The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  § But on p. 317 we have seen Kenneth Roberts bewailing the fact that The Specialist has led the best-seller list for forty consecutive weeks, while his fine competing novel gets nowhere.

  ‖ Lippincott’s of Philadelphia did ask permission in a friendly way to publish a small treatise of mine dealing primarily with Philadelphia and I gladly agreed, for I doubted that Random would want it. For Macmillan I wrote a long evaluation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind on the occasion of an anniversary edition and not long ago Scribner’s asked me to write a foreword for a long-forgotten manuscript by Hemingway that they wished to bring out, and I was proud to comply. And I have published small books with others.

  XIV

  Meanings

  A young man who has lived his life without a birth certificate, for the reason that no one seems to know where or when or to whom he was born, as was my case, gets along perfectly well as long as he stays in his home village and tries to do nothing of importance. Of course he runs into embarrassments, as when the stern principal of his school demands proof of his eligibility to enroll and grumbles when such proof is not forthcoming. Sometimes at children’s games or parties there is an awkward moment when birthdays or birthplaces are asked and eyes turn toward the boy who shrugs his shoulders and says: ‘I don’t know.’

  Of course, throughout the village it becomes generally known that such a boy has no antecedents, and speculation provides a score of answers as to who his parents might have been, but little harm is done by the guesswork. However, the boy is certainly set apart and he knows it, as do his fellow students in Sunday school and the larger public school. But, speaking from experience, I know that whereas the psychological scarring can be profound, modifying every act the boy will ever engage in, it is not crippling, for he begins to build defenses against his impediment, and whereas the scars will be with him wherever he goes and in whatever he tries to do, he does learn to live with them.

  But as he leaves boyhood a network of interlocking entrapments face him, and the ones that produce inescapable difficulties are those enforced by society. If the Army drafts a young fellow to go overseas to fight for his country, the big brass is glad to get him as he is, birth certificate or no. But if the tests that all recruits take reveal him to be unusually capable in fields needed by the Army, he will be thrown into training to become an officer, and when on being ordered to produce his birth certificate he replies: ‘I have none,’ the entire Army goes into spasm, for it fears that the man whom they have nominated to be one of their future officers might be an enemy in disguise: ‘Get us a birth certificate or else!’ And then the trouble begins.

  Or, should he wish to travel abroad to enlarge his view of the world or to train himself to be more useful to society, he must again prove who he is and what his lineage, lest he again be a spy traveling abroad for some nefarious purpose.

  Twice, first when I wanted to continue my education in Europe, second when the Navy wanted to make me an officer, I had to prove to the government that I had been born, and preferably in the United States, but I had no birth certificate.

  In such circumstances it is common for the applicant to hire a lawyer who will interrogate neighbors to establish the earliest possible date at which the child was known to have been in the community. On both occasions I employed, with the full assistance of my mother, the Doylestown lawyer John D. James, who compiled impressive testimony by Presbyterian Sunday school teachers, public school teachers and others that proved I had lived in that town since the age of two. No reliable evidence put me there any sooner, but it was generally believed that I had been born in New York and had arrived in town when I was about two weeks old.

  No parentage could be established, but testimony was clear that from a very early age I had lived in the household of Mabel Michener. However, the government required a specific statement of parentage, and for reasons I have never known, lawyer James concocted one of the craziest stories ever filed and one that was bound to unravel when anyone inspected it even casually. Witnesses under James’s direction swore that I was the son of Edwin Michener and his lawfully wedded wife, Mabel Michener, and was born on 3 February 1907, although it was well known that Edwin had died five years before. I suppose that copies of this document can be found in either Navy or State Department files; all I know is that I was issued a passport under that spurious arrangement and all subsequent legal documents state the same.

  Lawyer James, for whom I once worked as a boy tending his lawn, and who could personally certify me back to age two, told me: ‘Prior to that we can find no paper trail whatever. Therefore we could not tell the government what everyone believes to be true, that Mrs. Michener obtained you as she did all the other abandoned babies she took in when no parents could be found. So far as we know, you were an orphan and it seemed most practical to make you Edwin Michener’s son, even though there is that discrepancy in dates. We had to say something, and we believed that the papers you now have will get you by, probably forever.’ They have.

  Mrs. Michener, into whose hands I fell one way or another, was one of those great women who serve in silence but leave behind a legacy that glows forever. The oldest of six children of a Pennsylvania farmer whose Haddock ancestors came from England and a mother whose Turner antecedents were from the Protestant section of Northern Ireland, she inherited in her teens the task of playing mother to her five younger siblings—three boys, two girls—and she did such a superlative job that the four who lived into maturity, though impoverished, did so with dignity. But Mabel spent both her youth and her chance for an education in caring for others, and after her husband died young, leaving her with a son, Robert, she continued her role as a universal mother by taking in a dozen or so abandoned children, for whose care she was paid a meager sum by a local charity organization.

  It seems of utmost importance to me, as I look back upon those formative days, to remember that I grew up surrounded by noisy, loving, rambunctious children who played with me, knocked me about, tussled with me in the mud, and kept me from ever thinking myself as grand or favored or especially bright or entitled to privilege, or as anything but one of a mob. I was constantly reminded that I was a member of a social organization—a troubled, robust, loving extended family—which explains why, as an adult, I have repeatedly said that one of the lasting goals of my life has been to keep vital the social organisms of our nation: churches, newspapers, political parties, colleges, families. I have made great sacrifices to enhance such social groups and deem such service to be the best contribution I have made.

  I have said earlier that working at a very early age in a variety of businesses taught me much about American ways of making money, and I’ve told about how delivering papers at four in the morning introduced me to the intricacies of small-town life, but more important, I think, was the fact that growing up in a nest of foster children plunged me at an extremely early age into some of the more tragic situations that confront helpless people. And that awareness which never leaves a person and colors all that he or she does in later life can be of enormous value, as it was to writers like Charles Dickens, Maxim Gorky and Richard Wright. It influenced all I would write.

  I caught on fairly quickly to the fact that about half the children my mother shepherded reached her through big-city social agencies that helped young women in their late teens and early twenties who were in trouble, and although I was too young or too slow to decipher what that trouble might be, it was clear that copious tears were involved when the young women visited the children in whom they took a special interest, and I began to piece together odd bits of information.

  We had at one time an adorable little Jewish boy with whom I fell in love, Harry Litwack, whose young mother, always referred to as Mrs. Litwack, was even more appealing than her son. When she took Harry in her arms on Sunday afternoons, she became radiant, and because she knew I helped care for him as a kind of big brother—I could have been no more than five at the time—she always brought me so
me small gift, and since it was usually edible, my affection for her increased.

  There was no attempt to hide the fact that Harry was her son, but why they did not live together I could not fathom. However, starting on Wednesday one week, everyone in our crowded house was given repeated orders: ‘We must all see that Harry looks his best on Sunday,’ and I had the special task of seeing that his nose, which was often runny, was kept clean. At lunch on Sunday our house was extremely tense, as if a fire threatened or some other disaster loomed, and I remember my mother warning me: ‘Keep his nose clean.’

  At her regular Sunday time, about two, Mrs. Litwack appeared on our porch bringing with her an extremely nervous young man about her own age whom she introduced as Mr. Solomon, at which my mother stepped forward holding baby Harry by his little hand and engineering things so that the child moved toward Mr. Solomon, whom he had never seen before.

  There was a long moment when nothing happened, but then my mother gently pushed the child forward, and again, for a most painful interval nothing happened, but then Mr. Solomon came alive, lost his nervousness, stooped down and took the boy in his arms, bringing him up level to his face and giving him a kiss. Then, pushing Harry away to study his joyous features, he embraced him again and said to all of us: ‘He’s a wonderful boy!’

  Late that afternoon when it came time for Mrs. Litwack and Mr. Solomon to depart, they took Harry with them, and I never saw him again, but that night, after we had all gone to bed, I went back to the kitchen for some reason and there sat my mother, rocking back and forth with a hand to her mouth and tears in her eyes. She thanked me for having taken such pains to ensure that Harry looked his best when Mr. Solomon arrived, and some weeks later we received a wedding picture of Mrs. Litwack and Mr. Solomon holding Harry between them, and I can still see them after almost eighty years, but what I remember most is how Mr. Solomon stooped to take Harry in his arms.

  I could recount a score of such stories—Paul, Dorothy, Virginia, Eleanor, David, Edward—but they seem to blend into a vague blur of troubled parents, lively children and the abiding love my mother showered on everyone. I was in no way precocious and some of the most poignant stories I probably missed. Two years ago the delightful tomboy Mildred, whom I had especially liked, drove quite a distance to see me after seven decades. She was a matron now with a husband who had obviously loved her for many years: ‘I wanted to share something with you, Jimmy. You were always so good to me. My mother came from southern Jersey, daughter of a minister who would not let her marry the young man she loved. When she got pregnant her father, an unforgiving man, sent her away till I was born, then hustled me off to Mrs. Michener’s.’

  ‘What happened to your mother?’

  ‘Since my grandfather was a minister, he was powerful in the community, and he had her committed to an insane asylum in another town, unbeknownst to me, until he died. When I married they told me about her, still in the asylum, and asked if I wanted to see her, but Eddie and I talked it over and we said “No.” It was too long ago, and besides, someone told us after all those long years in the madhouse she had become pretty much a loony herself. Mrs. Michener was my real mother.’

  I was surrounded by such stories, but in many ways the most dramatic was my own. To understand it you must know what an impressive and far-reaching family the Bucks County Micheners of Pennsylvania are. At one of the yearly summer gatherings of the clan, to which Micheners come from hundreds and even thousands of miles, for they are a proud, ancient breed, I met a man who told their story:

  ‘A lot of us made up a kitty, quite a few dollars, and had Anna Shaddinger, the schoolteacher in Doylestown—she’s a Michener through her mother’s line—pursue her studies of just who the Micheners were in history. She put together a marvelous book proving that everyone in the United States bearing the name is related to everyone else. And she can tell you how.

  ‘So when the book came out it told the truth. The first Micheners came here to Bucks County in the 1680s as indentured servants with William Penn. Boy, when our people saw those words indentured servants they exploded, me among them. Saying something like that in a book we had paid for.

  ‘So in the second edition it appeared the original Micheners had been “sturdy English yeomen” but that still didn’t satisfy us, so in the third edition they became “trusted friends and advisers of William Penn” and I understand that in the next edition William Penn is going to come over with us.’

  Much of what he said was teasing, but one thing was clear—those early Micheners had a propensity for bearing male twins who took to farming, and soon the rural areas were filled with people of their name, and the rumor is correct: every known Michener in the United States is the cousin of every other, and the year I won the Pulitzer Prize and was expected to be guest of honor at the big picnic I was totally upstaged by Roland Michener, governor-general of Canada, and another pair who had come all the way from Ceylon or some such place.

  In one edition Anna Shaddinger had said somewhat petulantly that she had been able to place every Michener in the grand hierarchy except one family in the Detroit area, and she would appreciate information about them. In a later edition came the somewhat acerbic note that the Detroit affair had been clarified: a Polish family had immigrated into Hamtramck with a name like Miczelowski and had anglicized it to Michener.

  In my day Micheners simply abounded and at one time there were half a dozen James Micheners in our vicinity with several of them having the middle initial of ‘A.’ Down the years I’ve known quite a few James A.’s; one of the best was a Marine colonel in Virginia whose handwriting was exactly like mine; one of the most lively an imaginative young man who, like me, attended Swarthmore. He kept me hopping for a while, and once when I returned to visit Hawaii the police were waiting on behalf of local citizens who had paid large advance fees to a James A. Michener of Swarthmore who had advertised that he was leading a group of tourists through the islands of the South Pacific.

  Several energetic young men using my name have swept through the countries of Asia that I used to frequent, buying jewels and other valuables and assuring the sellers that their checks were obviously good, but the James A. that I will remember the longest and with the deepest affection was a man of that name who, against all odds of probability, came to live a short distance from me in our small village of Pipersville. The confusion this caused was so great that after trying in vain to sort things out, the local Sears, Roebuck store asked one of us to give back our credit card because they were incapable of keeping our accounts straight. After an amiable consultation that gave me an opportunity to meet this most congenial fellow, we agreed that he needed his card more than I did mine, and Sears lost a good customer.

  Problems of an amusing nature proliferated that centered on the fact that I had an unlisted telephone number while he did not, and when people in various parts of the country tried to get Jim Michener in Pipersville, Pennsylvania, they had no difficulty in completing the call. In fact, the other James A. received so many calls that he became a kind of additional secretary for me, and in time he became so familiar with the kinds of calls he might expect and so knowledgeable about my movements that he helped me considerably by handling inconsequential calls himself, then telephoning me in the evening with any he thought might require my attention.

  I stopped by his house once to apologize for the inconvenience I was causing him, but he brushed that aside: ‘It’s fun to get calls from all parts of the country and even sometimes from foreign newspapers. I never know what’s going to happen when the phone rings.’ I offered to remunerate him for his time but he said: ‘No, it’s a pleasure except for nights like Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.’

  I asked him what happened then and he said: ‘It’s that Catholic priest up in Scranton who talks for a long time.’ As soon as he said this I could remember the dear fellow, a jovial-faced Irishman who had served with me in the South Pacific as Navy chaplain and to whom I used to turn over my hard-c
ore discipline cases.

  I recalled the time when, as island censor, I was faced with the problem of Lombardelli Kutz from a small town in Arkansas. He was totally incorrigible and though almost illiterate he was able to write short letters to his wife, one girl in a town nearby and a third girl not far off, all of whom had become pregnant. As censor I had to clear all letters from the war zone but was under strict orders not to concern myself with morals, but when in one mail Lombardelli, a Neanderthal type, sent out four semiliterate letters threatening to murder his three girlfriends if they did not straighten themselves out, I had to intervene because now potential crime was involved.

  Plopping Lombardelli beside me in my jeep, I took him first to the base legal officer, who warned him that sending threats like that through the mail was a criminal act for which he could get years in jail. But the young fellow seemed not to comprehend, so the lawyer suggested that I take him to see the base chaplain. I told Lombardelli to wait in my jeep while I went ahead to instruct the chaplain about my problem boy. He read the letters, peeked out his door to see the fellow sprawled in the jeep and returned to ask: ‘So what?’

  ‘Well, what are you going to do about him?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Look, he’s threatening murder. We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Lieutenant Michener, in this job you learn that with some men there’s nothing you can do. He wouldn’t understand if I tried, so I’m not going to waste my time on him. There is nothing to be done but pray that when he gets home he doesn’t carry out his threats.’