular works. A few examples of possible cultural survival values in advanced literature are in novels by Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Sartre, and Samuel Beckett.

A test pilot is dedicated to experiences with the unknown and, as Tom Wolfe explains it, with "pushing the outside of the envelope" (the limits of an aircraft's performance) and with "the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then go up again the next day, and the next. . ." (8-9, 18-19). High culture lives at the edges, popular culture at the more comfortable center. The artist may push his craft onto destruction in nihilism, the absurd, and postmodernism. In the analogy with aviation, Michener's Space is a jumbo jetliner connecting distant but popular destinations, neither testing a new machine nor a new course, while the televised version is an even smaller airliner traversing an even more popular route. The former, in effect, transports us from one end of the earth to the other, the latter merely from Chicago to Hollywood.

We may observe high culture in the arts generally in the order in which they repudiated Victorian prudishness—loosely from painting, sculpture, music, literature, the theater, the cinema, and then to television—from the least popular media to the most popular. Of course, along with an increased blatancy in the popular arts came a diminished decency, earnestness, and respectfulness. As novels go, Michener's are demanding and respectable popular works, never debased or pornographic even when titillating.

The novelist himself has explained in his letter that he is "quietly amused" at a "condescending classification of my novels as cheap popular fiction. Popular they certainly are. . . . [T]here will be something like ten million readers of the book." Michener goes on:

My heavy mail divides into three categories: one-third comes from people who obviously don't read widely; one-third comes from people who would fit apparently into the [d]ead middle of our society; and one-third comes from scholars in all parts of the world who want to discuss in more detail subjects I've touched upon. I'll accept that mix, especially when one-third of ten million means that some three million readers with relatively good sense have bothered with what I've written.

I think, however, that the denigrating phrase 'merely popular writer,' does apply justly to me, because when I write something I intuitively go back and knock out all the fancy passages. I eliminate the heavy-handed symbolism. I think that may be why all of my books are still in print—except one erudite one on politics—and why none has ever been remaindered, the only instance of its kind, [from] a study concluded some years back. My search for the pure statement seems to work.

I enjoyed your letter and the accompanying essay. I'm proud that someone took the trouble to make the comparison. . . .

Congenially,
[signed] James A. Michener

"The accompanying essay" Michener refers to is a draft of this article, which did not classify the novelist as anything but a demanding and excellent popular writer. What makes Space a popular novel rather than one of high culture is an intriguing question; moreover, what makes the miniseries even more centrally popular than the novel is blatantly obvious and more indicative of popular American values, at least in the popular arts and entertainment, which, even when perverse or debased, are yet only conventionally so.

Edelstein's notion that popular television is more interested in romance than action is dubious, for car chases, murders, rapes, and other examples of violence are common incidents. His idea that "campiness" is a common trait is sound, especially if we extend the idea of "camp" to include not only amusing outlandishness and the sense of the 1930s of "exaggerated effeminate mannerisms" of homosexuals (as Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines the term) but also lust, the bizarre, gratuitous titillation, hedonism, sentimentality, youth and physical vigor, patriotism, luxury, and sometimes pro-found love as common television themes. Daytime and prime-time melodramas reveal that campiness includes deviant psychology, sexual obsessions, escapism, immature social defiance, occasional heroism, success, and fantasies. It is sometimes even tender and sweet, but, then, campiness becomes synonymous with popular.

The paradox that popular culture can emphasize deviance and defiance and yet fail to become high culture is resolved by recognizing that such portrayals reflect only popular and even naive values without primarily attempting to refine or challenge them. O. Henry-type surprise endings are similarly popular because the discontinuity is superficial, even artificial—merely clipping the tail of the dog rather than inventing a mythical beast. The essential distinction between popular and high cultural plots and other literary traits is remarkably similar to that posed by Coleridge between the Fancy and Imagination, in which "fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space," while imagination "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or . . . it struggles to idealize and to unify" (Ch. 13, 263).

What, then, is popular in both Michener's novel and in the miniseries? There are the themes of major historical events and human problems, social leaders and talented professionals, heroism, patriotism, lust, television evangelism, space flight, feminism, Germans, blacks, Jews, and marriage. The novel, however, emphasizes drugs, defiant children, social criticism, civil rights, religion, education, military waste, interservice rivalry, New Journalism, capitalism, politics, and homosexuality more than does the televised version, which completely ignores the issues of drugs, violent children, theology (except for televangelism), education, and military waste. Both versions equally emphasize themes on science and research, marriage, and feminism, but the long miniseries exaggerates lust, incest, physical attractiveness, the Democratic Party, Jewishness, social deviance, and sexual liberation far beyond the scope of the novel, although of these the novel ignores only incest and mutes the Democratic Party almost into nonexistence. This even though Michener has been an active Democrat and an apologist of sorts for rebellious youths, short of accepting violence (Day 138, 144-45). Clearly, some of the major revisions for television avoid major themes (like drugs, violent children, and religious piety) and exaggerate cheap romantic elements of sexual affairs, sexual liberation, and seduction. One newspaper critic writes that the miniseries "is a paean to the human libido. . . . Silliphant certainly immersed himself in the obvious symbolism of the towering Apollo rocket" ("Booster" Bl).

Marcus states that Michener probably told Dick Berg that the technical focus could be suppressed, Wernher von Braun omitted, and that the characters "can get into bed as often as you feel is necessary," but the novelist disputes any such conversation. In his letter Michener begins:

Austin, Texas

16 January 1986

Dear Dr. Osterholm,

You do me the honor and courtesy in sending me a copy of your well thought-out and written article comparing the television show SPACE and my original novel on which it was based. I read your pages with pleasure and a frequent nod of my head in assent.

I found only one serious error, and it was not chargeable to you. It was, however, distasteful to me, but in such matters I rarely express any concern about what has been said about me in print. I let such things fall to their own level, and here I am merely pointing out the problem.

. . . you quote Stanley Marcus as [understanding] from Dick Berg that I gave him, Berg, authority to 'get the characters into bed as often as you feel necessary.' I never said that. It's the type of statement I doubt I would ever make. I met Berg, a fine director, briefly at a big bash in Hollywood and told him: 'I wrote a novel. You're making a television series. They're different.' Certainly, by implication I not only invited him but encouraged him to go his own way, and he did.

I never discussed the series with anyone beyond that brief statement, never saw any scripts, never had any input in any way, and certainly never had any censorship authority. I did not even know who the actors were to be nor how the series was to be constructed. At a press conference in Washington it was stated that I'd read and approved the scripts; I did not bother to correct the error, as I take little notice in my life of such errors.

However, I liked the series, judged the technical work to be exceptionally good and the actors to be even better. . . . I thought the frequent sex interpolations sometimes gratuitious and even unnecessary, and unrelated to the idea of the book. I had no objection to the dropping of the idea-rich last 150 pages; they would not have fitted well into the series as Hollywood conceived it. My attitude has always been: 'If the book is on the shelf the way I wanted it, there it stands, year after year.'

Unlike the miniseries, the novel is intelligent, credible, and realistic. It is panoramic, like most of Michener's work, with incidents too numerous for even a thirteen-hour dramatization and with characters that are recognizable, like those in one of his earliest novels, the brief The Bridges at Toko-ri, published in 1953, five years after he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with Tales of the South Pacific, published in 1947. Space is largely an answer to the question raised by Admiral George Tarrant at the end of Bridges: "Why is America lucky enough to have such men? . . . Where did we get such men?" (126). He is referring to Lieutenant Harry Brubaker, who, like Randy Claggett, is the pilot of a Banshee jet and fights because the duty has fallen on him. Having himself served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Michener often emphasizes that branch. He wrote "The Forgotten Heroes of Korea" on Navy fighter pilots for the May 10, 1952, issue of The Saturday Evening Post, which became the inspiration for the 1954 film Men of the Fighting Lady, which features Louis Calhern playing the novelist on a yuletide visit to an aircraft carrier. His Bridges is a minor masterpiece of plotting and characterization, with the filmed version appearing in 1954.

In Space Senator Norman Grant, his wife, and both John and Penny are natives of the state of Fremont, a lightly disguised Colorado, and both men are Navy men. The occasional slapstick comedy of Bridges, however, disappears into the somber gullibility of Elinor Grant and into the bizarre confidence schemes of Leopold Strabismus, who bilks no one more than Elinor. Strabismus, the name assumed by the "visionary," of course, is the medical term for being cross-eyed or having a "wandering eye."

Christopher Mott, the second son of the scientist and brother to the homosexual Millard, is one character omitted from the miniseries, perhaps because his involvement with drugs in elementary school and as a pusher is too subtle for television. He dies at thirty attempting to smuggle $11 million worth of Colombian cocaine into the West Palm Beach airport at night in a stolen Lear jet without using lights or the radio (736-40). Early in the previous chapter Michener produces the most penetrating social criticism of the book as he editorializes on the son's defiance, a note ignored in television:

The songs of his day, the patterns of dress, television's idealization of the illiterate rowdy who disrupts the classroom, sleazy newspaper stories and the dreadful pressure of one's peers, all had conspired to put [Rachel Mott's] son on trial, and she and Stanley had been too preoccupied with society's business to combat the destructive influences. (660)

Michener provokes mature thought, and television does provide some social criticism as well. The miniseries portrays homosexual Millard and draft evasion over the Vietnam War, but when television depicts misguided youths and corrupted adults, it hardly ever includes itself or the other media as part of the problem.

The novel elaborates on many popular concerns, like feelings toward science, humanism, confidence men, education, visions of space flight, and communication skills. It touches on the culture of Swedes in Worcester, Massachusetts, (125-28, 348-49) and the sleaziness of California (336-38, 354-59). Much more than the miniseries, the novel depicts a growing anti-intellectuality in a populace of backward thinkers with anti-scientific and anti-humanistic attitudes. It emphasizes a devotion to modern art, classical music, and Swedish folk art as valuable contributions to a household (129-34). It also stresses the importance placed on the humanities by the German scientists (141-42), debates on contemporary theater and films by fighter pilots in Korea, with Claggett instructing Pope on an interpretation of Shakespeare's Othello (191-96), and Pope's early dedication to astronomy (60-65). Pope becomes a professor of astronomy as his mentor, Professor Anderssen, is denounced by the masses as an irreligious scientist, targeted in the anti-humanistic crusade of Dr. Strabismus, while the aged professor explains to his former students that education depends upon willing and eager minds and souls (701, 707-09). English instructors would profit from passages in which Claggett explains to Pope that two-thirds of a test pilot's skills are clear communication (283-84, 286, 294, 296, 298) and from another in which a counselor explains that verbal skills may be the decisive factor in selecting astronauts (403). The one skill devalued in a test pilot in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is the verbal (96, 119). Education, like the Orient and brotherhood, is another staple of Michener.

The novel exposes anti-humanistic values, especially in Leopold Strabismus, who turns late in the book into a scheming evangelist in support of a simpler life opposed to the terrifying challenges of progress (677-83, 702-07, 753-61, 775-83). Strabismus denounces humanism, the idea of evolution, and all he calls "atheistic humanism," while practicing book burnings and attempting to ban science, with success in a few states (656, 676-83, 702-07, 734-35, 752-61, 774-81, 796, 801-03). Although the miniseries develops this theme well, it ignores the nuances, such as the evangelist's actual respect for science and Darwin and Stanley Mott's increasing understanding that Strabismus is partly correct (758-60, 800-05). The finest portrayal in the novel is that of the scientist, son of a Methodist minister, accepting the limits of science as the proper concern of society and the beginning of religion. Again, this is all too subtle for the superficialities of television drama.

Michener is more devoted to reportage and didacticism than to art. His friend Professor Day even compares him to muckrackers and crusaders like Jack London and Upton Sinclair (17, 33, 165). One reporter quotes the novelist as saying that NASA officials were not happy with his portrayal of the astronauts at the Bali Hai Motel in Cocoa Beach, but he had to be honest even as an advocate of the space program (Watson). Yet, behind Michener's realism wafts the scent of a distant Bali Hai calling his reader to a more compassionate life, an odor that turns rancid in television.

In the miniseries Strabismus is merely a debased hypocrite, and the Democratic Party, Jewish-Americans, and sensuality are inflated. It is insignificant that the miniseries places Pope and Claggett in the same Navy flight class and that it omits the extension of the novel into other NASA programs following the death of Claggett on the far side of the moon and into the political demise of Senator Grant in 1982 with the election of Penny Pope, even though these concerns cover the final fifth or 150 pages of the novel. One of the major alterations is depicting jet flying as a mere matter of skill and raw courage, while the novel captures its ecstasy that approaches religion (180-98). Another is that Liesl proposes marriage in Germany to Dieter, but he proposes in the book (83). Grant becomes more powerful and has a continuing affair with Penny Pope, which she dismisses as a "wrestle in the mud like animals," but this baseness is competely absent from the novel, where Penny remains faithful and the marriage secure, although there is a difficult moment after her husband spends three harmless days in Australia with Cindy Rhee (663-76). Television also invents a long estrangement for the Popes. Silliphant changes the character of Grant because he is "too consistently nice" in the novel and good television needs villains (Boxer). In the miniseries Penny is nearly raped by her stepfather, but there is no such character in the book. Some television writers, it seems, project their own obsessive sexuality onto the home screen, perhaps in the attempt to liberate public standards to suit their own tastes or interests.

Senator Grant is a Republican in the book but a Democrat in television, apparently an accommodation to the personal political persuasion of James Garner, according to Andy Meisler (10). Penny becomes not only more sexually liberated and looser in television, she becomes the strength of a weaker husband. Perhaps the images of strong women and weak men are popular, as Penny needs men less and uses them more, although she does come to feel a bit guilty. The Korean journalist who writes for a Japanese newspaper has more affairs in the novel, and John Pope escapes her in both versions, but in television she brazenly tells Claggett that she might not only try to sleep with each of the Solid Six astronauts, she would please them all simultaneously if Claggett wishes.

In the miniseries Strabismus (when he was Martin Scorcella) has sexual romps with the daughter of the dean of a university in New York and with the wife of a professor at Yale before going to California, events not in the novel at all, where this period is covered in barely two pages (245-46). These scenes also appear much earlier in the miniseries, as Silliphant hastened to invent them. In the novel all of Strabismus' sexual escapades occur in California, where he founds the Universal Space Associates, gulls Elinor Grant, and leads her daughter, Marcia (Jennifer Runyon), into bed. He plays fast and loose with Marcia in the novel, changed in the miniseries apparently because the popular mind could not abide her living so long in a tenuous relationship. In the book she shares the mastermind with sixteen-year-olds for years and endures a terrifying abortion before they marry (315-19, 334-38, 478-82, 580-85, 676-79). The miniseries also omits Strabismus' intermediate institutes, the University of Space and Aviation and the University of Spiritual Americans, formed after the Universal Space Associates (obsessed with flying saucers) and prior to the United Scripture Alliance (which is, for some reason, "Scriptures" in television) (245, 678, 702, 753). The University of Space and Aviation in the novel issues phony advanced degrees, one to Dieter Kolff (334-35, 349-50). The confidence man is both clearer and more subtle in the novel, where he seeks power and vengeance on Yale-type students and professors who condescend toward him (705-06), but in television his superficial motives are merely sensuality and wealth.

The sexual inventions for the miniseries are astounding, Others include the love-making by Sam Cottage (Robbie Weaver), a student at the Sun Study Center in Boulder, Colorado, with his demanding girlfriend and the rape of Liesl Kolff by General Helmut Funkhauser (Wolf Kohler) as he interrogates her toward the end of the war. In television the general is soon shot by Liesl as she, Dieter, and the general try to reach the American lines, but in the book Funkhauser is more principled and becomes another German expert in the American space effort, albeit as an executive for a private corporation, Allied Aviation.

As the televised version is anti-German, it is also somewhat pro-Jewish, for the novel has no Jewish characters other than the secretly half-Jewish Strabismus. Television invents an interview between Dieter Kolff and Himmler (Hitler in the novel), who is portrayed as a bumbler in a badly cut uniform supplied by Albert Speer. It also invents an elaborate Jewish wedding in which Stanley Kolff (Dieter's son Magnus in the novel) marries a Jewish girl, a wife unidentified in the novel. In television Liesl tells her new daughter-in-law that she is loved, but no one tells the Germans they are loved. However justifiable it is to emphasize favorable attitudes toward Jews in our popular culture, which yet contains traces of anti-Semitism, it is an overt manipulation of the novel somewhat at the expense of the Germans. Many Americans denigrate Germans, especially any soldier of World War II. On the Donahue discussion show televised April 18, 1985, the morning of the final installment of the miniseries, many in the audience stated, concerning President Reagan's controversial intentions of laying a wreath at the German military cemetery at Bitburg, that honoring any German soldier honors the Nazi Party and the despicable SS.

Blacks also get short shrift in television compared to the novel, for the third astronaut (Jonathan Goldsmith) on the voyage to the far side of the moon is in the novel an important black scientist, Dr. Paul Linley, "whitened" and diminished in television. Both versions, however, have one significant black character: Gawain Butler (Dick Anthony Williams), another Navy shipmate of Grant's and later a Detroit educator and adviser to the senator (40, 120, 203-05, 464-67). One excellent scene in the miniseries has Richard Gordon, playing the Capsule Communicator (CapCom) from earth to the fictional Apollo 18, crying when the two astronauts on the surface of the moon die, in a performance that touched Bruce Dern (Durden F14).

The miniseries exaggerates voyeurism, luxury, and hedonism beyond the scope of the novel, in which many leaders are at least dedicated and more deserving of their honors. The video version, on the other hand, abounds in simplicities and the ill-formed notions that fame is importance, wealth is success, and pleasure is happiness. Michener's themes on humanism and brotherhood lie wanting. From the miniseries we have evidence that popular television is, at least in these ideas, juvenile and simple-minded. Such immaturity is reinforced by trivializing pseudorealism. Michener's novel rises in intelligence to the top of the popular culture from where the wide expanse of high culture may at least be surveyed.

Michener's ambitious popular novel, then, is more important and more realistic than the miniseries and its emphasis on escapism, lust, and puerile themes. The television production does do its public duty in briefly advocating civil rights, scientific research, feminism, and education, especially in a final speech supporting such values delivered by Laurence Luckinbill, the narrator, but these themes are undercut by the sensual portrayals and mindless characters of the dramatization. The happy or uplifting stock ending remains superficial.

Michener's novel has modernist traits of ruthless realism and absurdities. General Funkhauser, for example, twice orders Dieter Kolff shot, but both times rescinds the orders, to his ultimate benefit as he uses Kolff to escape the Russians to the American lines (76-80, 99-102). When Norman Grant first campaigns for the Senate in 1946, his father-in-law (a supportive Ralph Bellamy in television) and his wife refuse to campaign for him (117-18). His campaign manager, Tim Finnerty (James Sutorius), the former yeoman of Grant's ill-fated destroyer escort during the war, is an Irish Catholic Democrat from Boston (shades of John F. Kennedy) for a Republican campaign in a Waspish Western state (24, 119). Later Dieter and Liesl defend Funkhauser against charges of being a Nazi, of illegally employing his large automobile as a taxicab, and of transporting prostitutes across the Mexican border. The Kolffs proclaim his value to the space program and his high character (153-60). One good line comparing the American and Soviet space programs in the novel has Grant telling Penny in 1958 that "our Germans are as good as their Germans" (327), words given to Mott in television.

The novel has a few errors. Paul Stidham, Elinor's father, is first called Frank (113, 117), and the novelist calls a half-track a "semi-tank" and alters the pilot's common phrase for dying in a crash from "buying the farm" to the uncommon "buying the ranch" (107, 289, 636). He overuses the word elegant (e.g., 389, 572, 598, 709), and challenges credibility a few times, as with Funkhauser's belief that he needs Dieter only to approach the American lines but not for American acceptance. Another is with the super-intelligent Stanley Mott, the aeronautical engineer who has mastered both atomic power and rocketry, who expects Dieter to abscond with papers on the German atomic bomb (7, 10, 101, 104, 108). The miniseries is more credible on this point as Mott is amazed to learn the Dieter has stolen the plans to the A-10, a rocket larger than the A-4 (or V-2). Tucker Thompson (Thomas in television, played by G. D. Spradlin), the editor of a magazine with an exclusive on the Solid Six astronauts, as Life had with the seven Mercury astronauts, is ludicrously convinced that competing magazines would delight in scandals on only the Solid Six to diminish the value of his contract without tarnishing the reputations of other astronauts (380-81, 410, 547, 645, 668, 673). The novel offers the lame solution of loosening bolts that fasten a dosimeter to an orbiting satellite by squirting oil on them (516)—in the heatless conditions of space that would turn any oil to stone.

Such are a few momentary lapses in the novel that may establish the legends of early space explorations. Michener reflects his own expansive style when he describes the Korean journalist's technique of writing as imitating the laborious "underpainting" of exquisite Korean ceramics (489, 609)—Michener is also a popularizer of Oriental art (Day 22, 126-27). The novelist studies his subjects minutely, which serves as his "underpainting," and produces informative and intricate novels. The television miniseries suffers from the absence of depth and scarcely creates any legend at all, primarily just ephemeral titillation. Television resides in the realm of "Single vision," to allude to the "double vision" of Michener's Strabismus and to the phrase in William Blake's poem "With Happiness Stretch'd Across the Hills" (see line 27-28, 57, 83-88).

John and Penny Pope would sing another song by Blake on their cross-country automobile trips in the novel, with lines on "Arrows of desire" and "Chariots of fire." Identified by Michener (304-05, 563), the lines are from Blake's "And Did Those Feet" (lines 9-12) from his Preface to Milton. The succeeding and concluding quatrain expresses Michener's own vision:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
  In England's green & pleasant Land.

Michener and Blake celebrate a larger and eternal vision of religion, with the novelist generally achieving the "threefold" vision of poetic insight in Space. That Michener even contemplates Blake's "fourfold" vision (with stages from materialism and rationality, to experience and sexuality, to pastoral innocence, up to imaginative integration with the universe) is intriguing and revealing for one with a theme that is essentially humanistic, hardly mystical. The miniseries settles for triteness, campiness, which is average television, but the novel, although popular and not a work secure in high culture, is excellent. And even fair television is surpassed by even a mediocre novel.

The nine-hour version of the miniseries telecast by CBSTV on Saturdays through July 1987 improves the miniseries by excluding the first three hours and one of the remaining ten. The abbreviation loses the roots of the story in World War II, but it also omits the inventions of Penny's stepfather, a debased General Funkhauser, Strabismus' early affairs, and some of the Grant—Penny Pope affair. The revision emphasizes her sense of remorse and further focuses the story on the space program.

One final comment by Michener in his letter on the miniseries:

Specifically, I thought Television did much better for my novel than the movies did for Tom Wolfe's excellent non-fiction book. Certainly Television handled the Washington scenes better than the Movies handled President Johnson—more accurately, I mean—and my [story on] Television helped create a more honest picture of the astronauts than the Movies did when doing the tremendous damage they did to John Glenn.

James Michener is nothing if not a pursuer of brotherhood, truth, and accuracy in their wayward forms and elusive flights, and these are captured securely in the novel, hardly in the trivialized miniseries. If the miniseries does not grossly distort Washington politics, it is because it is already simple-minded enough. If the miniseries does not grossly distort the Solid Six astronauts, it is because they are already popular enough. The televised version certainly demeans intelligent experience and morality. Honest novels and titillating network television are the common natures of the popular beasts, and with this novel and miniseries we see the former at its best and the latter near its standard vacuousness.