The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  For his $4,800—today it would be more like $8,500—Dr. Deppard did receive six copies of a properly but cheaply printed book with a jacket bearing his photograph. Vanitatis did arrange for him to appear on one local television show, and an interesting release was sent to the Denver papers and to several others in the vicinity, only one of which used it. Nobody reviewed the book, but such details were irrelevant, because three hours after receiving his copies Dr. Deppard was in my apartment purple with rage: ‘Look at what they’ve done!’ and with trembling hands he showed me how Vanitatis, seeing that the book was using more paper than the $4,800 budget covered, had solved the problem rather neatly: they had dropped the four middle chapters.

  Since Dr. Deppard made his call of protest on my phone I was able to hear how J. Pitt Barclay weasled out of this one, and he was more than equal to the unpleasant task: ‘But Dr. Deppard, don’t you see our strategy? If you detected the absence of those pages, so will the readers, and they’ll be hungry for the second volume of your memoirs. Mistake? Far from it. The best brains in our office planned that strategy and F.X. Grimble tells me that stores are already making inquiries.’ Some months later the disgraceful affair had a brazen ending which, strangely enough, left no bad taste in Dr. Deppard’s mouth, for it was accompanied by another masterly letter from J. Pitt:

  This morning when F.X. Grimble walked into my office, his smile missing and his eyes downcast, I knew that his news was not going to be pleasant. But I was astounded by what he had to tell me. Because of the airline strike which paralyzed our part of the country for two weeks and the deplorable drop in the market just as your book appeared, the sales of your fine book have been disappointing.

  Six other ingenious explanations were given, including the fact that both The New York Times and The Washington Post found their book columns full that week and could not find room for the enthusiastic reviews that had been written. The letter concluded with the paragraph:

  So we find ourselves with some two thousand of your fine books on our hands and F.X. simply refuses to discard them. ‘I put my life’s blood in that book,’ he told me, ‘and I think it ought to have a chance to live.’ Our editorial board has decided that we will take our losses and offer the books to you for $1.50 each and we will pay the freight to Denver.

  So Dr. Deppard had to pay for the publication of his book and then pay again to recover the copies that rightfully should have been his, but he did not feel aggrieved by the experience. The original $4,800 had been an unexpected gift, and the money he paid for the unsold copies—so far as I could learn, not one had been sold—was not wasted, for he had published a book, he now had a rather good-looking gift that he could hand to his patients, he had been on television and the pile of books he kept stored in his basement did carry on their back covers a rather fine portrait of himself.

  · · ·

  I do not wish to push an elitist agenda, but I was struck as I reviewed the young men with whom I was concerned in those early postwar years by how many of them had intimate contact with the best and most expensive Eastern preparatory schools and the great universities. Buechner attended Lawrenceville, graduated from Harvard, and headed the religion department at Phillips Exeter. Burns attended Phillips Exeter, graduated from Harvard and taught at Loomis. Vidal attended Phillips Exeter, which seems to have been a training ground for writers. Mailer attended Harvard. Leggett himself attended Phillips, Andover and Yale, while I taught at The Hill and both of us attended Harvard as graduate students and taught there. Apparently would-be writers are helped by a rigorous education, whether absorbing or imparting it. I am mindful that excellent writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, John Cheever, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote attended no college, so I cannot argue that such an education is a sine qua non for a writer, but for some of us it does make the difference.

  At the time I began studying contemporary writers I was unaware that I was concentrating solely on young men, for in those days I was dealing in my lectures with men writing about war. Later I realized how macho I had been and how sexist in my literary choices. I therefore took a summer off to read only books by the emerging women writers, and only then did I appreciate how blinkered my eyes had been.

  This delinquency surprised me, because women writers had played a major role in my intellectual life. Lady Murasaki, Selma Lagerlöf and Sigrid Undset had introduced me to foreign-language worlds, and I considered George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights among our finest novels. Belatedly I discovered Edith Wharton’s short stories and had been enchanted by Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, and in Scotland I had enjoyed two exquisitely crafted minor novels then widely read but now forgotten, Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph and Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. Now I would catch up with the American women. Once more I settled upon three as my group of women writers, as if the concept of a trio had some mystical significance. Because I had focused on British writers I had missed three fine Americans (Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wolfe), but had been transfixed by the tragedies of three American contemporaries (Lockridge, Heggen, Burns) and entertained by the public antics of another American trio (Mailer, Vidal, Capote). It was to be expected that I would begin my investigation with three women.

  The first who commanded my attention was Sylvia Plath, who had been recommended to me many times, but whose Bell Jar I had not found the time to read. As I read it I could see that it was beautifully written, sensitive and allusive, but also so innately feminine that I could not imagine having written a word of it myself. I was disgusted by the callous way in which the author lampooned the woman writer who had provided her with scholarship funds and disliked her treatment of her mother. When I finished I felt that I had been in the presence of someone living on the edge and was not surprised that she committed suicide while still a young woman.

  The second book I picked up in my foray into women’s writing was another winner: Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, which alternates vibrant dialogue and philosophical essays in a masterly way. It seemed to me that if she maintained the course she had obviously set for herself, she was bound to become the preeminent black writer of our time.

  The final member of my distinguished trio was a woman I was already aware of, because Joyce Carol Oates had a splendid reputation, but I had not yet read one of her books. Now, as I dug into them, I found them completely to my taste, fine-grained, firmly set in a lower-middle-class milieu, and populated with strong characters about whom I cared. She reminded me of an American Zola, and I could see that her talent was so securely rooted that she was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Sylvia Plath. She injected into her writing a kind of liquid granite, and I could see that she had ahead of her a long and increasingly strong career. I had no feeling that I was reading an essentially feminine writer; she was just a fine, solid storyteller.

  In my reading that summer I encountered several other books I would recommend to anyone wanting to catch up with our women writers. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire is an inventive tale about two New Orleans male vampires who seek a woman partner and get by mistake a fourteen-year-old girl who proves a terror. It’s a masterpiece in its genre. Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays impressed me with its excellent use of language, and I could see why her reputation had blossomed. Judith Rossner’s explosive Looking for Mr. Goodbar blew my mind with its sexual explicitness and taught me how far from my early training in literature we had come.

  I wanted to finish my survey with the work of someone in my own generation, and I did so with a selection of short stories by Eudora Welty, in whose work I found the repose amid storms that I admire. She accomplishes so much with so little, sets her stage with such precision and moves her Southern players on it with effortless ease. She is an artist, the doyenne of her group, and she must be amused and sometimes startled by what those who trail behind her are doing.

  I will probably not find time for another vacation seminar in women’s writing f
or some years, but when I do I suppose that I will again be startled by what moves and advances have been made during my absence.

  If I have not played the public role that Mailer and my other heroes have, I have not gone entirely unnoticed, and on three occasions I have been honored publicly. When I was working on my novel dealing with Chesapeake Bay, a body of water I loved and of which I was created an admiral by the State of Maryland, I was invited to serve as grand marshal of the yearly Crisfield Crab Festival, which did honor to one of the bay’s major industries, crabbing. Crisfield is a small waterfront town on the more impoverished eastern shore of the bay, but during its festival it puts on a major show, with the grand marshal required to test personally the two dozen finalists in the competition to see who could devise the tastiest dish using crabmeat, one of the world’s most delectable foods.

  Crabmeat can be baked in a casserole, deep-fried in cakes of delectable quality, mixed with green peppers and tomatoes and other tasty ingredients, or prepared in a luscious salad with one of half a dozen different dressings. Crab may be very close to what the gods eat if they have diligent fishermen up there, and I was chosen to judge this important contest for a curious reason.

  When I took up residence on the Eastern Shore, I did not care to explain that I was thinking of writing a book, so I let it be noised abroad that I had come down to run a test: ‘Who prepares the very best crabcakes on the Shore?’ This was one of the smartest ploys I ever devised, for in the succeeding years housewives from all over, and restaurants too, asked me to judge their product and I rated each on a scale of 1 to 10 and became known as a very harsh judge, for after a while I was capable of telling an inept housewife: ‘Sorry, but this one cannot possibly go higher than 2.9.’ I always used decimals. But occasionally I would go into raptures, rise and kiss the cook and proclaim: ‘Madam, this one rates at least an 8.7 and if you want to lie to your neighbors and say I gave you an 8.9, be my guest.’

  There was a couple in Oxford, Bob and Mary Inglis, who gathered their own crabs and used the flaky meat in the best results I would ever taste, a soufflé at 9.6 and a set of impeccable cakes at 9.5. When someone asked me why, if I praised them so highly, I did not award 9.9 at least, I replied: ‘I suspect there’s someone up in heaven who is the master cook of them all, and I don’t want to use up my numbers.’

  Even today, in restaurants I frequently order crabcakes, seeking to remind myself of the ambrosial food I’d had on the Shore, and have been so disappointed that I almost gag. Not long ago, in an expensive restaurant where the cakes would register not more than 2.1 by Crisfield standards but cost fifteen dollars, I blurted out as I pushed the plate away: ‘That son-of-a-bitch ought to be shot!’ and patrons looked up in surprise, as did my wife, who explained to the others: ‘My husband takes his crabcakes seriously, and the cook who made these things really should be shot.’

  So I was a reasonable candidate for the job as grand marshal and ultimate authority on crabmeat delicacies, but as the parade was about to start, well-meaning friends came up to my car and whispered: ‘Now, if they start throwing eggs and tomatoes, it’s not you they’re trying to get. It’s the mayor. We’re trying to impeach him, and he sees this as a chance to ride in the parade with you as protection. He doubts that people will want to mess you up.’

  It was one of the chilliest parades I have seen, and certainly the ugliest I have ever been in personally. We rode through Crisfield in dead silence, and no matter where I looked, left or right, I was greeted with stony and hate-filled stares. No hand-clapping, not even any hisses, only those baleful stares. But the unpleasantness of the morning was forgotten in the joy of the noontime testing. I moved enthusiastically past all the entries, tasting each liberally, and awarded several marks above 8.5, several at 8.8 and 8.9 and two in the low 9’s. It was a day of honor I often recall, depressing in the morning, elating in the afternoon, and brimming with contentment as I rode homeward.

  Another honor bestowed on me turned out to be a somewhat dubious blessing. It happened rather suddenly. A meeting of one of my commissions in Washington was terminated ahead of time because someone from the White House wanted to talk with me: ‘Michener, could you leave for Japan tomorrow night?’

  ‘Wife also?’

  ‘Of course. We want you to serve as President Ford’s personal representative and honorary ambassador to the international Festival of Oceans being held in Okinawa.’

  ‘That would be a distinct honor.’

  At the airport my wife and I were met by Clifford Forster, a most personable young man in his late thirties and a diplomatic courier for the State Department: ‘I’ll be accompanying you to Okinawa. I suppose you know what this is all about?’

  ‘I know nothing, except that the White House assured me my commission would be aboard the plane.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, tapping his courier’s bag. ‘The brouhaha has been most embarrassing. We had one of the top senators prepared to undertake the job you’re taking, but the social staff at the White House pulled a real boo-boo. He was chosen for the job because of his great interest in Japan, but when the guest list for last night’s gala dinner at the White House for the Emperor and Empress of Japan was published, his name wasn’t on it.…’

  ‘We went,’ Mari said, ‘and you’re right, your man wasn’t there.’

  ‘So the senator became furious and yelled: “If you don’t want me at your dinner, you don’t want me in Okinawa.” Damn lucky you were available.’

  We had a great flight to Anchorage, where we laid over for a day so that I could rest and enjoy the mountain scenery, then we enjoyed flying over the Aleutians, which I scouted against the possibility I might one day want to write about them, and on to a stopover in Tokyo, where a group of rather burly American men, in their forties and all dressed in blue suits, came aboard and sat where they could watch me.

  Only then did Mr. Forster reveal the facts: ‘The men in the back there are United States Secret Service agents, called in from all parts of the Pacific. Intelligence, both Japanese and American, have heard that Communists might try to assassinate you. It would be very embarrassing to everybody to have it happen out here while the Emperor was in Washington. It would make Hirohito and Ford lose face.’ Mari said it would make me lose quite a bit more than face.

  ‘That’s what I’m here to prevent,’ he said and with that he handed me my commission. I was asked by the president to represent him in all ways, to be courteous as always to the Japanese officials, and to make America’s presence at the fair as normal and uneventful as I could. When I landed I was greeted by the permanent ambassador to the fair, William Lane, the urbane publisher and editor of Sunset Magazine.

  We dined with the Lanes, a congenial couple, and when we retired to our room we found that we had been given a suite, with the outside room occupied by three very big and strong men. When I asked what they were doing they said: ‘We sleep here. Some of us will be with you all the way.’ It was a tense three days, not made easier by being told that when the crown prince had been in Okinawa some time before, the would-be murderers had shot at him but had missed.

  The fair, which displayed the Japanese at their best and where my wife spoke to the officials in their language, much to their delight, is memorable especially for what served as pillars to the main entrance: two immense cylindrical fish tanks, at least a full story high. Inside the one to the right was a dazzling school of thousands of small, bright blue fish, in the one to the left an equal number of brilliant red fish. I can still see them, those giant columns of shimmering color; they were worth the trip.

  With that track record for near-disastrous public appearances, one might think that I would shy away from such affairs, and I do; each of the first two had been forced upon me in a fashion I could not reject, and now a third came my way, the most glamorous of all. Since I had always been an avid sports fan, had written a full-length book about games, had started Indianapolis-style races at Pocono in Pennsylvania and thrown out t
he baseball at a World Series game, it was not illogical that when I was working in Miami I should be asked to serve as grand marshal of the Orange Bowl parade and the subsequent New Year’s Day game. I was the more inclined to accept because the two contending teams, Nebraska and Miami, in the past had each given me doctorates and were in a sense my alma maters.

  The story is brief and pathetic. As in all I do, I like to report to an assignment at least a half hour before the event starts. When I reached the staging area for the eighty-odd floats, I was so early that they put me in a hospitality trailer, where I sat beside Susan Ruttan, one of the major characters in the television show L.A. Law. I had a most delightful conversation with her about the theater, and the time passed pleasantly.

  Apparently, the people running the show forgot where they had put me, so when the time came for my big moment and the immense float on which I was to ride started out, they could not find me. The float left the staging area and covered the first half of the parade with no one in the high seat of honor.

  Belatedly, someone recalled seeing me headed toward a corner of the lot, and after banging on all doors, they found me still chatting with Miss Ruttan, but it was obviously too late. We were about a quarter of a mile from where the empty float would, in four minutes, pass the television cameras, but a policeman shouted: ‘I think we can make it by the back road.’ I was thrown into the sidecar of a police motorcycle and we began a mad dash through alleyways and crowded feeder lanes, reaching the still-moving float one minute before camera time.

  A cherry-picker crane was waiting to hoist me into my elevated chair, and an NBC technician climbed aboard to hook up my television microphone. When, at the last second, delightful Sandy Duncan, hostess of the parade, cried enthusiastically to the nation: ‘And here he comes, the grand marshal of our parade,’ all that the cameras caught was the rump of the NBC man as he bent over to affix my mike.