The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  Of course, after the intermission, I listened carefully to hear in the Third the six crashing chords that indicated Beethoven’s disenchantment with his erstwhile hero Napoleon. I left the Academy convinced that I must return again and again, and I did. In fact, with money saved from wherever possible, I purchased a season ticket for the Saturday night-concerts—top of the balcony—and grabbed a copy of the Public Ledger each week to see what the music critic, Samuel Laciar, would have to say about that Saturday’s concert. In this way I underwent one of the finest musical educations a young man could have.

  Week after week, for three years, I attended the Philadelphia concerts and agreed with the critics that our orchestra was rather better than any of the others that visited the city. I felt the same about Leopold Stokowski, the wild man of that period, and through his artistry I became an afficionado of composers like Bach and Brahms, De Falla and Ravel. But I was so eager to experience the full range of classical music that whenever I purchased three or four albums of the composers I liked, I would buy one example of the most difficult contemporary music available, and make myself like it. In this arbitrary manner I acquired Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and came to appreciate it enormously.

  My unusual manner of learning music left me with an unbalanced musical education, as shown by the fact that I refused to have much to do with either Mozart or Chopin, since they did not fit into any of the neat categories I had set up. In later years, when I had more sense, these two great composers became permanent favorites, music to ease and reassure the soul.

  As a young man I became a devotee of Heathkits. Neatly packaged components with which one could assemble in his own kitchen a radio, a record player, and later a television, they were a boy’s delight, a grown man’s recreation. For a minor percentage of the cost of a completed machine, the Heathkit buyer, if he had the brains to follow the directions, got his machine at a bargain. I developed a hobby of assembling two or three quite valuable sound systems each year and building handsome wooden cabinets to house them. I would try them out for a month or so to see if the improvements made the sound better, and then give them to schools or churches as my contribution to the appreciation of music. I suppose I must have disposed of some twenty-five systems in this manner, but when Heathkits turned to homemade television sets, the instructions became too complicated for me.

  But music was so important to me that starting in 1934 I began to build reproductive systems with three sets of extremely heavy filtering devices monitoring the wires leading to three different loudspeakers. On the first wire my assistant, a high school junior, and I would filter out all the bass notes to provide a high tenor; on the third we would eliminate the high notes to give us a deep rumble, and on the middle wire we knocked off the excessive highs and lows so that the powerful middle tones that carried tunes could come forth most effectively. Placing the three speakers far apart, we had remarkably good stereo sound twenty years before commercial systems caught up with the idea.

  Then, in my maturity, I discovered chamber music, and on my invented system I learned the wonders of the Beethoven quartets, the grandeur of Brahms, the artful simplicity of Mozart and the delight of pieces like Dvořák’s American Quartet, Schumann’s quintet for piano and strings and Schubert’s wonderful octet. Two compositions led all others in my affection: Beethoven’s mystical last quartet, No. 16 in F major, and the marvelous Brahms quintet for piano and strings. In my later years I played these last three numbers more frequently than any others, and I have come to feel that in Beethoven’s last work the rapid pizzicato movement was a signal that he felt his end approaching and he must hurry.

  What a benediction classical music is to those who have grown to know and love it. I will say only this about my own reactions: whenever I am alone and playing Beethoven’s Fifth, I eagerly anticipate the third movement, and when the rumble comes in on the double basses and the great transition is made into sunlight, I stand in reverent remembrance of that magical night when I was introduced to music such as this.

  In the same year that I first heard Uncle Arthur’s records—that is, when I was seven—I found in an old magazine that some thoughtful person had given us a reproduction of a painting in color which quite changed my life in another direction. The picture was by the modest English painter of rural scenes, George Morland (1763–1804) and it depicted a farrier shoeing a horse in front of an open barn. It so caught my fancy that I tore out the page, trimmed its edges, and pasted it on a piece of cardboard. And with that simple action I embarked on another enthusiasm of lasting interest.

  I had entered the world of painting, and art was to have an effect on me comparable to that of my exploration into opera. For with my Morland as a start, I began collecting reproductions of paintings, usually of postcard size, finding them wherever I could and keeping them in order so that I could thumb through at leisure what soon became my private art collection. Through all the years of my life, no matter where I went, I would take my collection of photographs of paintings or part of it with me, and it would be constantly refined by the addition of better cards of paintings by artists I already admired or new cards of paintings by artists I had only just discovered.

  I would maintain this practice for more than seventy years, building in time a small collection of the cards, rigorously weeded, of some hundred and fifty of the greatest paintings of all time. But always I would keep in an honored position the George Morland whose magical charm never faded for me, even when it was surrounded by the work of much finer artists. His Forge was the key that unlocked for me the infinite riches of the visual arts.

  The second reproduction to find a place in my collection exemplifies the kind of child I was, for in another magazine I saw a painting that quite bowled me over with the freshness of its color and the almost majestic disposition of its forms. It was a landscape painting by an American artist, Willard Metcalf (1858–1925), and I was so taken by the excellence of his work that I thought it only proper that I send him a letter to tell him so: ‘I think your picture of the field and the tree is very fine. It is in a magazine I am not allowed to tear, so if you have a copy you can spare, I would like to have it.’ I signed my name and age and almost by return mail I received a most encouraging letter from the artist, telling me that he agreed with me that it was a good painting and that I seemed to have a sharp eye, which he encouraged me to develop. The letter and the clipping showing the painting that accompanied it entered my collection.

  Neither Morland nor Metcalf was what one might categorize as a world-class painter. They were excellent, and they certainly awakened my latent interest in art, and for that reason I permanently treasured them. But with my third reproduction, and a very fine one it was in standard postcard size, I entered the world of international art of the highest caliber. I can’t recall how I got my hands on the postcard—perhaps a teacher gave it to me—but it showed one of the seminal paintings of world art, the one that opened the eyes of European painters to the realities of landscape painting. It bore a name that enchanted me, and from the first moment I saw it, it has been enshrined in my memory, to be recalled whenever I chance to see a row of fine trees leading down a country lane. The Avenue at Middelharnis, by the Dutch painter Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), seems at first to be simplicity itself—it is a perfectly flat landscape with minute distant buildings showing, and down the dead middle of the canvas runs a dirt road flanked on either side by a row of very tall, scraggly trees of almost repugnant form, totally bare of limbs for 90 percent of their height but topped by misshapen crowns of small, heavy branches. It would seem as if almost anyone could paint a better picture than this, but if it commanded my attention and affection at age seven, so also did it captivate the artistic world; it proved that noble landscape painting could be achieved by using simple color, simple design and straightforward execution. People who love painting love Avenue, Middelharnis, and I am pleased to say that as a child I made that discovery on my own.

  Af
ter a slow start, I began finding copies of great paintings wherever I looked, and in later years I haunted museums to find what cards they had for sale. In time I believe that I visited every important museum in the world, save only one of the best, the one in Dresden; and if I were able to fly there tomorrow, I am sure I would purchase twenty or thirty cards to fill the blank spaces in my little hand-carried museum.

  Of course, in the early days I saw art as the domain of acknowledged masters like Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens, whose paintings flourished in the reproduction trade. It was some time before I discovered other painters, such as Constable, whom I cherished, and Poussin, whose stateliness delighted me. In my youth I am ashamed to confess, I temporarily fell under the spell of a sentimental Englishwoman, Mrs. Jameson, who wrote extremely interesting and readable books based on the concept that great art could be identified by the degree to which it exemplified noble and moral ideals. I agreed with her that one could see that since Raphael specialized in paintings of the Madonna and Fra Angelico in those depicting saintly devotion, they had to be finer artists than ones who did not use such holy subjects. And even though Tintoretto did depict religious themes, he did so in such a violent manner that he could not be considered to be in the first rank.

  Mrs. Jameson’s sermonizing was ridiculous, but with no other art critic to read, I accepted her judgments—for about half a year. During that time I devoured her various writings, but somewhere toward the middle of her third book I suddenly realized that she had no place in her theory of art for paintings like Morland’s Forge or Hobbema’s Middelharnis; in fact, she would have summarily dismissed both paintings. Nevertheless, she was invaluable to my education, for she taught me what not to look for in art. If she liked it, I had to be suspicious.

  With more sophisticated ciceroni I began to discover, still in postcard size, the great works of Masaccio, Piero della Francesca and Mantegna, but I was still obviously locked into the Italian school, as Mrs. Jameson had been. She would have had scant time for someone like Dürer and none at all for Holbein, whose works offered very little moral uplift.

  My highly restricted art education was rudely disrupted by three dazzling discoveries that modified both my understanding of art and my approach to it. In some out-of-the-way source I found a postcard showing a goldfinch resting on a hanging perch of some kind, just that and nothing more, but it was so exquisitely painted and so perfect in all dimensions that I fell in love with it. No other painting, not even those first three lucky discoveries, would have the effect on me that The Goldfinch, by the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius (1622–1654), would. But when I looked into art books I could find no mention of Fabritius; he seemed to have cut no figure whatever in Dutch art. I was about to discard him from my collection when it occurred to me that to like his goldfinch, which I obviously did, required no formal approval from anyone. This was a notable painting for reasons I could not quite determine, and even if no one else appreciated it, I did,† and with that arrogant conclusion I began my steady progress toward a theory of art and its relationship to the individual.

  But a third adventure awaited, one whose repercussions would uplift the later years of my life. In a glossy magazine I came upon a fine reproduction of a landscape like no other I had seen up to that time. It bore no relationship to either my Metcalf or my Hobbema, but it was compelling, for it showed in wispy, almost fragmentary detail, an Asian landscape that I took to be Chinese. It was such a pleasing work that I took careful note of the artist: ‘Ando Hiroshige, Japanese woodblock artist (1797–1858).’ That introduction started me on the way to meet some of the most congenial artists in world history, a collection of men who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would produce a wealth of rather small woodblock prints that have never been excelled or even equaled: Masanobu, Harunobu, Kiyonaga, Utamaro, Sharaku, Hokusai in more or less chronological order. I became such a devotee that I would in time own one of the major private collections of their art, some six thousand prime examples. Finally I came to American contemporary painting. After spending two years reading almost everything in print about it, I made out a comprehensive list of the notable painters and began combing the galleries with my wife to locate paintings we could afford. We decided early to confine our purchases to paintings done in my lifetime, after 1907, which put us right at the great Armory show of 1912, which launched American modern painting. In time we would acquire some four hundred major canvases.

  I cannot recall where I was when I came upon an art magazine that contained a magnificent reproduction of a painting by an Italian Renaissance artist named Benozzo Gozzoli. It showed a scene in the life of a young boy whose behavior was so exemplary that he became a saint. The colors were gold, red and blue, with an effect so stunning that I adopted the painting as my reigning favorite, a painting I had discovered by myself and liked because of its simple purity.

  Sometime later, when I had read all I could about the artist—he was a Florentine (1420–1497), who had worked with both Ghiberti, on the great bronze doors of the baptistery of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, and Fra Angelico, on the frescoes in St. Mark’s convent in Venice—Life published one of those extensive inserts in full color that helped the magazine establish its reputation; this particular series showed the famous frescoes in the chapel of the Palazzo Medici in Florence. Page after big page illustrated how the artist, Gozzoli, had converted the simple biblical tale of the three magi into a glorification of the Medici family, whose members were shown parading grandly against the backdrop of a typical Italian landscape.

  I cherished those pages, for they proved that the artist I had discovered had been a man of importance who painted works of great beauty. I was additionally charmed by the fact that Benozzo Gozzoli of the Palazzo had six z’s. His importance in my life would far exceed his role as one more gifted Italian painter with an interesting name.

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  Starting as a lad in primary school, I was required to memorize traditional poems selected by enthusiastic and patriotic teachers. Since I had a natural liking for poetry, I found the memorization easy and learned the verse with such tenacity that they reverberate in my memory: ‘The breaking waves dashed high / On a stern and rock-bound coast …’ (Felicia Hemans); ‘Behind him lay the gray Azores, / Behind the Gates of Hercules …’ (Joaquin Miller); ‘Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!) / Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace …’ (Leigh Hunt); ‘Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere … (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow); ‘For all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: “It might have been!” …’ (John Greenleaf Whittier); ‘Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, / As his corse to the rampart we hurried …’ (Charles Wolfe); ‘and what is so rare as a day in June? / Then, if ever, come perfect days …’ (James Russell Lowell); ‘The mind has a thousand eyes / And the heart but one; / Yet the light of a whole life dies / when its love is done.…’ (Francis W. Bourdillon).

  How many such poems was I required to memorize? Perhaps four a year for twelve years—that’s almost fifty. How many did I memorize on my own? Perhaps six times that number, but I soon realized that nothing I had memorized was of much merit. However the verses were imprinted in my consciousness, and I have concluded: ‘It’s better to have something in there than nothing.’

  It was not till I reached college that I began to understand poetry. It began when I had the good luck to act in two Shakespearean plays, one of which was Twelfth Night. Not only did I memorize my own lines, Duke Orsino’s, but also those of most of the other members of the cast. Was there ever a gentler description of a mournful love song than the one Orsino gives when he asks the clown to sing?

  …; it is old and plain;

  The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

  And the free maids that weave their thread with bones

  Do use to chant it; it is silly sooth,

  And dallies with the innocence of love,

  Like the old age. />
  Those lines, elfinlike and meaningless in part, have danced in my head and lived with me for sixty years among the most precious memories of my college years; they are worth, I estimate, the entire fall term in which I memorized them.

  But with my more advanced studies I naturally selected more substantial lines to memorize, and now the facile jingles of childhood were replaced by some of the greatest lines in English poetry: ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken … (John Keats); ‘Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come …’ (William Wordsworth); ‘I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night …’ (John Milton); ‘Go, lovely rose— / Tell her that wastes her time and me …’ (Edmund Waller); ‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away …’ (Percy Bysshe Shelley); ‘Yonder a maid and her wight / Come whispering by; / War’s annals will cloud into night / Ere their story die …’ (Thomas Hardy).

  But always, through the decades, I have gone back to the sonnets of Shakespeare, those impeccable masterworks of the English language. I once could recite half a dozen, and even today I can call up many single lines and couplets that illuminate my life:

  Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

  Of the wide world dreaming on things to come …

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  But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

  All losses are restored and sorrows end.

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