The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  I am sure she was constantly worried during my absences, and I know she was distressed that she could not give me a pocketful of coins whenever I set out, but we both knew that that was impossible. Both she and Aunt Laura would have wanted to do everything for me they could, but their capacity was limited. Also, when I left either my mother or my aunt, I never said: ‘I’m going to Canada’ or ‘I’m heading for Iowa.’ I’m ashamed to say that I just went, although I did try to send postcards after I was safely started. And since, after those first three trips with Ted Johnson, I made every trip alone, I was my own pilot, my own counselor, and was able to do pretty much as I wished. I was a free agent.

  Second, why did I feel driven to leave home or Aunt Laura’s comfortable quarters in Detroit? My life at home in Doylestown could be rather bleak, for I had none of the clothes and games and equipment that boys my age would normally have had. All I really had was that music, the art I remember so well and the endless books from the library; the essential elements of those three I could take with me intellectually and without burdening my knapsack. When one hitchhikes, one spends long hours either waiting at a likely intersection or trudging down the road, and when I was so engaged I found comfort in singing Caruso’s arias or in reciting the many poems I had memorized, or recalling the latest postcards I had added to my art collection. I was in many ways the poorest boy on the road, in others the richest, and I was always happy to be on the road meeting new people, hearing new stories and seeing new landscapes.

  Was it some psychic maladjustment that drove me then and later to this incessant traveling? Was it some sickness of the spirit, some malaise of the kind that follows if the body is deprived of some essential vitamin, or the mere perversity of a restless young male? I have never been clever enough to analyze the impetus, but I doubt that it was related to any deep-seated psychic deficiency. I’ve said that home was not exciting enough to keep me tied to it, and I had no physical possessions of any kind to hold my interest for long periods of time. Yet I was not unhappy with my family, my school or my friends. The simple fact seems to have been that once I saw that mysterious road outside my house, the eastern part leading to a dead end, the western to worlds unknown, I was determined to explore the latter.

  · · ·

  In high school and college I continued to hitchhike to all parts of the nation. I had had a treasured friend in high school, Lindsay Johnson, who was the son of a clergyman. I hitchhiked to see him when he was attending a small religious school in North Carolina, Elon College; one spring morning when he went to the college post office for his mail, there I was waiting for him. I had another friend, a young woman I liked very much, who went to school in Indiana, so I went out to see her. And I hitchhiked to certain places of great interest simply to see them. By then it was the late 1920s, when both the cars on the roads and the young people traveling them were more numerous, and I began to find myself with strangers older than myself and dangerous. One congenial gang persuaded me to go along on a railroad trip almost to the Rockies and, using empty boxcars and the structures under the cars, I went a fair distance. But a brush with railway police at a junction near Cheyenne terrified me, and I hitchhiked back, keeping to the highway system I knew, never again to mess around with the railroads.

  In 1931, while teaching in a private school, it was as if some outside agency had been studying my behavior and concluded: ‘That one is destined to travel!’ I was awarded a small sum of money that would enable me, if I was frugal, which I had learned to be, to enjoy two years studying and traveling in Europe. In the month before I sailed out of New York I practically memorized train and ship schedules for the Europe of that time, and as soon as I landed in Scotland I began calculating how I could obtain the most for my stringently budgeted travel funds. With the help of knowledgeable Scottish university mates, I mastered the intricacies of budgeting so well that I was able to give myself the modern equivalent of the famous eighteenth-century Grand Tour, which all young gentlemen of respectable lineage were expected to take. For reasons I can’t now recall, I missed the German cities, but I did visit Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, Ferrara, Madrid, Brussels, Antwerp and Amsterdam. The Rome and Brussels visits were of vital political importance, as I shall later explain, but equally so, and in a radically different manner, were three less glamorous trips my Scottish friends made possible.

  The first was a hiking trip clear across Scotland, which I did twice, first from St. Andrews to Oban, about a hundred and five miles, and the second from Inverness down that grand system of lochs to Fort William, about fifty-five miles. Seeing Scotland on foot in that plodding, patient way was to see in intimate detail the glory of the lochs set down amid brown hills, the beauty of the heather, the majestically unfolding landscapes, one after another as the path rose and fell. In those long hikes, broken by talks at night with men at the pubs or during the day with shepherds I met at the stiles, I learned what quiet, controlled people the Scots were, so admirably adjusted to their dour yet splendid land. They were warm in conversation and gracious in their hospitality, even though most of them had little more in their pockets than I.

  While wandering aimlessly I became acquainted with a poem I had missed in college; I was caught by it on the first reading because it spoke to my condition. It was Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gipsy,’ and in its stately lines, so in harmony with my own view of the world, I came upon a passage in which I discerned a portrait of myself:

  Come, let me read the oft-read tale again:

  The story of the Oxford scholar poor,

  Of pregnant parts and quick inventive brain,

  Who, tired of knocking at Preferment’s door,

  One summer morn forsook

  His friends, and went to learn the Gipsy-lore,

  And roam’d the world with that wild brotherhood,

  And came, as most men deem’d, to little good,

  But came to Oxford and his friends no more.

  The lines gripped me as if I could foresee the wild, fantastic time when I would travel with the gypsy-kuchi wanderers in Afghanistan and write a glowing book about them; as if I knew even then that I would never be able to dismiss my own longing to roam the world.

  The second trip my Scottish friends suggested was one of the finest I would ever take: ‘James, you should go out to Oban, catch a MacBrayne steamer, cross over the Minch, roughest body of water in Europe, and land on the wee island of Barra.’

  ‘Why Barra?’

  ‘When Knox’s Protestants converted all the rest of Scotland to their dour faith, they were afraid to cross that stormy sea to Barra, so it remained Catholic, a braw singing place.’

  The Minch was rougher than they had predicted; it always is. And Barra was such a grand ‘singing place’ that I spent three months there, and part of a summer later. It was such a fine adventure that I shall explain why later. Here it suffices to say that Barra is a small island of the Outer Hebrides, far out in the stormy Atlantic; its people, who were Catholic, were then among the poorest in Europe; and it contained right in the middle of the bay one of the most romantic castles in Great Britain, in my day almost a relic, today a fine memorial restored by a diligent chieftain of Barra who married an American girl and took American citizenship. To see Barra at any time was a privilege, to see it when it was still, to all outward appearances, in the Middle Ages, as it was when I knew it, was an exploration into the mists of history.

  The third bit of advice my Scottish friends shared with me was one of those fortuitous strokes of fortune that can scarcely be believed after they happen, so exceedingly appropriate are they: ‘Jim, you seem to enjoy getting about a bit. Have you looked into the program the shipping companies have out of Glasgow?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Seems like it was made for you. They welcome young fellows, and you don’t have to be a proper sailor or have papers or anything. You get in touch with their office and let them know you’re in good health, and submit a paper from the police that
you’re responsible, and that’s it.’

  ‘But what do they do?’

  ‘They check to see you’re telling the truth, and if they like your letter and find that you are really responsible, they send you a note telling you to report to Glasgow, and when you get there— Jock’s done this, he can tell you the details. But they sign you on as a kind of honorary member of the crew. You’re a full-fledged member of the British Merchant Fleet and ten minutes later you’re aboard a cargo ship heading out for the Mediterranean. Of course, if it’s a shipping company located in Edinburgh, you sail out of Leith and hit the Baltic ports.’

  ‘Do I have duties aboard ship?’

  ‘The big thing is, you have shore leave as soon as your ship hits port, and you can leave ship at Leghorn for example and pick her back up at Messina in Sicily, ten days later. But when you’re at sea, yes, you do have duties. You take the printed reports the ship receives from the government regarding changes in the time of flashing lights from lighthouses and warnings as to sunken ships and things like that, and you enter these changes on your ship’s charts. And while you’re doing this you learn a whale of a lot about the Mediterranean, if that’s where your ship’s going.’

  ‘Do I pay them or do they pay me?’

  ‘Standard rate for all assignments like this. You get one shilling a month and your board free.’

  ‘Why do they do this? Sounds like a wonderful deal.’

  ‘They want young Scots to know the sea.’

  ‘But will they listen to an American?’

  ‘You’ll have to write and see.’

  I did write, and the directors of the Bruce Line in Glasgow said they’d never had a Yank aboard one of their ships, and they’d be delighted to try their luck with me. Three days later I had my papers (Honorary) in the British Merchant Fleet and I was aboard a Bruce Line ship headed for the historic ports of the Mediterranean.

  The line had seven or eight ships, each bearing a Spanish name that began and ended with the letter a, such as the Almeria or the Almenada. My ship was the smallest in the fleet, the Alcira, commanded by a tough little fighter, Captain Reid, whose first mate was a grizzled veteran nearing the end of his career named Mr. Macintosh. He was responsible for instructing me in my duties. I was twenty-four at the time, eager to learn the ways of the British fleet, and Macintosh must have felt that I was one of the last young men who would fall into his hands, for he took special pains with me, teaching me how to shoot the sun, how to mind the all-important chronometer, and how to study the documents with which I would work. Both he and Reid were happy to have an American aboard, and by the end of the second day we had settled down to one of the most delightful and instructive cruises I would ever encounter. For me there would be no Captain Bligh, no terror such as those from one of the Jack London books—there was just the companionship of two older men who were pleased to have with them a young foreigner who was eager to learn and pull his own weight on the voyage.

  I would later learn that in World War II Captain Reid had the Alcira and two other Bruce Line ships sunk from under him and each time he swam clear to pick up another command. Toward the end of the war, my informant told me one night in Valencia, ‘The little son-of-a-bitch was steering his ship right through a nest of Nazi submarines and daring them to hit him.’ I believed every word of it, for he was a small dynamo who enjoyed responding to challenges.

  The Alcira was a remarkably tough, well-built Dutch ship with a nose so blunt that the engines almost had to push her through the waves. We made about four knots, that’s ninety-six miles a day, and when we battered our way into a heavy wind off Cape Finisterre on the Spanish coast we practically stood still for a whole day, making almost no headway. Never losing sight of that looming cliff proved that we were practically immobilized. But when the winds eased, we moved ahead and rounded Sagres, from where Prince Henry the Navigator had dispatched his Portuguese adventurers to probe the coast of Africa and the southern seas.

  Now we approached Gibraltar, our little ship coming so close to shore that we could see the battlements and the vast water catchments, and then we were in the Mediterranean at last. Under sunny skies we headed across that noble sea, on whose shores were so many relics of European and African history.

  When we left Glasgow, every available corner of our deck had been piled high with bituminous coal from Scottish mines, and so were our cargo holds. The tactic was to feed our engines during the early part of our trip with loose coal shoveled down from the decks, leaving as much as possible below for sale in Italy. Consequently, during the early days our decks and the rest of the ship were quite dirty, but now with the topside coal gone, sailors could hose down the Alcira and make her quite presentable preparatory to docking at one of the Italian seaports—which one we had not yet been advised. But the home office in Glasgow was monitoring markets carefully and would soon tell us where to go in order to sell our stored coal at maximum profit.

  The wireless report that came was so exciting that I could almost believe it was intended solely to make me happy. We were to head directly into Civitavecchia, an ancient port for Rome. And why would that thrill me? Because one of my idols was the French writer Stendhal (whose real name was Marie Henri Beyle). And what had Stendhal to do with Civitavecchia?

  He had been one of the most confused of all the great writers, a man of a thousand disasters. Everything he tried seemed to collapse about him, especially his attempts to get some attractive woman into either marriage or bed. He suffered in debacles so ridiculous that a lesser man might have committed suicide. Finally getting someone not attractive to cooperate, on his sole adventure with a woman he contracted a virulent venereal disease that remained with him for the rest of his tortured life.

  But what he could do was write—he produced hard-grained, analytical novels, two of the best in world literature, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. But even with these masterpieces he could not attract popular acceptance or earn a living income, so it was fortunate that he succeeded in obtaining the sinecure of diplomatic representative at the now sleepy port of Civitavecchia. The first step I would take on the Continent would be in the town where he had labored for many years. What a way for a voyager with my interests to enter Europe!

  Our ship coming in at dusk could not dock at a pier, so it anchored some distance offshore, but with two heavy hawsers attached to bollards on the dock. That left me with no way to land and see if I could find the house in which Stendhal had lived and worked. First Mate Macintosh, seeing my grave disappointment, and perhaps remembering his own first entry into Europe, told me quietly: ‘If a man had the nerve, he could work his way down those two hawsers, sort of like a monkey. They won’t give way, you know.’ And with him helping me over the side I grasped the two ropes, one in each hand, and planted my legs, one on each rope, in such a manner that I was more or less supported, and in that undignified posture I started to negotiate the fifteen precarious yards to shore. I landed in Civatavecchia bottom first, but as I left the hawsers swaying in the night breeze, I looked above and saw the top of the stone fortress to which Baedeker had alerted me: this was the citadel that Michelangelo had built to protect the treasure ships of Rome as they disgorged their cargoes here. Michelangelo and Stendhal greeting me in my first moments ashore! Throwing arms wide, and imitating Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo, who shouted when he landed on his island of treasure: ‘The world is mine!’ I cried: ‘Europe, I salute you!’

  I encountered a local gentleman who spoke English and was happy to lead me to the Stendhal house, and I think he understood when I paid my silent respects to the great Frenchman who has been called ‘one of the world’s all-time losers.’ Ten days later, when I rejoined the Alcira in Palermo, I was satisfied that I had been allowed an exhilarating if brief taste of Italy. It had been made possible by those friends at the university who had told me about the generous Scottish shipping companies.

  When I returned to the United States, I continu
ed to hitchhike to all parts of the country, except North Dakota, which in those years I could never get to. I became moderately familiar with all regions of the country, but not with any thoroughness with the northwest, and certainly neither Hawaii nor Alaska, two areas with which I would later be involved rather intensely.

  When peace came after World War II, I stumbled into one occupation after another that took me to every continent. Later, when the government wanted to put me on a committee whose work had overseas ramifications, material prepared for submission to the Senate prior to my appearance for confirmation of the appointment showed that I had worked substantially in some hundred and three different sovereign nations, some of them extremely small and unimportant.

  The travel in those years was fascinating. My work had made me something of an expert on Asia, and in those exciting days when I was active in all parts of that continent I used to keep a portable typewriter and a suitcase full of traveling clothes at one hotel in Tokyo and at others in Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. When an urgent call came for me to fly to any part of Asia, I would simply go to the airport, fly to one of my cities, pick up my gear and be on my way. In those years I am certain that I gave away at least ten Olivetti typewriters that I had carried to places like Burma and Afghanistan with no chance of taking them out when I left in a hurry. Some of the machines had been provided by the agencies that had hired me, but an equal number had been my own purchases, whose loss I dismissed as the cost of doing business. In the United States I have lost another dozen, and as for suitcases filled with work clothes, I have had to abandon a score, never with much regret.