The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  As a child I was fascinated by words. One summer during my stay at George Murray’s summer camp along the Delaware, I looked at the railroad sign at the end of the bridge leading from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, BYRAM, and was struck by a thought: ‘If the man who named this spot had had a daughter Mary, she could have spelled her name either forward or backward!’ (Mary Byram) The concept was so amazing to me that when I returned to school I boasted of my discovery, but Mary Armstrong, the brightest in our class, said in her superior way: ‘That’s called a palindrome and the two famous ones are “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” and even more amazing, “A man, a plan, a canal. Panama!”

  Later, during the yearly lecture on health and the terrible dangers of cigarettes and alcohol I was fixated by the word the nervous lecturer wrote on the blackboard: ‘A good way to refuse alcohol when your friends offer it is to say, without boasting: “I’m abstemious,” ’ and while he explained the meaning of that word, I saw that if you made that noun into an adverb you’d have a word that contained all the vowels, and in order. Again I trumpeted my discovery and again Mary Armstrong, after brow-knit study said: ‘Facetiously is the same, and one letter shorter.’ Mary was a bright girl.

  However I stumped her with a famous riddle: ‘There are only four words in the English language that end in dous. Horrendous, stupendous, tremendous. What’s the fourth?’ Weeks passed, with her begging for the solution, which I finally delivered, rather condescendingly I admit: ‘Hazardous.’ She was both pleased and irritated that the word was so different from the other three. Months later this persistent girl marched to my desk and slapped down a small piece of paper on which a solitary word had been written: ‘jeopardous.’

  I rejoice in the wonderful flexibility of English and read at least one book a year on the history of our language, being especially interested in the years after the birth of Christ when English was in its formative stage. I once compared the standard dictionaries of four or five of the major contemporary literary languages and found that whereas the dictionary sponsored by the Spanish academy was limited to some sixty thousand words and the French to not more than twice that many, majestic, slap-happy English, a conglomeration of everything, offered some five hundred and fifty thousand, and in the years when Charles de Gaulle was trying to expel English words from the French, English was welcoming new words from all other languages in the world, including French. For years I maintained a notebook listing some eighty different languages and for each I wrote six words which that tongue had contributed to English, such as dinghy from Hindi, cannibal from Carib, safari from Swahili, trek from Afrikaans, and wok from Chinese.

  The richness of English makes it possible for one writing in this language to choose for almost any thought he wishes to convey either a longish Latinate word, such as precipitous or a short, crisp one of Anglo-Saxon origin, such as steep, and a felicitous style often depends upon a judicious blending of the two.

  Because I was classically trained, I tend to write my first draft with a Latinate vocabulary, preferring words of three and sometimes four syllables that sound comfortable to my ear, but this tempts me into long sentences and rolling, run-on thoughts. Editing consists of junking the high-sounding beauties in favor of short words of solid Anglo-Saxon origin. But I find that when I do my final polishing to make the sentences really sing, I occasionally go back to some Latinate word that summarizes the situation precisely and exquisitely.

  English has been one of the continuing joys of my life, and I am proud that I have been allowed to publish in it; I could have been happy in no other language, even though I respect the elegance of French, the power of German and the soft loveliness of Spanish.

  The English sentence can be a structure of great beauty and variety, and the writer must use it with precision to convey his or her thoughts, images and emotions. Effective sentences can be as short and blunt as Hemingway’s in ‘The Killers’, which broke upon us with such revolutionary force when I was a student, or as seemingly endless as William Faulkner’s in his Southern tales, which were greeted with indifference at first and later won such acclaim. In my own writing I have preferred the simpler sentence because my aim has always been absolute clarity. I tend to think linearly, with a strong start, a clean, sharp active verb and a reasonable conclusion, but my editing reveals a generic weakness: I tend to use too many declarative sentences joined by and. To correct this, I often make the opening clause subordinate or dependent so that I can finish with a strong independent clause.

  The second editorial change in my first versions is to remove useless or ineffective words at the end of sentences. I have never mastered the art, in original composition, of the longish preliminary build-up and the short, effective ending after the verb, but in revision I often achieve good results by simply chopping off and substituting pronouns for phrases. Speaking of pronouns, I am not always secure in remembering which nouns at the beginning of a sentence were the antecedents of the pronouns at the end, but if I don’t catch the error either my secretary or my editor does.

  The would-be sentence with no verb I abhor but sometimes find no good substitute; the run-on sentence, which loses all form and force, I try to avoid, but even so my editors have always wanted to break my worst offenses into two or even three shorter sentences, and I bow to their superior taste. Having wrestled all my life with the English sentence, I realize that I have not conquered it; but I believe I have wrestled it to an honorable draw. And sometimes I have used it to my advantage, as if I, not it, were in command.

  My principal instrument of expression and one with which I feel easiest is the paragraph, which I strive to use with variation and effectiveness. I have repeatedly told younger writers: ‘I do believe that the only skill I have as a writer is in creating an effective paragraph. When I sit before my typewriter, one of my constant concerns is: How is this paragraph progressing? Too long? Too short? Enough variation in the sentences? and until I feel at ease with it, the paragraph cannot be considered finished. In every manuscript I write I cross out dozens of defective paragraphs that do not meet the test.

  I do not know any exercises that will teach the would-be writer to improve his technique in building paragraphs. An alternate reading of the very short ones in Hemingway with the very long and effective ones in The New Yorker essays would be a good start, but I cannot mimic either of those exemplars; my paragraphs fall in the middle and sometimes I am exceedingly pleased with one that finally succeeds.

  Concerning punctuation, I, like many writers of my generation, was influenced by an acerbic and fearfully sexist article that appeared in a major magazine many decades ago. It bore a revealing title, Feminine Punctuation, and lampooned the tendency of writers who wrote cheap romances to overuse exclamation points, dashes, parentheses, ellipsis points, italic, boldface and other devices to achieve broad humor and coy effects. Sometimes, in an effort to convey a sense of irony they even used the exclamation point inside parentheses: (!). The critic said that such usage marked a mind both inferior and juvenile, and he recommended that writers, especially masculine ones who wanted to be taken seriously, avoid them. Every device he ridiculed exists because through the centuries it has been needed, even by writers of acute sensitivity; it is the abuse that is to be condemned, for a long manuscript filled with improper or jejeune punctuation irritates, but, like pepper or cinnamon, when used properly it can add both accent and style.

  I try to restrict exclamation points to passages of dialogue. Some sentences cry out for a word in italics when it requires emphasis. I use dashes, perhaps too often, and ellipsis points to indicate a time lapse or a long pause. I do not use a comma before the last word in a series unless clarity requires it, and I adore the semicolon, which I use perhaps too much.

  As for spelling, I keep constantly at hand a small dictionary that gives no meanings but spellings of twenty-five thousand words, and if I could find one that had thirty-five thousand words I would buy it, for about half the words I look up are missing,
especially those with hyphens. I am a poor speller and suppose that I have looked five hundred times through the years for the plural of hero, the differences between flaunt and flout, gantlet and gauntlet and the spelling of minuscule. I am delighted to learn that recent word processors incorporate a program that automatically checks spelling, but it does me no good. I am an old-fashioned two-finger typist who won’t give up his manual typewriter, but my secretary, who is a wizard on the word processor, uses it to check my spellings for me.

  Throughout my writing career I have tried to use effective words that are not too arcane in sentences that are not too long to achieve paragraphs that produce a narrative that will constantly lure the reader from one page to the next.

  When I assessed myself in 1947 I concluded that I had at my disposal a fairly solid understanding of the English language and the nature of books, but not even the winning of the Pulitzer convinced me that I would be able to develop a good narrative style, and having been dismissed by my agent for lacking one, it is understandable that initially I was apprehensive about a career as a writer.

  If I wanted to write long, intricate books, which I did, it was obligatory that I develop a style suitable to that task, and I discovered that to a surprising degree such a style depended on the judicious linkage of paragraphs, so that the reader was invited to follow from one to another. This required the use of connectives at the start of the new paragraph to mark a transition. Authors of the past century were aware of this necessity, of course, but their best devices were so overused by poor writers that they became trite. Few today would use Little did I realize that when I visited Sir Charles, or the cliché of the Western film in this century: Meanwhile, back at the ranch …

  Good transitions are best achieved when they do not depend solely upon a felicitous connecting word at the beginning of a new paragraph, but provide hints at the close of the old paragraph and others at the start of the new. I have often been reminded of how closely I organize my text when I try to break into the middle of one of my pages to make a correction. Taking out even one sentence often destroys the entire linkage, and to restore it I find myself required to redo both paragraphs, for my transitions have been too solidly constructed to permit easy disruption.

  I once said: ‘I may not be the world’s greatest writer, but I’m certainly one of the great rewriters,’ my years as an editor at Macmillan having taught me how much hard work writing requires. To see one of my manuscripts in its third version is to see pieces of paper that have been scribbled upon, cut and pasted and endlessly revised. When the book finally appears it often reads so smoothly that others have been led into believing that the result was easily achieved; only my manuscripts, each filed away for inspection in some accessible library,† will show how diligently I worked to attain this ever-advancing narrative flow. It did not come automatically. I hear occasionally of writers who can sit down, type out a chapter and send it to the printer with only a corrected spelling here and there, but when I read their finished publications I do not envy the result. However, I do grant that John O’Hara used to deliver to Random House manuscripts that required almost no editing except marking for the printer, and his excellent short stories were among the best. Most of us have to work hard for optimum results.

  I suppose my attitude toward the creative process is much like that of Alexandre Dumas père when he was approached by a young aspirant who boasted that he was going to write a novel much better than either The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo. ‘Have you an attractive setting?’ the veteran writer asked politely, and the young man replied: ‘The greatest! Ominous islands. Gleaming castles. Wooded glens with gracious mansions.’

  ‘Have you interesting characters?’

  ‘Kings and beautiful princesses and dubious cardinals.’

  ‘But have you a logical plot to tie this together?’

  ‘A most ingenious one. Twists and turns that will bewilder and delight.’

  Said Dumas: ‘Young man, you’re in excellent shape. Now all you need are two hundred thousand words, and they’d better be the right ones.’

  I came to the crucial question: Did I know enough about the novel as an art form to attempt writing one? Three facts were involved. First, in my favor, my knowledge of the literature was prodigious, as the Graduate Record Examination had shown. At about the age of twenty-four I believe I had read most of the good novels ever written, especially the ones by European writers whom few Americans read: for example, Pérez Galdós, Goncharov, Manzini, Nexø, Lagerlöf, Reymont, Couperus. I had also read Lady Murasaki, of Japan.

  On the other hand, the second salient fact is that because my college was notoriously Anglophile, and also because I was overseas during much of my learning period, I had completely missed the works of three American giants, Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, so that they could exert no influence upon me, and this was a loss. Also, for the same reasons I had pretty well missed writers like Susan Glaspell and Edith Wharton, so my literary education, though broad, was lopsided.

  Third, and now we come to a more serious defect, I had never had a systematic course on the writing of fiction and had thus missed the philosophical discussions that centered on the works of Henry James, E. M. Forster, André Gide and other distinguished writers. I never attended to James’s dicta concerning the point of view from which the tale is told, nor did I appreciate the extent to which the psychological insights into character can deepen a novel’s meaning. Curiously, I never studied the way in which a gifted novelist like Flaubert can gather together a group of characters within a limited compass and give the entire novel a sense of the universal. And I missed entirely the scintillating word play of writers like Aldous Huxley. I would never write like that distinguished group, nor would I ever want to.

  Still, my knowledge of the novel was sufficient so that I could find models among its practitioners: men like Henry Fielding, Alain René Lesage, Eugène Sue and William Thackeray; or the panoramic novels of Tolstoy and Sigrid Undset; or heavy novels like Dreiser’s American Tragedy or Arnold Bennett’s powerful Old Wives’ Tale. In other words, I liked my novels big and rugged and extensive, but I was always aware that in making such a choice I was turning my back on a style of writing that critics had usually described as superior. I much preferred Victor Hugo to Jane Austen and so, I found, did many readers, and to label Charles Dickens inferior, as critics then did, was in my opinion laughable.

  It was reassuring to know that I probably had certain writing skills, but it was equally important to identify those other important skills I did not have. My negative conclusions were specific and firm. From having read extensively the best writers the world had produced, I had observed that they had certain strengths that I could never match, and it was important for me to dispose quickly of any ambitions in those areas.

  I am not trained in psychology and have little skill or interest in dealing with the psychological structure and problems of my characters, and none whatever in chasing them down the aberrational byways that other writers exploit with such riveting results. I tend to accept characters more or less at face value, preferring to have them reveal themselves in their own way. This technique has produced some wonderful characters for me, but if the reader wants involved psychological analyses he should look elsewhere.

  I have tried to create men and women who capture the imagination and hold it, and whenever my wife tells me that some critic has abused me for my cardboard characters, I think of Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque, who enchanted the world, and of Elly Zahm, about whose death from snakebite so many have written to me in protest. If these characters are cardboard, I imagine a lot of writers would like to know where I get my supply of that commodity.

  I have studied the problem of dialects, and have often been tempted to try using them, but when I review the record I find that generally books which were first hailed as marvels of narratives in dialect have very short lives. However, sometimes when reading Thomas Hardy
I come upon a rural word thrown in with an effect so dazzling that I wish I could emulate him; and from time to time I reread the exploits of Hyman Kaplan to remind myself of the delectable humor a lively dialect can achieve. I must leave such gems to others, for I have no talent in that direction.

  I have little interest and not much skill in plotting; when I have done it well it hasn’t added much to my books. I respect the intricate plotting John le Carré devises in his fine espionage books, but I do not envy it, and more often I find excessive plotting like Hardy’s tedious. I have been criticized for my deficiency, and several critics and readers have complained that my books tend to fall apart in their last chapters. I do not think so. I see a narrative as an endless web moving back and forth that the writer, like a Norn, severs at some arbitrary point to end his book. I am aware that a writer skilled in plotting could wrap things up in much neater packages than I do, but in writing, as in personal dress, I have never been much involved with neatness.

  I have been deficient also in the use of symbolism, which others use to such mystical effect. But I confess that when I read their books I find myself muttering: ‘This is getting to be quite precious,’ and I recall the sardonic statement once made by an older writer: ‘Symbolism is what goes over big among juniors in Yale’s course on creative writing.’ Even more cynical was Moss Hart’s crack about Broadway: ‘Allegory is what closes Friday night.’ I wish I had the deft touch that symbolism requires, but I don’t. I agree that certain subjects profit from its use because it can lift the story to a higher level, but I have seen so much bad writing in this vein that I prefer to leave it to others. I rely upon the marshaling of carefully chosen facts to produce the mythic effect, and if anyone can read my Poland without realizing that the subject and its people have heroic and mythic dimensions, I fear there is nothing I could add to make it more clear.