Iberia, my book on Spain, was the first of three of my works that were officially banned by the nations about which they were written; the Franco government objected to things I had said about the all-important Guardia Civil and the quasi-religious secret fraternity Opus Dei. The case with Poland was much the same, for my novel of that name was banned by the Communist rulers, who felt that my comments on their master, the Soviet Union, were unacceptable. But the most instructive was the problem with South Africa over The Covenant, which was banned by government censors, who castigated it for its ‘errors and distortions.’
Interestingly, in the first two cases, Spain and Poland, the governments found that the books they had banned were appearing in the luggage of most visitors to their country and many travelers said they had come to the country primarily because they had read the book. So in time each ban was quietly lifted and the governments even invited me to come visit and receive honors because my books had created so much international goodwill.
The South African matter was more difficult, but also more amusing, for after having blasted my book and threatening police action against anyone bringing it into the country—this done to appease the hard right-wingers—the government unobtrusively lifted the ban with no public notice on these stated grounds: ‘Mr. Michener’s book is so poorly written that it does not merit banning. Nobody would bother to buy it or read it.’ At the time this was said, scores of citizens inside the country were writing to me, saying how much they treasured the book because it spoke truthfully of a land they knew and loved. Strangers from foreign lands arriving at the big airport at Johannesburg carry the book with them, and write me a letter confirming or rejecting things I’ve said, and government inspectors know this. I expect that before I die I will be invited back to South Africa by persons aware of the wide readership the book has had and the good it has done, and if health permits, I will go.
But the incident that best illustrates the first reactions and later reassessments regarding best-sellers occurred with the publication of Texas, when three of the major opinion makers in the state simply tore the book apart with a viciousness I had never before experienced. They resorted to personal attacks, distortions of their own history and comments that had little to do with books or the exchange of ideas. I did not, in obedience to my long-established custom, read any of these character assassinations, but my wife and friends did, and they insisted upon sharing their outrage with me. I found nothing to complain of, because I remembered the admonition of my old mentor Hugh Kahler: ‘If you spend 1322 pages saying what you think of Texas, they have a right to spend six pages saying what they think of you.’
Offsetting these public blasts were the hundreds of letters that came pouring in, mostly from Texans, assuring me that my novel was one of the finest depictions of their state ever published, and in subsequent years that chorus has continued until I had the quiet satisfaction of knowing that 1.3 million copies were in circulation and being avidly read. Under such circumstances it requires no courage for a writer to absorb initial attacks without complaint.
I must clarify one bittersweet aspect of my career. I have always been fiercely determined never to promote myself, or speak well of myself to others, or in any manner to inflate or excite public opinion in my behalf. A score of media people, after interviewing me, have said: ‘Mr. Michener has only a modest opinion of himself and acknowledges that he is not a very good writer.’ These have not been preposterous conclusions, for whenever I have been asked point-blank what I think of myself, I have shrugged, smiled and allowed the questioner to form his own opinion, and if forcibly pinned down for a statement, I have said: ‘I know a score of writers as good as I am—I was the lucky one.’ I cannot recall a single instance in my life when I have said that I deserved a higher assessment than the questioner was willing to grant. The most I have said has been: ‘Toko-Ri is a good short novel,’ or ‘The Source was a massive effort,’ or ‘Iberia may be around for a long time, not because it’s particularly well written, but because it deals with one of the world’s most exuberant civilizations.’
Newspaper and television people have described me as ‘more like a small-town businessman or diffident professor in some minor college than an author,’ or said: ‘He shied away from any discussion of his merit, as if he knew his success was not warranted.’ They mistook my courtesy to them for indifference, my refusal to blow my own horn for a lack of critical insight, but if they were misguided, the fault was mine, not theirs. My job has been to write books, not defend them.
* * *
* Shortly after writing this paragraph, I did submit to a publisher in another country the entire manuscript of a novel on a floppy disk. The future had caught up with me.
† But a major bookstore sponsored in part by a leading intellectual agency of the islands refuses to carry Hawaii on the grounds that it is of no merit, despite the fact that visitors ask for it constantly.
XII
Health
Once when I was knocking about Egypt I came upon an unusually gifted fortune-teller named the Princess, who startled people who ventured into her bar with the accuracy of her comment. She was a Gypsy-like woman in her late forties, very quick of mind and sharp of eye. Using an ordinary deck of cards, she asked her subject to cut them twice so that she would have no control of what they were about to reveal, and then dealt them out into six vertical columns of eight cards, placed so that every card was totally visible.
This meant that forty-eight cards were exposed and four were left over, and part of her skill was showing how she identified and used both groups. Before starting to lay out the forty-eight she told her eager subject: ‘Since I want this to be your fortune, not mine, you are to stop me four times as I work, and we’ll set the next card aside, face down like this, and at the end they will disclose the heart of your fortune.’ Then she smiled warmly: ‘Besides, that will make the other cards fall as you want them, not in the order I might want.’ She said this with such a display of heartfelt honesty, as if duplicity were farthest from her mind, that she convinced her listener that this was going to be the most scientifically accurate and morally honest fortune he or she would ever be told.
She then launched into amazing revelations about the subject’s past, present and future, and sometimes as I watched she would make a statement whose accuracy staggered her listener. One night when she was telling the fortune of an English sailor whose ship had either just passed through the Suez Canal or was about to, she said: ‘Last week you had a marvelous adventure, young man. In Lourenço Marques you fell in love with a beautiful Portuguese girl, for whom you bought a fine gift. One of the best things you’ve ever done.’
‘My God!’ the sailor gasped. ‘Who told you?’ and with a smile that would melt an iceberg, she said softly: ‘You did. The way you came to my table. You either found money you didn’t expect or love. Lucky you,’ and he paid her double for her happy insight.
After I had watched her for some evenings, she saw that I was more than passively interested in her skill, and my answers to her questions satisfied her that I too had concerns about her art and under my insistent questioning she revealed her remarkable system for fortune-telling.
‘You can see that I have the subject cut the cards so that it’ll be his fortune, not mine, and that I then arrange them—or rather he arranges them through his cutting—in six columns. These stand left to right, for Head, Heart, Home, Health, Wealth and Travel. The top rows in each column summarize the past, the bottom the future, and the group through the middle— part top, part bottom—the present. The four left over at the end, as you’ve heard me say, they’re the heart of the affair.’
‘But how does the fortune reveal itself?’ and she explained: ‘Certain obvious facts. Ace, King, Queen are favorable, Ace representing raw power, King masculine traits, Queen feminine. Anyone could deduce that. The two is bad luck, but the threes, though also negative, aren’t merely bad, they’re evil. The Jack really is a knave, bu
t the tens are like a mother’s love, great, solid and dependable.’ She had comparable evaluations of the six less spectacular cards.
She then turned to the suits: ‘Spades are power. Hearts are love. Diamonds are wealth. Clubs are the great contradictions of life, the complexities. Three of Clubs is one of the most powerful in the deck, ten of Hearts the most reassuring. I love that card and am always happy when it turns up in the right place.’
Tapping her table, she said: ‘So there are your forty-eight cards in the order you determined, and here are the four secret ones,’ and with that she began to run down each of the six visible columns, but not in order: ‘Never allow the subject to see which column you’re looking at when you say something. And of course, he’s not like you. He doesn’t know what the six rows stand for.’
With that, never allowing me to detect where she was looking, she began to tell my fortune, dealing majestically with past and present, with future aspirations and making unbelievably close guesses about many aspects of my life on which no one in that bar or in Egypt could have instructed her. Toward the close of a remarkable exhibition of insight, shrewd guessing and plain common sense, she pointed to the last vertical column, the one to the extreme right: ‘As I told you, this reveals your Travel, past and future, but that includes more than just taking a plane trip or a hiking vacation. It means also your spiritual and occupational journey through life. It’s a most significant column.’ She then tapped the four additional cards, neatly stacked face down: ‘They unravel the secrets of your most intimate wish. Make it, but don’t tell me what it is. I mustn’t be influenced one way or another,’ and when I made a wish concerning a writing matter that I hoped would be settled in my favor, she turned over the cards, one by one and with extreme care to ensure that they preserved the order in which I had selected them. They were the Seven of Diamonds, the Jack of Hearts, the Nine of Hearts and the Three of Clubs. As soon as she saw them she grasped my left arm and said: ‘My friend! Whatever it was you wished, cast it from your mind. For if it were to come true, it would devastate you—destroy you. Look at those terrible cards.’ She did not explain where the terror resided, but I remembered what she had said about the Three of Clubs and any Jack, but she surprised me by saying as she gathered up the cards of my fortune: ‘She would drag you through hell if you ran down that alley.’ My wish had nothing to do with women, only a publishing problem, and I was about to tell her that whereas the main fortune was surprisingly apt, that revealed by the four cards had been totally irrelevant when I remembered that I had thought vaguely of a business association with a professional woman in New York and that if she did things her way I would be in trouble.
In later sessions my guide revealed some of her rules: ‘Never burlesque the cards. Tell the subject whatever the cards indicate, no matter how ridiculous it may seem to you. Use any secret information your subject reveals, but don’t try to base your fortune on being clever. Stick with the cards. They’ll do your work for you. Remember that all human beings are vitally concerned with your six headings. “Am I bright enough to master the new job?” “Will she really love me?” “Is my home safe?” “Am I about to die?” “How in the world can I gain more money?” and for some curious reason I’ve never understood: “Will I be able to take a trip to get out of this damned place?” Provide guidance on those topics and you’ll be a great fortune-teller.’
‘I have no ambitions in that line,’ I said, and she placed her hands on mine: ‘Oh, yes, you do. I’ve never had a stranger sit in that chair who showed such interest. You could take my place at this table tomorrow and tell fortunes almost as well as I do.’
‘How can you say that?’
She surprised me by saying: ‘Because natural-born writers have to have the interest and insights that I do; if you didn’t, you’d never be able to write much that’s good.’
‘How do you know I’m a writer?’ I asked, and she said: ‘With your degree of interest you’re either a detective or an accountant chasing thieves or a writer.’
She then told me one of the great secrets of her profession: ‘Never, never say anything as foolish as “You’re going on a trip.” You can’t gain points that way. Always be specific and say, for example, “You’re leaving for Cyprus on Thursday.” ’
I gasped: ‘Why Cyprus?’ for that was where I was going, and on Thursday.
‘From things you’ve hinted I judged you were interested in the Bible and that you might be working in Jerusalem. Just a guess.’
‘But why did you say Cyprus?’
She smiled: ‘Because I know that with the Arabs and Jews mad at each other, you can’t fly direct from Cairo to Jerusalem. You have to go through Cyprus. And Thursday? The Egyptian government doesn’t give unlimited visas, and you’ve been here quite a while. Time to get out.’
When I had digested that, she said: ‘Always remember how surprised the English sailor was that night when I told him about the Portuguese beauty in Lourenço Marques. Simple. If he was from a ship he was certain to be headed through the Suez Canal, going either back home or out to India or Australia. Why should I waste points saying: “You’re going on a visit?” Of course he is, so pick something reasonable. He may stop over at Malta, or go on to New Zealand. Why not take a real guess at Mozambique, and if you do, go all the way and pick a specific city. Lourenço Marques is such a lovely pair of words. Use it. And there are always girls, of that you can be sure.’
Some years later my home district in Pennsylvania decided to launch an arts festival to run a weekend each summer, and under the enthusiastic guidance of my friend Bill Vitarelli it became an outstanding success, raising large sums of money for local charities. All citizens were urged to contribute some skill to the affair, and someone who had heard me speak about my experiences with the Egyptian Princess proposed that I tell fortunes at the festival. So a tent was procured and set up near the center of the grounds and in it I sat with my deck of cards and an outrageous hat and scarf that might, if the viewer were charitable, be considered Egyptian. Billed as ‘Mitch the Witch’ I followed my tutor’s instructions to the extent that I remembered them. I asked the subject to cut the cards and to stop me four times as I spread them. The six columns were observed, with no spectator ever informed as to what the headings were, and with a certain confidence in my system of good Ten of Hearts, wretched Three of Clubs, I began to tell some of the wildest fortunes ever heard in rural Pennsylvania, featuring sex, criminal behavior, theft of documents and eloping wives.
Such fortune-telling became a sensation, and by sheer accident I hit just enough truths or near-truths to cause neighbors to tell others of the remarkable record I was compiling as a man who could really foresee past and future. It was then that I uncovered the real secret that the Princess had kept from me. In the course of telling a fortune the seer makes about forty-five separate statements, and at least thirty-five will be totally wide of the mark, but if he or she succeeds in the remaining ten to hit even one right on the nose, that is what is remembered, and the subject leaves the tent asking his friends: ‘How could he have known that I bought stock in a dairy company?’ It was a string of those lucky hits that established my reputation and began to attract clients from considerable distances.
In the process I discovered that one of the profound secrets of fortune-telling is that subjects want to believe what they are being told and will sometimes go to extreme lengths to make the prophecies come true. My reputation was sizably enhanced in the case of Mr. Kenderdine, whose Travel column showed much activity in the immediate future. Obedient to the counsel given me by the Princess I did not tell him: ‘It looks as if you will be taking a trip one of these days.’ Instead, I said: ‘I see that you’re heading for Omaha next Tuesday, and I’m glad to say that your business interest there will work out in your favor.’
The impact on Mr. Kenderdine was astonishing. He looked at me, shook his head in disbelief and walked off without telling me in what way I had struck home, but later I heard
from many neighbors: ‘That fortune you told Kenderdine. He did leave home Tuesday as you said. He did go to Omaha and things did work out favorably.’ It seemed to me that such a threefold verification defied the laws of probability, and when I checked into what had actually happened I learned that his company had indeed sent Kenderdine west on business but to Kansas City, not Omaha. However, when he completed his work there he went, of his own accord, to Omaha, where he unexpectedly engineered a deal of some importance to his company, and when he returned home he told everyone: ‘That fellow Michener is unbelievable,’ and my reputation grew.
After I witnessed this phenomenon of the self-fulfilling prophecy several times, it occurred to me that the readers of serious fiction are much like a fortune-teller’s clients: they are disposed to believe what has been thrown at them and unless the writer betrays them grievously, they willingly, and at times eagerly, go along with him. His task, of course, is to construct his narrative so that they can believe and to avoid with the most intense care any statement or situation that will awaken them to the fact that this is only fiction.
Never in my fortune-telling did I break one of the Princess’s basic rules: ‘Don’t burlesque the system.’ I told my subjects only what the cards revealed, which meant that I followed those cards wherever they led, and this faithfulness produced some of my most startling hits. One day at the festival there came into my tent a most beautiful young lady, obviously proud of her appearance and attended by three or four young men of about her age. She had come, they told me as I started to lay out her cards, from Somerville, a suburban town of some importance across the Delaware River in New Jersey.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 54