‘Isn’t this a grand parade, Mr. Michener?’ Sandy asked, and my reply came loud and clear: ‘Gggrrrmmmfff’ as the technician’s posterior blanked out both my face and my voice.
I decided that I was not available for any more public honors. However, just as I started work on these notes I was informed that my home county, historic Bucks in Pennsylvania, was proposing an action that so delighted me that I could not withhold support. The old jail on Ashland Street opposite the wonderful Mercer Museum featuring the Tools of Nation Makers was about to be converted into an art museum, with a big new public library to be erected close at hand. The museum was already named after Henry Mercer, our town’s leading and some say only intellectual; the library was to be named after Pearl Buck, our Nobel Prize winner and humanitarian; and the jail was to be renamed the Michener Art Museum. I had hitherto resisted having buildings named after me, but this gracious invitation I could not turn down, because I delighted in the irony that when I was a troublesome boy in town many had predicted that I would sooner or later wind up in that very jail, and here I was eighty years later doing exactly that.
I would like to be remembered in my hometown as a man who helped convert a jail into an art museum.
* * *
* On the day my first royalty check arrived I sent a letter to Sylvia Porter, whom I had met while we were both having lunch at Sardi’s: ‘Dear Sylvia, it looks as if I will be receiving a weekly check for some years ahead. What should I do with my money?’ She replied: ‘Dear Jim, I am far too clever to try to handle my own money myself. I allow a man at Merrill Lynch to do it for me, and here’s his name.’ John Sullivan accepted every spare dollar I received and protected it so that I would have something to fall back on if my later books failed.
† He has. From his industrious pen has continued to flow a unique mix of intelligent novels and masterfully argued religious essays. His reputation is solid.
XI
Best-seller
When anyone refers to me as a ‘best-selling author’ I wince because I do not like either of those two words applied to me. The first, of course, has a specific denotation: a book that sells over a hundred thousand copies in hardcover, or the number could even be as low as fifty thousand, or thirty. If that happens to one of an author’s books it’s noteworthy but possibly accidental; if it occurs repeatedly, he or she is a best-seller. But the word has come to be pejorative, implying that the author is interested only in big sales and making money; what is worse, it suggests that the books she or he writes are junk; such implications are not fair, but they are understandable and inescapable.
I do not like the second word either and have always tried to avoid thinking of myself as an author, because as I have mentioned earlier, I was taught as a child that authors were pompous American men of the last century who wore beards and had three-barreled names, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes. I wanted to be a writer, like Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert and Leo Tolstoy, and I have tried always to describe myself with that honorable word. When people ask me what I do, I reply: ‘I write books.’
Given such an attitude, how did I develop into a best-seller? I think it was because I was driven by the passion to produce good books within the great tradition that I had discovered when working with those admirable works published in London during the latter years of the last century, and fortunately I wrote some that were widely accepted. Always I was guided by a simple credo: ‘Writing is never completed till it’s published.’ Obviously the three key terms require explanation.
I use writing as a convenient shorthand for the entire world of literary expression: poems, opera librettos, novels, dramas, essays, biographies.
The most difficult term to explain is completed. I have always believed the artistic experience to be a kind of moral and aesthetic contract between the creator and the audience, and the more deeply I probe this relationship, the more convinced I am of its correctness. One starts a novel with the implicit understanding that the end product is a book that another person can acquire, hold, read and enjoy. If the second half of this contract is not fulfilled, the totality of this operation is negated.
By published I not only mean the issuing of the printed version of a manuscript but also mean the circulation of the manuscript among one’s peers, and I would accept the loosest possible interpretation of that phrase, including the sharing of one’s work with a close circle of discerning friends, as in the case of Emily Dickinson. Here was a poet who wrote many marvelous poems but refused to publish them in book form during her lifetime. In fact, out of 1,775, only seven saw publication in any form, and those only in a small-town newspaper of limited circulation. But she did attain another form of publication by circulating some of her work among friends or counselors whose opinions she cherished. Inordinately shy, she nevertheless fell in love several times, usually with some married man, and wrote nearly two thousand letters as elegant as her poems. She remains one of the world’s major artists most difficult to categorize, but within the broad scope of my definition she published quite widely, if only among those she felt worthy of her efforts and likely to understand them. For her the concept peer seems to have been paramount.
To repeat, writing is never completed until it’s published, and I wish to make a blunt statement: Something written in a so-called ivory tower for oneself alone, to be shared with no one else, is not completed writing, and those who believe that it is are deluding themselves, because the implied contract with the reader has not been fulfilled. Ivory-tower writing might be useful as therapy or helpful if it is an exercise to develop skill before real writing is attempted, but as an end in itself it is without value, and it invites the outside observer to conclude that the writer has been afraid to test his work in the real world.
Having said that as harshly as I can, let me quickly add that when I use the word publish in relation to a written manuscript, I am not only willing but eager to define the word as broadly as possible. Reading the work aloud to three maiden aunts is publishing; taking the manuscript to a home for elderly people and allowing it to be passed around is publishing; reading it to the members of a creative writing class is publishing; allowing a local free newspaper to print it without pay is publishing; allowing it to be abbreviated on a calendar is publishing; and even paying as Dr. Deppard did for a vanity press to print it is publishing. Any honorable and legal device whereby the writer can communicate his work to others is just as much publishing as having it brought out in a fine hardcover form by Knopf.
I have no hierarchy of value in which only publication in certain accepted forms is admissible; the task is to transform one’s writing from an exclusive possession into an exchange among one’s fellows; but I do have this advice: if you achieve printed reproduction of your manuscript, deposit copies in your local library and your county historical society. In my work I have used with excellent results historical books published under the most bizarre circumstances, and I do not mean good historical books and certainly not fine-looking; I mean some of the craziest-looking books you have ever seen, invaluable because of their authenticity and the obvious love that moved someone to create them two hundred years ago. Dr. Deppard’s book may be invaluable someday sixty years from now when someone like me is trying to comprehend what Denver dentistry was like in the 1980s, or how a Rocky Mountain dentist earned his living in those years. Such filing is also publishing—for future circulation.
I am not so indifferent to public reaction as to argue that even the most trivial form of publication is equivalent to the most impressive; there are gradations of quality, and to appreciate this fact let us consider a talented musician who has composed an opera. He has available to him several kinds and levels of publication. He can circulate his libretto and score to his friends who can read music and visualize stage production, and they can assure him that his work has first-rate qualities. Friends can arrange a run-through with him at the piano with a few selected singers sk
etching out the arias, and additional vitality is pumped into the score. Or an orchestra can arrange a concertized version with six strong voices and a full orchestral score but no scenery or action, and from this the knowing listener can form a fairly accurate opinion of the work. But none of these commendable substitutes can replace a full-blown performance by a major opera company with a complete cast, excellent staging and a seventy-piece orchestra led by a conductor experienced in opera. All previous alternatives are justifiable, but the full, professional performance before an audience is the desired end product when one says: ‘X has composed an opera.’
When I hear: ‘X has written a novel’ I wish it well and hope that if it contains sufficient intellectual content and is arranged in a form that pleases the reader, it will likely be accepted by a commercial publisher, who will help it find a place on the shelves of public and private libraries. I am grateful that I have been able to publish some thirty books that more or less agree with the preceding description. But I am certain that had I not won the favor of a publisher, I would have continued writing, and I am sure I would have had enough faith in what I was attempting that if someone unexpectedly willed me $4,800 I might very well have published with J. Pitt Barclay’s Vanitatis Press, because I am so convinced that publishing is the end goal of writing that I would accept it in almost any form.
I should now like to trace the events, whereby my desire to write good books that people would like to read led to my becoming a best-selling writer. I started, as mentioned before, with an extremely lucky Pulitzer Prize, but in one sense it did me damage, because people in the world of books who were either surprised or irritated by my winning were lying in wait for my second effort, The Fires of Spring, and chortled when it appeared: ‘Michener has demonstrated yet again that acceptable first novels are usually followed by unacceptable second ones.’ My agent rejected it because he deemed it disappointing, and so did George Brett, the president of Macmillan, while John Horne Burns gave it an annihilating review. Some of this adverse reception was justified, for it was the kind of book with which beginning writers customarily start their careers, a novel about growing up and about learning to write; it was the book I should have written first, and to have it appear ex post facto, as it were, apparently struck the wrong note.
The salient fact about my writing career is that I have been able to keep it remarkably viable during the fifth through the ninth decade of my life, and I hope it will continue to be so in the 1990s. Not many accomplish this, and in my case the explanation has been, I think, that I have remained alert to all that has been happening about me; I have tried to stay in contact with young people; I have tried always to be active; and, above all, I have had a burning desire to maintain a productive creative life, always looking ahead to new challenges, never back to old victories, which seem inconsequential when reviewed from today’s vantage point. I was willing to write The Fires of Spring out of order because I felt that it was a book that had to be written even though I was in my forties and it was the kind of book normally written when one is in one’s twenties or thirties. I have never regretted that decision, because through the years it has probably brought me more mail from readers than any other book I’ve written, having caught the imagination of young people who were pondering the direction their lives should take. I doubt that I have ever had a letter about it from a reader past the age of thirty-five, except to recall that it had a life-changing effect when he or she read the book as a teenager.
As soon as it became apparent that I could earn a modest living writing, I decided to write in a variety of different fields. As explained earlier, I had an abiding love of art, so I wrote five books on Japanese art. In every instance the publisher to whom I took my manuscript had doubts about its ultimate success, but I barreled ahead, sometimes putting up my own money to ensure publication. I was gratified to see those books gain wide acceptance, some going into reprintings and several into foreign languages. Today first editions have become quite valuable.
I wrote also about a handful of other subjects that interested me, and I believe that this scattering of attention helped keep my mind sharp. It is not easy to keep a literary career productive over a prolonged period; most fall short, and I believe it is often not a case of losing health or brainpower but of losing momentum. I did not jump about in my writing either by accident or lack of direction; I did it intentionally to keep my brain active and my imagination engaged. For that reason when I bought records of classical music, to which I am still passionately devoted, I also bought two of the most modern compositions, just to see what my contemporaries were attempting, and when I collected art it tended to be the most recent done, for the same reason.
I had great excitement in writing one of the crucial books of my career, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, because I wanted to see if I had the discipline and talent to write what is known as ‘the well-crafted English novel.’ When I was at Macmillan I had scorned those five books imported from London that had made me think that I might do well as a writer. I warmly remember the writing of that short novel partly because of the adventures I undertook to make myself competent: duty on an aircraft carrier, checking out the newer jet bombers, long hours in briefing rooms before and after bombing runs on enemy targets deep behind the lines in Korea. When an oversolicitious public relations officer warned the admiral: ‘The adverse publicity would be damaging if Michener was lost on one of these raids,’ he growled: ‘He said he wanted to be one of us. If he’s game, I’m game.’
It is something to crawl out of bed at 3:00 A.M., report to the briefing room to check the latest photographs of the target areas and the locations of enemy antiaircraft, then to climb into the rear seat of a dive bomber—it seems so damned far behind the pilot, so out of touch with him or anything else—and to be handed a box of Kleenex by an enlisted man who will have to care for the plane when it returns: ‘Kleenex, Mr. Michener. Them as throws up, cleans up.’ Since I would fly scores of missions, mostly noncombatant but in turbulent weather, I usually got airsick, so I did a lot of cleaning up.
Then, strapped in with restraints holding back the shoulders and stomach, to wheel out onto the catapult in blackness, to wait nervously for the signal, the flashlight sign from the deck officer to activate the catapult and that sudden, unbelievable jerk forward, eight or nine G’s—measures of gravity—which thrust the entire belly backward against the backbone, the fantastic leap forward, up to ninety miles an hour within the short length of the carrier, the takeoff and that perilous drop, more terrifying to witness from the bridge than to experience in the plane itself, because as the heavy bomber leaves the end of the runway it automatically drops, down, down, down toward the clutching waves until it seems to crash into them and sink, except that at the last minute the engines whine, the nose lifts up, and the plane miraculously gains altitude and is seen from the bridge to have completed a good takeoff. Of course, sometimes after leaving the forward lip of the ship the heavy plane does not recover and gain altitude; it keeps going straight down. Then sirens blast, deckhands run, helicopters take to the air, and all is chaos as brave men strive to rescue the pilot. On one ship I worked, a daring, bald-headed pilot named Paul Grey had ditched like that three times in icy water where survival time was calculated at seven minutes; you fished him out in seven minutes or counted him dead. I was so impressed with this cool hero who was still willing to fly again and take me along if I cared to go, that I wrote one of my best war stories about him, giving it free to the Navy for the widest possible distribution. I called it ‘The Bald Eagle of the Essex,’ and in it suggested that anyone like Grey who had gone down three times had done his duty and ought to be given a desk job. Headquarters in Washington agreed with me, and Grey flew no more night missions over Korea. When writers like me or journalists with a good reputation, such as Keyes Beech, Homer Bigart or Maggie Higgins, wish to work with troops in a battle zone, all the men are eager to have them go out with them on their missions in hopes that they will repo
rt honestly to the folks back home what life at the front is like, and also mention the unit’s name and perhaps even the individual men themselves. The result is one that few civilians appreciate: media people sometimes see far more actual warfare than the average man in uniform, because in a sense they seek it out, or it seeks them out, and they cannot wait for mere chance to dictate what they will run into. They look for trouble. During World War II I flew more missions than most, always as a hitchhiking passenger, and in Korea I saw many more actions, on the ground and aloft, than would have been expected in ordinary circumstances.
Lest I sound as if I had been exceptionally brave, I must emphasize that there is a vast difference between a media person and the average G.I. Whenever I grew exhausted or scared I could, of course, go back to safety, whereas the soldier in the dugout had to stay there and take it. One snowy day in Korea I drove right up to the front with a daring Marine general, who led me on foot to a forward gun position. He asked: ‘Want to lob one into their camp on that hillside?’ Eager for any experience, I stepped forward, pulled the lanyard and sent a huge shell heading for the Communist position. As soon as I had done this, the general and I leaped in his jeep and hightailed it to the rear, leaving the Marines in the forward position to defend themselves against the retaliatory barrage released by the enemy. I have been forever ashamed of that performance, to have caused incoming fire that I could escape but the Marines could not.
Now I was in the backseat of a Douglas dive bomber on a dawn mission to strike the target I would later change a bit and describe as the bridges at Toko-Ri. This morning we would see the bridges only from a distance, because we were diverted by the accidental discovery of a very long Communist supply train containing forty or fifty boxcars trying to sneak into the safety of a tunnel before full daylight. In sickening dives, which left me hawking, our bomber struck at the engine pulling the load, and, after three or four tries, knocked it off the tracks. Then, in runs down the length of the train, we tried to damage the individual boxcars, but I could see that we accomplished little. Another carrier plane, however, came in from a better angle and wreaked havoc.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 49