The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  * * *

  * Matareva is an imaginary island. It has been given a fictitious name to protect the privacy of those involved in the real-life military tragedy.

  † Although New Zealand lies well west of the date line and is not therefore technically in Polynesia, at some very early date its islands were settled by adventurous people who had left India and Malaysia, hopped eastward, island by island, all the way to Tahiti, and from there, much later, doubled back to New Zealand and northward to Hawaii. Those in New Zealand are called Maoris, but they were and are Polynesians.

  ‡ History of the United States Naval Station Bora Bora, Society Islands of French Oceania. Bora Bora, 9 July 1945. Submitted by John J. Allen [no rank shown] carbon copy to Lieut. J. A. Michener, ComSoPac Historical Officer. An excellent summary of the early days of the American occupation of code name Bobcat, with running account of feud between Vichy and DeGaullist factions, plus comment on the abortive movement to have Tahiti become part of the United States. [My material, of course, covers only the latter stages of the occupation.]

  § History of the United States Naval Advanced Base Togatabu. Noumea, no date but internal evidence indicates early 1946. Submitted by Lieut. Cmdr. John Burke. Early part from records, latter part based heavily upon my report but not attributed to me.

  III

  Vice

  When I was seven years old I fell prey to a vice that modified the remainder of my life, and although after a while I discovered its pernicious tendency I was by then so deeply infected that I could not free myself of its influence. I made several efforts to purge myself, and always failed, because the pull toward old habits was too great for me to resist.

  I was introduced to this vice by a singular man, my Uncle Arthur, whose life had both noble and tragic overtones. He was grotesquely fat and suffered all the disabilities that accompanied that condition. He puffed and wheezed and sought the shade; he made jokes about himself; and occasionally he would embark on fierce diets in which he would starve himself, then break out of his routine with a quart of peach ice cream.

  My first memory of this interesting man is of the time he brought our impoverished family an impressive ice-cream freezer, complete with crank, wooden bucket, steel cylinder and bags of salt. On Sunday mornings, whenever he was visiting, which was not often enough, Uncle Arthur would supervise the making of an ice cream that in my experience has rarely been surpassed. He would bring ripe peaches, a peck of them, and fresh cream. My mother would use milk, sugar, vanilla and a very light, high-quality corn starch to make a custard, into which Uncle Arthur would pour the cream and the peeled and finely chopped peaches, throwing in at the end some three or four that had been sliced into large chunks: ‘So you’ll know it’s peach and not something else.’

  This custard, cooled to room temperature, which could be rather high in our hot summers, was then poured into the steel cylinder, inserted into the wooden bucket, covered carefully by the mechanism that revolved it, and surrounded by ice packed tight with liberal amounts of rock salt. Then the crank was attached, and the turning by hand began. Uncle Arthur always got the mechanism started, grinding away for about fifteen minutes. Then, while the mixture was still soft enough to permit a child of five to turn it, I was allowed to spin the handle.

  We never started making the ice cream until after church, so that I did not begin my stint until about one o’clock, by which time I was ravenously hungry, and the longer I worked the hungrier I became. Our custom was that we held off our noonday meal, called dinner, until the ice cream had been frozen, for then it could be packed in more ice and, as Uncle Arthur explained, ‘ripen’ while we ate.

  I would crank till my arms ached, feeling the custard growing thicker inside its steel container. In later years I have seen electrical freezers in which a motor did all the work, and I have wondered if the resulting ice cream could possibly taste as good as ours did, which we painfully worked on, minute after minute.

  When my little hands could no longer make the steel container rotate within its bed of ice, Uncle Arthur would grandiosely move me aside, sit before the freezer, bring it back between his chubby knees and announce in a loud voice: ‘Let a man take over.’ He would then crank until he got blue in the face. Sweat would pour down his brow, but on he would go, putting the finishing touches to what was invariably a masterpiece. As I watched admiringly he would say: ‘It’s these last hard minutes that keep the ice cream from forming into crystals.’ This had happened once, and the family was so ashamed of itself, with Mom blaming it on the poor custard she had made, and me claiming there hadn’t been enough salt. But Uncle Arthur knew the reason: ‘We quit turning the crank too soon, and all because someone thought the work was too hard.’ He stared at me balefully.

  When not even big Uncle Arthur could move the crank, my mother would take over while he lay back, exhausted. She unhooked the contraption that rotated the container, pulled out the four revolving blades that had enabled the custard to freeze so smoothly, the wooden paddles dripping with the finest ice cream ever made, rich and flecked with peaches, and smooth and cold.

  At this wonderful moment, when it was ensured that we had made another fine batch, I always hoped that she would hand the four paddles to me. This never happened. Always they went to Uncle Arthur, who must have been much hungrier than I, for he literally wolfed down the ice cream, his large round face beaming in ecstasy. He was a severe judge of ice cream; he had always lived within the empire of the Philadelphia ice-cream makers, incontestably the best in the world, and he had standards. When he pronounced ‘Pretty good,’ as he licked off the blades, we could be satisfied that in about two hours we would once more taste a perfect dessert.

  As soon as he had cleaned the wooden paddles, he asked me to fetch the burlap, and when a tight steel lid was placed over the opening in the container, he forced it to the bottom of the wooden keg, heaped ice and salt around it, and covered everything with this heavy, wet burlap. The mixer was then wheeled into deep shade, and the ice cream was allowed to ripen and freeze even harder than it had before we finished the churning.

  Now everyone was ready for dinner, and we ate with special joy, for we knew that an hour or so after we finished, the freezer would be opened. Then Mom would dip her spoon into the frozen delicacy and give her judgment, and this was the one that mattered. Never was the ice cream flawless: ‘I think we skimped on the cream,’ or ‘The peaches were not quite ripe.’ But she always gave it passing marks, save the time Uncle Arthur and I had allowed it to form into crystals, when she wept.

  When Mom had approved the day’s work, Uncle Arthur took a special spoon, very large and square in the bowl, very stout of handle, and with it he scooped out huge portions of ice cream. When I saw the gargantuan portion he gave me for helping, and felt the cold dish against my hands and saw the flecks and even lumps of peach, I knew that this was a very good Sunday.

  I said that Uncle Arthur was both noble and tragic. His nobility lay in sharing his modest income with my mother, his sister Mabel, insofar as he could, and there were many times when our poor family would have been infinitely poorer had he not arrived on the scene with relief. He offered his aid with a willingness that always astounded me, for we really had no claim on him.

  He was tragic because his was an unfulfilled life. A brilliant man in some respects, he had been unable to gain an education that would have allowed him to use his talents, and he had been unable to educate himself. He was forced, therefore, to work in jobs that did not allow him to utilize his potential, and gradually life slipped away from him. I never knew when he made the great surrender, but I was aware that it had been made. I always loved Uncle Arthur for his open-handed generosity, and I pitied him as his shoulders began to sag.

  What vice did this big, amiable man bring into our home that affected me so deeply? About two years after he had given us the ice cream freezer he appeared on the trolley car from Philadelphia bearing a large and heavy package, accompanied by a smaller s
quare one, which he kept trapped under his right arm. As soon as he saw me he sighed with relief and handed me the square package, warning: ‘Guard that with your life. Drop it and I’ll kill you.’

  Like an acolyte performing some sacred rite, I carried the smaller package home while Uncle Arthur struggled with the larger one. I can be certain that I was seven at the time, because he told me twice during the journey: ‘Be careful with that package! It’s a present for your seventh birthday.’ My birthday was long since past, and I remembered with some sadness that it had gone largely unnoticed, and certainly with no present from Uncle Arthur. But three months late, here I was, bringing home my own present.

  At the house no one could guess what the packages contained, and this pleased Uncle Arthur, for with a dramatic flair he uncovered his treasure. It was a Victrola, and not the cheapest model. It had a crank, a lid, a turntable, an arm for the voice box, and a grille, which hid the speaker. The motor whirred almost silently, and the effect was one of beautiful simplicity.

  ‘It works this way,’ Uncle Arthur explained, and with minute repitition of detail, he explained the mysterious mechanism, announcing all the warnings that would govern the use of this precious gift. Over and over he repeated the instructions, until I at last understood them thoroughly. He even explained the governor that controlled the speed of the turntable and why we must never touch it lest the voices sound too low or too high, and only when he felt that we understood the rules did he ask for my package.

  Opening it tenderly, as if he felt that he had brought something truly special, something that would remake the lives of everyone in the family, he brought forth three records, each in its own heavy brown-paper cover. They were, and I can see them now as clearly as on that first magical day, two records with black labels—Cohen on the Telephone, and The Stars and Stripes Forever—and one with a handsome red label, the sextette from Lucia di Lammermoor, backed by the quartet from Rigoletto. The last record had cost Uncle Arthur an appalling sum; it was the famous Victor 10000, originally issued at $7.00 but now selling for $3.50, and he assured us it was the finest record ever made.

  The first piece of music I ever heard on a Victrola was the quartet from Rigoletto, sung by Enrico Caruso, Amelita Galli-Curci, Flora Perini and Guiseppe de Luca. With Uncle Arthur standing protectively over the machine, and the family gathered reverently, the faraway, thin and reedy voice of Caruso burst into the song of love, after which the other voices came in, one by one, until a grand ensemble resulted. It was a long selection, and we stood entranced; as the voices rose to a climax and broke off, leaving the orchestra to sound a few concluding notes, we knew that we had entered a new world.

  It might sound apocryphal, perhaps, if I were to state that I appreciated at this first hearing the grandeur of Caruso’s voice and the wonderful intricacy of the quartet but the incontrovertible fact is that from that moment on I began to collect operatic records; I memorized the Victor Records catalog; I engraved on my mind the brief stories of the operas and the tiny illustrations that accompanied them; I knew the biographies of all the great singers and in time had vocal samples of each. And I have kept that first wonderful record with me for the past seventy-five years, playing it and its golden companions until I memorized every note and understood every nuance.

  And I have been a slave to opera ever since. I believe I have seen almost every major one presented in my lifetime except Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chenier, whose concluding passages, as I shall explain later, have become one of my great favorites. I have seen opera in China, in Japan, in all the countries of Europe, in Australia, in South America; in Tashkent in farthest Russia I saw one tremendous performance, in which the individual singers performed in four different languages. I have heard every great singer of this century.

  With the aid of the scores I memorized the operas, to the point at which I possibly could have conducted them, Aida, La Traviata, Rigoletto, Otello, Lohengrin, Carmen, La Bohème, Cavalleria Rusticana, Pagliacci, Norma, Madama Butterfly and Faust, and learned where each instrument in the orchestra was supposed to come in. And at one time or another I have owned better than 75 percent of those stunning first records issued by Victor: Caruso, Martinelli, Galli-Curci, Bori, Tetrazzini, Destinn, and the thundering men’s voices, De Luca, Amato, Ruffo, Scotti and Journet. I knew by heart some thousand arias, duets, trios and other ensembles, and from the first I treasured especially the operatic choruses, which I have chanted to myself around the world. I think it is fair to say that with Uncle Arthur’s auspicious launching, I became an opera addict.

  But the constant musical companion of my early youth, when I had not the money to indulge my passion—I acquired my records painfully and one by one—was the Victor catalog. Seven and one-quarter inches high by five inches wide, it was paperbound in a different color each year, and I waited avidly for each new issue, bringing it home like the treasure it was. I could tell at a glance which artists had issued new operatic selections, and I watched for any change in the illustrations of either the operas or the singers. Faust embraced Marguerite while Mephistopheles diverted the attention of Dame Marthe. I found the illustrations for La Bohème disappointing, just as later I would find the actual stagings far too bleak. Aida was a disaster; the minute photograph showed not less than a hundred singers and no one could decipher who was doing what. The most satisfying depiction in the first catalog I owned, the 1914 version, came with Rigoletto: the young duke stood to the left, and Maddalena to the right behind the wall, with Gilda being drawn away from the shameful scene by her father, the hunchback. Sometimes in later years at public performances of Rigoletto I would see four singers disposed precisely as they had been in that first photograph, and the memories of my childhood would come flooding back.

  I studied carefully the postage-stamp-size portraits of the singers, and Caruso became more real to me than the man next door; I saw him in a dozen different roles, commanding the stage, and I was beginning to have enough of his records to hear him in many of these parts. For reasons I cannot explain, I was particularly enchanted by Luisa Tetrazzini, whose voice I preferred over those of all other sopranos. I was fascinated, years later when I knew most of her records by heart, to follow in The New York Times the sad account of her family’s hauling her into court in an attempt to deprive her of the right to supervise her fortune; the family members claimed that she was senile and dissipating money that would one day come to them if it was properly managed. At the height of the trial Madame Tetrazzini stood up and tossed off a couple of arias with such superb mastery that the judge had to conclude that she was still in possession of her faculties. I was delighted with the verdict.

  I pored over the catalog, not only the red pages that listed operatic records, but also the pages for nonclassical music, which I sometimes liked but did not respect, and occasionally I came upon some arcane note that perplexed me. I remember especially the one that appeared in the Victor catalog until well into the 1920s:

  Note—by “coon songs” are meant up-to-date comic songs in negro dialect. The humor of many of these coon songs cannot be called refined, and for that reason we have distinguished them from old-fashioned dark humor, these songs being listed under “Fisk Jubilee Quartet” and “Tuskegee.”

  Coon songs derived their humor from ridiculing Negroes, while the Cohen records featured a ridiculous Jewish man’s linguistic misadventures on the telephone, in the restaurant or while trying to purchase a train ticket. Several families on our street had such records, and I can recall our neighbors gathering about our Victrola and slapping their legs with delight as Negroes and Jews made fools of themselves. The record our family contributed to the gaiety, Cohen on the Telephone, was the favorite, but for some reason I would find difficult to explain, I considered it offensive. Even at age seven I preferred Rigoletto to coon songs or the ridiculing of Jewish immigrants.

  Another Red Seal record that Uncle Arthur brought us was the true beginning of my love for what might be called standard o
peratic singing; after all, the famous quartet and sextet of the first record can be appreciated by anyone, for those numbers are spectacular pyrotechnics. This new record offered Caruso and a baritone singing two of the most magical duets ever composed for men’s voices: the ‘Solenne in quest’ ora’ from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino and perhaps an even finer number, the duet from Les Pêcheurs des Perles. For some ten years I knew the latter only as sung in Italian, ‘Dal tempio al limitar,’ and I was convinced that it had originally been offered in that form; I was disturbed to find that it was from a French opera and that the real words were ‘Au fond du temple,’ translated into English as ‘From the depths of the temple.’

  These two duets opened my ears and mind to the amazing powers of the human voice: the way the artists alternately displayed their individual vocal glory and then joined each other in the most delicate harmony was a revelation. As a very young boy I had discovered that style in art sometimes consists of pushing something forward into a conspicuous position, then drawing it back so that it is lost in an ensemble. I found these duets infinitely more instructive than the more showy quartet and sextet; I memorized every nuance and believed that I could even hear the baritone taking a deep breath before launching into a difficult passage. Again and again I played the duet, listening to how Caruso used his voice and identifying the manner in which he infused passion into his singing. Today, if I hear even a few notes at the beginning of either of these duets, I am thrown headlong into the full range of the music, and I have sometimes played my recent recordings of these numbers ten or fifteen times in a row, so hungry have I been to relive the joy I found in them seventy years ago. In these days I find that I prefer the Bizet, and by a large margin. The Forza duet speaks of the love two brave men can have for each other; the Pearl Fishers duet recalls the love two men had for a beautiful girl. Each is good; but I find the latter the more affecting.