The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  Murray rented a kind of gymnasium where Friday-night drills were held and where during the rest of the week his boys played basketball. It was there I honed the skills that would serve me well in later years, but what we enjoyed most was the summer camp he ran on the banks of the Delaware River some miles to the east. There we whipped ourselves into condition, playing rugged games, canoeing up and down the river and, best of all, riding the coal barges that brought anthracite out of the Pennsylvania mining regions to markets in Philadelphia. Heavily laden, they drifted down a beautiful canal running beside the river and were hauled back north by mules that trod the towpath. It was on those barges that I acquired my love for water travel.

  Murray amused us by his Sunday sermons in which he frequently said: ‘In the Bible Jesus says …’ What caused merriment was that he pronounced says as saze and other words in equally curious ways. (As I type this I wonder for the first time why says should not be pronounced to rhyme with ways and days.)

  In his quiet, almost Christ-like insistence on boys living a good life, Murray saved many of us, especially those without fathers, but just as I left his care, the Boy Scout movement moved into our community with explosive force. All the better families who had ignored the lowly Brigade now placed their sons in the Scouts and provided huge endowments, while Murray with his roofer’s pittance was forgotten.

  But today, three quarters of a century later, scores of aging men in my hometown still meet each spring to pay tribute to this man who, by the force of his quiet character, rescued so many of them. In most years my peripatetic life prevents me from attending these reunions, but I send in my dues, because the debt I owe that good man can never be discharged.

  The third factor in disciplining my rebellious and contentious nature was the bigger boys I kept running into. They were tougher than I, quicker on their feet, and abler with their fists. After absorbing fearful punishment, I concluded that since I had not the equipment to be a bully boy, I would accomplish more with mouth shut than open.

  The consequence was that at thirteen and fourteen, when I was about to begin that life of impetuous travel on the road and the near-criminal activities at the amusement park, I could not think of myself as the cockiest kid on the block; instead I carried with me the memory of a meaningful home, a fatherly roofer who had taught me what ‘Jesus saze.’

  Having escaped the personal degradation or even criminality that could have been the consequences of my deprived childhood, I have been driven in later years to reflect on the plight of the average black boy in modern American society. Raised with no man in the family, often unable to determine who his father is, rejected by white society, demeaned by almost every agency of government and cheated by his teachers, who routinely pass him along instead of trying to teach him, he is the outcast of our society, doomed from birth.

  I have, understandably, compared his lot with my own and tried to explain why I, as a fatherless boy in a household headed by an unmarried woman, could make my way in American life while the black boy of comparable character and skills cannot. The answer seems simple. All the black boy needs is a mother like Mrs. Michener, who has the moral support of her brothers and the assistance of her sisters, all of whom have good jobs; the support of her church; the moral support of his entire community; the counsel of older men who tell him: ‘Get out of this pool room and stay out!’; the ennobling aid of an inspired friend to the young like George Murray; instruction from dedicated teachers who insist that he learn; and a fees-paid scholarship to a great college like Swarthmore.

  The unceasing support that I encountered is not available to the black boy, and the mistreatment he suffers is one of our national disgraces, which, if continued, will do irreparable damage to the country itself. The tragedy gnaws at me, for whereas I had the Boys’ Brigade, the black boy has a gang. I had Coach Grady, who preached: ‘Don’t eat greasy foods’; he has the man in the corner saying: ‘Here, kid. Try this new one, crack.’ And while my opportunity of going to college was backed by that good night job at the hotel, he can find no work of any kind that can support him.

  I am appalled at the difference, at the waste of human talent. Of course, every boy is better off if he grows up in a family where a wage-earner father is present, but if that is not possible, society ought to help mothers provide constructive alternatives. The black boy faces mainly destructive options, and my heart grieves for him.

  Now, toward the end of a long and lively run, how do I see myself as a man and a writer? I see myself as a standard American with a usable I.Q. and a strong education drilled into me by dedicated professors. Throughout my life I have been able to work more diligently than most and to keep my wits about me. I was deficient in the standard manifestations of ambition and once said, accurately: ‘I’ve been content if I could reach Friday in one piece. And I never start worrying again till Monday.’ I do not think of myself as a romantic dreamer; my life has been too hard for that indulgence. But when I have suffered my physical setbacks I have muttered a saying I heard once but whose source I have not been able to identify: ‘I will lay me down and bleed awhile, then rise and fight again.’ I have been persistent.

  But I have never set goals for myself save one: I insist on being a reliable citizen who works to help society hold itself together.

  Viewing myself as a writer, let me first comment briefly and in good humor about how critics see me. Academic critics dismiss me completely because, like Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, they have fairly rigid rules as to what constitutes literature and it does not include what I write. I am sorry, because I think they are wrong, and so do many readers.

  Literary critics have a difficult time with me. They sometimes condemn me for writing for money, but as I demonstrated in the preceding section, that is patently absurd. Others say that I direct my writing only to middle-brow or even lower tastes, but two recent studies have disproved that. In the first, a national magazine interrogated a large sampling of the well-educated mature men who run the nation’s largest industries as to their reading habits, and while many said honestly that they were too busy to read anything but reports relating to their jobs, many others said they knew they ought to keep reading and when they found time they habitually read a book by Michener because they knew it would be readable and reward them with knowledge of value. The second inquiry was directed to the young military men in training to be fighter pilots and they said: ‘Only Saint-Exupéry and Michener. Those two knew what flying was,’ and I thought: If a writer can keep the old lions and the young tigers with him, he must know something about narration.

  Other critics intimate that no one should bother with my books because they are not written in approved styles, but the books continue to live and not only at home. The Englishman in charge of Britain’s excellent program by which the government collects data on reading tastes in public libraries throughout the nation and then pays cash awards to the authors of the books taken out most frequently did me the honor of sending me a report of what the British system would have paid me had they paid similar fees to foreign authors (which they should not). My books stood close to the top of the list for foreign authors and quite high even among local writers. The same would be true, I judge, for certain of my books, not all of them by any means, in countries like the Netherlands and Germany.

  Typical criticism of my work was well voiced recently by Chauncey Mabe, books columnist of the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, News Sun-Sentinel:

  Sometime in the late 60’s or early 70’s James Michener ceased to be a serious writer, at least in the literary sense and became something else—an industry, his typewriter a factory upon which, with two fingers pecking, he took history and processed it into best-selling novels that could also be used as door-stops and further processed into movies or, better yet, TV miniseries.

  The rest of the review was well phrased, witty and laced with legitimate content, but in the covering letter Mabe illustrated the ambivalence that some critics feel about me: ‘While
I do not think you are a great writer, I see you as a great American whose ideals and whose life provide one of the few examples worthy of admiration in our troubled age.’

  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, of The New York Times, makes somewhat the same point as Mabe in his review: ‘Rice Krispies happens to be one of my favorite junk foods, just as I regard Michener as superior among junk writers.’ That is a clever juxtaposition of ideas, to which I take no offense, for it is an honest opinion amusingly delivered, but I suspect that some of my readers will be surprised to learn that the books that have meant so much to them are only junk.

  A writer is well advised never to respond to negative criticism, a tenet that was hammered into me by prudent editors and publicists when I worked at Macmillan and by several grizzled veterans of the writing wars when I joined their ranks. The rules were laid down by my trusted mentor Kahler: ‘The Old and New Testaments regarding criticism: “Never complain. Never explain. Never disdain.” To complain makes you look petty and juvenile. Make sure that your publisher sends you a check for whatever you’ve honestly earned, and keep your mouth shut. Put your full attention on the next job, because to complain is fruitless. And don’t try to explain. If you’ve spent three hundred pages putting your thoughts down and haven’t succeeded, what makes you think you can clarify them in a one-page letter? Anyway, the editor will cut you to a quarter page. And as for disdaining your critics, remember, never make a joke at their expense. They’re probably brighter than you, have thought more deeply about literature, and could probably write a damned sight better than you if they put their minds to it. If you fight with such a talented man you will lose. Besides being superior to you in every way, he will have that big, forty-eight-page newspaper in which to blast you for the next six months.’

  I read far more criticism than the average citizen: what movies are best, what shows to go to, what music is worth buying in compact disk, what restaurants are worth the effort of getting a table. I prize the opinions of critics and am guided by their recommendations, but I never, never read criticisms of my own work. I summarize the problem this way: ‘Critics are invaluable in advising me how to spend my money. They are not qualified to tell me how to spend my talent.’

  At one period in my life numerous critics, when writing of other writers, were fond of comparing them with me, and always the other fellow came off best: ‘He is a lot better storyteller than Michener,’ or ‘His novel moves more honestly than a Michener.’ For a while I kept a list of such comparisons because I wanted to know what happened to all those people who were so much better than me,‡ but it came to naught because most of them were never heard from again, and those that were had only feeble lasting power.

  Obedient to Rule Three of the professional writer’s code, I have never tried to rebut any critic, and in general I had no cause to, because so many greeted my books with an enthusiasm that enabled publishers to garner as many encomiums as they had space for in their paperback editions and no critic, so far as I can remember, ever treated me unfairly. I know that those who did not like what I had written, or the style I used, usually had ample quotations to back their judgments, but, to repeat a solemn fact, for the past eighteen or twenty years I have refused to read even one review of anything I have written. (The Mabe review arrived in a personal letter and I had to read the first paragraph to know what it was about.) I find praise distasteful, harsh criticism irrelevant; I am not saying that I ignore criticism or denigrate it—I just don’t read it. My wife does and chortles over good notices, moans over bad ones, but down the long years of any productive life what critics say has only limited relevance to a career, because it will all be reevaluated some decades hence.

  It would ill behoove me to speak poorly of critics, since two played major roles in my writing life. When my first book was published, Orville Prescott of The New York Times wrote a glowing comment, one of his most enthusiastic, in which he predicted that I was a writer from whom more might be heard; and John Mason Brown, that gallant, polished master of the lecture circuit, spent an entire season reading excerpts from my first book, thus bringing me to the attention of thousands of people who were interested in books and bought them. My debt to those two experts is incalculable, and in their lifetimes I told them so.

  Critics have problems, too, and here are examples to illustrate the point. When The Drifters was published, one man of considerable erudition wrote: ‘Mr. Michener absentmindedly shifts the point of view in his narration in each of his first three chapters, forgetting that many of his readers will remember Henry James’ dictum that a consistent point of view is everything.’ He was correct in his facts; my point of view did shift in a most un-Jamesian riot, but what he did not know was that over a period of some months the publisher and I had studied the problem in prolonged discussions to see if my daring plan would work: to have the narrator slowly reveal himself after two episodes in which he was only peripherally involved. I liked the idea, one of my editors did not, and obviously the critic didn’t either, and maybe he was right. But to assume that it was through careless oversight was quite wrong. The presence of superior knowledge in the critic’s mind had tempted him, not the writer, into error.

  Another critic who got himself into trouble because he knew too much rather than too little was the one who included in his review of Caravans the observation: ‘Apparently Mr. Michener never looked at a map of Afghanistan, for if he had he would have seen that it has no seacoast and therefore no navy. So there could be no naval attaché in the American Embassy and his story falls apart.’ What this able gentleman could not know was that the appearance of the naval attaché was the result of two weeks of difficult discussion back and forth which was resolved only by the brilliant suggestion of a high-priced libel lawyer. This was what happened. In the novel I experimented with having my faintly unpleasant embassy officer hold five or six different offices, but the real ones were too libelous and the imaginary ones too clearly fake; it was then that the lawyer said: ‘Let me see the map,’ and we were saved by giving Afghanistan not only a navy but also a naval attaché who was free to behave as I wished. The critic was right to condemn me for an error, but he should at the same time have commended the lawyer for having helped us avoid a lawsuit.

  The problem of libel is one that faces all writers, and it can best be illustrated by what happened in my novel Space when it was imperative that I have the fictional junior senator of some state play the role that a real senior senator in a real state had played. Good idea, but when you’re working in a known time period when there was a known junior senator from that state holding the office, and you have your man acting up, the real senator can rightly claim that whatever you say about your fictional character has to represent him; his claim for damages would be valid on the face of it, and lawyers know this. So they advise writers to create a fictional state—in Space I chose the State of Franklin—which gave me an imaginary junior senator who could misbehave as either he or the author wished. A lot of lawsuits are avoided by such a device.

  Sometimes critics are devastatingly right. In The Bridges at Toko-Ri I have my hero flying a jet fighter and creating a wash with his propeller. One critic, a pilot himself, wrote: ‘Miraculous! I wish Mr. Michener had explained how he did it.’ I spent one afternoon trying to devise an answer but gave up; jet fighters don’t have propellers. But if I feel honor-bound never to quarrel with a critic, my wife is not so constrained, and if anyone bad-mouths one of my books she makes a little wax effigy of him and attacks it with red-hot needles. I can tell you that certain critics are walking about in far more peril than they realize.§

  I sometimes wonder when I read what even knowledgeable people say about writers and writing if they have any conception of what the life of a writer is like, especially if his or her books achieve wide circulation in many languages. What they don’t know might include: a visit to the dentist when people from six surrounding offices come with their books to be signed; the letters that arrive daily thanking yo
u for books that changed the letter-writers’ lives; the startling experience of walking to the rear of an airplane to exercise your bad legs and finding six or seven people reading your novels, and often ones published a quarter of a century ago; the warming contact with people who love books and who are endeavoring to entice their children to read, too, by testing them with one of yours; and the knock on the door from a group of neighbors: ‘We heard you were in town. We have almost all your books—would you please sign them?’

  I know of no finer portrait of a writer than one offered some years ago by a young black aspirant from one of the small Caribbean islands: ‘When I finally reached New York City my heart expanded and in sheer joy I cried: “To think that I am in the same town with James Baldwin and that when I turn the next corner I might meet him.” ’

  Sometimes we catch a better portrait of a writer when we see him obliquely, as through the letters from strangers who seek contact with him. Critics have sometimes made jokes about the length of my books, as if that were a detriment, but every month throughout the year I receive letters complaining that the novels were too short; they wanted more, and I have supposed that this was because I had been so patient in building the locations of my stories and so studious in peopling them with characters who mattered that the readers were loath to bid both place and people farewell. This has been borne out by the surprising number who have said the same thing, year after year: ‘When I realized that the book was coming to an end, I was so sorry to leave it that I began to ration myself, only so many pages a day, and it was painful to see those pages stop.’

  I receive about fifty letters a year begging me to write about the correspondent’s home state or country on the theory: ‘If you make rural Nebraska come alive so beautifully in Centennial, think what you could do with Minnesota!’ All corners of the nation have been represented in these suggestions but none with the frequency with which the citizens of California press their claims, and I more than most know that I would have found excellent material in that majestic land, but I have not had the courage to tell the writers that years ago I intended moving to California, but my wife refused to accompany me back to a state which she too loves but which had treated her so savagely in 1941 during World War II: ‘Soldiers came to the little store my mother ran south of Los Angeles and said: “All Japanese are traitors! Lock them up!” and our property was taken from us without compensation. We were thrown into the horse stables at Santa Anita racetrack, and then into concentration camps, American style. I have no hostility toward California—it’s a wonderful state—but I could not bear to go back to where we were treated so unfairly.’