The World Is My Home: A Memoir by James A. Michener

  Obviously, in doing research I cannot read all of every important book, but I have made myself adept at reading indexes, a skill I recommend to would-be writers; I see in the indexes reminders of topics in which I am interested, but, of equal value, I see notations about ramifications that had not occurred to me.

  When my general reading has been more or less completed, I explore in great detail four or five ideas central to the subject and, using studies of all kinds, I give myself what amounts to an intensive seminar-level course in each. When writing about the Chesapeake, for example, I focused on shipbuilding, merchant dealings with England, slavery in a border state, the history of a typical small-town church and the building of railroads. The virtue of such study, especially if there is a time span covering several centuries, is that it fixes in the mind an appreciation of what was happening in various fields of endeavor in different periods.

  None of my patient work in these chosen areas has been unprofitable, but I have never utilized all the subjects I studied in such depth. When planning Centennial I was certain that I would concentrate on railroad building because it was significant, but when I began to write I don’t believe I mentioned that subject even once. Was the study wasted? Not at all, because it helped me keep in mind what other industries were experiencing. I must confess that had I done not five such studies but twenty I would have been better prepared, but as with all problems relating to writing, there is a rule of reason where the expenditure of time is concerned. A self-supporting writer can do five such studies; he simply hasn’t the time to do twenty.

  Here I must pay homage to the historians on whom writers like me base so much of their writing. The difference between a historian and someone like me is that the former must pay close attention to a host of important and sometimes difficult themes, whereas I can evade the difficult problems; however, I try never to abuse fact or invent situations contrary to known conditions. The historian’s task is many times more difficult than mine, and I know it.

  My debt to geographers is equally significant, because invariably the first book I read when starting my intensive work is the most advanced geography of the region I can find, and I especially seek one that explores ecological aspects and not merely the statistics. I concentrate on the geographical setting because I want to know the natural constraints my characters must deal with, the availability of resources, the climate and the temperature extremes, the susceptibility to disasters like prolonged droughts, sea-based hurricanes, land-based tornadoes, the growing seasons and even those minor signals that alert the knowing to the potential problems of the area, such as an abundance of pollen in the air and the possibility of a delayed spring causing famine by hampering the growth of vegetables and grain.

  I am a man bound to the earth and I am keenly aware of its potential for either enhancing or diminishing human happiness. I am always aware of the solstices and equinoxes, and although I do not celebrate holidays with any enthusiasm, finding them commercially offensive, I do always honor three days in the calendar: December 21, as the shortest day in the northern hemisphere; June 21, as the longest; and April 23, Shakespeare’s birthday—I use him as surrogate for all the Beethovens, Titians and Balzacs of the world to whom I owe so much.

  The birds and animals that we share the earth with have always been of intense interest to me. The Canada geese in Maryland were one of the most appealing inhabitants of that choice countryside; my wife and I formed a close friendship with a pair of herons who fished the swampy area in our backyard, and we threw out bits of fish for the wonderful osprey that took up residence atop a pole at the end of our dock; they had been near extinction from DDT before outraged nature lovers took steps to rescue them, and we were privileged to see them slowly multiplying near our salty river.

  I knew buffalo in Wyoming and sable antelope on private ranches in Texas. For six happy years we had a seven-foot black snake who lived under our house in Pennsylvania. He used to scare visitors when they found him sunning himself on the walk leading to our house, but he became accustomed to us, at least to me, and would stay in shadows as I talked with him. One day a visiting professor from Penn State who arrived in my absence was startled by him, took him to be a deadly copperhead and, grabbing a nearby hoe, hacked him to death, showing us with pride what he had done to save us. Often when I pass that fatal spot I grieve for my dead friend.

  I have never claimed that I had any special skill in talking with animals or making them my friends, but I did fraternize with a hyena at a game park in Tanzania. Hyenas are one of the ugliest breeds on earth, big misshapen creatures with heads and bodies that seem deformed. When converted by affection into pets, they are among the best—rough, rowdy wrestlers, playful snappers with jaws that can break branches. The African hyena I knew was highly addicted to beer. Known as Joseph, he would range the camp and the attached motel cadging the last half bottle of beer at each table, taking it in his powerful jaws and chug-a-lugging like a veteran. He would get visibly drunk, and when in the late afternoon he felt exceptionally woozy he would bid us farewell, lurching from one to the other of us as if to say ‘Thanks for the beer,’ and then lumber off to find a place to snooze in one of the guest cabins. We would know which one he chose when the guests returned from seeing the wonders of the Serengeti and started screaming in terror because they had found Joseph completely passed out on a bed. He and I were strong friends, so I was moved by a letter I later received from Tanzania: ‘I’m sure you remember Joseph. Time came when we had to dispose of him, and were fortunate to find him a home in a fine zoo in Edinburgh. When any one of us goes through that city we stop off to see him, and he remembers our smell and after a long visit we cry and he cries and it is all terribly sad. We may stop going because the Edinburgh people tell us that for days after we leave he sits and mopes.’

  I have tried to write with authenticity and affection of the animals with whom I have shared my world, and I have sometimes been abused for falling into the ‘pathetic fallacy’ of attributing to animals mental and sentimental reactions of which only human beings are capable. Realists assert that this is evidence of an intellectual slovenliness that any thoughtful writer should avoid, but I wonder how one would observe that stricture and still try to convey Joseph’s staggering roll as he lurched among us to thank us for his beer.

  I am equally attached to plant life, and consider my deep involvement with trees one of the richest parts of my life. By planting thousands of trees, I have helped convert hillsides in Pennsylvania and flatlands in Maryland into lovely wooded areas, and my intimate association with a cacao plantation on a remote South Pacific island, where cacao trees were interplanted with coconut palms was one of the chief reasons why I could write about that part of the world as I did.

  Once after I had been rescued following the crash of my airplane in the middle of the Pacific I said when asked if I had been frightened: ‘No. I expected to be saved. I’ve spoken well of this ocean in my books and expected courtesy in return.’

  One final word about the selection of subject matter. I have never written any book on whose subject I was a preeminent scholar. There have always been a score of experts far better qualified than I to write the book in question, and I have been much abused by such people for trespassing on their turf. There were in Jerusalem a hundred scholars better qualified than I to write The Source, in Hawaii, Poland, Alaska and the Caribbean, a score much more knowledgeable about the respective areas. On the subject of Japanese prints there were many who could have done a more scholarly job, and in Texas I suppose that conservatively there must have been two or three hundred, because down there everyone is a historian. But if I have never been the top man, I was the one who knew how to tell a story, to organize experience, and to be dogged enough to spend three years of intense work on the subject. In other words, I was a committed writer and they weren’t, and that makes an infinity of difference.

  When I am about to start a major project, I am much like a zen master in Japan wh
o is about to serve a ritual tea. I wash my face, cleanse my mind, eat sparingly, exercise every evening by taking long walks, go to bed early and rise at seven to go to my typewriter. I do this seven days a week for the two years during which I am doing the actual writing, and I am loath to permit interruptions. In the morning I do not welcome either visitors or phone calls because writing is hard, exhausting work, and at twelve-thirty when I stop, I am usually sweaty. I customarily wear loose Bermuda shorts, very loose T-shirt or loose sport shirt, loose socks and floppy sandals, and I have grown to feel wonderfully at ease in that uniform; it restricts me at no point and leaves my arms and hands free to move easily. I also wear reading glasses with thick lenses, and I work with such intensity that sometimes when I pause to look out the window the world is a blur because my focus has been at such close range for so long.

  Almost every day of my life, working or not, I listen to music, never while I am at the typewriter but when I am filing, or checking some old book or just wasting time. With the advent of compact disks I am prone to place some time-tested favorite on the machine—Schubert’s Octet or Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra or Mahler’s First or Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ or Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli or some Chopin waltzes—and play it maybe fifteen or twenty successive times from day to day because I know I will enjoy it and I am too lazy to keep changing disks and running the risk of getting something I do not like as much.

  Many of my days are spent in research and even more in rewriting passages that are already fairly good, or drafting whole new versions of a chapter I didn’t particularly like the first time around. When I am working well, I can produce perhaps five typed pages a day, rarely more and often less, but the fine-tuning aspect of writing—editing, revising, selecting the correct word—require just about the same amount of time as the original composition, which means that I produce about two pages of finished text a day, and I have never devised any way to accelerate that process.

  For me, writing the original draft is murderously difficult, and I often spend more than a day striving to unravel a difficult passage requiring less than a page; but rewriting, when I know that the book will be completed and published, gives me joy, because I feel that everything I am doing is making the manuscript significantly better. And reworking a passage in galley when I really nail down a thought that has previously been fugitive is one of the most pleasurable exercises in which I can engage. If writing is hard labor, it can also be great fun.

  Do I ever have writer’s block? Professional writers cannot afford to indulge themselves in that dramatic experience so beloved by writers who write about writers, and especially by those who make motion pictures about them. Of course one sometimes hits a blank day or a frightening one when ominous questions flood the mind, but one does not surrender to them. In my case I turn to some later part of the manuscript that I feel will pose no problems and seek refuge in it, and the robust ease with which I sail through it restores my confidence. However, I must with a wince confess that afterward, when I reach that part of the manuscript, I find that I cannot use the passage—that is, I cannot incorporate it into the narrative where it belongs because it fails for a subtle reason that other writers will recognize: the flow of the part done out of turn is wrong; its tone is not right; words have the wrong intonations and characters do not reflect the modifications of intervening chapters. But the work has not been done in vain, because it contains many parts that can be salvaged, and it probably does indicate the general direction in which the plotting and character behavior should go, so I quite happily sit down and rewrite the whole thing. By seeking to escape a blockage by writing an easier part, I saved no time; in fact, I wasted a good deal, but I did get back on track, and that’s what’s important.

  I have always tried to do my work on an old-fashioned heavy manual typewriter with elite type that enables me to get the maximum number of words to the line and lines to the page. In an age of miracle electronic typewriters and word processors it is becoming difficult to find the old machines—in all of Alaska none could be located and I was forced to use a pica, which evoked profanity—and in both Texas and Florida serious searches had to be made. One dealer told me: ‘Five years from now you won’t be able to find one, elite or pica,’ so I treat the ones I have with care.

  One of my peculiarities illustrates how writers develop fixations. In revising a manuscript I have a horror of altering the original pagination. I have that sequence of pages and their contents engraved in my mind; to disturb it would be destructive. Therefore I protect rigorously each page as it stands, and if I must insert new material or delete old I do so within that page. This means that some pages are twice the normal length, others only half. When I complete my corrections—and often my corrections of my corrections—many pages are a jumble, but they still stand in their original order so that I can be sure of where topics will appear in the manuscript.

  Curiously, I have never used markings to indicate transpositions or insertions of passages. I insist on seeing each item in its proper place on the page. I cut and paste, so that an old-fashioned paste pot is a mainstay in my writing routine. (Recently it has become a much-diluted self-dispensing flask of Elmer’s Glue-All.)

  Of course, as soon as I finish editing a chapter I turn it over to my secretary, and from then on we do all editing on the floppy disk. If I were in my youth and wanted to become a writer, I would take off a summer and make myself proficient on the typewriter keyboard—a skill I do not have and whose absence I mourn—so that I could shift easily to a word processor. Without that ability young people will find no opportunity to work in the writing professions, and the time may not be far off when writers will submit two copies of a manuscript to a publishing house, one a printout on paper, the other a floppy disk on which the publisher can do the editing and which he can deliver by telephone connection to the company that will set the manuscript in the preferred typeface and print the book.*

  When I have done all I can to make the manuscript readable and meaningful, I employ at my expense the most learned man or woman available with special knowledge of the subject to read the entire manuscript to detect gross error, ridiculous misinterpretations or failure to note recent developments. Such peer review is invaluable, and I have frequently been saved by a judicious question such as: ‘Do you really want that sentence to read as if Canada were west of Alaska?’ For vetting several of my books I have sought different specialists for each chapter, rather than one overall expert, and with the South African novel I had at one time chapters being read on four different continents: Africa, Europe, Australia and North America.

  A feature of writing that the layman may not appreciate is that leading scholars are eager to help writers avoid error because they have acquired enormous respect for the field of their expertise and do not care to see it burlesqued or misrepresented. One of the major rewards of my writing life has been my affiliation with men and women of learning; to read their thoughtful comments is a privilege. Equally gratifying, however, is the fact that I receive about a dozen inquiries a year from all over the world from scholars asking me to clarify points on which I have special knowledge or unique experiences. These are letters I answer in considerable detail, for those of us who cherish ideas are part of a brotherhood.

  When I have digested the criticisms of the experts and made the revisions that will bring my manuscript nearer to the truth, I ship it off to Random House, where for most of my career a brilliant Southern gentleman, a traditional classical scholar, would study the work for three or four months, spotting errors and detecting weaknesses in a story line or characterization. Albert Erskine worked with such a distinguished parade of authors that no new one could bring him problems he had not already encountered: William Faulkner, John O’Hara, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison. He worked with me for some thirty-five years and gave me constant good advice.

  When dealing with a long manuscript of mine, he would send me, over the course of six or seven months, tw
enty or thirty long letters of inquiry, each of which I had to answer in detail, often with substantial redrafting of individual passages and always with scores of responses to his questions about individual words that came close but missed, or sentences that were not clear. His famous Erskine’s First Law has helped innumerable writers: ‘If you try three times to fix a paragraph and it still creaks, kill it.’ I have had only good results from that dictum.

  When, after long effort, the manuscript satisfied Erskine’s requirements, he would pass it along to a remarkable woman, Bert Krantz, four feet eleven, who has a magical touch with English. She was the final arbiter on matters of style, and the casual reader would not believe how often in the writing of a manuscript one has the choice of two perfectly good options: fulfill or fulfil; dishabille or deshabille; paillasse or palliase. More serious is the inclination of the average writer, and I am one, to repeat words in a manuscript, or to use them improperly, e.g., presently to mean now instead of the correct in the near future; and a hundred other tricky questions of taste and judgment. Bert’s responsibility was to make a Random House book look like one and not some grab bag. She was brilliant in her ability to spot improprieties and adamant in her determination to correct them. She was one of the most valuable of the editors and I would not have been happy about sending any of my manuscripts to the printer before her sharp eyes had vetted it.

  When she and Erskine had done their jobs, the company lawyers would check to see if anything I had written was actionable at law, and in recent years, with our society’s becoming more litigious, printed statements that used to slip by are now pounced upon, to the surprise of and financial damage to the writer. There are many things a writer may not say, and it is the task of the lawyers to identify them and sound warnings.

  When the printer finally sends back galleys, one set goes to an outside proofreader skilled in nitpicking—three I have worked with were incredible—who read the narrative with an eye as impartial as if it were the Bronx telephone directory he or she were reading and it is unbelievable what they come up with. By this time, if you have been keeping count, the manuscript has been read by me, by my skilled secretary, by anyone who works with me in my office, by the paid expert, by Erskine, by Krantz and by the lawyers. One would think that no error could exist, but this outside proofreader will find a score of things he or she does not approve, or old errors that have slipped past everyone. These brilliant wordsmiths work free-lance, this week for one publisher, next week for another, and when I submit a manuscript I always hope that Random will line up one of the truly great ones. I am obligated to these lifesavers, none of whom I have ever met.