The Novel

by James A. Michener

  Why didn’t I walk out that night, especially since I wasn’t married to him? I cannot explain, except that I loved him and that when he smiled that smile at me I simply melted.

  And my threat worked, for when he realized that I might one day just leave, he no longer menaced me, but this restraint seemed merely to direct his aggressions into other channels. Within a few days he was involved in another imbroglio and again it was he who initiated it. Kinetic’s young editor Jeppson, who felt so strongly about Vietnam, had written a letter to The New York Times bewailing the lack of attention and justice the veterans of that war were suffering, and Benno found his statement so objectionable that he sent off a blistering retort, charging Jeppson and most other veterans of Vietnam with being crybabies and self-appointed critics of the military who were perilously close to committing treason:

  Throughout history real men have gone to war. Most of them probably wanted to remain home, but they went. To defend the things they held worthy. They took their lumps grinning If they made it back they considered the war the greatest adventure of their lives and knew they were the better for it. The way the Vietnam veterans cry the blues makes me sick. And I’ll bet the rest of the nation reacts the same way.

  He signed the letter with his full name, adding: A REAL VIETNAM VETERAN, and proud of it.

  When the girls at the office showed me what he had done, I was outraged and could hardly wait till I returned home to berate him: ‘You thoughtless clod. Jeppson offered to help you. Later he did help me when I was in a tight spot. And you ridicule him. Benno, he’s just as much of a man as you are, and don’t you forget it.’

  Doubling his fist, he sprang at me, but I sidestepped and he banged into the wall. I said quietly: ‘We agreed there’d be no more of that,’ and he blandly excused himself: ‘Forgive me, I’ve been drinking.’

  At his mention of this unfortunate word, which symbolized so much of his problem, a flush of remembrance swept over me, and I heard again my uncle Judah talking with me privately on the night he gave me the money for my wedding dress: ‘I want to see you married, Shirl. And you ought to pick out your man quickly, when you’re in full control of your senses, because I fear you may become one of those sentimental Jewish women who pass up all the good men who might want to marry them but beat the bushes trying to find some derelict they can save. They pick drunkards, psychos, men who will never hold a job, wife beaters, weirdos. They convince themselves that they alone can save this poor fellow who the others don’t understand—and they waste their own lives in this futile attempt.’

  I remember that at this point my uncle fell silent, then started to laugh mirthlessly: ‘I watched three fine ladies dedicate themselves to the reform route. They were going to save heavy drinkers, and all the while there I was—available, sober and with a good salary, without the necessity of any salvation job. They could never see me. They were determined to save someone, and I was already saved.’

  I asked him why he’d never married and he said almost bitterly: ‘I was invisible. They saw only the lurching drunkards, who’d provide them with a noble life’s work.’ He ended this unpleasant summary of a lonely life by taking my hands and saying solemnly: ‘Shirl, I’ve seen signals, little things, that make me fear you may be one of those women who will always search for some weirdo to save. Let me tell you one thing. There are five hundred young men in New York right now—Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Republicans—who would surrender two fingers from their left hand to marry a fine girl like you. For God’s sake, Shirl, find yourself one of them, someone you won’t have to save.’ I listened, but I did not hear.

  And then salvation came our way: Evan Cater stopped by our apartment with a tempting invitation: ‘I teach a course at N.Y.U. and I have to be in Chicago for two weeks. Class meets three times a week, and no one I know could handle it better than you, Benno. Would you be interested?’

  I almost leaped forward to answer ‘Yes!’ on his behalf and was delighted when he agreed: ‘That would be an honor,’ and arrangements were made: ‘Two weeks, that’s one sixth of the term, I’ll give you that percentage of my fee. Subject matter? Six lectures on six novels, you’ve mastered them all, Passage to India, Tin Drum and I’d like you to include my notes on McTeague. Class meets for only an hour, and the people do enjoy the last twenty minutes of lively question and answer.’

  Arrangements completed, Benno dug into the six novels, reading McTeague for the first time and enjoying it. As time approached for the first Monday-afternoon session, I realized that he might be a bit nervous and asked: ‘Would you like me to come along?’ and he snapped: ‘I don’t need a baby-sitter.’ That night when he came home, five of his students had trailed along, and hours after the class on the novel had ended they sat at mute attention as he expounded further on various subjects. I served lemonade made from crystals and as they filed out at a quarter to seven I heard one say: ‘That guy’s terrific!’

  It was so obvious to me that Benno enjoyed the class that I wanted to see him teach. I slipped away from work on Wednesday and slid into the rear of his classroom, from where I heard a brilliant exposition of Tom Jones as the archetypal picaresque novel. I could see that he was proud of his ability to identify subtleties that others had missed in the novels. I had never heard him use words more effectively, and he displayed an unusual skill in leading students to conclusions that would not have occurred to them a few minutes before. It was a bravura performance, and when I saw the manly way he comported himself, his charming trick of using his smile to make the students feel at ease, I thought: No wonder I love that gorgeous hunk, and I would have been willing to wager that half the girls in the class were in love with him too.

  That night when the students had left the apartment, I said joyfully: ‘Benno, I think we have it! You’re tremendously good at this teaching bit. The students are going to tell Cater, and I’ll bet you can land a steady job. You have so much to share.’

  He was not excited by my suggestion, and showed a diminished enthusiasm for his Friday class, which I was not able to attend. That afternoon he invited no students to the apartment, and when I got there I could see that he had been drinking. When I asked him how the lecture on Madame Bovary had gone, he shouted: ‘I don’t want to teach others how to write. I want someone to teach me,’ and he announced that he was damned well not going back to that stupid class come Monday.

  Failing to make him realize the dreadful thing he was doing, especially his violation of the trust Cater had placed in him, I spent the weekend trying to make him change his mind, but all I received was a stream of profanity of a kind that I would never have allowed in any book I edited. I tried in vain to track down Evan Cater to seek his advice and could come up with no solution but to inform Kinetic that I was occupied Monday, Wednesday and Friday from two to four and teach the class myself.

  When I told the students that Mr. Rattner was indisposed, they groaned, so that I started behind the eight ball, but I turned the class into an informal seminar on how people only a bit older than they wrote and published books, and I had at my fingertips so much behind-the-scenes chatter about the trade that I held their attention. In the next session I dealt with grammar, at which I had necessarily become something of an expert, and on Friday I enlisted the aid of Suzy Jenkins, in charge of our subsidiary rights, and between us we told of a dozen exciting auctions of Kinetic books, three that we won and three that we lost because of our ineptitude.

  The second week was not a disaster, but it was not what Evan Cater had intended, and when he learned of Benno’s juvenile behavior a coolness developed between the two men and we saw him no more at our apartment.

  In this unhappy way we passed the next years, with me rising steadily in the hierarchy at Kinetic while he moped about our apartment during the afternoon and attended one class or another at night. It was the year 1976, when Yoder’s Shunning proved to be a commercial failure and I threatened to walk out of Kinetic with all my writers if the house did not ext
end its contract with my cherished Dutchman; it was also the year when Rattner made a wholehearted effort to finish his novel. He had been freed from his writer’s block by some curious reasoning that he developed by himself and certainly with no input from me, for it ran counter to everything I believed about editing: ‘Darling, I see it so clearly now. I’ve been on the wrong track. I listened to you advising me how to write my book. Then I listened to Evan Cater, how he would do it. Then the people at Gallantry kept yakking at me, and I suppose if I’d taken that offer at Simon and Schuster they’d have given me the vital word that would break me loose. The fact is that the writer must, entirely by himself, solve the big problems. He must generate a clear understanding of where he’s heading and how he proposes getting there. Claptrap from editors merely muddies the water.’

  I was sure I could cite a dozen historical instances in which knowledgeable editors did help tremendously, but I judged that this was not the time to name them because he continued: ‘So as of today I become my own man, with my own guiding star. This novel is going to be finished my way, and to hell with the smartasses at Simon and Schuster.’ I did not point out that he had never spoken a word to anyone at S&S, nor they to him.

  But in the mornings he was inspired to get out of bed when I did and sit at his typewriter throughout the day. The few ideas he shared with me about alterations in his story line sounded sensible and, I must confess, more original than any suggestions I had made months before. When I saw the pile of neatly typed pages building up I told myself: ‘He’s really going to do it! He knew himself better than I did.’

  But then things slowed down. When I left for work, he would still be in bed, and when I returned at night—at Kinetic we worked late—I would see no increase in the pile of manuscript but there would be The New York Times folded back at the crossword puzzle, which he had apparently spent some hours trying to do in ink without making corrections. Most ominously, glasses showed that he had been drinking: he used a new glass each time he moved about in the apartment.

  The day finally came when he did not leave his bed at all but lay there for hours in a drunken stupor. That did it. I was unusually exhausted one evening when I saw him still under the covers, for I’d been involved at Kinetic in irritating discussions about how we might cut costs to make our corporate overseers happy, and I was in no mood to humor a grown man who was acting like a baby. Slapping him to make him pay attention, I threw a wet towel at him and growled: ‘Wash your face and clear your eyes. We have something to discuss.’ Propping him up with pillows, I said: ‘There’ll be no more nonsense about your working on a novel that doesn’t exist and never will.’ The sharpness of my words startled him and he began in a whimpering way to assure me that … ‘Cut it out,’ I said bluntly. ‘We’ve been down that road too often.’

  He astonished me by leaning on his left elbow and gesturing grandiloquently with his right arm as he delivered a wildly poetic exposition of what a novel ought to be, and he sounded more logical and inspired than Evan Cater and Erich Auerbach put together. He was so persuasive that for a moment I was transfixed, but then he smiled at me mischievously and asked like a boy of nine who has been caught misbehaving: ‘Isn’t that so?’

  Waving my hand across his eyes to break the spell he had generated to mollify me, I said: ‘I’ve learned the hard way what a novel really is. It’s sixty thousand carefully chosen words, and if you can’t put them down on paper in a meaningful way, you have no novel.’

  Dropping his pretense, he said so softly that it was almost a whisper: ‘Sixty thousand words would be just the right length for my novel. I’ve been trying to make it too long. Tomorrow I start cutting back.’

  ‘You’ll never do it. Stop daydreaming, Benno, and make believe you’re a man.’ But once I had spat out these words, I was terrified at their finality and became the befuddled woman that Uncle Judah had foreseen: I wanted to save this lost soul.

  Gently I combed his black hair with my fingers and helped steady him as he climbed out of bed. ‘Benno, my dearest, your dream is finished. Help me attain mine.’

  Benno was so demoralized that he did just that; he put aside his manuscript and helped me edit the novels I was working on. Since he had a good critical sense for narrative and an even better eye for grammatical construction, he created the illusion that we were a team, but his work habits were so erratic that I could not rely on him to complete any self-assigned task on schedule. After a while I abandoned the illusion of teamwork and became just one more hardworking New York woman who was striving to bolster emotionally her shattered unemployed man.

  At this dismal point, in 1978, I visited for the first time the small Grenzler town of Dresden to work on Yoder’s fifth novel, Hex, for which I had vibrant hopes, and as soon as I saw the Dresden China, at which I would be staying for the next three working days, I fell in love with its rural charm, its white-and-blue decor and its glass cases filled with Meissen objects. At my first meal I was given a table in a corner formed by two of the cases at right angles so that I sat surrounded by beautiful shepherdesses, country swains and posturing members of the German nobility.

  ‘No wonder Mr. Yoder loves his Grenzler if this is a sample,’ I said, and my daily drive east to the farm where we worked on the manuscript showed me the rich lands about which he wrote. But the visit had its bitter overtones, for as I watched the close intimacy enjoyed by the Yoders—the sensible division of labor, the respect each had for the other, the shared leadership and the tremendous amount of work they accomplished—I could not help thinking: How can these two achieve with such apparent ease the kind of meaningful companionship I sought so desperately with Benno? Why can Yoder, relying on Emma’s help, complete his manuscripts, while Benno, who receives much more assistance from me, completes nothing?

  Back in New York with my besotted but loving partner, I worked twelve and fifteen hours a day, afire with the conviction that Hex was going to be the breakthrough for the Yoder I had fought so diligently to protect. When, at last, the accolades and the sales and glory streamed in, I reveled in the joy that reigned at Kinetic.

  At the height of the frenzy, when on each Monday morning officials at Kinetic would proudly inform the media: ‘We go back to press tomorrow for another fifty thousand of this runaway,’ I suffered near exhaustion from excitement and lack of sleep. ‘Take three days off,’ Miss Wilmerding of personnel advised, and I did. But as I rested in bed the phone continued to ring with glad tidings regarding Hex, and at one point, when I thought Benno was out of the room, I shouted after replacing the phone: ‘Another hundred thousand! Yoder, we’ve done it!’

  Benno, hearing the hateful name that had haunted him in these weeks of triumph, stormed over, pulled me out of bed and bellowed: ‘I warned you not to say that name in this house.’ When he raised his fist I screamed: ‘Benno! No!’ Just in time he refrained from striking me, but he vented his fury by giving me a mighty shove in the chest, which should merely have sent me spinning more or less harmlessly into the opposite wall, but my feet caught in my nightgown and I tripped on the Persian rug. To break my fall, I threw out my right arm and smashed it against the sharp back of the sofa, breaking a bone in two places.

  When I left the hospital and returned to my apartment, a contrite Benno tearfully apologized: ‘Darling, I never meant to strike you, you know that.’ There was nothing I could say, so he continued: ‘All I did was push you, not hard. It was your nightgown … the back of the sofa. I would never harm you, sweetheart.’

  When he asked what I was going to do, I said: ‘Go to work tomorrow.’

  ‘But they’ll ask about your arm!’

  ‘Simple fracture. I’ll tell them the truth. I tripped on my nightgown, fell against a sofa.’

  ‘You won’t tell them about me?’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘I thought you might.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it make me look stupid? To remain with a man who treats me the way you do?’ Suddenly, when tears threatened to
overcome me, I fought them back, for I had never been the kind to cry. ‘Do you know what I kept saying while the cab carried me to the hospital … when you couldn’t make it downstairs to help me? I said over and over, “But I love him. He’s the only man I’ve ever loved. And we can work this out.” ’

  My words so awed him that he swore in that solemn moment that he would cherish me, and to prove that he was the man I’d met at the New School, he would finish his Vietnam novel and invite me to edit and publish it, if not with Kinetic, then with some other good house. He said: ‘I have no more illusions, darling. It’s not a great novel, but it’s a damned good one … potentially …’ I smiled at his sad optimism, but I did want to help him defeat his self-doubts, so against inner warnings I said: ‘I think that maybe this time you can do it,’ and the very utterance of those words lifted me into believing that this damaged man could save himself and that with one gigantic final push he could complete the job: ‘Benno, we’ll make this one hell of a book.’ Why was I willing to persist in what must have seemed to my friends at Kinetic this inane folly and self-delusion? Because in a somewhat comparable situation I had rescued Yoder and I truly believed I could repeat the success with Benno.

  In the weeks that followed I led two lives, each resonant with satisfaction: in my office I was swamped with continuing good news about Hex; in my apartment, where I must not mention that name, by reassuring news regarding Benno’s resurrection. He had definitely tried to cut down on his drinking and kept no alcohol in our apartment, but late one afternoon he ambled into a Village bar for what he termed ‘a quick fix that Shirley doesn’t need to know about.’ Two hours later he wove his way home with a tall red-headed man in tow, the kind of winsome talker one meets in bars, but this one was different. ‘I’m Arthur Jameson,’ he said when Benno failed to introduce him ‘President of Pol Parrot Press and profoundly impressed by your husband’s philosophy, Mrs. Rattner.’ When my astonishment revealed that I could not imagine why Benno had created such a favorable impression in his near-drunken state, Mr. Jameson volunteered an explanation while Benno went into the bathroom to drench his face in cold water.