The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  On that cruise we landed on eight different Aleutian islands, and on each I covered the last fifty yards wading through the surf. I flew to the most remote outposts, including a helicopter landing at the forlorn spot on the edge of Arctic seas where round-the-world aviator Wiley Post and his passenger, Will Rogers, had fatally crashed in 1935. I paused to collect seashore stones to outline his monument, as I had done with the lonely memorials of James Cook on a remote beach in Hawaii, Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, Pierre Loti in Tahiti, Ernie Pyle on the tiny island of Ie-jima near Okinawa. On other journeys and in other ways I had saluted the graves of Chopin in Paris, Henry Fielding in Lisbon, and Wladyslaw Reymont in Warsaw. I feel a strong affinity with men and women who have excited my imagination and always seek to pay them honor.

  The move to Alaska was one of the most sensible I ever made, because it finally discharged an obligation to myself that I had ignored for many decades, but in my long walks around Sitka at night, including climbs up the hill from which Aleksandr Baranov had surveyed his domain when serving as governor of Russian Alaska, I began to experience so much additional pain from my hip that one night I had great difficulty in reaching my log cabin on Jefferson Davis Avenue, and when I finally limped into the room where my wife was waiting, I said simply: ‘This is too much. Let’s call the doctor.’

  Once the decision was made to have the operation I made intensive inquiries and learned that since the early days when I had found that eight of my twelve friends had had negative results, procedures had improved radically. One expert told me: ‘We’ve developed an entirely new approach. We don’t make the steel inserts highly polished like before and then fasten them to the interior of the bone with a glue which, though powerful, does deteriorate in ten or eleven years. Now we make the steel as rough as possible, crisscrossed with reticulations, drive it home with no glue whatever, and invite the bone itself to grow into the interstices, locking everything together, forever.’

  An impartial referee from a major center in Boston told me: ‘The no-glue process seems to work well and promise an indefinite life. But we have no extended track record on it. We know that the present method of epoxy-fixed smooth steel works, but the hardened glue does ultimately begin to fragment and require replacement. We’re advising: “If you’re under age fifty, by all means try the new system and gamble on a lifelong solution. If you’re over seventy-five, by all means use the old method, because you might get fifteen years of good use, and who cares after that?” When I asked about the fellow between fifty and seventy-five, he said: ‘You toss a coin.’

  When it came time to select the specific doctor to do the job, I was given more reassuring news by his nurse: ‘Our man is remarkable. He’s learned to cut your entire hip apart without damaging muscle. You won’t believe how quickly you’ll be out of bed, and when you get home you’ll walk without crutches—all you’ll need is a four-legged walker.’

  I had the operation in Miami, where flat land and kindly temperatures would encourage me to walk long, easy miles in rehabilitation. I chose the old-style, smooth steel insert and lots of epoxy, and the second night after the operation I was taking cautious steps to the commode in my bedroom with the assistance of my wonderful four-legged helper. The male nurse said: ‘Mr. Michener, you have no idea how people suddenly get up and walk when they see me coming with my bedpan.’

  An unexpected bonus from the hip operation was the beautiful Haitian nurse who helped me recover. She was a splendid example of those numerous young Caribbean women who come to the United States and help us keep our hospitals open. As I lay immobilized I was planning a novel about the Caribbean, and she served as a prototype for the most engaging heroine in the book, Thérèse, the Haitian graduate of Radcliffe, who dominates the final chapter.

  When I left the hospital after ten days, riding home in a car I could have driven myself, I quickly resumed my long walks on level ground as planned, but lengthened them to a mile each night. As I was correcting this manuscript I calculated that at least five nights a week for four years would be more than a thousand nights, a thousand miles. Yes, on my new painless hip I’ve walked that much and I suppose I shall maintain that pace for as long as I am able, for my writing does not go well when I am totally sedentary.

  I have belabored this matter of health because I wanted to encourage others who suffer disabilities to keep striving for a productive life. I felt that if they knew I had written most of my long, demanding and essentially optimistic novels while suffering intense pain they would realize that it can be done. I do not consider my behavior unique because I know of many men and women nagged by physical impediments who succeed in forging ahead.

  How long can a healthy person continue working in the arts? Titian and Verdi were both active until eighty-eight, and Hokusai said when approaching ninety that if he could only live a little longer he might really learn how to draw. I have no aspirations of such a long working life, but I often reflect that had I lived two hundred years ago I would probably have died in my forties. When someone asked the other day if I had any more books I’d like to write, I replied: ‘About thirty. But if it takes three years to write one of the long ones, that would advance me to the age of a hundred and seventy, and history is not replete with examples of men or women who have continued writing to that age.’

  Many years ago a well-intentioned friend asked my wife: ‘Why doesn’t your husband retire?’ When Mari asked: ‘Why should he?’ the friend said: ‘Because then he could travel and meet interesting people,’ and Mari whispered to me: ‘We mustn’t tell her that’s what you’ve been doing for half a century.’

  Of course one’s health is a limiting factor, and if one receives a genetic inheritance that is heavily flawed, creative work can become impossible. I believe I have accepted the body I was given, protected it sensibly and worked with it about as well as could have been expected, but I have never pampered it.

  My life-style and intense work habits have put me at risk, especially in the degree of nervous tension they might inflict. But instead of trying to avoid tension, I have sought it out because through the years I learned that if I started my morning’s work in a lackadaisical mood nothing I wrote was worth a damn; it was only when I tensed myself for the day’s task that things went well. If I have paid heavily for this self-imposed risk it is an option I would repeat three times over if I had three lives to live.

  The other day I heard the distinguished political adviser Clark Clifford, who must himself be over eighty, say: ‘If you’re past eighty and you wake up in the morning with no pain anywhere, it means you’re already dead.’ And it occurred to me that the appropriate heading for this chapter might well have been ‘Slouching Toward Euthanasia.’ I have strong feelings on that subject; having watched several close friends die anguished and prolonged deaths, I have given strict instructions: ‘I am in favor of allowing totally helpless and lost persons, including me, to seek the help of friends in ending their meaningless misery. But I do not want on my board of review any book critics, people to whom I owe debts, or conservative Republicans.’

  * * *

  * In 1991 I received three letters from the 1966 crop of Keriths, women now in their twenties, asking me about the derivation of their name. And each year I hear from some family that is naming their newborn Kerith and seeks information.

  † Probably Black had only one, or at most two, different sets of printed sheets of the novels. They could slap on six differently priced bindings, adding a portrait of the author in one, illustrations in another.

  XIII

  Wealth

  Having been unusually frank about the fourth column of my fortune-telling system, Health, I shall try to be equally so with the more sensitive column Wealth. Memoirists usually avoid this delicate subject, but because of my good luck I have so often been accused of writing for money that I simply must clarify the record. My atypical background dictated that money—or the lack of it—would frequently be the bones and marrow of my ex
istence, and although I seem never to have handled it well I have at least tried to be sensible in the way I have used it.

  First let us establish the intellectual basis for my attitude toward money. In my youth I had the good luck to become acquainted with the work of an English novelist well known at the time but whose reputation has somewhat withered. George Gissing, born in 1857, was a young man of considerable talent who wrote half a dozen books of high caliber; they were a little advanced for me, but I plowed through two of them. I read somewhere that he died prematurely in 1903 at the age of forty-six as a result of extreme privation, due to his never having been able to earn a decent living. In his best-known book, New Grub Street, which dealt with London’s literary world, he spoke of the humiliating lives men lived when they had writing talent but achieved only limited or no financial success, and somewhere he uttered a cry from the heart to the effect that every writer would be better off if he could but have an assured income of a few hundred pounds a year. His story played an important role in my life.

  While steaming to Alaska on the cruise ship Royal Princess, Captain John Young invited me to dine at his table. At dinner another guest at the table asked him: ‘Where are you from, Captain?’ When he said: ‘Bristol, England,’ a surge of memories flooded my mind and I blurted out: ‘St. Mary Redcliffe.’

  The captain stared at me and asked: ‘How do you know that church?’ and I referred to the incident that had made it famous in English literature: ‘That’s where the chest of manuscripts was found.’ He said: ‘It was, indeed.’ Someone at the table asked what we were talking about and I answered: ‘Chatterton,’ and the captain said: ‘Yes. He is the ghost of St. Mary Redcliffe.’

  Now our table was really curious, and when questions were asked, Captain Young pointed to me and I said that like many others of my generation I had long been under the spell of the doomed English poet Thomas Chatterton, who was born in 1752 and had a tempestuous life of eighteen years; I went on to explain: ‘When Thomas Chatterton was just a boy in Bristol he became infatuated with the Middle Ages and while rummaging through the long-forgotten rooms of St. Mary Redcliffe, the main church of his city, he came upon an old chest containing very ancient parchment documents. On the spot he conceived one of the most famous—or infamous, if you wish—literary forgeries in history. Using the old paper and what he conceived to be old-style ink, he created an imaginary fifteenth-century monk named Thomas Rowley and wrote several poems that he attributed to him.’

  ‘Did he get away with the fraud?’ a listener asked and I pointed to Captain Young to finish the story: ‘He was most precocious, had written first-class religious poems at ten. His Rowley poems were very good—excellent, in fact—but when experts began to examine them they quickly saw that whereas the paper was authentic, the ink, capitalization, spelling and general style were suspect and the deception was easily unmasked. But in Bristol he remains a hero.’

  Our listeners wanted to know how the affair ended and I happened to know, for a very good reason which I would reveal later: ‘Putting aside the forgeries, which had brought him fame, he went to London to be a poet in his own right. He had success but no money. Living in a garret, he wrote frantically but could find no publisher, no purchasers. Alone with no friends and no food, this young genius took arsenic and died.’

  Captain Young broke the silence by asking: ‘How do you know so much about Bristol and Chatterton?’ and I replied honestly but with some embarrassment: ‘When I was eighteen, his age when he died, I came upon the story of his life in the library stacks at Swarthmore College and was so deeply moved that I ignored all my studies and began to write a play about him in blank verse. I found an etching of St. Mary Redcliffe as it had been at that time and I imagined every stone, every cranny in the old building. I can still see my Chatterton with the brassbound trunk.’

  ‘What happened to your play?’ someone asked and I said: ‘I learned that I wasn’t quite ready for such a task,’ and laughed, ‘My second attempt to be a writer and my second failure.’ When someone wanted to know what the first attempt had been, I said: ‘When I was about eight I was desolated to find that the honorable Trojans had lost their war to the dishonorable Greeks, and I became so outraged at the unfairness that I took two notebooks and rewrote the entire ending of the Iliad, giving what-for to Achilles and his bully boys. But I wasn’t ready for that job, either.’

  Gissing’s New Grub Street poses the question with harrowing realism: How can the serious artist earn enough money to live? I would suggest that all graduate schools of writing recommend this worthy novel to their would-be authors. It is obligatory that beginners know what can happen to men like Chatterton and Gissing when they earn nothing; my knowledge of what transpired* in their tragic lives colored the rest of my life because it reinforced what I already knew. As a baby I lived in a family of women where money, or the lack of it, was a daily problem. My mother, Mrs. Mabel Michener, of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, made her living by taking in orphaned children, for which the social services of the time paid her a pittance, and doing other families’ laundry, for which she received even less. The family I was reared in usually had four or five and sometimes as many as six other children. Food was not plentiful. In some years even Christmas was a bleak affair, but there was abundant love, and although as a reasonably intelligent child I was aware that other children received many things denied us, I never brooded over the fact that we were deprived.

  The chief characteristic of my childhood, and later too, was constant moving from one low-rent house to another, and I can recall with infinite and exact detail each of eight different houses we occupied on seven different streets. I remember moving at night to escape some problem or another, and at midday with someone yelling at us, and at all other hours of the day. We did not improve our lot with each move, but we didn’t diminish it either. We moved laterally, you might say, and someone researching that period on his own has recently come forward with an explanation that, hearing it as I did in my eightieth year, seems reasonable: ‘A man who owned a lot of houses allowed your mother to shift from one to another in order to clean them up and make them presentable to would-be renters. For doing this, she got to live in the various houses without paying rent.’

  I know a lot about the laundry business because it was my job to visit the neighbors who used my mother as their laundrywoman and pick up the bundles of dirty clothes. I was also intimately acquainted with the man who came to Doylestown on the trolley car from Philadelphia bringing with him cloth sacks filled with unfinished shirts, with small bundles of buttons tied to the side. My mother finished sewing the shirts and then attached the buttons, but she often ended up with a few more buttons than needed, and these she kept in a quart jar with a green lid. The earliest memory I have of games is playing with those buttons, which I arranged in a hundred different patterns. I have often thought that my love of geometry and maps stems from those games with varicolored buttons, for they introduced me to an appreciation of spatial relationships. To me, even today, a jarful of mixed buttons is a symbol of home.

  The point is that from as far back as I can remember I knew that a lack of money was a terrible affliction and one from which some families never recovered. We had none, never a spare nickel that I can remember, but I have related how Uncle Arthur who had a job did bring us that Victrola and the Red Seal records, so there were days of celebration and nights of music that I have never forgotten.

  However, the normal childhood presents did not come our way, and it is important in view of later developments to understand what I did not have. I never had a wagon, or a pair of roller skates, or a baseball glove, or a tennis racket, or a radio, or a bicycle, or a pair of ice skates. I never had more than one good suit, and it had to last years, or more than one pair of shoes, and I can reconstruct as if it were yesterday my reaction to this deprivation. I listened to my mother explain why others could have these things but I could not, and with an act of will as powerful as a steel bear trap
snapping shut I simply closed my mind to them. I never longed for a bicycle, because bicycles did not exist. I never regretted my lack of roller skates, because there was no sensible reason why I should ever have had a pair. I wiped the slate completely clean, leaving myself about as unacquisitive a child as one could imagine, and later, when other boys tried so hard to get hold of automobiles, I avoided the problem completely, because since such vehicles did not exist, I had no longing to have one. Even today I am bored by Olympic ice-skating because eighty years ago I satisfied myself that there were no skates.

  Obviously I did myself psychic damage by adopting this evasion but just as obviously I learned to live with whatever dislocation it caused, and this will be important when the subject of real money comes up, for I would be just as rigorous in dealing with it as I was in dealing with bicycles. I have never in my life applied for a job, never asked for a raise, never worried about comparative salaries or purchase prices for my work or royalties paid for my books as compared to those paid for someone’s else. I have been able to banish such subjects from my mind, but I have never been indifferent to just rewards for work I’ve done. I demand them, but allow others to make the determinations as to how much and when I should receive them, and whenever I have accidentally acquired money that came to me in some process that I did not respect or did not initiate, I have given it away before nightfall. Again, I have probably paid a high psychological price for this attitude, but to lament it is to ignore the more important fact that I never had any other option. Once one determinedly establishes a mindset that automatically eliminates unpalatable facts, it will continue to operate regardless of time or tide, and such damage as it may commit is offset by the ease of mind that one enjoys.