The World Is My Home: A Memoir by James A. Michener
When I first read, as an impressionable young man, the Java novel Max Havelaar, by Eduard Douwes Dekker, I was astounded by the freedom with which he incorporated in his novel material of the most revolutionary character: price lists, data on the cultivation of sugarcane, long disquistions on life in Indonesia and political analyses. It was as untidy a narrative as I had ever seen, but I quickly saw that he was using this chaotic material to create an ambience that was overpowering, and I reached a conclusion from which I have never retreated: ‘A novel is a receptacle into which the writer throws everything he believes to be relevant, but the reader will be enticed only if the matter is thrown with skill and artistry.’ I saw that he had written a novel that was technically miserable, but emotionally a masterpiece. In the fifty years since I formed that judgment I have never met one other person outside Holland who has read the book, but not long ago I saw the majestic motion picture made in the Netherlands that was based on it and learned that sensitive critics throughout Europe consider Max Havelaar one of the master novels.§
Like Douwes Dekker, I have been willing to write about anything that absorbed my interest, believing that what captivated me would entrance readers. Thus I have written about dinosaurs and bears and geese, the movements of continents, the growing of glaciers and the slide of earthquakes beneath the sea.
Confident that I had discovered and defined the type of writing I was qualified to do, I started writing a long novel that would test my theories, and as the pages of the future Hawaii accumulated on my desk, making a pile so tall that it frightened me, I often wondered: Who will take the time to read about coral building islands and workmen irrigating sugarcane? But before I could panic, an inner confidence asserted itself: If I’m interested in such things, my readers will be too, and I plowed ahead, not shortening a single chapter and certainly not eliminating any. It was a major gamble, and when it succeeded beyond anyone’s prediction, I judged that my convictions had been justified.
When I turned to the question of how to write, what first came to mind was that glorious Adoration of the Magi which Benozzo Gozzoli had done in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici in Florence. It was evident that he saw the art of narration in the same perspective that I did: as a glorious procession of people and sites and the wonders of nature. I would use words to paint vast murals, and, like his work in the palazzo, I would break my narrative into splendid panels, leaving it to the reader, as he did to the viewer, to bind the whole together.
In looking for subject matter I went back to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, in which he invoked memories of a great German family striving and thriving through the generations, and illuminating its part of the world while doing so. I would see subject matter as continuous through the centuries and the people who live in a given place as being closely interrelated with those who came both before and after them.
Of profound importance in the way I would plan my books would be Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with its very slow and measured beginning before the piano takes over and the drama begins. I deduced that an artist who has a sure idea of where he is heading can not only afford to delay his opening statement but also derive much profit from doing so. I therefore decided quite consciously to start my long novels with spacious preambles in order to establish the setting for the emotional coloration I hoped to achieve in the body of the book. Thus it was not uncommon for me to utilize scores of pages for the geological background, the physical appearance and the animal life of the area I wanted to write about before I introduced my first human beings. I believe that had I not known Beethoven so intimately—the fire of those opening statements in the Fifth Symphony and the Emperor Concerto as opposed to the more restrained beginnings of the two Fourths, symphony and concerto—I might never have discovered the virtue of the understated first chapter. I have said, not lightly but with a light phrase: ‘I use those long, dull openings to weed out the ribbon clerks.’ The words come from poker, in which an old-timer raises the ante spectacularly to scare away those who are timorous or not really engaged in the game. My openings scare away readers who are not prepared for a narrative of long duration, and I often think: ‘I probably couldn’t have held their interest anyway,’ because I know that many readers who begin my books are not able to finish them.
Suppose that in 1962 someone had assembled the fifteen brightest men and women in the publishing industry—editors, booksellers, critics, university experts, and enthusiastic readers—and had given them this commission: ‘Tell us what kind of novel the American public is yearning for, one that will command attention for at least a full year.’ Would that group, after mature deliberation, have conceivably reported: ‘The public is thirsting for three books: an archaeologist digging in a small hill in Israel, a rabbit on a journey north from London, and a moody mystery about a Scottish monk in a medieval Italian monastery’?
I think not. Yet when I wrote The Source on the first subject, it was received with enthusiasm by the public.‖ And a few years later Watership Down, a book about a rabbit, had the same reception. And some years after that it was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which dealt with crime in a medieval church. The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that the latter often results from shrewd suggestions made by thoughtful editors. The best novels result from the often preposterous imaginations of men and women who have a flair for telling stories; clever analyses and business projections rarely play any meaningful role in their success.
As for the future of the fictitious narrative known as the novel, I am often asked, more times than you would think: ‘Do you believe the novel is dead?’ and I reply with a smile: ‘Do you think I’m the one you should ask?’
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* Even though I have studied English for decades I am constantly surprised to find that words long familiar carry definitions I have not known: panoply meaning a full set of armor, calendar meaning a printed index to a jumbled group of related manuscripts or papers.
† Early manuscripts, The Library of Congress; Centennial, University of Northern Colorado; Chesapeake, Public Library, Easton, Maryland; The Covenant, Swarthmore College; Texas, University of Texas; Alaska, University of Alaska; Journey, Caribbean, University of Miami. I have not yet decided where to place Space, Poland, Six Days in Havana, The World Is My Home, Mexico and Workbook.
‡ Even though I made four extensive visits to South Africa when writing The Covenant, I chose not to take extended residence because of the stern laws governing writers; I was sure they would not enforce them against me but they might against someone who worked with me. And although I visited Poland nearly a dozen times for extended stays, it was never practical to live there.
§ Curiously, I had the same experience with another European novel that meant a great deal to me, Martin Andersen Nexø’s splendid Pelle the Conqueror. In my years of travel I never met one person who had read this great Danish novel and I began to wonder if I had overestimated its worth. Then, as I was writing these notes, a motion picture based on the adventures of Pelle’s rather worthless father impressed the world and I could say: ‘I knew it all along, a fine book.’
‖ Publishers at that time had a degrading rite in which the author of a book was required to stand before the company’s assembled salesmen to defend it. When I presented The Source as well as I could, which apparently was not reassuring, the senior salesman, who was accustomed to establishing the pattern of his fellows’ reaction to a new book, said in a tone of self-pity: ‘Let’s face it, men, what we have here is another book of short stories,’ and everyone groaned, for they knew that collections of such stories, often a sop to the vanity of an established writer, could rarely be given away. I swore then that I would never again try to defend any of my books to salesmen, even though Random House’s were among the shrewdest judges of books in America, nor have I.
X
Trios
Two facts about my writing career must be understood. First, I have always remained out of the literary mainst
The second significant characteristic is that, because of my apprenticeship at Macmillan, which gave me knowledge about publishing and the life of a writer, I chose not to become involved in the literary scene on a social level. It did not appeal to me; it did not seem rewarding; it was distracting rather than productive and, most important, because of my personality and attitudes I would not have been very good at being part of it. I have thus remained off by myself, and it may seem shocking that at age eighty-five I have known almost no other writers, American or foreign, even casually.
I had thirty-second introductions to Gore Vidal, E. L. Doctorow and Robert Ludlum. I once met James Clavell for twenty seconds in an Amsterdam restaurant, Yukio Mishima for half that time as I left a Tokyo geisha house as he was entering, and Evelyn Waugh for half that time in an Istanbul restaurant, where he looked up without taking my outstretched hand and said: ‘I do not care to have Americans who have read my books interrupting my meal.’ On the other hand, when I met his brother Alec Waugh in Honolulu we spent many fine days together, and when he handed me a copy of his Island in the Sun he said warmly: ‘Really, Michener, with your love of islands you should visit the Caribbean one day.’ It was the first time I had heard that suggestion and I would take it up years later.
When I was introduced to William Faulkner in the editorial offices of Random House he grunted, and one wintry afternoon at Toots Shor’s in New York Ernest Hemingway nodded in my direction a couple of times as I spent several hours listening to his fascinating monologues. I had one delightful lunch with John O’Hara and a fine evening in Rome with Tennessee Williams, who awed me. I have been on brief television shows with Norman Mailer and Allen Drury, and I once met Herman Wouk for two minutes at a Leonard Lyons party. That’s the extent of my literary life, except that once I drove a far distance in Iceland to meet with Halldór Laxness, the Nobel Prize winner from that island whose work I had held in high regard long before he won the prize.
Even at mighty Random House with its multiple subdivisions I have known only three of the editors, my own two—Albert Erskine and Kate Medina—and Jason Epstein, one of the adventurous literary editors. One day I came into the office I customarily used when working on galleys to find it occupied by a handsome black woman, and when I retreated to ask: ‘Who’s that?’ I was told: ‘Toni Morrison. She edits for us and writes books for Knopf,’ but I doubt if she even saw me. I know no editors at other houses, no agents other than my own Owen Laster at the William Morris Agency, no critics except the delightful John Barkham, who has served American writing so long and with such distinction, and certainly no headwaiters at the restaurants frequented by literary coteries. I have also remained aloof from university circles, for I do not give readings from my work in progress, nor do I lecture. John Barth did introduce me one night at a reading in Baltimore, but that’s about the extent of my wild life at the heart of the American literary scene. I have paid a penalty for this aloofness and would not recommend it for other writers. I have not played the role in American letters to which I was entitled and my voice has not been amplified through committees and agencies. I occupy no salaried position in the literary life of our universities, and one of the saddest aspects of my writing is that I have never come upon any young person of obvious talent whom I might have helped along to a professional career. I have been bombarded with manuscripts and visits but have failed to identify young writers with high potential whom I could have introduced to publishing circles in New York. An exception to this mournful generalization could have been a shy, modest young man whom I met during the American occupation of Japan. His name was Oliver Statler, a minor functionary on General MacArthur’s huge staff. Living in Japan, he had developed a consuming love for that country and wanted to write about it, and I could have been of help, but by the time he got to me he had already written his Japanese Inn, which became a minor classic, so he needed no assistance.
My experience with Oliver Statler shows that if the young man or woman has a reliable talent he or she requires no boost from others. I remember an afternoon when a group of would-be writers from a Philadelphia university visited my hilltop home to discuss writing; they were an able group and I felt sympathy for them but not much assurance that any of them would become writers. However, as they started down the hill I heard one fellow growl: ‘He was courteous and all that, but he certainly didn’t show me much.’ That one, I thought, had a chance to become a writer, because unless a young person feels intuitively that he is at least as good as some who have gone before, he has small chance of excelling them.
I am not speaking of arrogance, which is not a bad characteristic for a young person to have when trying to launch a life in the arts, but the honest kind of self-evaluation that I exercised when I concluded that I could write better than the authors of five novels Macmillan was importing that year from London. Without a solid self-confidence to sustain them, I do not see how young people will have the courage and determination to undergo the disappointments of an apprenticeship in any of the arts or the will to protect themselves if they do succeed in becoming professionals. My self-removal from the literary scene is best understood as such an act of self-preservation.
The reader must not conclude that I was a recluse. Far from it. I have always engaged in a rich social life with business leaders, politicians, the owners and coaches of professional sports and, in my frequent trips abroad, with political leaders of many countries. I have often been at the center of current events if not of the writing profession, and in retrospect it was a good decision that led to this self-imposed exile from the literary milieu. I like being off by myself and doing things in my independent way.
But even in my isolation I maintained a keen interest in the literary experience of our nation and read avidly both Publishers Weekly and the Monday edition of The New York Times with its reports on developments in publishing and writing. Like a starry-eyed enthusiast in some small obscure town, I followed the news about writers, their successes and failures, and read a large number of literary biographies and autobiographies. When it was announced that some writer was going to appear on television, I scheduled my day to watch, and can still remember one interview with S. J. Perelman, which highlighted his unique talent, but I profited more from the thoughtful programs on Faulkner, Hemingway, Dreiser, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Cather, Wharton and Kerouac. Of course, I had already read biographies of most of the great Europeans and often wished that there could have been one of Lady Murasaki, the eleventh-century novelist who wrote the masterpiece Genji Monogatari. From such reading and watching I evolved both an understanding of the life of the writer and my personalized attitude toward the profession.
In this chapter I shall pay tribute to six young men of about my age whose experiences were influential in forming my attitudes toward what a writer is and how he ought to behave. The lives of the first group of three ended in shattering, premature tragedy, which terrified me. The second group became adornments of our profession, often with a jocund touch that I envied. Finally I shall pay my awed respect to three women writers who have been just as gifted as the men, and a lot more stable.
The tragic deaths of my first three fellow writers helped frame my attitudes toward literature, sudden wealth and self-preservation. Assessing the way those lives had ended, I determined to set for myself orbits totally different from theirs.
It is therefore important to appreciate that I was extremely fortunate in escaping sudden early fame. Since celebrity did not burst upon me in one mighty
In late 1946 I was prepared to place my first book, Tales of the South Pacific, before the public, but as I have explained, a lucky sale of two stories to the Saturday Evening Post delayed publication into the less competitive year of 1947, so that in the spring of 1948 it was eligible to compete for the Pulitzer Prize. But this meant that much more than a full year had elapsed between publication and prize, and in that span the book, which had never enjoyed even a modest success commercially or critically—of the nine major reviewing media, eight did not even mention it, let alone review it—had expired and been forgotten.