First, any publisher who has been in business a long time has acquired a wealth of knowledge about the pitfalls of writing. His editors may not themselves be able to write successful novels, but they can spot with uncanny skill defects in their authors’ work. Sensible writers listen to cautions voiced by their publishers, as expressed through their editors; the writers may not accept everything said, but they do weigh it carefully. So when I was warned that the Canadian material was not in the best interests of my Alaskan story, I had to pay heed.
Second, there are writers, and some of the best, who, when they submit a manuscript, tell the publisher: ‘This is it. Print it,’ and permit no editorial work. There are others of equal merit who not only listen to critical opinion but seek it, even altering their novels substantially if that seems desirable. I fall within the second group. Regardless of the debate as to which attitude is correct and produces the best results, I avidly seek criticism before the book is published. After it’s in print I do not, because then it’s too late, and I would not have released the book for publication if I hadn’t liked it pretty much as it was.
Third, I had from the very start of my Alaska project a self-set determination to keep this novel noticeably shorter than some of my previous works, even though my readers have insisted through the years that my books end too soon. I felt obliged this time to keep the total pages to less than a thousand and, if possible, under nine hundred. I was therefore attentive when one reader warned:
There is a vast difference between a book of 1209 pages and one of 918. Both the critic and the general reader will comment negatively about the former and allow the latter to pass. The critic will cry: ‘Another thousand-page effort,’ and in the bookstore the potential reader will heft the book and look at the last page and moan: ‘I can’t read a thousand pages of anything.’ In other words, the length of the book runs the risk of becoming the most important thing about it, and for a writer to allow that to happen, or even invite it to happen, is self-destructive.
So I was myself looking to identify segments that could be eliminated, knowing that at the same time my editor would be similarly engaged. Consequently, his suggestion for a cut did not come as a surprise, but the fact that the Canadian story was chosen did.
Fourth, there was another major objection to the Canadian section, fearfully obvious and damaging, once voiced. I was spending a lot of time on a river that played no further role in Alaskan history, on a town not in Alaska that never reappeared in the novel, and on five characters of whom only one, the Irishman, appeared in the purely Alaskan material, and his role could be salvaged by creating another Irishman for my Nome and Juneau segments. So far as characters necessary for the narrative were concerned, cutting the Mackenzie River segment completely, as my editor advised, would lose us little. Even as I was writing the Mackenzie River passages I had sometimes the feeling: Boy, we’re getting pretty far away from Alaska. These men are headed to the Arctic Ocean, not the gold fields. But I muffled that sneaking suspicion by pointing out to myself: But that’s what the story is all about. Heading for a gold field but constantly moving farther and farther away. However, I never fully disposed of this unease, and when New York advised exactly what I’d been tentatively thinking, it struck fire.
All these reasons for eliminating my Canadian story were sound. They added up to one unavoidable conclusion: this segment, while a good and interesting story in itself, did not belong in Alaska. So the advice was accepted. A sequence on which I had labored arduously, and which I cherished for the great scenes it contained, would not be in this book. The general narrative was speeded up, and the focus was kept more sharply on Alaska and not disturbed by a diversion into Canada.
The cut had not been forced upon me: I had made the decision, and in retrospect it had many virtues to defend it; specifically, it served as an interesting example of how publishing decisions are reached.
Of course, when the cut was made many valuable cross references productive of resonance were lost, both earlier incidents which foreshadowed present ones, and present which foreshadowed future. Two of the first type were serious losses. I wanted the ease with which Captain Cook saved lives by his handling of scurvy to be contrasted with how Lord Luton lost lives by his mishandling. And I had planned for the comic scene in which the Russian tyrant Tsar Peter the Great, who hated beards, used a dull razor to shave his cossack to presage the later scene in which the English dictator Lord Luton shaved Fogarty with an equally dull blade.
In the present-to-future relationship I wanted Luton’s exhibitionist fifty-mile trek down the middle of the frozen Mackenzie to pave the way for the ridiculous scene, founded on fact, in which Fogarty’s replacement in Alaska, Murphy, rides a bicycle down the middle of the frozen Yukon during blizzards, an incredible eight hundred and fifty miles from the played-out gold fields of Dawson to the rich new field at Nome: I wanted this to be the Irishman’s subtle comeuppance to His Lordship.
But eliminating the Canadian segment was not the end of this adventure, nor could it be. I had spent so much energy researching the Canadian episode that it had become almost a living part of me, and I was disconsolate to think that it would never see the light of day. Here an important characteristic of the writer surfaces: I had worked hard to tell the Canadian part of the gold rush because I had a strong conviction that this interlocking between North America’s two nations which share the arctic region ought to be known, just as it ought to be appreciated that the Soviet Union also shares in that frozen terrain and in the responsibility for it. I had said something important, in parable form it is true and therefore limited in certain significant ways, but also with the potential of achieving the readership that sometimes accrues to parables, and I had a strong desire to see it published and in circulation, especially among Canadians for whom I had intended it in the first place.
On the day I agreed to cut the section, I placed the banished pages neatly in a folder and vowed: Someday I’ll get you into print; and then I surrendered the matter in the rush of seeing the rest of the manuscript through the editing process.
But good ideas take a long time dying and the same is doubly true for characters into whom one has breathed life. Often in my nightly walks I would recall incidents on the Mackenzie River and I became increasingly forlorn over my failure to get their story published. One night it was as if my five characters rose in revolt, demanding my assistance, and a happy thought struck: Why not try to place this Canadian story with a Canadian publisher? Once that acorn was planted, it grew into a very strong tree.
Here, I must make an observation. The Mackenzie River story that lay unquietly in my files was far shorter than the one I would try to place with a Canadian publisher, since I had cut portions of the original manuscript and had refrained from writing parts I had planned because it was already running far too long. In preparing the manuscript for my Canadian publisher, I was able to set down the full story I had originally wanted to write. Parts cut were restored and parts originally intended but not written were added. Now that I was working on a short novel, not a segment of a novel, I was able to research my story further and to develop incidents and passages that I had not previously imagined. In short, I was able to give flesh to what had been bare bones, but in not one word was the story modified to make it more palatable to the Canadian reader. This was and is a story conceived for two purposes: to acquaint American readers with facts about Canadian existence, and to demonstrate to Canadian readers my respect for the history and achievements of their country.
To friends in the modern metropolis of Edmonton, I apologize for having dwelt so heavily upon the misbehavior of their ancestors in 1897–1899, but the propaganda about routes from Edmonton to the Klondike in those years was reprehensible and as a result many died. In later years, of course, the frontier town transformed itself into a major center and a force for good in Canada’s westward expansion and in the development of the prairies.
Only another novelist or a trained
researcher will appreciate the quiet joy I experienced in the final days of editing this book. My editor in Toronto, now aware of my infatuation with the Edmonton photograph of the intrepid woman gold-seeker, had urged the custodians of the Provincial Archives of Alberta to ransack their files to see if the name of the young woman could be determined, and one morning Toronto called to say: ‘Great news! They’ve identified her name. Mrs. Garner.’
I gasped, for my high school Spanish teacher, a graduate from Swarthmore College who had arranged for the scholarship that sent me to Swarthmore, thus paving my way into the academic career I had enjoyed so much, had been a Miss Garner, so that to me the name was revered.
‘Where was she from?’
The archivists did not know.
‘What route did she take north?’
No one knew.
‘Canadian or American?’
They did not even know that, but she was a real woman; she had been in the studio of Ernest Brown, photographer, in Edmonton in August of 1897, and as far as anyone knew, she had left that town for the Klondike. Even with that meager information I was content, for it dramatically changed her from a ghostly shadow to a living person.
Then, as we were about to go to press, Toronto called again: ‘Even better news. We’ve found out more about Mrs. Garner. She came from Fresno, California, with a party of eighteen men. They bought eighty horses in Edmonton and headed out on the overland trail with a great determination to find the gold fields.’
That’s all we know, but the phrases haunt me, for the questions are limitless. Was her husband, or brother, among the eighteen men? How did he allow her to go to Edmonton? And why in the world should she have gone there when Seattle was so much closer and was the start of a much simpler route? What happened to those horses? What happened to her? If she raised children somewhere and they had grandchildren, I hope that someone informs them that their great-grandmother was the guiding light of this book.
It is strange what sometimes transpires when we go prowling about through old photographs.
BY JAMES A. MICHENER
Tales of the South Pacific
The Fires of Spring
Return to Paradise
The Voice of Asia
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Sayonara
The Floating World
The Bridge at Andau
Hawaii
Report of the Country Chairman
Caravans
The Source
Iberia
Presidential Lottery
The Quality of Life
Kent State: What Happened and Why
The Drifters
A Michener Miscellany: 1950–1970
Centennial
Sports in America
Chesapeake
The Covenant
Space
Poland
Texas
Legacy
Alaska
Journey
Caribbean
The Eagle and the Raven
Pilgrimage
The Novel
James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook
Mexico
Creatures of the Kingdom
Recessional
Miracle in Seville
This Noble Land: My Vision for America
The World Is My Home
with A. Grove Day
Rascals in Paradise
with John Kings
Six Days in Havana
About the Author
JAMES A. MICHENER, one of the world’s most popular writers, was the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the best-selling novels Hawaii, Texas, Chesapeake, The Covenant, and Alaska, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.
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