The World Is My Home: A Memoir by James A. Michener
He did not bother much with me in our discussions, because he felt the book was Oscar’s responsibility. At one three-hour session he asked me only one question: ‘Jim, do I have to use wailing guitars and ukuleles?’ I replied: ‘Only musical instrument I ever heard the natives play was two clubs beating hell out of a gasoline drum.’
‘Thanks,’ he said with a deep breath, ‘I hate guitars.’
I sat with him and Oscar at another session in Josh Logan’s New York apartment when Hammerstein said: ‘We lack one essential. A song that will convey the mood of the South Pacific. Something to go with Michener’s inspired place name, Bali Ha’i.’ I can vouch for the fact that the next minute Rodgers was at the piano—others who were present, including Mary Martin, witnessed this feat—and with two fingers picked out notes that would correspond to the pronunciation of the words Bali Ha’i, and within ten minutes he had the song in hand. Later I asked Hammerstein: ‘Was that an act? To impress Mary and Josh and me? Had he already done the song?’ and he laughed: ‘I’ve seen Richard do that a dozen times. I sweat over my words, he lifts his music from the air.’
Hammerstein was the worrier, the man who had a burning desire to move his audience deeply. He slaved to find the right words, the right symbolisms and he was a jealous guardian of his lyrics. Once when I wanted to quote something of his in an article I was writing, he refused permission: ‘Jim, if you quote four lines, that’s half the song. Would you allow me to quote half of one of your books?’
Midway through the writing of the play, Oscar lost his nerve—he could not see how to bind the strands together and for the first time I heard the complaint that I would subsequently hear from everyone in the theater or movies or television who had to grapple with one of my books: ‘You have some wonderful stuff here, Michener, but there’s no dramatic story line a man can hang on to.’ Artists in other fields who must work with one of my books earn their pay, and my gratitude; the difficulties they face explain why so many of my major works have never been transferred into another medium.
In the case of South Pacific the savior was Josh Logan, that ebullient manipulator of mood and movement. He rushed down to Doylestown and assured Hammerstein: ‘This can be licked. We can hammer this into shape,’ and together they did, with Logan ultimately receiving co-credit for the book of the play and a Pulitzer Prize.
What they devised was a spirited musical drama about a contingent of American sailors and Seabees waiting on a South Sea island for a major battle against Japanese forces. The play focused on two love stories, that of a Navy nurse with a French planter and that of a Navy lieutenant with a Tonkinese girl. The action was rowdy, romantic and tragic, and it won instant public approval.
I played no role in the adaptation, except for writing, at Logan’s request, some narrative accounts of how the rowdy comedian Luther Billis might operate as a wheeler-dealer, and as an afterthought I suggested that he would probably run a laundry of some kind, and maybe have a shower. Who invented the delightful character of Captain Brackett to represent Navy brass, the agent who holds the narrative together I do not know, but that move was one of genius and the name invented sounded exactly right; it exuded discipline and responsibility.
I did not then, nor ever in the dozen or so subsequent instances when writing of mine was adapted to the stage or the screen, participate in the creative work. Since I love the theater, have a passion for movies, and enjoy good television, I would relish working in those fields but, alas, I lack the dramatic touch.
I was called out to Hollywood just once, early in my writing career, to work on the script for a South Seas epic and accomplished nothing. I did, however, work with an amazing Hungarian writer who pointed scornfully at the sign then prominent in the Paramount offices: ‘In these difficult times it is no longer sufficient to be Hungarian. Now you must also work.’ He assured me that any good Hungarian writer could have saved the recent disaster The Spirit of St. Louis, the movie about Lindbergh, which was probably the dullest ever made. I told him: ‘Not even you could have saved that one,’ and he said brightly: ‘In my version Lindbergh doesn’t get to Paris. His plane runs out of fuel in southern France and he bails out into the garden of a nunnery. The abbess is Deborah Kerr and we have a whole new show!’ His imagination knew no constraints. Once when we were discussing a movie version of Hamlet he seriously asked: ‘But what if she isn’t Hamlet’s mother? Suppose she’s his aunt and he falls in love with her. What do we have then?’
He was a joy to work with, a wily fellow who knew how to protect himself when corporate battles were raging, and one day he told me: ‘They don’t know it, and they refuse to pay me what I’m worth, but the writer provides the heart and soul of any motion picture. Never allow directors and actors to push you around.’ On his office wall he had posted a large sign: ‘Never forget it was an actor who murdered Lincoln.’
Six weeks of working with him satisfied me that I lacked the Hollywood touch and I never tried again. I have left the dramatizing of my works to others, and they have served me exceptionally well, starting with Rodgers and Hammerstein. At one point when I’d had nine movies made from my books I told an interviewer: ‘Three hits, three so-so, three disappointments, that’s batting .333 and if a man can keep that up he can stay in the big leagues.’ I have never resented a penny paid to others for the work they did on my stories, for they knew the secrets required for transmuting words into images and I didn’t. In South Pacific the conversion was miraculous.
· · ·
When it became obvious that Rodgers and Hammerstein had on their hands one of the blockbusters of all time, rumors circulated that they had shortchanged me in allowing only 1 percent—a charge I never made, not even privately, because it had never occurred to me that my ugly duckling of a book would ever have a life in the theater—and Walter Winchell the columnist let it be known that he was going to blow the whistle. He phoned me to tell me so, but I begged him not to muddy the waters of what promised to be one of the most triumphant Broadway openings seen up to that time, and he promised he’d hold off for a couple of days.
That night after a full dress rehearsal Oscar Hammerstein called me to say: ‘Jim, we’ve got a hit on our hands. We can’t adjust your percentage, but we do want you to invest in the show. It’ll be a sure thing. Five thousand dollars.’
‘I don’t have one thousand.’
‘We will lend you the money—tonight. You can pay it back when the first profits come in.’
Tears came to my eyes, and I think Oscar knew it, for he waited for me to say: ‘That’s wonderfully generous … one Doylestown kid to another.’ He kept his word. He lent me the money to buy shares that would have otherwise accrued to him and Rodgers, and my financial rewards were not trivial.
Winchell was faithful to his word,‡ and the opening night was explosively wonderful, with the audience remaining in the aisles to cheer again and again. In the years that followed I received, from my royalties and the share of the show that Oscar gave me, the funds, though never excessive, that enabled me to become a full-time professional writer.
One summer when I was preparing to sing in South Pacific at the Lambertville Music Circus—I had the role of the Greek professor, much augmented in my behalf—I visited Hammerstein, then dying of cancer, to tell him about how the show was progressing. He wished me well in my performance, expressing regret that he would not be able to travel the four miles to see me: ‘I’m sure you’ll take it seriously, Jim. Don’t burlesque it,’ and I said: ‘I take everything seriously.’ Then we chuckled over a preposterous incident at the time of the original production: On the morning after the tryout in New Haven some agitated New Englanders had accosted me at the train station and warned: ‘Your play will fail if you keep in that song about racial prejudice. It’s ugly, it’s untimely and it’s not what patrons want to hear when they go to a musical. Please beg Rodgers and Hammerstein to take it out.’ I had reported their suggestion to Oscar and he laughed: ‘That’s what the pl
“You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” made the show memorable,’ Hammerstein said. ‘Everyone wrote about it and forgot the love duets.’
I was swept by emotion, seeing this man who had so loved life lying stricken. For some minutes we recalled the joys of working with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza and Josh and Leland and that wonderful cast, and I said: ‘Those days and nights were golden.’
* * *
* Understand that the publisher has only 50 percent of list price to play around with. If a book is listed at $20.00, it sells to the bookseller at a 50 percent discount, leaving the publisher with only $5.00 to cover all his costs, including the royalties to the author, which will fluctuate between 10 and 15 percent of list per copy.
† In its present Macmillan printing the peculiar pagination is retained, as is the color of the inside cover, one of the ugliest puces ever used on a book, but the quality of the paper and the binding have been improved. Considering the honorable life this mistreated book has had, I have grown to love its ungainly appearance and would not change it.
‡ When the show opened he was ecstatic, and coined the phrase that remained the catchword during its run: South Terrific.
IX
Intellectual Equipment
The belated and modest success of my first book, Tales of the South Pacific, encouraged me to consider whether I might be able with continued good luck to become a full-fledged writer. I naturally spent several months taking a hard look at myself—my personality, my intellectual equipment and my attitude toward art—and I realized that my thoughts the very first time I ever considered that I might have writing ability were somewhat shameful. In fact, they were ridiculous.
In 1942, just before leaving Macmillan to head for the South Pacific, I had occasion to check the batch of five minor English novels we were importing that season to complete our list. Each year when our editors in New York could not find enough satisfactory American novels to meet our quota, we traditionally looked to our London house and picked up four or five that had already been published there. This was both legitimate and sensible, for the manuscripts had already been vetted by Macmillan’s first-class London editors and all we had to do was give the published English books to some young assistant just in from Vassar or Smith to search out and change English spellings to American: favourite to favorite, aluminium to aluminum and so on.
As I read these books, three by male authors, two by female, I made a discovery that suddenly struck me: ‘Hey! I can write better than any of these clowns!’ The judgment was hardly literary; it was simply a gut reaction from a hardworking editor who had helped revise textbooks on a variety of subjects in order to make them understandable; it had nothing to do with the books’ content or narrative flow. But it was an honest reaction and it was relevant.
In ways that mattered but I could not pinpoint, I felt I really could write better than those five, and that evaluation lingered with me long after it first came to me. It was the experience at Tontouta that revived it, tempting me to consider myself at least eligible to think of writing. But after Tales of the South Pacific I needed a more sophisticated assessment of myself, and in an orderly way I began to marshal the pros and cons of a writing career for it is no light matter when one is past forty to consider quitting a salaried job to plunge into the wilderness of free-lance writing.
On the day I started my self-examination I asked myself these questions: ‘Am I interested in people? Do ideas excite me? Am I knowledgeable enough about novels to write one?’ I’m sure there were other questions, but I forget them now.
My earliest memories involve being one among many other children, so I did not grow up with a self-centered view of myself, and because of my early jobs I knew a great deal about life. I had knocked about America as a lad, seen Europe in my college years and had been in the Pacific as an adult. But most important, I had always loved people, their histories, the preposterous things they did and said, and I especially relished their stories about themselves. I was so eager to collect information about everyone I met that I was practically a voyeur, and always it was their accounts that mattered, not mine, for I was a listener, not a talker. If the writing of fiction was the reporting of how human beings behaved, I was surely eligible, for I liked not only their stories, I liked them.
As for ideas on which to base my writing, I was interested in everything—I was a kind of intellectual vacuum cleaner that picked up not only the oddest collection of facts imaginable but also solid material on the basic concerns of life. In college I’d had three majors, English, history and philosophy, and done well in each, but it was after college that I really educated myself with travel, studies in art, speculations on the nature of government, and participation in the business world. I had as broad a knowledge as anyone I knew, but about its depth I often had doubts, for I was constantly meeting men and women my age who were true scholars in some one discipline at which they far surpassed me. But as a teller of tales, an organizer of material, I needed only to incorporate certain ideas into my stories.
It was only when I reached the question about whether I had enough brains to be a writer that I felt I could give an unqualified yes for an answer, for through the years I had received several scholarly assessments of my intelligence. The first was in elementary school; a teacher took me aside and said: ‘We’re not supposed to tell you this, James, but your ratings on the intelligence tests you took last month were very high. You can do anything you set your mind to, so keep working as you’ve been doing.’
Later there was further proof of my aptitude. At Swarthmore College, I was among the students chosen on the basis of superior performance to participate in an experimental system in which we attended no classes in the last two years but had seminars and tutorials. I participated in no study group that contained more than five fellow students, and since the seminars lasted two and a half hours, each member could be sure that he or she would be called on and subjected to inspection not only by the professor but also by his or her peers.
At the end of those exciting two years we were examined for our final degrees not by our own Swarthmore professors but by a battery of experts from outside who had never seen us before. I would be tested by a visitor from Oxford, a philosopher from Harvard, an Elizabethan expert from Penn and the head of the English department at Princeton, and I would spend mornings and afternoons for a week writing the most demanding papers for them to examine, after which I would sit before the four to answer orally whatever questions they threw at me in order to refine their judgments about my ability and the thoroughness of my preparation.
In such an examination period both the student and his professors were being assessed. As the week progressed, with my finding the papers assigned by the outsiders almost ideally suited to whatever expertise I had developed, it became generally known that I was doing exceptionally well. As I said to Professor Manning, who had conducted the history seminars: ‘They’re asking everything we studied.’ He and I were a team.
My orals came on a Saturday afternoon in June and a fair number of students filed into the hall to see how I conducted myself. Fortunately, in philosophy, history and English I was again questioned about only those matters on which I was well prepared, so I was able to achieve high marks. But toward the end of the exam the English professor from Princeton said: ‘Now, Mr. Michener, my last question will have no bearing on our assessment of your work. Purely a personal interest of mine. But at the heart of the written exam I sent over here for you students was that list often unidentified quotations from the great works of English literature from which you were to choose two on which you would write what I merely described as glosses, expecting you to know what that meant. Your handling of that part was, well, exceptional, and I wondered if you had by luck stumbled upon the very two on which you had prepared yourself. Could you possibly have done equally well on any of the others?’ He passed me my copy of his exam, and I saw the passa
Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dst yesterday.…
Curiously enough, I could quote this entire passage in English and also in French, Spanish and German translations. Early in my years at Swarthmore I had purchased at considerable expense Furness’s extraordinary Variorium edition of Othello, in which he quoted the stunning passage as it had appeared in some two dozen foreign languages, and I had memorized three of them. I then offered the learned guesses made by others as to how Shakespeare had come by his knowledge of narcotics, and pointed out that since he had also used mandragora in Antony and Cleopatra he obviously liked the word, probably because of its euphonious sound. In my closing I said: ‘Theories aside, the lasting value of these lines is their majestic poetry. These are words that sing.’
The Princeton man said: ‘You’ve handled that quotation rather well. Could you do as well with the six others?’ and when I looked again at the list I replied: ‘Four of them, perhaps,’ and he nodded. At this the students in the audience and some of the professors, all of whom wished me well, applauded, because at Swarthmore the college cheered academics as well as athletes.
When the results were posted, I saw that I had been awarded highest honors, Swarthmore’s equivalent of summa cum laude, and one of my professors told me: ‘Yours is the highest grade anyone ever attained in English and history so far as our records go.’ But recently when I looked at the examinations now being given seniors at my college I saw that the level of scholarship had been raised so dramatically that I doubted I could even pass, let alone take honors.