The World Is My Home: A Memoir by James A. Michener
‘What’s his name? Maybe I know him.’
‘Robert Dean Frisbie. Those who know tell us his books are first class, but nobody’s seen any of them. Anyway, we can’t leave an American citizen dying on some atoll. Hurricane could sweep him away.’
As I left the last meeting I thought: This is a pretty full plate for a mere lieutenant, but the other officers know that what Halsey said was true. I do know these islands and maybe I can bring some sense to these matters. But the situation that intrigued me especially was the one on Bora Bora, where enlisted men were about to mutiny because they were being returned home as heroes. That really merited looking into.
But an even more interesting case presented itself when a legal officer of high rank took me aside for a briefing: ‘Michener, I want you to read this court-martial record, take no notes and forget it when you’re finished. Deals with a messy affair on Matareva,* and on your way back, depending on how you schedule your flights, we want you to visit the island and let us know, top secret, what you think happened.’ He then handed me a rather thick file, which dealt with the court-martial held recently in Noumea, the capital of the French island of New Caledonia, which served as Halsey’s headquarters even though he was usually stationed far to the north.
The case involved a hush-hush affair on a remote island about which I had heard only whispers: ‘What in hell happened on Matareva?’ we had asked one another, and the only sensible answer we got was: ‘The whole damned place went ape.’ Now I would find out, but as I read about the unbelievably sickening background, I felt dizzy, and was relieved when the account of the actual court-martial conjured up a more normal scene with the five officers behind a table with the crisp brigadier general of the Marines in charge, and the court reporters at their dictation machines. I could also visualize the two dozen accused, all young and trim in the laundered uniforms to which they were entitled when being tried, lest they give an unfairly poor impression in battle-worn gear. But I could not visualize any of them giving in open court the testimony they apparently had given.
I read transfixed, and when the file had narrowed to only a few pages I was bewildered: How can this disaster be cleaned up in the remaining six pages? A hundred loose ends cried out for testimony! And then I came to an ending for which no one could have been prepared: the young Marine general had taken it upon himself, without consultation with his other judges, to halt the case with the bald announcement ‘The trial is over. The twenty-two accused will be dismissed from the service and shipped out this night on any available transport. And no one will speak abroad of what has happened in this courtroom.’
When I asked my briefing officer what had happened next he said: ‘As you learned from the file, it was one of the worst cases the Marines have ever faced, maybe the worst. So their young general acted prudently when he halted the trial to keep even worse testimony from getting onto the record.’
‘How did his superiors who ordered the trial feel about that?’
‘Bull Halsey had wanted those Marines scorched, and when the young general let them off the hook, he really blew his stack. I was there: “Get me that son-of-a-bitch, now!” and when the general stood before him, Halsey raved: “I’ll have you busted! You’ll leave this area in disgrace.” Young fellow never flinched, stood straight and said: “I knew you’d be furious, so I typed out what the next line of testimony would have paraded before the world. Would you really want this displayed in the record?” Halsey read it, said not a word, passed the paper along to me. When I looked up, Bull had his right arm on the general’s shoulder and was walking him slowly toward the door, where he said: “Anderson, if you had permitted that trial to proceed I’d have chewed your ass for having allowed that sewage to get into the Navy record,” and we’ve never heard another word about Matareva. But rumors have filtered back to Washington and they want a coded report, just to complete court records. Stop by the island and give me something that I can forward … but clean it up.’
With that handful of commissions I was driven out to the airfield at Tontouta, where I hooked up with a tough crew of four who had flown their miracle DC-3 to all parts of the southeastern war zone: New Caledonia to Tahiti. I had ridden with them often and had complete faith in their skill to find and land upon the most remote islands. I also had more than adequate reason to rely upon the great DC-3, workhorse of the world. I had little confidence in some of the other planes I had flown in, especially the tricky B-26s, which tended to go down on takeoff if improperly balanced, but the DC-3s I could depend on to fly me anywhere and get me safely back.
I was aware as I flew eastward that I was heading away from the war zone, but recently I had seen a lot of war and flown as a passenger on various bombing missions, so I was entitled to a respite. Also, I had fallen victim to what my managing officer in BuPers, the Bureau of Personnel that assigned officers to jobs, called ‘the menace of the card punch.’ The records and abilities of all officers had been entered on IBM cards containing many little boxes into which operators working clever machines punched holes, showing what the officer in question could do; mine apparently showed among a good many other things that I had a master’s degree in history, so when an electric beam probed its way through my card and ten thousand others it alerted BuPers to the fact that they had a trained historian way out on a tropical island, precisely where he was needed. Result? After I had completed one full tour of duty, some of it quite demanding, I was approached by a courteous rear admiral who said: ‘Michener, without question you have enough points to get out of this war zone and pick up a good assignment stateside. But we have an important job for which you seem ideally qualified. Your aviation duty has made you familiar with most of the islands, more than anyone else we can find. We need a historian, someone with brains and a sense of military movement, to start compiling a history of the Navy in these waters. Samuel Eliot Morison of Harvard will be your boss, and you’ll be asked to fly to every corner of our theater. It means another full tour of duty out here, but we’d be grateful—Halsey, Morison, the crowd—if you’d consent.’
No one then, or up to now, knew why I was prepared to accept so rapidly, but I had two good reasons: I had recently had a refulgent experience on the airstrip at Tontouta in New Caledonia which I will describe later, and this made me eager to revisit as much of the South Pacific as possible; secondly, I had reason to suppose that my marriage might be dissolved, so that I really had no burning desire to get back home. I was prepared to accept another tour of duty, but fortunately I did not reveal that fact immediately.
In order to sweeten the invitation, which the admiral admitted was just a bit out of line, he uttered words of purest gold: ‘Now, Lieutenant, if you take this job you realize that I will issue you permanent orders authorizing you to travel to whatever parts of our command you judge you must visit in order to complete your work,’ and then he added the words that caused a Navy man’s heart to skip a beat: ‘Fagtrans and Per Diem.’ The first meant First Available Government Transportation; the second that I would be able to present my travel orders and documentation to any pay officer, no matter where I was, and receive immediate cash payment for my living expenses. An imaginative young man with a yen for travel who had a Fagtrans and Per Diem in his pocket could see a good deal of the world.
I accepted the additional assignment, which was why Admiral Halsey could say that he had heard I knew a good deal about the South Pacific. I would spend two full tours of duty, nearly four years, in the tropics, the first two often in battle areas, the last two in paradise.
At dusk on the day my trip began we reached the Fiji island of Viti Levu, which I had more or less made my headquarters during long spells, and as we rode into town from the airport I saw again those sights that had inspired me years earlier. There were the green fields; there among the mountains rose the peak shaped exactly like a human finger—Joske’s Thumb, it was called—guardian to the capital town of Suva.
How enchanting that town was to those
On the hill and beyond the field rose Government House, occupied in those years by a rising official who would later be the distinguished governor-general of Hong Kong. He had an American wife, who proved helpful in that period when many American officers like me either passed through on government business or holed up in the local hotel for weeks on end. They were a gracious couple who served the Allies well, and I used to see them riding in state as they came down from Government House and into town. They reminded everyone that Great Britain still ruled Fiji and all similar islands and would continue to do so for the next hundred years. At least I thought so, for when the G-G rode past in his Rolls-Royce I felt curiously secure.
And then came the target of any trip I would ever make to Fiji: one of the memorable hotels of the world, not majestic and not particularly spacious, but a haven to all who crossed the Pacific on tourist ships or who now came in by airplane. It was the Grand Pacific Hotel, famed G.P.H. of the travel books, a big, squarish building of several floors, with a huge central dining area filled with small tables, each meticulously fitted with fine silver and china, bud vases, and a facing porch leading out to the lawn that went down to the sea. It was grand, and it certainly was pacific, and the barefoot Indians who served the meals had a grace that few hotels in the world could offer and none surpass.
G.P.H. was my home away from home, the place where I would hear a hundred stories that would serve me well in later years, the place where I got to know the silly foibles and the tremendous internal strength of Englishmen who served overseas, the place that was the setting of one of the great love stories of my life. How glad I was to be back in this grand place at the start of my travels.
During the war years the American government must have subsidized the G.P.H. in some secret way, because any American officer on travel duty was allowed to reside there for as long as he liked for one pound a day, three excellent meals included. Since that was less than $4.85 a day, the management must have shuddered when they saw a free-loader like me sign the register saying that I’d be around for a week or two. However, my official position enabled me to do the hotel a good turn now and then, like finding cargo space on our planes for things they needed, and in time I was greeted by the hotel personnel as an old friend.
On this night when I checked in I found myself facing a cheery young woman of about thirty whom I had not seen before, and when I asked who she was she said with no hesitation: ‘Laura Henslow, from Christ-church in New Zealand.’ Since she had never heard of me, I had to present my travel orders before I could get the special rate, and she checked their authenticity with a manager who, when he saw my name, came out to greet me. He assured her that I was legitimate, and since I had nothing better to do and she was so congenial, I remained by the desk talking with her for some time.
She had worked in two different New Zealand hotels, one on the cold South Island, one on the warm North, and had been urgently sent for to bring some order into the G.P.H. business systems, which had been overtaxed by war traffic. She was obviously a clever woman and so attractive that I was surprised when I learned she was not married. ‘You’ll not remain single long,’ I prophesied and she replied: ‘I’ve had my chances, but I do prize my freedom.’
Since it would be some time before my plane would be free to carry me out to Bora Bora, I had four or five days in Suva, which meant three great meals a day, fine gin and tonics at night and good conversation. In the daytime, starting at two, I would go to see my good friend Pandit Karmasingh, who owned the local movie theater, where those wonderful Indian films that ran four and a half hours played. I had once done him a small favor and he adopted me, introducing me to Indian life in the islands and to Indian drama in his theater, which he allowed me to enter free whenever I wished.
An Indian film was an art form as bizarre and rigid in structure as a Forty-second Street burlesque: it had a dramatic line involving terrible conflicts, fights, betrayals and tearful reconciliations, but at some point in the film it was obligatory to insert either a very long classical dance or a scene from one of the ancient epics with gods and demons all over the place.
One of Karmasingh’s favorite films, which I liked so much I saw it three times in the course of my various visits, focused upon the first woman in India to become a lawyer; and in her maiden case she is called upon to defend the very handsome man who wooed her and left her at the altar while he ran off with another woman, a slut if I ever saw one. When this other woman is found dead under suspicious circumstances he is brought to trial as the killer. It took one hour for the fledgling lawyer to decide whether or not to take the case, and you could see that she went through hell as she tried to make up her mind. The trial itself required two hours, one of which was taken up by her impassioned address to the jury, in which she said ‘Gentlemen of the jury’ in English at least fifty times. The rest of the dialogue was in Hindi, of course, but Mr. Karmasingh had placed a boy beside me who spoke English and kept me informed as to what was going on, although much of the time he was as bewildered as I. I started wondering: How are they going to get the gods in this one? The solution was this: as she searches for the one plea to the jury that will save her faithless lover, she falls asleep and in a dream sequence in which the gods participate they help resolve her problem; she gives a marvelous peroration, saves her man, and at the conclusion walks off into the Indian sunset with him. She was an excellent actress, looked fine in a lawyer’s wig, and convinced me of her lover’s innocence.
On this trip I saw only one Indian film, because the next day I was invited to an affair in the center of town. For the first time in Fijian history, a locally born Fijian young man, tall and broad and handsome with a massive head of hair and very white teeth, was being ordained as a Catholic priest. As a schoolboy he had been a star athlete, a first-class scholar at the seminary, and a devout young man in the final studies that entitled him to enter the priesthood. His accomplishments were the pride of not only the Catholics but also the Protestants of Fiji, for it reminded the young black men of their churches that they too could enter the Church of England priesthoods and Methodist ministries. Robert Derrick, my friend in Fiji who had once been a Protestant missionary there, took me to the ordination, where I saw a boy carrying a sign which read CONGRATULATIONS FATHER BEGA. When I read it I received a lesson from Derrick in the damage that very bright people can often inflict: ‘The name’s pronounced Mbenga. One of the earliest London missionaries fancied himself an amateur philologist who decided to give the world its only sensible system of spelling. Since in Fijian b was always preceded by m, he said: “Let b stand for mb, and since g is always preceded by n, let g be read ng.” So what you see on that sign is really Mbenga.’ He told me that the all-wise one had also decided that since Fijian did not use the letter c, it would be used to stand for th, which meant that Fiji’s great black leader who pronounced his name Thakambau, had to spell it Cakabau, to the utter confusion of all who followed.
The service was memorable, for flowers flooded
The service ended with a homily by a bishop with a name like Caldwell or Dawson, an elderly man who announced that his see was the entire South Pacific and that he was going from here to visit his churches in Samoa; he spoke movingly of how overjoyed he was personally to be in attendance when a Fijian young man was taken as a priest into the church he governed: ‘May he be the first of many, for he symbolizes the fact that the Holy Church is increasingly a part of our island life.’ I liked the bishop intuitively and understood why his fatherly approach had won the hearts and support of people throughout his scattered see. When I met him after his brief comment, I told him that I too was flying east to Samoa and invited him to ride with me, but he said: ‘Alas, I go to British Samoa, you to American, so I cannot fly with you. However, the two islands are only a few miles apart, so perhaps we shall meet after all.’
As I was speaking to the bishop I saw that Laura, the New Zealand woman from the hotel, had also attended the induction of Father Bega and now wanted to congratulate him. But since thirty or forty huge Fijian women wished to do the same, she was quietly leaving the line, when he saw her and raised his left fist with his thumb extended to acknowledge that he had seen her; when he did this his hand looked exactly like Joske’s Thumb, the guardian rock of Suva, and I judged this to be a very good omen.
The flight to Samoa was so storm-tossed that I was relieved when we dropped very low, almost touching the waves, where we found stable air for a turn to the north and a fishhook back to the important American base at Pago Pago (pronounced Fijian style, Pango Pango). I had of course read Somerset Maugham’s finest short story, ‘Rain,’ which depicted the tropical village to perfection, and I believed I understood both Sadie Thompson and Reverend Davidson; certainly I felt at home in Pago and I started early on the first morning trying to find some clue as to what had been happening at the American base in British Samoa. When not much information was forthcoming I realized that the brass was not going to confide much to a mere lieutenant, so I decided to wait till I reached British Samoa, a New Zealand mandate, to make my inquiries.