Did James Michener ever visit Lake Chapala?

The very famous American author James Michener (1907-1997) wrote more than forty books, of varying quality, in his lengthy writing career, including Mexico, a sweeping historical novel published in 1992. He began writing Mexico in 1961, but then abandoned the idea (or the manuscript was lost, depending on who’s telling the story) for about thirty years, before deciding to complete it. Shortly after its publication, Michener also released My Lost Mexico, giving his version of why and how he wrote the book’s first draft, why he’d abandoned it, and why and how it was eventually resurrected and completed.

According to American historian John Mason Hart, in his epic tome of 600+ pages Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War, Michener visited Chapala in the 1930s:

“In the 1930s James Michener resided at Lake Chapala, where he became fast friends with D. H. Lawrence and a small group of largely American writers then living by the lake. Lawrence was working on his famous novel The Plumed Serpent. The fledgling Michener attempted his own essay at the time, which he called “Mexico,” but deemed it his worst writing effort and shelved it. Fifty years later, I argued with him that the artist should not be the critic and that he should publish it for posterity. Unfortunately, his negative view of the manuscript proved correct.” (The endnote attached to this text is “Hart interview with James Michener, July 1985, Austin, Texas.”)

I have no idea what Michener actually told Hart during the interview, but clearly the first sentence is wildly inaccurate. Lawrence only visited Lake Chapala in 1923, when Michener would have been only 16 years old. Lawrence’s first visit to Chapala lasted about ten weeks from May to July 1923, and he returned to Chapala for a single day on 21 October that year. And, given that Lawrence died in Europe in 1930, the idea that Michener met Lawrence anywhere, let alone Chapala, in the 1930s is entirely fanciful!

Elsewhere, Michener himself has written that he spent three summers in Mexico in the 1930s, from 1936 to 1938 inclusive, while teaching in Colorado. In those years, he met Mexican bullfighters, ‘traveled the bullfight circuit’ and ‘traveled widely throughout Mexico.’ He even submitted a ‘compact novel on bullfighting’ to The MacMillan Publishing Company in 1937, but they weren’t interested. When Michener and his wife returned to Mexico in late 1959, it was to spend time in Mexico City and Guanajuato to research his next major book, but shelved the project in 1961 because of doubts about its structure, and some stinging initial criticism from Bennett Cerf, the then president of Random House. The draft lay unloved in a box until reemerging thirty years later.

It is possible that Michener visited Chapala, but IF he did, his visit was only very brief and has left no known footprint. There is no mention of Chapala in My Lost Mexico, and no indication whatsoever that the lakeside area would ever have appealed to Michener as possible background, inspiration or setting for a novel.

[Sadly, equally suspect, as I’ve written elsewhere is Hart’s account of the chronology and family of the New Orleans poet Mary Ashley Townsend, who had a genuinely close connection to Chapala in the second half of the 1890s, and was one of the first Americans to ever own a house there.]

Several chapters of Foreign Footprints in Ajijic: Decades of Change in a Mexican Village offer more details about the history of the artistic community in Ajijic.

Sources

• James Mason Hart. 2002. Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War. University of California Press, page 398.
• James A Michener. 1992. Mexico: a novel. Random House.
• James A Michener. 1992. My Lost Mexico. State House Press.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Tony Burton

Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).

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