The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  This attitude was so alien to my Quaker-Presbyterian upbringing that I could not comprehend it. With us, if you had the bad luck to come upon someone like Lombardelli you became agitated and beat your brains and prayed a lot in an effort to save him. But the good chaplain, having seen many such men, realized that there was nothing that he could do and the less time he wasted on this hopeless case, the more he would have for people who could be helped.

  I became quite attached to the chaplain; out of gratitude for the common sense he taught me I arranged for him to get from the submarine base his share of torpedo juice, the ultra-high-proof pure alcohol used to propel torpedoes on their deadly runs. I often thought that this very expensive and closely guarded fuel did far more damage to our American troops than it ever did to the Japanese enemy, but my chaplain did like his nip now and then, so now I was not surprised when my Pipersville James A. told me: ‘Apparently this priest goes to the local bar on big nights and toward midnight he must shout: “Do I know Jim Michener? Get me Jim Michener in Pipersville!” and when he gets me he reminds me of the great times he and I had together on Espiritu Santo, and then he introduces me to all the fellows in the bar. His calls go on for maybe forty minutes, but I don’t mind because they are festive and he never realizes that he isn’t talking to you.’ When I asked: ‘How do you handle him?’ he said: ‘Oh, I grunt just enough to keep him going.’

  The Micheners were a constantly surprising lot, and although I was not a Michener, a fact that was widely known, I attended their yearly picnics with relish; I was happy with them and appreciated the warm courtesies they extended me.

  It had not always been that way. In those early years when my mother was struggling to feed and shelter her brood in the strange houses into which we moved with such frequency, we were sometimes visited by two tall, austere women in their fifties who were known to us as the Michener aunts—sisters or cousins of the deceased Edwin Michener to whom Mabel had been married. Edwin and Mabel’s son Robert, older than I, was a thoroughly likable lad; in fact, I tried to model myself after him, for he was a good athlete, and it was to see him that the Michener aunts came to our home. They brought with them little paper bags of goodies, and with stern looks intended to dismiss the rest of us hangers-on, they gave the candy only to Robert.

  They were especially hard on me, and I realized even at that early age that they resented the fact that I bore the name Michener, and on not one but many occasions they pointed out to me as they gave Robert his little treats: ‘You’re not a Michener. You don’t deserve any.’ And some of the things they said when neither Robert nor Mabel was around were painful to me. They were harsh, unlovely creatures, two characters from a Grimm’s fairy tale or like Frank Baum’s Wicked Witch of the West. They despised all the children my mother had taken into her home, judging this to be an occupation unworthy of the widow of their sainted brother, but the others, so far as I knew, did not receive the constant hammering I did.

  They were among the ugliest memories of my childhood, the first time I had encountered real hate, and I have often wondered what lasting effect they had on me. At the time when the aunts were persecuting me, my response was neither anger nor fear, though I was furious that Robert received candy and I didn’t. They certainly did not dampen my enthusiasm for life, for I was incurably ebullient, nor did they sour me on Micheners, for the others I have known have all been as warm and friendly as the James A. of Pipersville. I believe I did not allow them to do any damage beyond what harsh words could do, but perhaps I am not the one to judge. Certainly, something in those early years made me more reserved and introspective than the normal boy, and some alteration occurred that would make me more withdrawn in later years. Perhaps it is best said that a dark cloud had passed my way, of which I was aware, and that it threw harsh shadows on a palette that had hitherto been mostly a bright gold. At least the Michener aunts served a constructive purpose in that they taught me the journey through life was not going to be easy.

  Sadly, the aunts must have turned Robert against me because, some years later, when he went to California to marry a fine Doylestown girl who had moved there, I wrote to him the kind of letters a thirteen-year-old would write to an older brother whom he idolized, but he refused to answer. After being thrice rebuffed, I wrote no more, and during the remaining sixty-odd years of his life we exchanged not one word or visit.

  Some unknown Michener, and it may have been two different people, one male, one female, although I have always thought of the person as a man some years older than myself, played a significant role in my life when I became a writer and began to attract local attention. The day after my name first appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper he mailed me a letter from that city:

  Dear Mr. ‘Michener’????

  You don’t know who I am but I sure know who you are. You aren’t a Michener and never were. You’re a fraud to go around using that good name and you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Sooner or later the truth will be made public and you will stand disgraced in the eyes of all good people. Why don’t you operate under your own name, which I am sure is something like Ginsburg or Cohen.

  I’ll be watching you,

  A real Michener

  From that day he hit me with a barrage of letters, always writing after I had accomplished something, no matter how trivial. His letters were not illiterate, and in a curious way they extended the animosity the Michener aunts had exuded, for he too was infuriated by my presence in the family. I could not conceivably have posed any threat to him, and nothing that I did defiled his precious Michener name—quite the contrary—but any positive behavior of mine caused him to vent his spleen. Repeatedly he advised me to resume my proper name, which he again assumed was something like Berkowitz, Liebowitz or Hoffberg, and why didn’t I sink back into obscurity so that I could not offend good people.

  But it was when I won the Pulitzer that he really exploded. His letter this time exceeded any that had gone before, and I am sorry I did not keep it, although it may still be hidden somewhere in my papers. He started with the old accusation that I was not a real Michener and gave great offense to those who were. Then he advanced to splenetic sentences like: ‘I would think you would be ashamed to show your face in public,’ and ‘we will smoke you out,’ and ‘It’s disgraceful to pose as someone you aren’t.’ He denigrated the award I had won and supposed that the judges were Jewish, and then he closed with a sentence whose counter-parts I have heard all my life, in one form or another—not directed at me but at others with whom I identify—‘Who in hell do you think you are, trying to be better than you are?’

  The last seven words of that cry are burned into my soul because one meets them everywhere. Jesse Jackson runs for president, and who the hell does he think he is, trying to be better than he is? In South Africa any black who aspires to a decent job is excoriated for trying to be better than he is. English literature is replete with ridicule of persons of lower class who by dress or speech are trying to imitate people who are better than themselves. In my novel Texas I tell of rednecks who gunned down freed slaves who by merely walking on sidewalks were trying to be better than they were entitled to be, and of a choleric white judge who shot a black lawyer dead for presuming in court to be better than he was. In Miami newly arrived Cubans are scorned for putting on airs, and in many other cities immigrants from all nations are censured for trying to be better than their station in life would warrant.

  One of the most terrible things I have seen in my life was a gang of white hoodlums in a small Western town who drove their car close to the sidewalk on Sunday morning, reaching out with a tar brush to smear the freshly pressed clothes of black women going to church. When I reprimanded them, the local police being unwilling to do so, the young punks snarled: ‘Where in hell do those niggers get the nerve, trying to be better than they are?’

  I have spent my life trying to be better than I was, and am brother to all who have the same aspirations.

  The valuable thing ab
out those Philadelphia letters was that they reached my desk on mornings when I might have been tempted to think that some good thing I had accomplished was more important than it really was. Awards, doctorates, public notices, small victories in politics, all were chipped down into proper perspective by the next monitoring letter: ‘We know what a fake you are, and pretty soon the whole world will find you out.’

  Sensible ancient emperors, who might be tempted to consider themselves immortal, kept near them human skulls to remind themselves that they, like everyone else, must die someday. Memento mori, a reminder of death, was what such a useful object was called, and for me my friend’s letters served roughly the same purpose: no matter what I did he reminded me that I was a fraud. His attacks reached a frenzy when I ran for Congress in 1962, for then he bombarded me weekly and sometimes daily with postcards onto which he pasted bits from newspapers that vilified Democrats and on which he wrote or printed harsh statements about my right to run for anything. He was especially bitter about the fact that I had a Japanese-American wife and asked scornfully at least once a week: ‘What’s the matter with you, trying to slip a Jap spy into our national capital?’ Only then did I wish I had his address, for I would have enjoyed reminding him that there were already in Congress several congressmen and senators of Oriental ancestry, a fact he seemed not to know. But night after night when I returned home dead tired from campaigning, awaiting me would be his latest bit of savagery.

  In 1976 the papers carried a notice that President Ford had elected to give me the highest civilian award this nation has to offer, and the final letter from my mentor was a scorcher: ‘Still using a name that isn’t yours. Still a fraud. Still trying to be better than you are.’ He was right on all his accusations. He must have died shortly thereafter because his letters ceased, and I missed them, for they had been therapeutic.

  I was nineteen years old before I knew for certain anything substantial about my background. Prior to that time I had stumbled along happily knowing only in a vague way that I was not like other boys my age; I supposed that the scowling Michener aunts knew what they were talking about when they snarled that I was not a member of their family, but I was not unhappy about that, because they offered little inducement for me to want to join them. I never really knew who I was, and neither my mother nor Uncle Arthur ever told me, even supposing they knew. But as thousands of adopted children or those of uncertain birth invariably learn, some well-intentioned adult can always be counted on to break the secret, and usually at some moment when it is least appropriate.

  In my case it was a beautiful girl from a Michener family in another town, about my age and a frequenter of the big Michener reunions. With the kindliest intentions she told me one Thursday night: ‘You know, of course, that you aren’t one of us, and that the woman you call your mother really isn’t your mother.’ She then gave me the first of about twenty variations of who I really was—I would hear every possible version in the decades that followed and still do—and then she waltzed along to talk with others.

  My world was shattered and there was no one with whom I could talk. Assumptions with which I had been content and which had kept me happy were proved to be insecure, and that Friday was one of the worst days I would ever encounter. I cut my college classes, walked about in a daze and could come to no conclusions about anything. I had, of course, known from my treatment at the hands of my Michnener aunts that I was not a member of their family, and I had certainly had it drummed into me that I was not like my brother Robert, but I had carelessly supposed that although I was much like the many children who came and went in our household, I was somehow different. But if I was not a duplicate of Harry Litwack, who was I? And what was my relationship to Mrs. Michener? Such questions could not have struck me at a worse time because for some months I had been pondering the moral nature of mankind in the universe,* specifically the question of whether God did or did not exist; and on the less important but more immediate level I felt I must resign from my college fraternity because I found myself opposed to what it stood for.

  I wrestled with these three questions all Friday and found no answers, nor could I think of anyone to whom I might appeal for help, but on that tempestuous weekend I slowly managed to resolve the problems. On the basic question of who I was I decided that I would never know the answer, that a hailstorm of solutions would probably be thrown at me, and that I would never be clever enough to sort truth from legend. As calmly as if I were a practiced surgeon performing a major operation, I cut that part of life out of my existence, then and forever. I did not know who I was, nor did I care, and what was more important, I would never again bother myself about it. I would not daydream, I would not construct what-ifs, and I would find contentment in myself as I was at any given moment; I would have no envy for anyone else’s position, no shame for my own. From that moment of decision I never wavered or looked back. I knew who I was, a young man of nineteen with certain proved abilities and known weaknesses ready for the long haul of years that lay ahead.

  Two later evaluations of that period must be inserted here. When Alex Haley’s excellent novelized account of his African forebears, Roots, swept the country in 1976, it launched a nationwide frenzy in which adults who had been adopted in childhood started digging in genealogies and a great deal of nonsense was written about the necessity for every human being to know his or her real roots. Laws were passed giving such people the right to inspect their previously locked adoption papers to enable them to search for their birth parents, especially their mothers. Having solved this problem for myself years before, I was amused at much of the nonsense being peddled by both professional and amateur psychologists. From what they were preaching one would have thought that it was impossible to lead an acceptable life if one didn’t know every detail of one’s origins, and women who had been adopted were particularly susceptible to this hysteria.

  Much harm was done, for although I am aware that in a few cases out of a million someone might want to know his or her family background because of possible predisposition to genetically inherited diseases whose lifesaving cure might be started if knowledge came early enough, for the average person such knowledge, especially if acquired in a way to cause pain to oneself or others, is of little practical or emotional value. I must know of at least a hundred men with uncertain parentage who achieved both personal and professional success in a competitive world, and two of my heroes, Ramsay MacDonald, who became prime minister of Great Britain, and Alexander Hamilton, one of the architects of the American system of government, were such men.

  I have been consulted by many people asking my advice on these matters and it has been short, firm and consistent: ‘If you think that such knowledge will do you any good, or if you think you might have fun trying to track down elusive facts, by all means have a go at it. But if you think the discovery of such knowledge will in any significant way improve your life, don’t waste your time. The morning after you find what you seek, you’ll be the same confused, reasonably competent bloke you are today, and not a thing will be changed.’ With men I often end my statement a bit more roughly: ‘You’ll be the same miserable jerk you are today,’ and we laugh at ourselves. The older I get the more secure I feel in giving such advice.

  I have been accosted even more frequently by married couples who are thinking of adopting children and who seek counsel on whether to tell their children right from the start that they are adopted. Now, there is no flippancy in my response, for on this subject I am really one of the best-informed men in the world.† It has been my experience that there is no good way to handle the problem. Whatever is done will probably turn out to be wrong, or at least will create certain unpleasant problems. If you tell the child as soon after birth as possible, it sometimes disturbs him a great deal at the very time when he most needs the reassurance of a normal background; and if you defer telling him you can be sure that sooner or later some well-meaning person will reveal the secret to him, and usually at the moment th
at will be the most psychologically damaging. Of one thing you can be certain: ultimately the child will find out and, even with the most stable child, such a discovery can be painfully disorienting. But if he or she is reasonably stable to begin with, recovery can be swift and complete. I know of no good way to handle this problem, and have seen even the best-prepared procedures go awry, but I have seen only occasional long-term damage.

  At the end of my tortured weekend wrestling with the problem of my heritage I moved on to the greater question of religious proof, which had been worrying me for some time. Because we had no Meeting in our area, I was a Quaker reared in strict Presbyterianism, a form of religion I found congenial and about which I would do a great deal of study and some writing in my lifetime. But I had never been interested in theological aspects of the religion; I was what might be called a religious sociologist: I respected the actions taken by Christians. I was confused about both the nature of God and the question of whether he did or did not exist, and that weekend as I roamed about the Swarthmore campus I decided that if I was never going to solve a relatively simple problem like my parentage, I was certainly not competent to solve the infinitely greater problems relating to the existence of God. With a mind as clear as it would ever be, I decided: ‘I will never know about God and I shall never bother my head again about it.’

  I decided further that I would live my life henceforth as if Deuteronomy and the New Testament had laid down the best patterns for human life. I would be a practicing Christian, would support churches, would aid Christian endeavors of all kinds, would be impartial toward the various denominations, and would conduct my life so that I need rarely be ashamed of my behavior. Never in the years since, in moments of either elevation or despair, have I deviated from that simple conclusion, and I would think it highly unlikely that on my deathbed I would suddenly cry: ‘I have seen the light!’ and announce that I was joining this or that specific church, for I see the light almost every morning when I awake and look out upon my world.