The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  Another demonstration of acquired knowledge was a dramatic one. When I was a graduate student at Harvard a useful educational tool was introduced nationwide, a battery of some seven comprehensive and penetrating tests, each two or three hours long, which would reveal not only how much intellectual power the young people had who were presuming to take advanced degrees like the M.A. and Ph.D. but also how well the various colleges and universities were doing their job.

  I was then in Harvard’s School of Education and the faculty feared this examination because it might prove true the charge made by professors in the more prestigious schools like law and medicine that only men and women of ‘inferior intelligence’ go into education. Since the test was being administered in several hundred of our best institutions, the norms would have validity. If I remember correctly, our knowledge in seven subjects was tested: three sciences, two liberal arts and two general fields, perhaps vocabulary and miscellaneous knowledge. It was an exhausting investigation, and I, like my professors, nervously awaited the results. When they arrived there was both disappointment and rejoicing.

  I was disgusted to learn that I was below the national average in chemistry; I was in the 45th percentile, which meant 55 percent of the students had done better than I. I was pleased, however, that I had been well above average in all else. What startled everyone, including me, was that I stood very near the top percentile in three of the other subjects; in my best two—general arts and literature, I believe, or it might have been history—my marks were so far above the top of the scale that no numbers were available for comparisons.

  I was told that in total score I had either led the field at Harvard and nationally or been close to it, and that night a proud faculty group—Dean Homes, Franny Spalding, in administration, and Howard Wilson, in social studies—took me out to a celebratory dinner at which for the first time I tasted Chinese sweet-and-sour shrimp, a dish I never eat these days without recalling that triumphant night.

  With three such demonstrations of my ability and the almost unbroken chain of A’s in my various courses, I could have been forgiven had I become convinced that I was brilliant, but I did not, because I felt intuitively that my intelligence was of a special kind—acquisitive rather than speculative. I was obviously a man born to excel in formal examinations once I understood the parameters of the requirements, but I doubted that I had those ultimate intellectual gifts that marked the truly exceptional mind.

  I discovered at an early age that I saw spatial relationships differently from other children, so that geometry and geography meant far more to me than to them. I would think that I know, eighteen hours out of every twenty-four, where north is and where the stars are in the sky. I check the newspapers at the first of every month to be sure where the planets will be, and I am uneasy whenever I am on a piece of land until I know its exact size in relation to the United States. When I am situated in any town for a length of time, I find an atlas and determine its latitude and longitude so that I can type out the names of the dozen or so settlements around the world at my latitude, and with the same longitude. Then I know whom I am like in other nations and I feel reassured.

  Numbers were always of great importance to me, and I remember vividly a disappointing day in fourth grade when our teacher, Miss Ward, explained the magic of cancellation when I wasn’t listening. She then placed on the board an exercise like:

  and asked me to give the answer. Not having paid attention, I was unable to do so and sat dumbfounded when Eggs Hayman and Jimmy Groff rattled off the answer: 491. Because I knew I was better at figures than they, I remained after school to ask Miss Ward how they had been able to give such quick answers when the numbers were so large, and when she explained the trick she added: ‘So you must not only know numbers, you must also pay attention.’

  In my adult life I have proved time and again that I can keep more or less in mind details in some five hundred books on the topics to which I have dedicated myself. I take no notes but do list on the inside back cover of certain books page numbers to which I know I will want to refer, later followed by one word to indicate subject matter, but even without this aid I can and do go quickly to the right book and to the correct page, more or less, for the data I need. When I fail, I fail completely and can think of no clue that would lead me to the page I want; this would mean I had not implanted it firmly enough in my mind. I am not talking theoretically. I have done this at least a dozen times with my long novels, keeping a hundred characters in mind, controlling a tangle of different story lines, and remembering many individualized locations. I doubt that I am remarkable in possessing such a skill. I suspect that many clergymen can do the same with the Bible and it’s obvious that some lawyers can maintain control over a huge volume of case law just as scientists can master a jungle of relevant experimentation in their fields. But I have done it in a score of different fields: astrophysics, geography, ancient religions, art, politics, contemporary revolutionary movements and popular music.

  In the week prior to my finishing a long novel I am qualified to take a job teaching a postgraduate seminar on the subject because my knowledge then is quite extensive, especially regarding the specialized literature in the field, but if today you were to ask me to give you the names of three reliable books on the Polynesian background of Hawaiian history you would find me a blank. I am constantly embarrassed by my enthusiastic readers who question me about one or another of my old books, which I wrote twenty years ago; they’ve read it last week and know much more about it than I.

  It was obvious that I had a fairly competent brain, but what its exact quality or special capacity was I did not know until in wartime I took a test of fiendish ingenuity. It had been constructed by the military to fill a specific need: ‘We are desperately in need of cryptographers to break enemy codes and protect our own. Only men and women with special skills are fitted for this work. We know they’re out there in society or in uniform.’

  After intensive work a small team of geniuses came up with a wholly new kind of test, which they administered to hundreds of men and women in uniform who were known by their associates or their test scores to be unusually capable. Sent forth by the Navy, I reported for the investigation. The officer in charge said: ‘This test has been devised to separate you into three groups. It has what we call “precise discriminatory capacity,” which means that many of you will score five, many sixty-five, and a very few, ninety-five. What it tests for is your raw intelligence, not what you learned in chemistry class or in job training or later study. It tests the ability of your brain, unclothed as it were, to tackle abstruse problems and function with great rapidity. In this test time is vital and, again, the test is discriminatory. Some of you will complete it in an hour and a half, some in fifty minutes, and the few we are seeking in thirty.’

  That was pretty heady stuff and seeing that we were apprehensive, he smiled warmly and assured us: ‘How you perform on this test has absolutely no bearing on your general intelligence or your ability to do your present job. You cannot fail it, in the ordinary sense. We already know you’re bright. What we now want to know is: “Have you the special skills required for cryptography?” ’

  It was a horrendous test, and although I handled fairly well and rapidly any questions posed in verbal form, there were others that totally mystified me and made me waste a good deal of time. When I saw some in my group galloping through the pages and others gnawing their fingers I surmised, correctly, that I was going to be in the middle group that scored sixty-five.

  One question will indicate the discriminatory nature of the test: ‘There are three sets of sequential numbers and in each set the sum equals the product. Find them.’ You either knew what sequential meant (7, 8, 9) and sum (add) and product (multiply) or you had no chance even to attempt the problem. Those who were destined to score down in the fives took one look at the arcane stuff and fled. We in the sixty-fives slogged through a laborious equation and belatedly reached the proper solution +1, +2, +
3 and −3, −2, and −1 and the surprising −1, 0, +1. But the geniuses who were destined to be cryptographers studied the problem for a moment, saw immediately that if the numbers were not extremely low, the products would become unmanageable, and by a process called iteration found the answer. Iteration is how a slow-minded man finds the square root of 19: ‘4 is too low, 5 too high, so I’m looking for something in the middle, say around 4.5’ and by this process of trial and error he ultimately reaches 4.3588 if he wants to carry it out to four decimals, if not, roughly 4.4. The mathematical genius can perform iteration almost instantaneously.

  In dealing with the above question as stated, such men quickly found the +1, +2, +3, and because they thought in both positive and negative numbers, the second series came almost immediately. The third series, centering on zero, gave even some of these superbrains trouble, but since they had been told there were three sets, they discovered by a process of elimination that it had to involve zero. I required perhaps five minutes to set up and factor my equation; the geniuses deduced their solution in an equal number of seconds.

  When the test ended, there were, as the administrator had predicted, quite a few with scores down in the five range, and they were some of the best officers we had. There were many like me in the sixty range but almost none in the high seventies or eighties; you got either sixty-five or ninety-five and there were several who got the latter.

  I was disturbed by one who did, a friend named Saul Dreditch whom I knew to be not nearly as intelligent as I was; he knew no music, had read little, showed no interest in current affairs, and could not converse easily with an elevated vocabulary. Yet he came away with the highest mark, a ninety-seven. It baffled me.

  There was one set of questions on which the examiners obviously doted because they appeared in various forms, and I had been quite unable to handle any of them, while Dreditch had obviously solved them not only accurately but swiftly. They consisted of careful line drawings of a pyramid or similar structure composed of many individual building blocks, all of the same size. They were drawn with one edge of the structure showing, so that the viewer saw Face A and Face B, but not Faces C and D, which were hidden. The question always was: ‘What is the minimum number of unseen blocks required to keep this structure standing?’ I was completely baffled by such a question. How could I peek around the limits of the drawing and see what stood behind? When I asked Dreditch how he solved such questions, he said: ‘Couldn’t you see that it had to be three or six or whatever the case was?’ No, I could not see around corners, but he could, and instantly.

  I came upon Dreditch several times during the war. He was one of the cryptographers for Admiral Halsey, and men on the staff told me he was a genius: ‘Nimitz in Honolulu sends us an important message in code. It arrives garbled. Either their sending machine or our receiving has acted up, or maybe the sending operator has been careless. We hand the garble to Dreditch and alert Honolulu to send again, but in the meantime, seconds count, and if he can unravel the mystery we’ll be prepared to go into action that much sooner. I’ve seen him do it a dozen times. He sits over his coding machine, both hands extended like a pianist about to start playing. Hands in the air, never touching the keys, and he plays “What if?” What if the fellow had forgotten to turn this switch? What if his left-hand fingers were too far to the left? He plays a hundred possibilities in the air, and quite often he hits exactly the mistake the sender has made. He decodes the message, passes it along to Halsey, and we’re already taking the proper steps by the time the resubmission arrives from Honolulu. Of course, we have to wait for it. We can’t go ahead on Dreditch’s guesswork, but with him it isn’t guessing.’

  As a result of that remarkable test, which identified men with the kind of raw intelligence required for cryptography, Saul Dreditch was identified as having a special brain power far excelling mine, and with it he helped win the war. With my more ordinary power I contributed little.

  It was obvious from the various tests that I had a brain but not one qualified for abstract analysis. What was it good for? After continued reflection I realized that I had what was essentially a Germanic type of intellect, the kind whose owner plods along year after year until he comes up with, say, a new theory of who wrote the first five books of the Old Testament. I was tenacious in acquiring detailed knowledge. I positively loved the game of ideas, and had the patience to spend long hours day after day playing it.

  What I did not have was the scintillating type of intellect so often found in Frenchmen, Irishmen and Indian savants from the subcontinent. Their flashes of intellectual brilliance and the wit of their conversation delight me, and I envy the grace with which they marshal words and illuminate ideas. I found I was more of a pachyderm than a hummingbird, and for that reason I especially prize those things I cannot do—I leave the fiery statement, the incandescent revelation to others, not because I want to but because I have to. Convinced though I was that I would never have a flashy intellect, I knew with equal certainty that I possessed a sturdy one well qualified to grapple with the kinds of books I would want to write.

  Raw brainpower is one thing; mastery of skills and techniques is another, and here my training had been exceptional. My early wide reading in the classics and in those precious Haldeman-Julius Blue Books had imbued me with a love for the flow of words, and my teaching of grammar at The Hill and George School had been invaluable.

  At college I had learned to write substantial term papers, and here I must tell young would-be writers that effective learning, especially in the writing trade, often starts with hard work done in college. Professors do not aid their better students when they do not demand thoughtful term papers, and any course in history, English or philosophy that does not require extensive writing is fraudulent because a major aspect of the discipline is being left out.

  I had three distinguished professors: in philosophy the great Brand Blanshard, in literature the noted expert Robert Spiller, and in history the irrepressible Freddie Manning, married to the daughter of the former president William Howard Taft. Both Blanshard and Spiller taught me much about writing, but it was Manning, in his two seminars on English history, who really taught me what a research paper ought to be. I’d written a forty-page paper dealing with the Great Reform Act of 1832 and in it I’d made Lord Brougham, a chameleon politician of the period, my hero, and when the class ended Professor Manning asked me to remain and said: ‘Michener, that was first-rate. You could be a writer. Two criticisms. A bit too long, and you were quite misled when you had that rather pathetic bit about your hero Brougham being “kicked into oblivion on the woolsack.” You misinterpret the values in English political life. When he “took the woolsack,” as they say, meaning that he sat on the time-honored bale of wool on which all Lord Chancellors sit when they preside as the realm’s chief justice, as a reminder that a nation’s wealth comes from the land, he ascended to a major position in British politics. You must attend to detail, and dig for it if necessary.’

  I had not appreciated that, but it was what he said next that lingers: ‘Two years ago when my wife and I accompanied Chief Justice Taft on a tour of England the leaders of that nation were eager to meet him, not because he had been president, but because he was our Chief Justice. To them that meant something.’ Why do I treasure that memory? Because it suddenly brought everything I had written into focus. Brougham was a real man who had held a real job, sitting on a woolsack. Howard Taft was a living American politician who’d had two contrasting jobs, and there was a practical possibility that I might one day meet him. History past and present became very real that day, and all because I had written a long paper into which I had plowed everything I knew and exposed all the emotions I had felt about my noble villains and worthy heroes. That paper was an augury.

  No writer ever knows enough words but he doesn’t have to try to use all that he does know. Tests would show that I had an enormous vocabulary and through the years it must have grown, but I have never had a desire to
display it in the way that John Updike or William Buckley or William Safire do to such lovely and often surprising effect. They use words with spectacular results; I try, not always successfully, to follow the pattern of Ernest Hemingway who achieved a striking style with short familiar words. I want to avoid calling attention to mine, judging them to be most effective as ancillaries to a sentence with a strong syntax.

  My approach has been more like that of Somerset Maugham, who late in life confessed that when he first thought of becoming a writer he started a small notebook in which he jotted down words that seemed unusually beautiful or exotic, such as chalcedony, for as a novice he believed that good writing consisted of liberally sprinkling his text with such words. But years later, when he was a successful writer, he chanced to review his list and found that he had never used even one of his beautiful collection. Good writing, for most of us, consists of trying to use ordinary words to achieve extraordinary results.

  I struggle to find the right word and keep always at hand the largest dictionary my workspace can hold, and I do believe I consult it at least six or seven times each working day, for English is a language that can never be mastered.* I also keep at hand for daily reference a copy of Rodale’s Synonym Finder, incontestably the best thesaurus ever published; its scope is enormous, its organization superb. I have never known a professional writer clever enough to use the old Roget’s Thesaurus, its arrangement of synonyms and antonyms being too difficult for easy reference, and I have never understood why some books waste half their space on antonyms, for I cannot remember ever having used that service. Much as I treasure Rodale, I have never used it to ferret out a dazzling new word for inserting in my manuscript purely for effect. I have always used it to remind me of some word I know but cannot recall.