The Novel by James A. Michener
As might be expected in a Dutch family, the food was tended to first, with plump Mrs. Fenstermacher crying: ‘Emma’s puddings we love, and since it’s near dinnertime, Lukas, stop with us and I’ll fry up a sample of Otto’s new scrapple.’
The invitation was irresistible, for if there is any food I dearly love it’s Dresden scrapple, cut thin and crisp-fried on each side. And Otto Fenstermacher’s was the best in the valley, for no matter how his fortunes declined in farming and real estate, he continued to make scrapple of such high quality that he might have made a lucrative business of it had he been more sagacious.
When his hogs were slaughtered, and the scraps of the carcasses were combined with a few shreds of real pork thrown in to make the product respectable, Otto added fat, cornmeal, salt, pepper and spices, cooking the mixture lightly until it formed a grayish concoction that, when poured into elongated cake tins, hardened into a unique and delicious country delicacy. Culinary experts unfamiliar with it in childhood said when encountering it as adults: ‘It can best be described as “the poor man’s pork pâté” or perhaps “an hors d’oeuvre that’s imaginative and cheap to make.” ’ We Pennsylvania Dutch thought of it as our national dish and felt sorry for people in states where it was unknown.
When Mrs. Fenstermacher flipped the scrapple to crisp the other side, which sent ravishing smells circulating through her kitchen, her husband and I waited at the oak table. ‘Why do you want those hex signs?’ Otto asked and I explained: ‘Whenever I finish writing a book I need a change of pace. I work on hexes. But they must be old.’
‘How old?’ Mrs. Fenstermacher asked from her stove.
‘Before World War Two. Even older. Real Dutch, not recent make-believe.’
‘My father had four old ones on our barn,’ she said and I reminded her: ‘You were standing beside him the day I bought them.’
‘That’s right,’ she cried. ‘But you never told me what you did with them.’
Addressing both the Fenstermachers, because I could not guess which would agree with me and which would oppose, I said: ‘I clean the boards, mend the damaged areas with epoxy—’
‘What’s that?’ Mrs. Fenstermacher asked.
‘Powerful new glue. Then I replace the missing paint very delicately so the repairs don’t show, and break off the edges of the board so it looks as if it had been busted loose, not cut by a saw.’
‘Then what?’
‘I glue it onto a wooden panel, leaving a margin about six, eight inches on each side.’
‘What’s that for?’ Otto asked, and I said: ‘For the artwork. First I rough the panel, to make it look old like the hex. Sandpaper or pumice does the trick.’
‘What artwork?’ Mrs. Fenstermacher asked as she flipped her scrapple again to ensure a golden crust, and I explained the interesting part of the operation: ‘On the exposed margin of the panel, I paint Pennsylvania Dutch designs. Old frakturs.’
‘Like on birth certificates!’ Otto cried. ‘Distelfinks. Tulips. Hearts with prayers.’
Dutch society was short on all forms of art: not much music except hymns of interminable length and little variation in the tunes; no painting of portraits or landscapes; and absolutely no sculpture. Biblical austerity forbade such display. But what we did have in glorious profusion was pen-and-ink fraktur, depictions of a relatively few symbols, endlessly repeated: birds, flowers, letters of the alphabet and occasionally human figures. Fraktur had been used in the old days to decorate birth certificates, school diplomas, genealogies and other important documents.
‘Why do you mix hex signs and fraktur?’ Otto asked, and I explained: ‘Because I’m making a painting. Old hex and new fraktur, a beautiful blend and very Dutch.’
‘What do you do with it?’
‘Sell it, give it to a museum, place it in a public library.’
‘Are you an artist, then, like on television?’ Mrs. Fenstermacher asked. ‘French cap and all?’
‘Only an amateur. But after a long sit at my typewriter, I want to work with my hands.’
‘People buy what you make? This hunk of barn sidin’?’
‘I give most of them away. But yes, sometimes people buy them.’
‘I thought you was crazy yet,’ Otto laughed, ‘offerin’ me money for that old sidin’. But if you sell them, more like I should charge you double what you offered last time.’
Before I could answer, Mrs. Fenstermacher served us dinner, as we rural Dutch called our midday meal, and she brought not only perfectly fried scrapple with its side dish of applesauce, but also a delicacy she had slipped into her frying pan at the last moment: slabs of golden cornmeal mush, fried in butter to a deep brown and served with a heavy Karo syrup. It was a meal for working farmers and provided enough cholesterol to last a month, but as we Dutch say: ‘If it aindt fried it aindt food.’
The mix of flavors was so delicious that I had to compliment the cook: ‘I can’t tell which is better, Rebecca, your scrapple or your fried mush,’ and she replied: ‘Scrapple was made by the Mister, mush by me.’
The pleasantness of the meal was marred by the noisy arrival of the Fenstermacher son, a loutish overweight young fellow of nineteen who bore the unusual but appropriate nickname of Applebutter. In Dutch communities, where only a few family names and even fewer first names, brought over from Germany, exist, it was possible for six or seven boys with only a few years’ difference between them to have the same name. In my case there were three Lukas Yoders, and with the Fenstermachers three boys named Otto. It was the custom, therefore, to refer to Big Otto, Red-haired Otto, and Applebutter Otto, the ungainly son.
Before he sat down both parents jumped on him, his mother whining: ‘You’re suppose to be here at sittin’-down time,’ and his father: ‘You was goin’ to help me take them boards for Mr. Yoder yet.’
Wolfing food and dousing his fried mush in a flood of syrup, he ignored me and shoved his empty plate toward his mother: ‘More scrapple,’ which she supplied. Finally he belched, pushed his chair back from the table and grunted: ‘Let’s get to them boards,’ after which he clumped out, grabbed an ax and a crowbar and led his father and me to the barn that seemed about to collapse.
As Applebutter clung to his ladder and hacked away at the barn siding he growled at me: ‘I don’t see what good these’ll do you—or anybody.’ I tried to humor him by assuring him he was doing a good job, but my encouragement was useless, for at that moment he swung his ax and intentionally dug a deep scar across the face of the best of the three hexes. Eager to prevent him from doing further damage, I said: ‘That can be fixed. You’re doing a fine job,’ and he hacked away at the last one without mutilating it. When it broke loose he climbed down, and again I tried to humor him: ‘You helped me get three fine hexes for my work,’ but he would not be won over. Leaving the barn without helping to load the boards into my car, he roared off on his motorcycle.
‘Applebutter can be headstrong,’ his father apologized, ‘but he’s better now than he was three years ago. The Missus spoiled him when he was young, fed him like a hog,’ and I laughed: ‘She fed you and me the same way. But it was good.’
As I prepared to leave, Rebecca brought out the three long pans of her husband’s scrapple, the meat in each hidden beneath a quarter inch of solid white pork fat that had been rendered in the cooking, and I thought: A symbol of my region—hearty, nourishing, old-fashioned and good.
The third stop on my traditional tour on manuscript day was in some ways the most important, for at our little one-room store in Rostock I handed Mrs. Diefenderfer, the postmistress, the carefully wrapped package that contained my manuscript: ‘To Kinetic Press, as usual. Return receipt requested.’ These last three words, which slipped out like the lyrics of a song, meant that the package would be delivered only into the hands of the addressee, who would sign for it, after which the receipt would be returned to me as proof that it got there safely. This protection cost only an additional ninety cents, a postal bargain.
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Raising her glass of milk, she offered a toast: ‘To our good friend Lukas Yoder! May Book-of-the-Month Club take this one, too!’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ I said, and after refusing a second helping of brown betty, I drove off muttering: ‘I won’t be hungry for a week.’ Finishing a manuscript and mailing it off in Dresden was not a simple affair, but as soon as I reached my farm I kissed Emma, assured her that it was in the mail, and trundled off to bed for an afternoon nap, thinking as I fell asleep: I’ve been in four homes in the heartland. Yoder, Zollicoffer, Fenstermacher, Diefenderfer. Never entered by the front door. Never saw any room but the kitchen. Never ate better in my life. That’s Pennsylvania Dutch.
That evening, after showing Emma my three fine hexes and assuring her that in view of the gorging I’d been doing I needed no supper, we sat with her little bound diary for 1990 and the two-page condensed edition for 1991, and tried to anticipate what our obligations might be for the year that loomed ahead. When she began to complain that dates associated with the publication of Stone Walls were piling up, I reminded her: ‘This is the last book, and this will be the last year we’ll ever do this. I want to give the book a proper send-off, every chance of success,’ and she retorted: ‘And it’s my job to see that you come out of it alive.’ On one decision she was firm: ‘No publicity tour to eleven cities. Not at your age.’
‘I agree. Too demanding—and I doubt it does much good.’
I did add one date of which she had not been aware: ‘That museum of folk art in Williamsburg, the one named in honor of Abby Rockefeller, wants me to show eight or nine of my hex paintings. That’s why I was so eager to get those three from Fenstermacher.’
She considered this for a moment and said: ‘That could be a very pleasant trip south. They’d put us up at the Inn?’
‘Better yet. In that wonderful colonial house DeWitt Wallace refurbished for them.’
‘That would be most agreeable.’
I’d done several articles on Dutch country for the Reader’s Digest, and the Wallaces, to show their gratitude, had invited Emma and me to use what was known as the Wallace House whenever we went to Williamsburg.
‘In all decency we’ll have to be in New York when the book is published,’ I said and Emma nodded. ‘And if publicity arranges for television crews to come here, which might happen, considering the luck we’ve had with our last few books, we’d have to agree.’
‘They must come here. You can’t be yo-yoing back and forth to New York every week.’
I leaned back and said reflectively: ‘I doubt I would have much leverage in dictating to N.B.C. how they should run their network,’ and she laughed.
I had just used a word that loomed large in our life as we entered our sixties; we both believed that in America the artist in any field was remunerated in large part by the leverage that society entitled him or her to exercise. Emma, who at Bryn Mawr had acquired a much more sensitive education than I had at Mecklenberg, which was after all primarily a church college, was strong in her belief that a writer like me wasted my hard-won prestige and fortune if I did not spend it on good social projects, or use it to help students gain a foothold in society, or, as she liked to phrase it, ‘raise hell in the local community when you see it careening off in the wrong direction.’
But I had been reared to be so reticent that when she first voiced this opinion it did not occur to me that I had any leverage. But she educated me on that score, pointing out that wherever I had gone to autograph books long lines of admirers waited for as long as two hours while I scribbled names and exchanged greetings. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ she and the store owner would plead, ‘just sign your name, not theirs,’ but I could not do that: ‘After all, Emma, readers are the ones who keep you and me in business.’
I could not share even with her the true reason why I had tried to be kind and attentive to strangers who sought my autograph. On the publication of my fourth novel, The Shunning, my lively editor at Kinetic Press badgered her publicity department: ‘Damn it, this man has written three fine novels and he can’t get them off first base. Hell, he can’t even get them to first base, forget coming around to score. So please, please, I ask on bended knee, this time give him a break. Arrange an autographing party at one of the big stores in his home district. Lancaster, Reading or Allentown. Please.’
When publicity checked populations they found that the three towns moved upward in increments of 25,000. Lancaster was smallest with 54,000, Reading next with 78,000 and Allentown the largest with more than 100,000, and Kinetic decided to approach the popular Hess store in the last city to see if they would arrange a modest celebration for me. They pointed out that I could be featured as a local boy, since our farm was only thirty miles to the south.
‘I must say,’ I confessed later when recalling the dismal affair, ‘the store did everything right. Advertising, a sign in the window, a well-arranged corner with a baize-covered table and a pile of my books. I was the one who failed.’ Since hardly anyone had read any of my first three books and almost no one realized that I was a writer, no one lined up to buy. I still wince when I think of it. ‘There I sat like the Pope waiting to give benediction and maybe allow them to kiss my ring, and no one showed.’ After about forty minutes on that doleful day, I heard the store manager tell some of the clerks: ‘Form a line, walk past and say hello as if you were buying a book,’ and later, when there still had been no sales, the same man told two women clerks: ‘Here’s seven dollars each. Get in that line of clerks and buy one of his damned books. Let everyone see you flash the money.’ The sales were made, two of them, the only ones on that painful day, and even before they happened, I knew they were fake.
As Emma was holding her diary I said: ‘Put down in December next year an autograph party at Hess’s,’ and she protested: ‘You do it there every time. Why not some other store?’ I knew the reason but did not explain. At the first party Hess had done everything right but had sold no books. Therefore when Hex was about to be published and Kinetic asked again if the store would like to host a party, since the novel dealt with their sales district, the manager replied, understandably: ‘No thanks,’ but when the book department sold more than two thousand copies at eighteen dollars each, the manager had a gracious idea: Hess would put on a gala celebration honoring their local boy on the sale of the three thousandth copy of the book in Allentown, and the customer who bought the lucky copy would not only be photographed with me as I signed it but would also receive a sales credit for a hundred dollars to be spent in the store that joyous day. As I told my wife that night: ‘A man could become quite fond of Hess.’
As soon as the manuscript of my final novel left my hands and passed under the control of Kinetic Press, it seemed to take on a life of its own. Numerous duplicate copies were made of the unedited manuscript, and I was assured that they were being placed in the hands of what my editor called ‘the opinion makers.’ The hope was, Kinetic told me, that people in the trade would begin to say: ‘The new Yoder is a hot item.’ In the period between October and New Year’s a variety of officials held consultations with associates to determine how their companies could participate in the launching of what my editor assured me was going to be ‘the sensation of the coming season.’ I hoped she was right.
Shortly after the New York offices opened in January, nine months before publication, I began receiving what seemed like daily telephone bulletins about the progress of the ma
Since my contract with Kinetic gave it control of sales to foreign publishers, the first excited calls to reach our house came from Ms. Marmelle, and now a curious routine developed that some will not believe. I had an aversion to talking about the financial aspects of my occupation as a writer, but Emma, who had always handled what money we had, or didn’t have, took great interest in how we were doing, so the calls came not to me but to her: ‘Emma! Fantastic news! Great Britain has just bought Stone Walls, seventy-five thousand dollars guaranteed.’ A few days later came the exciting report that Germany wanted rights in that country, $110,000 guaranteed. France had had good luck with the last three Grenzler novels and wanted this one, as did Sweden, Spain and Japan. By the middle of February six more foreign publishers had come aboard, the most gratifying being the one represented by a call that Ms. Marmelle wanted to deliver to me personally: ‘Remember how disappointed I’ve been over the fact that Italy took none of your three big novels? Well, they’ve not only taken Stone Walls for a fine advance, but they’ve also picked up the other three for publication at scattered intervals later. And they’ve paid the money on those others now.’
Because I was afraid of the deadly sin of hubris, remembering when my first books had been ignored by everyone, I masked the quiet satisfaction I felt at having Italy accept me at last and asked: ‘How’s the editing going?’ and she snapped: ‘Hey! Forget your work for a minute and let’s celebrate,’ but I reminded her: ‘I have a year’s hard work before me. Reacting to your suggestions, reworking rough parts—’