The Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘When your husband wandered into the bar I paid no attention, but when I overheard him tell the bartender that he was fed up with Vietnam veterans crying the blues, I had to comment, for those were my sentiments, too. One exchange led to another, and the more I heard your husband speak, the more I liked him. At one point I said: “Sometime ago a chap had a letter in the Times castigating the whimpering attitude of the noisier Vietnam veterans,” and he said: “Who do you suppose wrote that letter?”

  ‘When I learned that he had written it, and that he also had a novel on the subject three-fourths done, I asked if I could accompany him home and dip into the parts he’d completed.’ He stopped, smiled at me and said: ‘In bars when the beer flows, lots of men have written novels. But when you walk home with them, the novel vanishes. In this case, is there one?’

  I avoided the direct question: ‘I know your press well, Mr. Jameson. It does distinguished books—like your translations of German authors and that one about the revolution among American Catholics. You must be gratified when books like that catch on.’

  ‘Thank you, ma’am, for your support. But does your refusal to answer my question about your husband’s book mean it doesn’t exist?’

  ‘Wait a minute, Mr. Jameson! Did Benno tell you who I am?’

  ‘In public bars, gentlemen never discuss their wives. Who are you?’

  ‘Lukas Yoder’s editor at Kinetic Press. And as an editor I assure you that Benno not only has a novel nearly completed, but it’s also very good. Gutsy, if I may say so.’

  He bowed: ‘If Lukas Yoder’s editor says so, I must accept the verdict. She knows what a readable book is. Now, may I see part of it?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask.’ As he laughed at my enthusiasm I went to where we kept the precious papers, but at that moment Benno returned from the bathroom, saw what I intended to do and shouted: ‘Leave it! It’s not ready for—’

  I cringed, expecting a scene in which the sensitive author protects his immortal pages, but Mr. Jameson asked gently: ‘Isn’t it the job of the publisher to say whether it’s ready or not?’ and to my delight, Benno subsided, saying: ‘It’s the Vietnam book you’ve been looking for. That I guarantee.’

  So while I threw together some sandwiches, cookies decorated with marzipan, and wine, this distinguished publisher, who had fallen into our laps as it were, rapidly turned the worn pages of Benno’s masterpiece and mumbled through his sandwich: ‘Hey, this is for real! Pardner, you know what war is.’

  And so, as a result of this meeting in a bar, Benno’s nearly completed manuscript found yet another home with a major publisher who was determined to see it in print. Mr. Jameson handed it over to an experienced woman editor who reported: ‘The first three chapters are exactly what we’ve been looking for,’ and this so excited Jameson that he took Benno and me to dinner, where he explained the plans he had for vigorously publicizing the novel: ‘The Today show. Maybe Good Morning America, and I’m sure Ted Koppel or MacNeil/Lehrer will want it for its controversial nature.’

  ‘It is a novel,’ I reminded him, but he said: ‘Yes, but it deals with one of the hottest subjects of our time. One that’s been sadly distorted. Your husband, Mrs. Rattner, is going to be wanted everywhere. We’ll see to that.’

  As a consequence of this heady conversation, Benno did something so bizarre that I suspected the old instability was returning: he went to court and had his first name legally changed to Bruce on interesting grounds. ‘Benno sounded too Jewish, and if my book is a smash like your other fellow’s, it might work against me when I appear on national television.’

  ‘Why Bruce?’

  ‘Good clean name. Lots of young men I know are Bruce.’

  ‘You’re crazy! Crazy as a loon, but you’re also a darling.’

  As Bruce Rattner, he shaved more regularly, drank even less, was amazingly considerate of me, and seemed to be working with some effectiveness on his novel. But on a bleak day in mid-December, while I was celebrating with Kinetic officials the astonishing fact that orders for Hex had leaped past the half-million mark, a young man working in my office interrupted: ‘Miss Marmelstein, an urgent call from Mr. Rattner’s editor at Pol Parrot,’ and I left the celebration prepared for the latest catastrophe.

  ‘Miss Marmelstein? I found your name on a memorandum from Mr. Jameson. Forgive me for bothering you but I thought you’d better know. Our board decided this morning that our contract with Rattner was not going to work. He’s done none of the revising he agreed to do. He’s not even tried to correct the big errors. He’s ignored every bit of help I offered, just tinkers with stray items here and there. It seems to me that Mr. Rattner just doesn’t give a damn, and I said as much to Mr. Jameson, who lost his cool: “Let him keep his damned advance. But cut him loose.” ’

  ‘You didn’t! Not in the holiday season!’

  ‘Had to. I asked Mr. Rattner to meet me this afternoon and when he arrived I told him: “Sorry. Your association with Pol Parrot is terminated. Keep the advance.” ’

  ‘Not like that! What did he do?’

  ‘He whimpered. Pleaded to see Mr. Jameson. I told him Mr. Jameson was in Denver, but he would not accept that and started saying things like: “I know he’s in the office. He wants this book. He wants the truth about Vietnam.” He started bellowing, made quite a racket. I had to call my assistant to show him to the door.

  ‘When my assistant saw that Rattner was making trouble, he astonished me by the harsh things he said: “You insist on knowing what Mr. Jameson said about you? That in a saloon you’re an inspired philosopher, but at your typewriter you’re a horse’s ass. Here’s your manuscript, take it, hit the road, and don’t come back. You had your chance, but you screwed up.” ’

  When I heard this report I knew that I had to hurry down to Greenwich Village and find Rattner so that I could give him whatever support he needed, but meetings at Kinetic kept me pinned there, and as a wintry dusk settled over the city I thought numbly: Poor guy. He’s out there somewhere, lugging a manuscript no one wants, and my heart ached.

  Subsequently several people told me that they had seen Bruce that snowy afternoon, plodding aimlessly about the Village, and he apparently went into a drugstore to use the pay phone. Dusk had already fallen when he called Kinetic, asked for me and started blubbering as soon as I answered. Never before having heard him cry with such abandon, I realized that this was serious, but I could not console him: ‘They said it was no good, that I was no good. Everything’s falling apart, it’s dark outside and I need you. More than ever, darling, I need you.’ Before I could give him encouragement, he hung up, and as I stuffed manuscripts away so that I could rush to help him, I saw the darkening sky: What a hell of a day to inform a man he’s finished. A week before Christmas.

  Running into the street, I flagged a cab: ‘As fast as you can to Bleecker Street.’

  During the dash south, I did not once consider leaving Rattner; I thought only of what I might do to stabilize him, support him in his loss of dignity. He was a fine man, one with a remarkable brain that was superior even to Evan Cater’s, and I loved him.

  As I ran toward the entrance to our apartment house I saw the doorman out in the street trying to pick up sheets of paper, which I recognized as parts of ‘Green Hell.’ What happened?’ I shouted, afraid that Benno might have been hit by a car.

  ‘Mr. Rattner. He came home staggering like, but not drunk. I told him: “Your papers are scattering,” but he walked right past me. Heard not a word I said.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  Fumbling with my purse, I extracted a handful of bills and gave them to the doorman. ‘Gather all the pages. They’re valuable,’ and with that I ran to the elevator, summoned it, and was irritated almost to the point of screaming by its slowness in arriving.

  ‘We’re fixing Number Two,’ the doorman explained as he came in with a messy batch of manuscript. ‘Getting ready for Christmas, remember?’

&n
bsp; When the lazy lift finally carried me to my floor, I rushed to our door, inserted my key on the first try, and ran into the apartment, where I found Bruce face up on the Persian rug, covered with blood. Grasping the sharp kitchen knife with which I had once come close to killing him, he had tried twice to stab his heart but botched it. In what must have been terrible pain, he had then thrust the knife deep into his Adam’s apple.

  In the months following the funeral, when I was forced to find an apartment closer to our office, for without warning Bruce’s parents sold his apartment and evicted me, I underwent a transformation. Realizing that with the phenomenal success of Hex, now with more than eight hundred thousand copies in print, my life had reached a watershed, necessitating numerous decisions. I was now, at thirty-six, one of New York’s top editors, able to shift to any company I might choose, provided that I brought Lukas Yoder with me. I was invited to panels discussing publishing, where young writers in the audience sought me out, and sometimes, when Rattner’s face replaced theirs, I would feel dizzy and ask myself: What is happening to me?

  My transformation was taking one turn that astonished me, but whenever I thought critically of my two men, Rattner and Yoder, I discovered that although the latter had become what columnists called ‘one of the hottest properties in the business,’ with probably more triumphs ahead, I could express no intellectual interest in the kinds of predictable books he wrote. His plans for The Creamery, sixth in line of his Grenzler novels, were, to put it bluntly, dreary. The same formula, the same fetching characters, the same enchanting material about the Pennsylvania Dutch, the same sprinkling of risible dialect. I thought: I could almost write the book myself. But I could see no social contribution it would make.

  What really interested me were the ideas illuminated by Evan Cater and Benno Rattner, who saw the novel as an explosive thing, filled with surprises and glorious revelatory scenes, crammed with unique interpretations of normal behavior and prosaic explanations of what seemed bizarre. I could visualize unlimited horizons for the kinds of books Benno had dreamed of writing, works sparkling with vivid ideas, stormy with challenges. What I now sought in a novel was not another prose poem about Grenzler real estate but an explanation of how a sensible person like me could have wasted so many years with a self-destructive whiner like Benno Rattner, helping neither him nor myself. When I reflected on this surprising switch in my priorities, I reflected: ‘Keep at it, Lukas, you adorable fellow, so reliable, so removed from sharp knives. You do small trouble in the world and perhaps a smidgen of good. But, Rattner, you were right. In every argument we had about books, you were right. You saw things the rest of us never dreamed of, and it killed you. You could dream it, but you could never write down those sixty thousand organized words.’

  One night I cried aloud: ‘I’d like to find just one young man with your vision, Rattner. I’d give my life’s blood to help him get started properly, feet on the ground, head among the stars.’

  At the conclusion of these incandescent thoughts I performed an act as bizarre as Rattner’s. With the help of a lawyer and an understanding judge I had my last name shortened legally to Marmelle. When the judge, a jovial Irishman, asked: ‘Now, why would a lovely lass like you want to do such a thing?’ I explained: ‘I’m proud of my family and heritage, but my parents and uncle are gone now, and so is much of my past. I want to make a fresh start.’

  ‘With a French name? Will a French name help?’

  ‘It sounds better. And while we’re at it, let’s make the first name Yvonne. You cannot imagine, Judge O’Connor, how many Shirleys there are in New York, all Jewish and all called Shill. I despise that name.’

  ‘So would I, Shill,’ Judge O’Connor said: ‘Greetings, Miss Yvonne Marmelle.’

  ‘I’m going to make it Ms.,’ I said and the judge said: ‘If you had to have my permission for that, I wouldn’t give it.’ The judge and I smiled, and that afternoon I circulated this announcement to those who might be interested:

  To assist me in my business relationships, I have this day had my name legally changed from Miss Shirley Marmelstein to Ms. Yvonne Marmelle. Wish me luck in my vita nuova.

  III

  THE CRITIC

  In compiling these somewhat scattered notes, written as I approach my fortieth birthday, I have had only one ambition: to explain how a gangly red-headed Mennonite farm boy whose Pennsylvania Dutch parents had not finished high school became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a critic of American literature, the head of a writing school and a visiting professor at Oxford. It was not an easy route.

  After a dozen years of teaching the advanced course on writing at Mecklenberg College I find that nine of my graduates have become professional authors, and a tenth, Jenny Sorkin, about whom I have the most ambivalent feelings, seems assured of publication by Kinetic Press next year.

  A graduate who landed a Literary Guild Selection with her first novel wrote this description of my class for a journal that presumed to teach amateurs how to become professionals:

  It was a class for serious students only, never more than fourteen a semester, and since each session lasted ninety minutes you could be sure he would call on you, so we went prepared. We girls thought he was a very odd type; he had never married and we could guess why. He was quite tall, but very thin, with red hair that would not stay combed and eyes that preferred not to look at you unless he was about to ask a question that might reveal how stupid you were. His clothes? Well, yes and no, sloppy but clean, but always of a style about ten years back. A strong baritone voice that went up in scale when you least expected it to, and where the average professor might display a sense of humor he offered a taste of bile. We girls sometimes cried in his class when laughter was directed at our mistakes, and several boys told me they wanted to sock him, but one, a football player, said: ‘We held back because a real blow might of broken him in half.’

  A young man who now taught in another college said: ‘Streibert had one virtue that eclipsed his faults. The moment you entered his class he let you know that no matter how he behaved, he was on your side. Come hell or high water, he fought for you, was determined that you become a writer, and would do anything to assure your success. He got me my job. When you enrolled with him he offered you a contract: “Bide with me and I’ll show you how it can be done.” ’

  Another graduate who has published two rather good novels said: ‘You could see it in his face. He willed that you produce something meaningful. And I got the curious feeling that he saw us as his last chance. He’d wanted to be a novelist, you know. Failed miserably. Published one and it was murdered. Never went back. After that I think he realized that his life would be justified if he helped his students succeed.’

  I feel quiet pride when these former students report: ‘I would never have made it if I hadn’t taken that class with Professor Streibert.’ I know it sounds as if I were touting my own teaching, but I’m not. In interviews they never say what a charismatic person I was (I’m not), nor how brilliant my analyses of literature were. No, they always say: ‘That mural he had painted on our classroom wall made all the difference.’ Because when a young would-be writer finished memorizing that damned mural, and passed the drill on it, he or she had a visceral understanding of what great books were. One student said, ‘I’d read a dozen novels before coming to grips with Professor Streibert’s mural, but I hadn’t caught any of the hidden meanings.’

  0. A goddess whose parents were either Cronus and Rhea or Oceanus and Tethys.

  1. Had an incestuous desire for his daughter and killed any young man seeking to marry her.

  2. His father cooked him alive and served him to the gods.

  3. Her twelve children, sons by Apollo, daughters by Artemis, were slain before her eyes.

  4. His fratricidal strife with Thyestes dooms his house.

  5. She conducts a liaison with Thyestes and exacerbates the quarrel between the brothers.

  6. Atreus, in revenging his wife’s faithlessness, serves
Thyestes his own sons for dinner.

  7. She is slain by Clytemnestra at the killing of Agamemnon.

  8. He is sent to kill his father, Atreus, but is slain by him.

  9. He is slain by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra.

  10. She and her lover, Aegisthus, murder her husband, Agamemnon. She is slain by her son, Orestes.

  11. Helen of Troy and sister Clytemnestra marry brothers; Helen also bigamously weds Paris.

  12. She commits incest with her father, Thyestes. She is thus both sister and mother to Aegisthus.

  13. These two children are cooked and served to their father, Thyestes.

  14. Becoming the lover of Clytemnestra, he murders her husband.

  15. To avenge the murder of his father, Agamemnon, he kills both his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus.

  16. Her father, in order to gain a favorable wind for his ships, sacrifices her at Aulis.

  17. She helps kill her mother, Clytemnestra, goes mad, tries to kill her sister, Iphigenia.

  18. Soon after her husband is killed by Orestes, she marries the murderer.

  19. After seeing her brother Aletes slain by Orestes, she has a son by Orestes.

  20. He was the son of Orestes and Hermione, widow of a man Orestes had slain.

  21. They are Furies, avenging dieties, who torment criminals. They haunt Orestes for his matricide. They can forgive a husband killing his wife, but not fratricide, patricide or matricide.

  Students who entered my class later than Christmas 1983 invariably commented on the mural, the typical evaluation being one delivered by a graduate named Timothy Tull, who would achieve considerable fame at Mecklenberg and in the publishing world. He said: ‘My writing life began when I sat in Streibert’s class, studying that awesome mural, analyzing it privately until I caught a sense of what literature in the grand sense involved. It invited me into the actualities of life and showed me how a great writer dares to use the facts.’ Another student said: ‘Streibert’s mural, a preposterous thing, which the college authorities wanted to paint over, taught me more than any normal class I’ve ever had. There was the world of human behavior, stark, cruel, infamous and dramatic.’