The Novel

by James A. Michener

  Hasselmayer, from a German family in the Lancaster area, could justly have been called a drone. For decades he had been teaching an old anthology called From Beowulf to Thomas Hardy, and he long believed that literature in English culminated with The Return of the Native. But during his mid-fifties he suddenly came upon a series of novels outside his customary purview. In rapid succession he read D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale, and Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, followed by three powerful American novels, Frank Norris’s McTeague, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground.

  That autumn he gave a series of enthusiastic lectures about his recent discoveries, and the effect on me was overpowering. The sounds of those harsh voices that were new to me broke me out of my lethargy. I was awakened by the skill of the English writers Lawrence and Bennett. ‘They present a life so different from what we see in this area,’ I said, and I talked with friends that summer about how much I had lost by not having familiarized myself with these writers earlier.

  My major attention, however, was directed to the American writers. I had never before heard of McTeague, which I found a compelling story of a miserable dentist in California, and although I had seen references to An American Tragedy, I had concluded that it was nothing more than a sensational bit of gutter probing; that it was a grand novel in the great tradition of storytelling surprised me. I also spent some time reading the short works of Edith Wharton, which pleased me enormously and led me to read three short novels of Henry James, as a result of which I concluded that The Aspern Papers was just about the finest novella in the language.

  When I voiced this opinion in class, Professor Hasselmayer suggested that I write my term paper on the James story, but I attempted a more elaborate topic: Henry James and Thomas Mann: Two Novellas Based in One City. I wrote some four dozen pages analyzing ‘The Aspern Papers’ and Mann’s ‘Death in Venice,’ which I had read in a German course, and describing how the authors had used Venice to powerful effect. It was a city I had never seen but understood intimately, thanks to the evocation of its colors and meanings by the two masterpieces.

  What especially caught Professor Hasselmayer’s attention was a long passage in which I analyzed the narcotic effect of Venice on James, Mann and their protagonists. My writing assumed a lot, made shrewd guesses and at times confused the living authors with their imaginary heroes, but it also revealed an analytical mind. I had transformed a reading assignment into the portrait not only of two short books but also of a student’s mind pole-vaulting from one level of thought and expression to an entirely new plateau.

  Summoning me, Hasselmayer said: ‘A remarkable paper, Mr. Streibert. You’ve seen into the heart of the literary process. I would now like you to try your hand at a more difficult subject matter. Compare The Old Wives’ Tale and Point Counter Point in the same way. I mean, how do these two vastly dissimilar men utilize dissimilar locales to achieve their common purposes?’

  It was work on this paper, which consumed several months, that determined my future, for whereas I could see Bennett’s famous Five Towns of industrial England as counterparts of Pennsylvania’s three Dutch towns—Lancaster, Reading and Allentown—which made comparisons and understandings fairly simple, I was astounded by the polished glitter of London and its inhabitants as described by Huxley. ‘What kind of people are these?’ I cried in frustration as I labored to untangle their lives and motives. And when, for instruction, I delved briefly into Huxley’s other novels, I withdrew almost in horror from an amoral world I could not comprehend.

  At the height of my bewilderment, with my paper not only unfinished but also unfinishable, a more sophisticated student told me: ‘You can’t understand Huxley unless you first understand André Gide.’ I had never heard of the Frenchman, nor did the college library have any of his books, but the library in Reading did have two, The Counterfeiters and a brief work called The Pastoral Symphony. The first repelled me with its portrait of a decadent society, but the second enraptured me with its pristine, controlled storytelling. As weeks passed and I burrowed into the difficult parts of my paper, I awakened to the fact that The Counterfeiters had profound meaning for me, while the shorter work seemed no better than a French version of Ethan Frome.

  When Professor Hasselmayer read this second paper he told me: ‘Mr. Streibert, you have an amazing ability for penetrating the heart of a piece of writing and also the mind of the man who wrote it. What are your plans after graduation?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I do. What foreign languages do you have?’

  ‘German from birth, French well beyond the conversational level.’

  ‘My goodness, you’re well on your way.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To a doctorate. In literature.’

  ‘What would that mean?’

  ‘Three years at Chicago, or Columbia, or maybe, best of all, Harvard.’

  ‘Would that be very expensive?’

  ‘Not for you. The top schools are hungry for young men of proven ability.’

  So before my final semester ended, I again had offers of three fellowships to the universities that Professor Hasselmayer had named and to whose English faculties he had commended me. For a sensible reason, I chose Columbia: ‘Huxley taught me that I knew nothing of London. Gide, that I was ignorant of Paris. Time I learned what a major city is.’

  That summer the gentle hand of André Gide lay heavily upon me, for I read, in the original French, L’Immoraliste and then moved on to Marcel Proust’s Du Côté de Chez Swann and a sampling of the later books of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I spent the entire summer without inviting even one young woman to dinner, and when I left for New York in September I had not yet kissed a girl. But my knowledge of books, especially novels, was profound.

  My years at Columbia were explosive, for I had excellent professors who led me into the broad boulevards of learning so much grander in design than the limited country roads I had known at Mecklenberg. I learned early that my proficiency in languages, especially German, made it easy for me to master the early tongues from which English was derived, and my progress in pre-Chaucerian language was so rapid that two different professors suggested that I specialize in that branch of study. This I might have done had not the beacon light of my career arrived in New York from Oxford University to teach for six months, beginning with the fall semester of 1977. He was Professor F.X.M. Devlan, born in Dublin, educated at Cambridge and Berlin, holder of a chair at Oxford and an opinionated luminary on the English literary scene.

  He was a rotund little man with a puckish smile, a monk’s tonsure, which left a fringe of hair above his eyes, and an ingratiating Irish brogue. A leprechaun, really. He started his six months at Columbia with a running high dive smack into the center of controversy. At a public gathering he gave a reprise of the teeth-rattling lecture he had given three years earlier at an Oxford symposium and which would now be quoted extensively in American newspapers. I had not met him prior to the lecture, but I took a front seat in the hall and gasped at his iconoclasm:

  ‘If you desire to learn the secrets of meaningful narration, there are only four English novelists worth reading. Chronologically, by date of birth, they are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. You will notice that two of them are women while the other two are not English.’

  When the shocked whispering ceased, he proceeded to extol his four selections, coming close to revealing that he thought Middlemarch the best novel in the language, but he was also laudatory of Henry James and his severely controlled type of narration. He said of Conrad: ‘With a golden net this Pole who never wrote a word of publishable English till he was in his forties captured the soul of Africa and the islands of the Pacific.’

  Having justified his choices, he made a daring move; he identified four customary favorites whom he considered unacceptable in that they wrote only of life’s facile surface:

&nb
sp; ‘My attitudes toward literature will become clear when I share with you the names of four novelists whom some of you may hold in high regard but whom careful analysts dismiss, not as trash, to be sure—that’s far too harsh a condemnation—but as mere purveyors of fiction not worthy of serious attention. They are, again in order of birth, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy and John Galsworthy. These men are facile and inviting and entertaining, but they provide the reader with no substance and should be reserved for a summer’s light reading.’

  There was audible opposition to this annihilation of old deities, and two professors who specialized in precisely those four highly regarded Englishmen felt constrained to leave the hall, but as they departed, Devlan said puckishly: ‘Goodness, what a lack of commitment. At Oxford, seven stalked out,’ and he proceeded to demolish both the works and the undeserved reputations of the four he rejected. During this part of his lecture the rumblings continued, for he revealed himself to be an arrogant, inflammatory exhibitionist. But those were the very characteristics that had prompted Columbia to invite him to cross the ocean.

  A highlight of the evening came when a Columbia professor observed: ‘You’ve given us four you anoint and four you condemn. In American fiction, who would the comparable eight be?’ and Devlan replied: ‘A most penetrating question. But that’s why I’ve been invited over, isn’t it? To learn something.’ He said he would be spending his six months in New York wrestling with just that question: ‘And I invite each of you to start racking your brains to determine whom you will place in my eight American slots, the good and the bad. I’ll be doing the same, won’t I?’

  And that was the beginning of one of the liveliest six months I would know, for F.X.M. Devlan quickly spotted me as a young American with the kind of sharp mind prized by the English universities. Inviting four of us graduate students, two young women and another young man, to work with him, he initiated a seminar in which we analyzed past American fiction. Toward the end of his stay in New York the group had identified eight American writers who might be eligible for the saved, eight who surely deserved to be condemned, and at his last session this fiery Irishman told us:

  ‘You’ve looked into the heart of writing. You’re far ahead of where I was at your age. But now comes the difficult part. Each of you must coldly and critically nominate the four whose example you will follow in your teaching and writing and the four you find unprofitable and stale. And you must adhere to those judgments, because I assure you, you are in better condition to make those choices now than later. The freshness of youth is a marvelous lens through which to see the world. You see better now than I do at my age, and remember that after the age of thirty you will discover few new truths. Do it now or surrender hope.’

  When we pressed him: ‘Now tell us your eight American candidates,’ he fended us off with a roguish smile: ‘Do you think I’m crazy? If I told you what I thought I’d probably not make the plane home in one piece.’

  ‘But you will tell us later, won’t you?’

  ‘Tell you? No. But I will write a companion essay to my first one. Remember the sovereign rule. Never say it. Write it. Of the ten million great stories that have been told to admiring friends, especially by Irishmen in their pubs, literature consists of the five thousand that were written down. If it’s not written, it doesn’t exist.’ And he left New York with his secret American list intact.

  In Devlan’s memorable four-student seminar in 1978, one of our two women was an attractive graduate from Grinnell College in Iowa, whose name was Kathleen Wright. One day when I was in the library stacks looking for a book, I overheard Kathleen and a friend discussing my role in class, and I had the strange, almost unworldly experience of hearing myself described almost as a character in a book. What I heard staggered me.

  ‘Sandy, what’s the matter with Streibert?’ Kathleen asked. ‘I find him so easy to be with and unbelievably bright, but he seems a hollow man. He reacts to nothing except books.’

  Sandra chuckled: ‘When you grow up in San Francisco you hear that problem from all your girlfriends. “What’s the matter with Paul? He won’t look at me, and he’s such a neat guy.” ’

  ‘And your answer?’

  ‘Each group of girls develops five or six criteria for judging men, and when you apply them intelligently you get your answers.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Now remember, Kathleen, we’re talking in a San Francisco ambience. The girls there have a dozen code questions.’

  ‘Translate.’

  ‘Answer these questions. Have you ever seen him with another girl?’

  ‘No. Just men and not many of them. He’s a real loner.’

  ‘Does he quote his mother more than his father?’

  ‘Yes, he does. His mother seemed to fight for his education, at least so he says, but I’ve never seen her on campus.’

  ‘Do you catch him eyeing you when you appear not to be looking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does he go out at night? Alone? Looking around?’

  ‘I really can’t say, but when I have seen him he seemed to be on his way to the library—or the bookstores on Broadway.’

  ‘You’d say he was not a night prowler? Looking for the easy pickup, male or female?’

  ‘Male?’

  ‘Kate, where do you think my questions have been leading? I think you’ve got your eye on a mama’s boy who won’t marry till he’s in his late forties, if then. Take my advice. Get off that racecourse. You’re not on the inside track.’

  Kathleen contemplated her friend’s questions, then asked: ‘Are you saying he’s queer?’ Her question so shocked me that I wanted to cry out. But Sandra did it for me. ‘For God’s sake, Kathleen,’ she snapped, ‘give up that backwoods stuff. Half the really swell guys in San Francisco don’t like girls at age twenty, nor at forty. They’re great people and every girl I know has two or three of them as friends—some of the most reliable friends in the world. Accept Karl as the brilliant man he is, and do what you can to help him get started, but don’t wait around expecting him to marry you.’

  ‘Who said marriage?’

  ‘You did. By implication.’

  ‘Is it so obvious that I’m fond of him?’

  ‘Sticks out all over.’

  ‘And you think nothing constructive can come of it?’

  ‘Constructive? Yes. If he becomes head of a department at some good college, he might remember you and offer you a job. Sweetheart? Bedfellow? Husband? Not a chance. Not one.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Look elsewhere.’

  In the months remaining, Kathleen was courteous and even friendly with me, but it was obvious that she now saw me only as an impersonal scholar who was going to do superlative work for my doctorate. We would probably be friends, perhaps even write to each other as our careers progressed, but that I might one day want to marry her was totally improbable, and both she and I knew it.

  In 1980, two years after Professor Devlan had returned to Oxford, he sent a letter that astonished me:

  I have located a traveling bursary for which you may be eligible—Germany, France, Italy, England, to finish your education—and I may be able to break away toward the close of your journey to join you for a jaunt into Greece. Please arrange your schedule so that you can accept. You need the civilizing impact of these great areas.

  It seemed amazing that the famous British professor would even remember me, let alone go to the trouble of arranging a fellowship of such interest, and at the first opportunity I hurried home to consult with my parents about the practicality of accepting such an invitation. Mother displayed her common sense by pointing out: ‘Karl, the offer hasn’t even been made. You’re jumping the gun, already.’

  My life at college and the university with learned people had made me uneasy when my parents used Dutch idioms, like repeated alreadys, so I replied rather abruptly: ‘Speculation. But if Professor Devlan says he’ll do something, he’ll do i
t.’

  ‘Have you told him you’d go already?’ Mother asked, and when I replied: ‘No, I wanted to ask you and Poppa what you thought,’ she asked: ‘How well do you know this man?’

  ‘He was my professor for half a year, surely you remember that. Best I ever had.’

  But she was worried: ‘I saw this terrible show on television. What a Turkish prison was like. It was horrifying.’

  ‘Mama, those two college boys, smart alecks I’m sure, they were smuggling drugs.’

  Poppa asked a more pertinent question: ‘I thought your big job this year was to find a teaching spot for next year. Stick to the main task, son. Stay home and land a place to work.’

  Slightly irritated by having to reveal a secret that I had intended sharing at the end of my visit, I said: ‘My old professor at Mecklenberg, you remember him. Hasselmayer. He’s retiring and has nominated me to take his place. So energetically that the administration has agreed. I have a job for next year, a wonderful one.’

  Poppa responded: ‘Then I think you should go to Europe. A fine chance to see Germany, where you come from.’

  ‘I’d be even more interested in France and Italy.’

  ‘They’re all right,’ Poppa said grudgingly.

  ‘And especially England, since I’ll be teaching English.’

  ‘Makes sense, but they’re very stuck-up.’

  My mother returned to her major concern: ‘Why would this man Devlan—how old is he?’

  ‘Mid-forties, maybe.’

  ‘Why would he want to travel with a youngster like you?’

  ‘He’s a scholar. He loves literature, and he recognizes that I do, too.’ I paused, then added: ‘And maybe he wants to refresh his judgments on American writing. He spoke once of doing a major essay.’