The Novel

by James A. Michener

  One sharp interviewer who’d done some writing was not satisfied with these generalizations and asked: ‘How specifically did the mural help you become a writer?’ and a young man explained: ‘He conducted a drill. Pointed at you cold turkey and shouted: “You’re number seventeen and tomorrow you’re going to kill your mother, the Queen. What do you say to yourself when you lie awake at three in the morning?” And you had to stand, usually a man playing a woman, or vice versa, and you had to become her, and speak as she might have spoken.’ The interviewer had interrupted: ‘A way to teach, I grant, but what did you learn?’

  The young man said: ‘That unless you have a strong sense of blood coursing through your veins when you write, significance won’t be in the words you write. I learned that writing is an act that draws upon every part of my body. Streibert told us: “If you can’t throw everything into the pot when it begins to bubble, you’ll never be a writer.” ’

  A woman writer told the newsman, ‘Mecklenberg itself didn’t want to obliterate his mural, but some girls from good Lutheran families objected to it on moral grounds, although great literature is full of heinous goings-on. Streibert said: “If it goes, I go,” and so it was allowed to remain—thank heaven, for it showed me the way.’

  My mural was entitled THE DOOMED HOUSE OF ATREUS. It covered a wide spread of wall and consisted of an intricate genealogical chart showing the members of the Greek family upon which the focus of early Greek literature rested. It showed the father of the gods, Zeus, marrying the earth goddess, Pluto, who gave birth to Tantalus, who sired the man Pelops, of whom Milton sang. The sons of Pelops, Atreus and Thyestes, were bitterly estranged, and their actions and feelings fueled the brooding tragedies that preoccupied Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, and laid the groundwork for all subsequent literature.

  Those fateful names loomed before the students—Agamemnon, Menelaus, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, Helen of Troy, Orestes, Iphigenia, Electra—and after each name appeared a bright red numeral, from 0 through 21, so that students could trace the awful tragedies. There it was, all spelled out, the hideous doings of the Atreides.

  On a Tuesday in February 1989, when students who had come into my course at the end of the autumn semester had their first meeting with me, I launched my introductory lecture on the essential nature of literature. After stressing that it dealt primarily with human emotions and passions, I said: ‘If you cannot imagine the emotions that drive your characters and identify with them, you’ll never be a writer. Regardless of how horrible their behavior, how noble, how self-sacrificing, how banal, you must goad yourself into putting yourself not only in that character’s situation but also in his or her heart.’

  At this point in my introduction to the chart I have a ritual. I designate without previous warning some would-be writer to imagine himself or herself one of the Atreides caught in some terrible dilemma and to recite either his hero’s speech of the moment or his unspoken reflections, as if writing dialogue for a story in which the ancient Greek appeared. On this day I chose as my first actor a young woman about whom I had had mixed reactions. A transfer from the distinguished writing school at Iowa, she had brought with her a finished novel of quality, but she had the nasty habit of wearing form-fitting T-shirts that carried across her chest provocative messages that might have been considered amusing in Arkansas or Oklahoma but seemed out of place in Mecklenberg. Her name was Jenny Sorkin, and on this day emblazoned across her chest was the challenge: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET, and I judged that now was the time to test her merit.

  ‘Miss Sorkin,’ I said abruptly, ‘you are Number Fourteen, and you have been asked to lunch by your sister, Number Twelve, whom you have just discovered to be your mother as well. I want you to speak in two distinct voices, one that your mother-sister hears, the other that only you hear. You have entered the room where she waits to serve you and you speak.’ Before Miss Sorkin, a normally brash young woman, could collect her thoughts I shouted, standing close to her: ‘Go!’

  I realized that she had been given a most difficult assignment. She was required to be a man and he was to find himself in a shattering situation, and I feared she might not be able to handle it. But I was in for a shock because Miss Sorkin had been studying the mural and had learned that her man Aegisthus14 was one of the real swine of Greek tradition, the seducer of Queen Clytemnestra10 and the murderer of her husband, Agamemnon.9 So with a skill that astonished the class, who had not previously taken favorable notice of her, she became a man, adopting an oily and sycophantic approach to his sister and establishing himself as a weasel. Then the voice dropped to an Iago-like snarl as he contemplated killing his sister for the wrong she had done his mother through her incestuous relationship with Thyestes,6 their father.

  She spoke four times in each voice, and at the conclusion all of us in the room were satisfied that Aegisthus14 was capable later on of killing not only his sister Pelopia12 but also his king, Agamemnon.9 I led the class in applause, concluding: ‘I have a suspicion, Miss Sorkin, that despite your T-shirts you might become a writer,’ and again the class clapped.

  I then made the subsequent points I wished to hammer home, and they came as a shock to students who heard them for the first time: ‘Throughout the remainder of your lives you are to be the guardians of literature, the ones who combat censorship in all its forms. If some Baptist women’s group in Oklahoma protests that a book or a play quote deals with ugly themes unquote, I want you to remind them that some of the greatest literature the world has ever known, the stories that got us started, were founded on the behavior of this gang of scoundrels,’ and I jabbed at the mural: ‘Murder. Matricide. Incest. Betrayal. Patricide.’ Halting dramatically, I said: ‘So do not listen if anyone presumes to tell you what decent literature is and what is forbidden. And if you need strength to fight them, remember this mural and the names of the men who relied upon it for their inspiration: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. They showed us the way.’

  Then, with a sudden leap, I pointed at a young man: ‘Mr. Cates, you are Number Seven and you’re having tea with Number Ten, but because you are a seer you foresee that she is going to murder you. Two women’s voices, please. Their conversation.’ Cates was not the impassioned actor Miss Sorkin had been, but he had subtle insight as to what the two women were up to, and when he finished their dialogue I said: ‘Less dramatic than Aegisthus, but you know what you’re doing, Mr. Cates. Your heart is attached to your mind, and vice versa. The story you submitted for entrance made me think you might make it. Your performance today doesn’t change that estimate.’

  I then proceeded to my third message from the mural: ‘Shakespeare wrote three majestic studies of murder—Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello—but I strongly doubt that he himself ever committed a murder. He didn’t have to. Watching the prisons and the hangings, he deduced what murder signified and allowed his fevered brain to do the killing. Homer imagined and Aeschylus daydreamed. They didn’t have to commit these horrors.’ And then I slammed the wall and said, ‘You don’t need it here. You need it up here, in your head, and down here, in your heart, and way down here in your guts and your loins.’ Several students remarked later that when I said this I seemed ‘to grow in majesty … no longer a skinny red-headed Dutchman but one of the Atreus family … maybe Orestes awestruck by the terrible duties he was about to discharge.’ Another said: ‘From that moment on, when he challenged us to become the Atreides, everything changed. We saw literature in a nobler and more passionate light.’

  In the silence following this episode on the opening day of the winter semester, I said quietly: ‘Mr. Thompson, you are Number Sixteen on a summer’s afternoon in Aulis and you see your father coming toward you. You are not sure what he is about to do, but as a sensible girl you have an idea. You do not speak to him, but to yourself. What is it you say in these last moments of your life?’

  Thompson was not equal to the assignment. He had studied the mural so assiduously and with such a powerful sen
se of identification that he became Iphigenia, beautiful daughter to the king and queen, and the thought that he was about to die so overwhelmed him that tears flooded his eyes and he stood mute. When it became obvious that he would not be able to speak, some students grew restless, others embarrassed, but I in my gentlest voice resolved the impasse: ‘Excellent, Mr. Thompson. You may have come closest of all to the truth, because it’s probable that our beautiful princess in Aulis that day, realizing that her father was about to kill her, did what you have just done. She wept.’

  I was born in 1952 on a farm near Reading to a German family that had followed not the strict Amish discipline of using nothing automotive for their farms, or buttons on their clothing, but the gentler Mennonite tradition that was stoutly conservative but also prudent in business activity. We did use buttons and motor cars, but both had to be a funereal black, as were our clothes and German-style hats. There was one exception: women wore beautiful lace bonnets, and the care with which they made them differentiated the meticulous housewife from the slovenly. There were not many of the latter.

  Strongly imbued with Mennonite tradition as a boy, I had overlaid it with a straight-A academic record in the public schools of Reading, where I acquired such a solid grounding in mathematics, science, history and French that my teachers knew from my first year in high school that I was going to be eligible for scholarships to the best universities. And as graduation approached and placement officers from schools like Pitt, Penn and Syracuse saw that I had not only been class president and one of the mainstays of the school band because of my skill with the trumpet, but also was more than competent in three languages German, English, French—and passable in both science and literature, they were not content merely to offer me scholarships; they contacted alumni in the area to persuade me to accept.

  When the scholarship offers from three major universities rested on our kitchen table beside one from a small college, it was my mother who made the decision: ‘Penn and Pitt are out, because Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are godless places, and I doubt if Syracuse is much better. Poppa and I think you ought to turn down these three offers and go to Mecklenberg. It’s God-fearing and Lutheran, and there you couldn’t fall into evil ways.’

  When I said: ‘But they haven’t offered me a scholarship,’ my mother snapped: ‘They will, when I talk with them,’ and on a memorable day in April, Momma and I drove the ten miles to Mecklenberg. As we passed through the beautiful German countryside with its reassuring names from the old country—Fenstermacher, Dresden, Wannsee—we were put so at ease that when we reached the stone battlements of Mecklenberg College we were satisfied that if the school wanted me, we wanted it. ‘Poppa would like this,’ Momma said, and when we faced the admissions officer, Momma had no hesitation in spreading before that gentleman her three sets of papers: ‘This shows what he did in class, this out of class, and these three letters are the scholarships he’s been offered. But we’re a Christian family, Professor, Mennonites by persuasion but very respectful of you Lutherans …’

  ‘I’m a Quaker, Mrs. Streibert.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Protestant. Sort of like a Presbyterian or a Baptist.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with them. What do you think, Professor?’

  The officer hesitated, shuffled the documents, then smiled: ‘I’d say that if these papers are authentic, and I’m satisfied they are—I’d say we’d be lucky to get your son.’ Mother was not one to be satisfied with vague promises, not even from a smiling Quaker in an official position: ‘What we mean, coming so far, could Karl get a scholarship here, same size as these others?’

  ‘I’m empowered to make only limited decisions, Mrs. Streibert. I can’t even say on my own that he can get a scholarship at all. But from the look of these papers I can assure you that it’s ninety-five percent certain. We seek boys like your son.’

  ‘How much?’

  I could see that the officer had become accustomed to hardheaded Pennsylvania Dutch parents discussing matters of importance. He smiled: ‘Mrs. Streibert, the college does not allow a relatively junior staff member like me to spend its money. A committee does that.’

  Mother shoved the four scholarship papers forward. ‘You see those figures?’ Without answering, the officer pushed them right back: ‘Mrs. Streibert, those figures mean nothing.’

  Mother was astonished and showed it, but the officer quickly explained: ‘You’ve noticed that the figure from Penn is much higher than the one from that small college. Doesn’t mean a thing, because the total costs at big Penn are much higher than those in the small one. If we took time to compare, I could prove to you that this smaller scholarship is a better financial deal for Karl than the larger ones from Penn, Pitt and Syracuse.’

  ‘Are you saying that your costs to us are lower, too?’

  ‘Much.’

  ‘Then your scholarship—’

  ‘If the committee approves one.’

  ‘I understand. It’s only maybe. But yours will be lower?’

  ‘Much. Because living in this part of Pennsylvania is a lot less expensive than living in a big city. Let’s put it this way, Mrs. Streibert. You know that the stores in Lancaster, Reading and Allentown have to keep their prices competitive. Or sensible Dutch farmers like you and your husband will seek out only the bargains, and the high-priced stores will go out of business. Penn, Pitt and Syracuse are competitive, but so are we. That I can promise you.’

  ‘But you can’t promise a scholarship, and if you do give one, you can’t promise how much?’

  ‘No, but you can believe every word I’ve told you today.’ As he was about to lead us from his office he stopped and said: ‘Karl, you haven’t told me what you think.’

  ‘I want to come here,’ and later I was told that when we two were gone, he wrote on my application: ‘This one we want!’

  I believe the college never regretted its decision to offer me a full scholarship and a waiver of fee for the extra courses I elected to take after I saw my grades at the end of my first semester. I found my classes easy, science as well as literature, and since I was already proficient in two foreign languages, I had free time to pursue courses that I might otherwise have missed. The record of my first three years was so uniform it was monotonous: in each of my six semesters I received four A’s and one B Plus. I was proving to be so precisely attuned to college work that I could predict exactly what my professors expected and how much effort it would take to do the assignments and pass the examinations. Some of my teachers considered me close to a genius, but others, more perceptive, tabbed me as an ideal work machine, totally capable but totally uninspired. I allowed neither group to see me as I really was.

  My attention to study limited the time I could devote to nonacademic activities. I played trumpet in the orchestra but refused to try out for the school band. I lent my strong baritone to the glee club, but found acceptable excuses for not participating in trips away from campus; I avoided going even to the church concerts the Mecklenberg students traditionally gave in Allentown and Lancaster churches, for I did not feel easy leaving my studies for even those short distances.

  My social life was uneventful: no fights, no brawls, no surreptitious drinking, no card playing, and very little traffic with the opposite sex. As a reasonably presentable if awkward young redhead with a well-cared-for body and a reticent but pleasant smile, I suppose I was acceptable to the stolid German girls from our part of Pennsylvania who crowded the campus, and since Mecklenberg had a well-deserved reputation as an encourager of sensible courtships that ended in marriage, some of these young women could understandably have speculated in their nighttime talk sessions: ‘Who is Karl going to settle on?’ as if I were a meadowlark seeking a mate.

  During my first two years I remained totally unattached, but as a junior, that best of all college years, I started seeing a fine German girl from Souderton named Wilma Trumbauer, and once when her parents visited the campus they and Wilma invited me to lunch
at a famous country restaurant, the 7&7, halfway between Allentown and Reading. I went, but I was too naive to realize that this was intended as an encouragement to my supposed courtship. When days passed without my following up in any way, or even letting Wilma know that I had been pleased by the lunch, she dropped me and was soon thereafter engaged to a more responsive Mennonite senior from north of Allentown. When I heard of the betrothal I said: ‘That’s nice,’ having no awareness at that time of the part I had played in her decisions.

  In my senior year, when I was determined to nail down an A or an A Plus in each of my ten classes, I ignored girls altogether. I was a young man who moved alone, but I was not lonely, for in a course called The Modern English Novel I was experiencing one of those intellectual awakenings that students sometimes encounter in their early twenties. Unlike others who discover the joys of learning in their teens and become self-directed dynamos in their first days in college, I had been one who fumbled along, doing well in whatever class I took but headed for no visible goal. This class changed that.

  The professor was a man in his early sixties, a graduate of Penn who had taken his master’s at Chicago and his doctorate at North Carolina. Never a top-flight scholar, Paul Hasselmayer had landed a routine appointment at Mecklenberg and had proved to be such a reliable workhorse that he was kept on, finally becoming chairman of the English department because abler young men did not want to waste their time on the paperwork that job entailed—they spent their time writing books that would carry them off to better jobs at Indiana, Colorado, or, if they were really fortunate, to some prestigious Eastern school.