The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  I am quick to admit that the creed I follow, which is a kind of liberal humanism in the vein of Thomas More, Thomas Jefferson and John Dewey, would be ill suited to many and probably not satisfactory for a community whose members require structure, priests of one sort or another and meeting places for worship and socializing, but for me it has been most satisfying and reassuring. When I taught in Colorado during the depression, teaching positions with an assured income were at a premium, and rural schoolboards took almost fiendish pleasure in interrogating would-be teachers about all aspects of their behavior: Did the young woman date during week nights? Did the young man smoke? And especially: Are you religious and if so, what do you follow? I had a sardonic head principal who devised an effective answer to that last question: ‘I am a Home Baptist.’ I am a Home Quaker.

  The last moral crisis I grappled with on that difficult weekend was more agonizing than either of the other two but in retrospect seems almost comic; it was preposterous that I should have allowed it to torment me as it did. From what I have revealed so far about myself it should be clear that I was somewhat different from the average young college student, immeasurably more insecure and naive than many, but at the same time tougher and more worldly wise than most. I was not, and I was aware of this when I allowed it to happen, qualified to be the the typical fraternity member, but on arriving at Swarthmore I had accepted an invitation from the brain-trust fraternity on campus, Phi Delta Theta, with whose serious and capable members I felt congenial. But even a brief acquaintance with fraternity life proved that I had made a grievous mistake. If the fraternity would be able to do very little for an uncut diamond like me, I could do even less for it, so in decency I resigned.

  I did not know it, but those were the years when a strong antifraternity sentiment was beginning to develop in various corners of the nation, and the older men who supervised fraternity affairs nationally felt that they must nip any incipient negative movement in the bud. Such was the mission of a Mr. Maxwell who arrived on campus to talk things over with me. He was in his late forties, a handsome man in a handsome three-piece suit and a handsome pair of shoes. He was suave, understanding, sympathetic and forthright: ‘Mr. Michener, we simply cannot afford to lose a man of your caliber. Winner of an important scholarship. Very high marks. Fine, clean-cut appearance.’ I had never before thought of myself in those terms. ‘Now let me broach a ticklish subject. If your problem is money, if you cannot afford fraternity life, I have some influential friends to whom the fate of a young man like you is important. They’ll lend you the money, no interest, and you pay them back after you graduate and we have found you a good job.’

  For two long days Mr. Maxwell hammered at me, never raising his voice, always playing the role of a friendly adviser, which in fact he was, but I remained adamant, and then at the close of the second day he moved the discussion to a level of great significance. We were having an iced Coca-Cola in the corner of the local drugstore—no alcohol was allowed anywhere at Swarthmore College or in the town nearby—and he asked in a fatherly way: ‘How old are you, Michener?’ When I said ‘Nineteen,’ he snapped his fingers and said: ‘Dash it. I have a lovely daughter, almost your age,’ and he produced a photograph, which he allowed to rest on the table between us. Then he continued: ‘Now, a young fellow with your background and brains, you’re certain to do very well in American life because we need men like you. And in due course you’ll want to get married, and it could be that you’ll meet Patricia and fall in love, and, like any decent, self-respecting young man, you’ll come to my office and say: “Mr. Maxwell, I would like permission to marry your daughter,” and after the usual questions back and forth I’ll ask: “And what fraternity were you in in college?” and if you say, “Mr. Maxwell, I wasn’t in any fraternity,” do you think for one minute I’d let you marry my daughter?’

  The question hung in the air like an unexploded bomb suspended by a parachute. It opened vistas I had never considered before, and when Mr. Maxwell returned to his hotel room for a night’s sleep before leaving in the morning he said: ‘Think about that, Michener, and tomorrow at breakfast tell me you’ve changed your mind.’

  I spent a horrible night. Pressures were crowding in on me from too many directions and with too many ramifications, but this time as I again wandered the campus I could see the delectable Patricia’s photograph resting on the soda-fountain table, and I could visualize the rejection when I asked her father for his permission to marry her, and I could see myself roaming the world, unable to find anyone to marry me because I was not a fraternity man. The prospect was bleak, but just as I was about to conclude that I was damaging myself for life, I saw not Patricia Maxwell but her father, that handsome man, so polished, so sure of himself and I could hear his reassuring words: ‘I have some influential friends to whom the fate of a young man like you …’ I could see him dining with those friends for discussions of great importance, and it suddenly occurred to me: ‘Hey! It wouldn’t make the least bit of difference if I did belong to a fraternity. He would never allow me to marry Patricia!’ and suddenly things began to fall into place: my parentage, God, the fraternity and, at the center of it all, me.

  Next morning, feeling as certain of my judgment as I ever would in my life, I called Mr. Maxwell at the Strath Haven because I could not trust myself to confront so persuasive a man face to face, and told him: ‘Mr. Maxwell, you’ve been so understanding and helpful. A perfect gentleman. But I’ve got to go ahead. I’m resigning.’

  ‘Son,’ he said without losing his temper, ‘I’m sorry for you. You’re making a mistake you’ll regret for the rest of your life.’ And I never saw him again.

  The college subject matter that fascinated me the most was a query posed in biology when the professor asked almost casually: ‘Which factor influences human behavior most strongly, heredity or environment?’ Since this ancient riddle was offered toward the end of class, he had only a few minutes to discuss it, and after briefly summarizing the current thinking, he said: ‘With our present knowledge, no conclusion can be reached.’

  With me this brief introduction to the subject touched a vital nerve. I saw that a young man who comes from a historically important family is inclined to accept the opinion of a proud woman who told Winston Churchill: ‘I think breeding is the most important thing in life,’ to which he replied: ‘It is fun, but one can have other interests, too.’ Such young men tend to choose their wives from families of equally illustrious background, so that the superior breeding can continue.

  But when a young man has no secure knowledge of his genetic inheritance he is prone to think that everything good that happens to him is the result of his upbringing and the strength of character he is resolutely developing. I obviously fell into this second category, and it led me into investigations that would never end. I noted every scientific study that strengthened the environmental hypothesis, and I could see in the lives of those about me ample evidence that those boys and girls who studied, went to Sunday school and learned to utilize public schools, libraries, churches and Boy Scouts were the ones who prospered. Heredity had very little to do with it, so far as my inquiries went, and I was pleased to know this, because it meant that my clever use of environmental opportunities would ensure me ultimate success.

  I had been engaged in this speculation for only a brief spell after graduation when I began to hear from learned friends of a brilliant Russian scientist, Trofim Lysenko, who was accumulating old evidence and producing new data that quite blasted the Mendelian theories of genetic control of plant destiny. He substituted the Communist doctrine that a plant’s environment, properly controlled to produce benevolent results, became a far more powerful developmental factor than its inherited capacity. Furthermore, and this was stunning news, Lysenko seemed to be proving that the favorable behavior patterns that were induced in the present generation would be inherited in the next and future generations. In other words, the inherent nature of a plant or a human being could be altered,
if properly acted upon by a benevolent environment; this meant that salutary change could be transmitted to future human generations until it became embedded as part of the genetic structure of the plant or human. Thus the entire future history of a plant or of a human society could be modified if one applied the right pressures now. It was a theory most reassuring to a new society like the Soviet Union that wanted to break with the past or someone like me who had no idea of what his past was. So, like Stalin, I embraced it enthusiastically, for it solved a lot of problems and gave great hope for the future.

  But as the decades passed I began to hear most distressing reports from Russia and the international scientific community about Lysenko. When he succeeded in persuading Stalin to make Lysenkoism the official state policy, he installed himself as a virtual czar in control of agriculture and associated fields, and from this position dictated how crops should be grown and that scientists who opposed his doctrine be removed from office. When I first heard stories of these excesses I blithely attributed them to partisans of old ways of doing things.

  But evidence that discredited Lysenko began to mount. His plan for growing wheat in new ways was such a disaster that famine became a real threat. It was proved that many of the so-called experiments on which Lysenkoism was based never took place; they were total frauds. And refugee scientists he had persecuted told of others less fortunate whom he had sent to Siberia and their death. The world community of scientists raised an uproar, ridiculing his concept of new forms of plant life on demand, and heaped mockery on Russian science. So ended one of the most bizarre episodes of scientific perversion.

  I now realized that my assumption that environment accounted for perhaps as much as 85 percent of human development was ridiculous, and after carefully restudying the evidence I summarized my new conclusions in this way: The genetic factor does impose definite limits as to what can be altered by the environment; I’d say the balance is about sixty-five environment, thirty-five heredity, because I still insist that what a man becomes is largely due to what he determines he shall become. Now, at the close of a life of speculation, I conclude that I have always, for personal, not scientific, reasons, underestimated the significance of the genetic factor. The fierce discipline I have imposed on myself, the endless hours of work, the obsessive attention to the project at hand, have probably been superfluous. I really didn’t need to work as hard as I have.

  It now seems likely that I started with a fairly stalwart genetic background; certainly my longevity and the fortunate retention of my mental circuits would point to a strong initial endowment. I suppose also that my ability to withstand hard psychological and physical shocks stems not from determination but rather from a nervous system with quick recuperative powers, and as my doctors and dentists have pointed out, I can bear a lot before I call for help.

  I conclude that my genetic inheritance was so favorable that it provided a sturdy base on which my acquired characteristics could thrive. But then the question arises: From where did that genetic inheritance come? and I am left as much in the dark as when I started. If my good fortune in life has been due more to my grandparents than to my own dogged willpower, who were those grandparents?

  The reader already knows that during that vital weekend when I was nineteen I reached two conclusions: I would never know what my parentage was, and I would not speculate idly upon it. I have never deviated from those decisions and have had a remarkably placid emotional life as a result. But others have spent a good deal of time prodding into the record, of which there is almost none, and trying to judge the validity of rumors, of which there is an abundance. One reporter who spent time and ingenuity on the matter called me after his work was done and told me breathlessly: ‘Jim, I’ve found out who your parents really were. Do you want to know?’ and he must have been bewildered when I said: ‘Not really.’

  Despite my strong intention to keep myself isolated from this fruitless speculation, hints of some dozen or so radically different answers to the question have surfaced; I have not attempted to catalog them. They run the gamut, and had I been disposed to join the Roots hysteria of some years back, I would have had many titillating alleyways to explore, but I was far past that point in my life.

  But I was not immune to shock, and in 1987, as I was celebrating my eightieth birthday, a dear friend from school days, Helen Gallagher, one of the finest girl athletes I had ever known, sent me a letter that was quite startling. She said that as a girl seventy years ago she had overheard a kitchen conversation in which the mother of one of her girlfriends was telling another woman how disgraceful it was that Mr. Blank, one of Doylestown’s most upright and respected leaders, refused to help in any way the widow Mabel Michener and her son James, when everyone knew that he, Mr. Blank, was the father of the boy. The letter had such a stamp of honesty about it, the kind that might have been written by a character in Hawthorne or Dickens, that I could not dismiss it.

  I had known Mr. Blank well, had even had business dealings with him and had liked him. He was proper, staid, a respected voice in the business community and a veritable pillar of the Presbyterian church. When having my hair cut at Nelson’s Barber Shop I had always faced that handsome row of shaving mugs that the leading men of our town kept there on display, the name of each owner outlined in gold, and Mr. Blank’s was the finest of the lot, as befitted his high station. Now, as I twisted Helen’s letter in my hand I could easily visualize him, the kind of small-town businessman that Theodore Dreiser might have described as conducting his affairs in Chicago, or Samuel Butler might have shown on his way to important business in London.

  What I have to say next summarizes an important aspect of my life. From what I have written earlier it should not surprise anyone when I claim that that revelation—and it has by no means been proved—had little effect on me. If Mr. Blank had been my father, so be it. He’d given me a sturdy body and a clear mind, and a boy can wish for little more; I am being completely honest when I say that so far as I personally am concerned I bear him not the slightest grudge. But when I think of my mother slaving as she did, toiling at the most menial jobs, unable to give her children the things she knew they needed, I find it incomprehensible that a man of means and position who was in major part responsible for her condition should have refused to help. If indeed he stood close at hand and did nothing to help her, then I can only echo St. Paul as he cried in Corinthians when wishing to utter a crushing condemnation: ‘Let him be Anathema,’ to which I add my own: ‘Let him rot in the lowest level of hell.’

  It was fortunate, if he was my father, that I never knew it, because my free and wild upbringing had given me a surprisingly rugged character, and had I known that he was treating Mrs. Michener in the way some said he did, I would surely have killed him.

  Why, if I had such a potentially violent nature and such a motley background, did I escape a life of rebellion and perhaps even crime? Various factors civilized me. Among them were the three women who raised me who were paragons and together compensated for the lack of any man in my life.

  Aunt Laura was a magnificent teacher in the tempestuous Detroit school system, a champion of uneducated blacks who were flocking to that industrial town. Gallant, pugnacious where human rights were concerned, and militantly active into her eighties as a strict disciplinarian, she was beloved wherever she taught and recognized as a great woman.

  Aunt Hannah was a shy, retiring woman who served a huge area of Bucks County as the public nurse. Tireless, she was available to all at all hours of the night and pushed her beat-up Ford down back roads to the lonely farmhouses. She was an angel of both mercy and common sense, and doctors treasured her because she seemed to save the lives of more babies and elders than they did.

  Mabel Michener was, of course, the most important of the trio. As a young woman at the death of her mother she had surrendered her own life to the rearing and educating of five siblings. She was the Mother Earth of fable, and with no assistance other than what her younger sisters c
ould provide, she brought love and stability to the children who fell under her care and continued doing this into her seventies.

  I was raised in an atmosphere of love, responsibility and service, but what I remember most is the constant laughter in my home. We laughed at our own follies, chuckled at the foolishness of others, mocked the nonsense of our elected officials, and relished the jokes that circulated in our small town. Despite the anguish we suffered at times, we did not live tragic lives; laughter, not tears, surrounded me.

  I remember one Christmas Day when our doorbell rang incessantly: grateful villagers bringing presents to Aunt Hannah, who had nursed them back to health, and older children returning to thank Mabel for having given them a loving home when no other homes were available. I vowed that day to live my life the way the three sisters had lived theirs, not that of others in town whose selfishness appalled me, and each Christmas throughout the remainder of my life I would renew that pledge.

  But a growing boy needs contact with men, or even better, with a man, and Doylestown almost magically provided such a one in the person of George Murray, a placid, uneducated, unmarried man in his late forties who worked as a roofer, earning a modest salary, which he spent on the underprivileged boys of our community. He personally ran the local branch of Boys’ Brigade, a group once strong nationally but now in retreat before the much more alluring and socially acceptable Boy Scouts. This Brigade was a paramilitary outfit with wooden guns, bugles, uniforms and marching formations. It was affiliated in each community with some Protestant church, in our case the Presbyterian, but boys of all denominations were welcomed.