The World Is My Home: A Memoir by James A. Michener
The courage of the Pulitzer committee in awarding their prize to me was not applauded, major voices complained that my book was not a novel, it did not conform to the award’s stated and implied conditions, and was surpassed in merit by half a dozen other novels that did conform. Contrary to awards in the past, this one did not spur any interest in the book; sales of the hardcover edition did not suddenly leap from nothing to high respectability as a result of the prize, as had often happened with earlier winners. This lack of sales was caused by a stroke of bad luck: in the month the prize was announced a paperback reprint appeared on newsstands, brutally abbreviated and for sale at twenty-five cents.
Another year of sharp deflation of ego passed so that when the wonderful musical South Pacific opened in 1949 the existence of the book was known by few and remarked upon by none. Indeed, several important reviewers, wondering from what magic seed this flower had evolved, bought copies of the paperback edition, which, to save space, had not reprinted the two stories on which the play had principally been based, and wrote that since Rodgers and Hammerstein had such meager material to work with, they were to be doubly praised for having invented such a heart-warming story line on which to build their play. I cannot recall that any reviewer gave me any praise, and it was generally believed that R&H had found lying in the gutter a sow’s ear and had converted it into a silk purse. As I joked at a literary soiree held a few days after the opening, paraphrasing Lord Byron’s comment following the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: ‘I went to bed an unknown and woke to find Ezio Pinza famous.’
I was more fortunate than I can tell in having all these red-letter events occur so comfortably spaced over four calendar years, 1946–1949. I did not have to adjust to sharp swings of public attitude, nor decide how to handle an unexpected bonanza,* nor fend off a chain of pressing invitations.
I started slowly in the writing profession, maintained a low profile, and permitted nothing to divert me from the job at hand—to make myself into a good writer. In those sober years, when I worked so diligently at four o’clock in the morning, I was following the careers of those three ill-fated young men more or less my age, and what I saw horrified me. In each case the young writer’s life intertwined with mine and left scars.
At this point the reader should lay aside this book and check out of the library a copy of an excellent book about the problems of young American writers, John Leggett’s Ross and Tom. But since the book may not be easily available, I will summarize the parts relevant to what I wish to say.
Leggett was a New York boy with considerable writing talent. After an education at Andover and Yale, he became a naval officer in the Pacific. Upon demobilization he tried his hand at writing and submitted his first novel to Houghton Mifflin, the distinguished publisher based in Boston; the editors dismayed him by rejecting his novel, then showed their confidence in his other talents by offering him a job as one of their editors.
When he reported to work in 1954 at the age of thirty-three, he found the offices of the company still shell-shocked by the tragedies that had overtaken two of their most spectacularly promising young authors within one year, 1948–49. As Leggett began to probe the causes of the two deaths, so similar that all America commented on the almost simultaneous loss of two exceptional talents, he became obsessed with the question that had disturbed me when I was in college pondering the death of Thomas Chatterton: ‘What diabolical force killed these young men?’
They were so similar, Ross Lockridge and Tom Heggen, each talented, inordinately handsome and attractive to women, Midwestern in origin and acutely aware of American values, and each achieving staggering fame with his first book. They were paradigms of the triumphs and tragedies of the American literary scene.
Ross was from an upper-middle-class Indiana family with cultural pretensions and minor accomplishments. He looked much like Tyrone Power, with copious jet-black hair, flawless white teeth, straight lean body, dark eyes and a radiant smile. He had graduated from a good school in Bloomington, Indiana, and done unusually well at the university in that town. A year of study in France converted a country boy into a sophisticate, and graduate study at Harvard edged him close to being a serious scholar. He then taught five grinding years at Simmons College in Boston, earning a meager salary. He married a high school sweetheart—she was also his college sweetheart—of considerable beauty and charm and even more strength of character, and with her would have four children, which posed serious financial problems because of his limited income. But he was a loving and caring father, and handled his family obligations responsibly. He was a quiet young man, but also one seething with ambition.
At a surprisingly early age, at a time when I had never even remotely considered being a writer or much of anything else relating to a career, he had visualized himself writing a great American novel, and as he daydreamed it underwent a subtle transformation into the great American novel. From that moment he channeled all his considerable talent and above-average mental and physical energy into first outlining and then drafting a massive novel, which would ultimately run to more than one thousand book pages.
The writing did not go easily, what with living in cramped quarters, with noisy children underfoot, and travels back and forth between Boston and Bloomington.
But after seven painful years of writing, he had a massive manuscript that was as good as he had hoped it would be; it was indubitably a fine novel. The trouble was, he was now totally convinced that it was a great one, and all the really dreadful things that he was now about to do stemmed from his firm belief that he was the greatest writer in English since Shakespeare.
He had a cousin living in Indiana, the writer Mary Jane Ward, whose recently published autobiographical novel, The Snake Pit, had been a sensational success. Focused on Miss Ward’s mental breakdown, it was a harrowing account of life in a mental institution. She knew Bennett Cerf, the publisher at Random House, and said she was sure she could get Ross a hearing at that house, but through another writing friend he found entree to the staid old firm of Houghton Mifflin and he elected to take his book to them.
At this point in my narrative John Leggett’s book becomes important. I had long been profoundly interested in Lockridge—we were roughly of the same generation (I was born in 1907, he in 1914) and had had our first books published almost simultaneously—so when Leggett’s book appeared I hurried out to buy one of the first copies. As I read I was appalled and at times disgusted by Lockridge’s attitudes toward being a writer and publishing a book; they were completely different from mine. I told an interviewer at the time: ‘If you want to get a clear picture of me, buy a copy of Leggett’s book, start on page 86 when Ross Lockridge delivers the manuscript of Raintree County to Houghton Mifflin, and whenever he does something totally outrageous, jot in the margin in pencil “—180°,” which will mean that I would have done it in a manner as far from that as possible.’ Obviously, Leggett’s portrait of a frenetic young man with barely a grain of common sense, humility or restraint activated nerve ends throughout my body, and especially my brain. That was in 1974, when Lockridge was already dead and I was in midflight in my own career.
Two years ago, in 1989, in preparing these notes I reread the whole Leggett book, which was an astonishing experience, for as a much older man who has seen a great deal of writing, publishing and attendant follies, I had a clearer understanding of the preposterous moves Lockridge was making, as if he was determined to destroy himself. And as I read page after page about his outlandish behavior and about his near insanity and, finally, suicide, I was sick with anger at such a great loss—tears filled my eyes, and I sat quite numb. Here is what he did.
When Houghton Mifflin accepted his manuscript, with enthusiasm, he proceeded to lecture them interminably on how to handle this great treasure. Finding himself in the hands of Paul Brooks, one of America’s ablest editors of that period, he abused Brooks, questioned his judgment, and gave him insulting advice on how to do his job. He sto
Then he launched a manic campaign to make Life magazine run not only a segment of the novel but also a pictorial essay about him at his home in Indiana. He succeeded in persuading Life to run an excerpt in its issue of August 18, 1947, handsomely illustrated and with the editorial note that here was one of the finest American novels in many years. So his novel enjoyed a magnificent send-off.
Next he concentrated on the Book-of-the-Month Club, instructing Houghton in the steps it must take to make the club select Raintree as a major selection. He found time to advise Houghton’s publicity department almost daily on how it could best handle his novel, ignoring the fact that the company would also be publishing quite a few other good books, each deserving attention.
He pointed out to anyone who would listen that Raintree was better than James Joyce’s Ulysses, and in his later evaluations he considered it equal to Shakespeare. His behavior toward Hollywood was grotesque. When MGM acquired film rights to the book, Lockridge sent Louis B. Mayer an insulting letter in which he told the veteran filmmaker that his pictures were much inferior to those made in Europe but that if he made Raintree properly he had a chance to recover his reputation. It would be, he assured Mayer, a much better film than Gone With the Wind. He was not happy with the reported casting of Raintree, and since he knew his book better than anyone else, he intimated that he would be prepared, if called, to hurry to Hollywood to take over. The flood of Hollywood money seemed to unhinge his mind, for he launched a series of disgraceful attacks accusing his editor, Brooks, who had served him well and honestly, of financial misconduct.
What made me feel compassion for this arrogant, self-centered writer was the pathetic way in which he inflated both the value of his book and its importance to him. In any decade a score of good novels come along, but only rarely do they modify a life significantly. Nobody gave Ross the caution that my mentor Hugh MacNair Kahler gave me: ‘Remember, Jim. Writing a book or a dozen books doesn’t remake you or create miracles. Next morning, when you wake up, you’re the same horse’s ass you were yesterday. Writing is a job. Do it well, it’s a great life. Mess around, its disappointments will kill you.’
Lockridge had allowed his book to become so all-important that when it passed out of his hands at publication, its disappearance threatened his life. No one warned him that the job of the writer is to ignore the book that’s been done and buckle down to the next one. Quickly he fell into a profound depression from which he feared there was no chance of rescue, and then into a bleak despair far more intense than his earlier euphoria. Fumbling about pitifully, wondering whether he could ever reorganize his life for the long years ahead, he could devise no answers, no reassurances. On a calm Saturday afternoon in March 1948 he listened by radio to the finals of the Indiana high school basketball championships, drove into his garage, closed all the doors, left the motor running and at the age of thirty-four slipped painlessly into the lasting peace he had not known since those days eight years before when he had started writing the novel that would ultimately destroy him. Lockridge had taken his book too seriously. It was good, but it was just a book, and today nobody reads it and the movie made from it creaks when it is given a slot on The Late Show. But I respected both the book and the movie, so if a writer like Ross finds even one faithful reader after forty-four years, perhaps he does gain the immortality he so eagerly sought.
Lockridge’s life could have been construed as an object lesson to beginning writers: ‘Study everything he did, then do the opposite.’ In an oblique way his catastrophic life had a slight connection to my own labors. While Raintree County was being written, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood announced that a prize would be awarded to some outstanding unpublished American novel that could be converted into a major motion picture. The prize—$100,000, plus bonuses—could total a staggering $250,000. Lockridge won it primarily because Raintree County was far superior to the competition. It was this vast sum of money, incredibly greater in value in those days, that started his plunge toward disaster. It happened that the literary agency in New York that was masterminding the contest for MGM was the one that had taken me on as a client, in hopes, I believe, that I might be the following year’s winner of the prize. At any rate I was intensively groomed for the competition, with considerable guidance from the agency. I suspect that it was my inability to revise my manuscript for my second novel to make it attractive to the Hollywood people that made my agent send me that devastating letter I received on the morning I was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Ross won the Hollywood prize but not the Pulitzer; my reward was the reverse, and how fortunate I was.
Tom Heggen was utterly unlike Ross Lockridge. I first heard of him one Monday morning when my boss at Macmillan came in wreathed in smiles: ‘Michener! You’ve got to read this book I bought. It’s about your part of the world, and it’s the funniest thing to come along since Mark Twain.’ Before I was halfway through Mister Roberts I agreed, but the further I read, the more I noticed the structural similarities between Heggen’s book and mine. Both depicted a draftee’s life in the Navy. Both used the South Pacific as their locale. Both consisted of a group of loosely integrated short stories. Both focused on the dull routine of daily life rather than on battle heroics. And a real coincidence: both had as their central character a tall, loose-jointed, easygoing courageous junior officer who fled the safety of rear-line duty to find death at the distant front where battles raged, and in each instance the hero’s death was not actually seen but reported by letter or official report back to the station he quit. Strangest of all, although I could not have foreseen it that day, the theatrical genius Josh Logan would take each book in turn, Heggen’s first, then mine, and whip the stories into dramatic shape to produce two of the greatest smash hits of that period: Mister Roberts and South Pacific.
As with Ross Lockridge, whose life has meant so much to me, I never met Tom Heggen or even saw him from a distance, which is all right, for I doubt that either Ross or Tom would have found me interesting and I would have been terrified by their moves toward self-destruction. But since Heggen and I followed such strikingly parallel paths with our books my interest in him was of a special kind. All I knew about him, however, was that at the time his book was bought he either was or had recently been an editor at Reader’s Digest, which I consider a very lucky break for a young man who wanted to write, because I have heard that salaries there were monumental.
When I turned to the second half of Leggett’s revealing book, I was rewarded by finding my first full account of Heggen’s life. Leggett had accumulated through much legwork and many interviews a good deal of information about Heggen’s growing up and difficult behavior as a youth. Born to a middle-class Norwegian family in Fort Dodge, Iowa, not far from the Minnesota border, he was a congenital rebel, a disturber of the peace and later on a hard-drinking rowdy. Whereas Lockridge was a conservative type who dressed carefully and seemed a typical member of the Midwestern bourgeoisie, Tom dressed abominably and sometimes outrageously, and his principal characteristic was an uncontrollable tendency toward making trouble. Wherever he went or in whatever setting he was placed he violently opposed the establishment and invented ingenious pranks to create disturbances.
The Great Depression forced his family to move far south to Oklahoma City, where he enrolled in the city university, a strict Methodist institution that tolerated his antics only briefly. Expelled at eighteen, he switched to Oklahoma A&M at Stillwater, learned little, raised hell and fell in love with a quiet, lovely girl named Carol Lynn Gilmer, who must have sensed that she could have only a tempestuous relationship with Heggen, for she tried her best not to fall in love with him but did.
When his family, discouraged by their failure to accomplish much in Oklahoma, decided to try their luck in Minnesota, Tom enrolled in the university there and, in its lively, free-wh
Upon graduating from college he persuaded Carol Lynn to marry him, and while he served in the South Pacific in the old Navy buckets he would make famous, she joined the Red Cross. She trailed her husband through the Pacific islands, hoping to join him, but she never did, and after the war they reunited tentatively. He was unable to bridge the gap of those lost war years, and their marriage was in deep trouble.
Now Leggett tells swiftly of Tom’s disastrous years at the Reader’s Digest, the last place in America he should have gone with his contempt for sober authority; the publication of his novel; the total failure of his attempt to draft, with Max Shulman as coauthor, a stage play based on Mister Roberts; and finally, Josh Logan’s three-month collaboration with Heggen, which results in the faultlessly carpentered stage play.
When the curtain fell on opening night, Tom Heggen, at twenty-seven, was at the apex of fame and on his way to becoming a millionaire. Few young men at that age would know the accolades, the fawning and the invitations to do the sorts of challenging things he was offered, but there was gall in the honey: almost every review said that Josh Logan had taken a trivial book and hammered it into one of America’s brightest comedies, and several magazines used photographs of him, not Heggen, to represent the play.
The descent from Parnassus was swift and terrible. It began the day after the play opened to raves, and Leggett reveals the curious nature of the trouble:
Later that same day, February 19, Tom got around to the rest of the paper and found on the page following the Mister Roberts review a news story about Joshua Logan’s future plans. He had proposed to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein that they write the score, book and lyrics for a musical version of James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Leland Hayward was to produce and Logan would direct the play for presentation next season.