The World Is My Home: A Memoir by James A. Michener
I not only participated in the fire storms of my generation but also tried to fathom what they meant. Under Mussolini’s persuasive enticements in 1933 I saw the best of Italian fascism, and quickly detected its spurious grandeurs and essential emptiness. I was tardy in appreciating the brutality of Nazism because my young German instructors were careful to mask its hideous anti-Semitism; indeed, when they spoke of wanting to correct the injustices of the Versailles Treaty of 1919 I sympathized. But when the Nazis invaded Spain to help establish fascism there, then annexed Austria, and with Kristallnacht revealed their plans for destroying all Jews, I knew that one day we must go to war to stop Hitler’s madness.
Communism affected me more profoundly than fascism because it has a formal intellectual base that can be analyzed, while fascism does not. I never knew exactly what view of world society fascism proposed, while I saw that Communism offered a pseudoscientific theory that had been developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin and was embraced by millions in Europe and hundreds of thousands in the Americas. But as I studied its operation I saw that not only did it promise more than it could deliver but it also crushed freedom. Communism made me a defender of liberalism and democracy.
Spain impressed me deeply, as it has the habit of doing with visitors from Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, and I made a careful study of Spanish life, including its politics. In the 1930s many idealists flocked there from various countries to combat Franco’s fascist rebellion, but I had developed a belief that civil tranquility is essential to a decent society, and so, although I despised Franco, I never doubted that he was preferable to chaos.
My work took me to a score of former British colonies, where I had an opportunity to observe the condition in which England had left her possessions when freedom was either grasped or granted. I saw that of all the powers—and here I include the United States—England performed the best in preparing her erstwhile colonies to launch out on their own. Even in South Africa, where racism has a tenacious hold, she left a legacy of law and order, educational opportunities, financial stability and general honesty in civil life. Belgium behaved the poorest, while the United States won no laurels in her temporary management of the Philippines and her longer custodianship of Guam, Samoa, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
During the brief period when McCarthyism threatened freedom in the United States I reflected on Mussolini’s prediction: ‘Each nation will acquire the fascism to which it is entitled.’ The shameful behavior of our government in those years confirmed a belief I’d had for some time: that it would be easy, if the United States turned sour, to establish Nazi-like concentration camps in almost any part of our nation and find eager recruits to staff them. It was clear that the eternal vigilance that Thomas Jefferson and other patriots had urged would always be required.
During World War II I was sent to Manus, in the Admiralty Islands, north of New Guinea, where we maintained a big naval base. After servicing the various aviation installations in the area and the carriers in the lagoon, and participating in the bombing of Rabaul and Kavieng, I grabbed some R&R in Wewak on the north coast of New Guinea and accompanied a group on a long canoe ride up the gloomy Sepik River, one of the least-known important rivers in the world.
We were soon in the grass-shack land of headhunting cannibals. But we had little fear, since we were a body of ten or twelve and well armed, and also we knew that under steady and compassionate Australian pressure the savages were relinquishing their ancient rituals. In fact, we camped with them in one of their villages for two nights, and as we sat with them around the fire before climbing into sleeping bags with mosquito nets, we listened to them telling stories in a language we, of course, could not understand. As I listened to one old fellow I admired the exquisitely carved shell he was wearing as a breastplate. Then the singing started and the mix of men’s and women’s voices, the high and the rumbling low, paralleled what one might have heard in a fine church choir in some English city. And it occurred to me that the old man telling his story and the person who had carved the breastplate and the singers who performed according to traditional rules of their tribe were artists as fine as any I had known elsewhere in the world. They had successfully preserved a culture that was in its own way and purposes as rich as mine. I felt a tremendous affinity with these people and I experienced an epiphany: ‘We are all brothers. We all face the same problems and find the same satisfactions. We are united in one great band. I am one with all of them, in all lands, in all climates, in all conditions. Since we brothers occupy the entire earth, the world is our home.’
I was at the midpoint of my travels throughout the world. I had seen Europe and much of North America, including Canada and Mexico, and now I was familiar with the vast complexity of the Pacific, including New Zealand, Australia and some of the Dutch East Indies. I would soon begin my first tentative exploration of Asia. I would within a few years have seen all the world except three places only: the great Amazon River, China and the South Pole; Much later, in the most unexpected manner, I would see the first two; the South Pole I would never see, to my lasting regret.
I think that first visit to the Sepik occurred in early 1944.* Tonight, nearly half a century later on the opposite side of the world from that dark river, I feel the surge of brotherhood I experienced that night. No matter where in the world I have traveled, I have never felt that I was an alien, for I have tried to meet all men as though they were kin and have been able to share with them their hopes, their fears, their political uncertainties.
This concept that the people of all geographical areas and civilizations are my brothers and sisters has created a never-ending problem for me: if I’m so closely bound to them, does it follow that I owe allegiance to all nations? Or do I owe a special debt of patriotism only to my homeland? I have never been able to answer such questions categorically, for obviously I have been a citizen of the world, at home everywhere, at ease in all cultures, with all religions, and with all kinds of people living under almost every conceivable form of government. I have been invited to take up residence in a dozen different countries and have evaluated the merits of every invitation.
But from my earliest days I have had an intense love for my native country and have never seriously considered living for any extended period anywhere but under the protection of its flag. For that reason I have never acquired a home overseas, or kept my money there, or expressed any allegiance to a foreign way of life.
This indissoluble affection for my homeland is based on a compelling reason: only the United States’ system of free public education enabled me to escape from a severely disadvantaged childhood, and when asked about it I say: ‘Had I been born in Yugoslavia under the conditions of my childhood, I would have spent my life counting gasoline drums.’ In the American system I was able to attend eight different colleges and universities, always at government expense. The debt I owe my country is incalculable.
I have been so intensely associated with my homeland, and all corners of it, that I would be emasculated if I were forced to leave it. In fact, all the times I have worked abroad have only strengthened my ties to the country of my birth. To honor it, I have planted, I would judge, about three thousand trees, some fingerlings, some so large they had to be moved by gangs of men working with a truck. I have been driven to do this because I wanted to replenish the soil that in so many ways nourished me.
I knew instinctively that I required contact with my homeland—with my hillside, the rivulet at the bottom of my hill and the broad Delaware River, on which I had done so much of my early exploring when I rode north and south on the coal barges that drifted up and down the canal that fringed the river. Some of the most exciting families I knew in those days were the ones who lived on the huge barges that came down out of the Pennsylvania coal fields to deliver their cargo to the Philadelphia furnaces. For me to get back to those scenes after a long absence abroad was an emotional experience whose impact never diminished.
But if I was so responsive to
When I analyzed the matter seriously I made a curious discovery. It seemed that many American writers, and among them some of our very best, had suffered this confusion. Born and educated in the United States, they had been able to do their best writing only when they fled the place, as if they needed distance from a familiar society if they wanted to comprehend the subtlety of life and find a pattern for writing about it. I studied in some detail the lives of six of our best American writers, choosing a varied group in order to ensure a wide coverage of types: two elegant stylists, Henry James and T. S. Eliot; one extraordinary mythmaker, Herman Melville; a powerful original, Ernest Hemingway; and two who gained enormous popularity, Pearl Buck and Jack London.
What I discovered was amazing. Each of these writers found his or her most effective subject matter outside the United States: James and Eliot in England; Hemingway in Spain and Cuba; Melville and London in the Pacific; and Buck in China. The three who won the Nobel Prize—Eliot, Buck and Hemingway—did so for work done outside the States; and all matured intellectually and artistically abroad. Two of the greatest, James and Eliot, actually relinquished American citizenship and became naturalized citizens of Great Britain, a country they found more congenial.
In other words, six extremely talented predecessors had, for remarkably similar causes, behaved much like me. I concluded that I need make no apologies for aping them, but, like Hemingway, I also tackled several American themes and problems. And if I was a citizen of the world, I was not cast in the Gary Davis mold, for he had felt that in order to embrace all cutlures he had to surrender his American passport. Instead, the more I grew to apprciate and love the world, the more firmly I rooted myself in America.
In later years my ambivalence regarding this abiding conflict between the claims of the entire earth and those of my native corner of it reached a head when the government nominated me to work on committees dealing with sensitive information. Appointment necessitated careful clearance by the F.B.I. and during one extended period I was investigated almost yearly. Old hands in Washington explained: ‘The Bureau has found that if its investigators query sources without revealing the purpose of their inquiry—clearance for an appointment to an important job as opposed to investigation based on suspicion of criminal or treasonous activity—they get better results. If the person being questioned gets the idea that you may be subversive, they rack their brains to recall anything you may have done wrong.’
One such investigation proved memorable. At a White House meeting with President Nixon he informed me that another of the checks was being made regarding an appointment he had in mind, but in the weeks that followed friends flashed none of the warning signals. Later a Washington acquaintance told me why: ‘Philadelphia headquarters received instructions: “Full field check on James A. Michener, Pipersville, Pennsylvania, for assignment to a committee dealing with foreign affairs.” They looked in the phone book, got your address, and the investigation was under way. Very thorough.’
‘The one they investigated? What does he do?’
‘Works in a nearby stove factory. One of the nicest guys you could ever meet.’
The events in the lives of the other James A. Micheners caused both happened?’
‘The early Micheners were a prolific lot, had kids all over the place. In my home county, Bucks, there used to be six James A. Micheners. Today I live in a village of about fifteen families, and two of us are James A. Michener.’
‘The one they investigated? What does he do?’
‘Works in a nearby stove factory. One of the nicest guys you could ever meet.’
The events in the lives of the other James A. Micheners caused both amusement and irritation. When one of them was hit by a truck, I was reported as being near death, and my wife was once startled to learn at her hairdresser’s that she had filed for divorce. Such affairs caused me to contemplate what might happen if someone with my name committed a real crime, and this led me to a painful review of recent cases in which American men and women of some stature in their communities had engaged in treasonous activity by acting as agents of foreign powers.
Treason seems to me the ultimate crime, beyond which there is nothing worse; it is similar to patricide, but much more evil because there have been instances in which an irrationally abusive father has become such a threat to his children that they have had to kill him in self-defense. I can find no justification for treason; it is totally abhorrent.
An experienced operative for naval intelligence explained several factors that can operate to turn a man against his homeland: ‘Why is the military so apprehensive when they see one of their officers accumulating big debts, especially gambling ones? Because they have learned that such debts often lead to treason. Foreign spies see that the officer needs money and would be susceptible to their approaches. Same with homosexuality. Very vulnerable to blackmail.’
He then told me about a fascinating counterintelligence tactic: ‘By analyzing hundreds of cases and seeking the correlations between them, we discovered that if an officer subscribed to leftist magazines like The Nation and The New Republic, if he patronized foreign movies, especially the Russian ones, and if he allowed his wife to retain her maiden name, his loyalty had to be under suspicion.’
When I said that under those tests I could be convicted, he changed the subject: ‘What gives us the greatest worry is that whenever the armed services terminate a lot of officers in a general retrenchment those men are so embittered by the arbitrary treatment that they decide to get back some of the money they’ve lost by selling secrets to the enemy. So the armed services save nothing. Why not? Because they have to hire an almost equal number of investigators for counterespionage duties, keeping track of the disgruntled men.’
I have not known personally any of the traitors in the categories he mentioned, but I have followed the trials of a dozen or more as the sordid details were revealed. I have also been dismayed by the appalling case of the Cambridge spy ring that included Maclean, Burgess, Philby and especially Blunt.
I am aware that millions of our citizens go through life without pondering the problem of treason and there’s no reason why they should. But those of us who work abroad, or love foreign countries, or are attracted to the idea of world citizenship ought to contemplate these matters seriously and decide at some early stage that allegiance to one’s country, whether citizenship was acquired by birth or naturalization, is not negotiable.
During World War II, I was caught up inadvertently in what officials thought was a case of international espionage.
On Sunday morning, May 5, 1940, before the United States entered the war, I was reading the front page of that day’s New York Times when I saw an article that exploded in my mind like a flash of lightning.
Written by William L. Laurence, the Times’ science writer, the story dealt in revealing detail with the inspired efforts of Hitler’s scientists at a place called Peenemünde, on a remote island in the Baltic, to produce a significant supply of ‘heavy water,’ a phrase I had heard before but about which I had only a vague understanding. I hunched over the paper and read every word with extreme care, learning that ‘heavy water’ was water in which each molecule consists of deuterium (or two atoms of heavy hydrogen), which could be used to produce a system whereby the atom could be converted into a bomb. The article said that it thus appeared evident that German and Allied scientists were engaged in a race whose outcome might determine who would win the war.
I was shocked by these facts and surprised that so much had been revealed, for this
When I joined the Navy I carried with me the memory of that article about the inevitable race between America’s scientists and Nazi Germany’s for the creation of a bomb that would have the power to destroy cities. I therefore read with special interest secret aviation reports on the importance of an obscure German scientific research center on Peenemünde. From something I read, and it could have been the Times article, I deduced that it was at Peenemünde that the Germans were working on problems relating to heavy water, and the place became a fixation in my thinking.†
But I was in a quandary, for no one I knew had heard of either Peenemünde or heavy water; either I had miscalculated their importance or I had misunderstood what that disturbing article had said about them. Therefore, on my next visit to New York, in naval uniform, I went to my old friend the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue at Forty-second and said to the grouchy man staffing the reference desk: ‘About a month ago I read an article in The New York Times, front page, about some scientific experiments done by the Germans. I wonder if you could check your index and verify the article and the date so I can look it up.’