The Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘But the publishing industry is able to exist only because it sells to the multitudes books you seem to despise.’

  ‘No, no! You have it wrong, Karl. The industry sells junk so that it will keep available its presses for publishing the great dialogue. Imagine a network of brilliant minds occupying centers like Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Madrid, Moscow, Dublin and the two Cambridges. Rare intellects cluster there, striving to keep this world together. Talk with them, give them encouragement and such illumination as you’ve been able to assemble through your own brilliance. And to hell with the rest.’

  We discussed this principle regarding what Devlan called ‘the best minds’ as we drove slowly around the top of Italy, into Trieste and south through Yugoslavia and its funereal town of Sarajevo, then into the two Macedonias, where we paid our respects to Alexander the Great, who had been nurtured in these areas. As we traveled, first one driving, then the other, the time would come in late afternoon when I would become impatient for the day to end so that we might find some quiet inn and slip into bed.

  Now we entered Greece through the historic northern city of Thessaloniki and even the skies seemed to change, for as we traveled dreamily down the peninsula ancient names loomed up as reality, and I was ashamed that Devlan was familiar with so many more than I. ‘Product of a classical education,’ Devlan said, ‘and a good one, not just the light brushing you would get in the States.’

  Before we reached Athens, Devlan said: ‘Turnoff for Sparta,’ and he showed me the ancient canal at Corinth, a beautiful sight from the high roadway. As we crossed the famous waterway to gain entrance to a secondary peninsula, I could imagine in the water below the passage of ancient Greek warships on their way to one battle or another, flags waving, slaves tugging at the oars.

  Sparta was a mournful disappointment, little more than a bleak remnant on the plain where battles had raged, and Devlan said: ‘I wanted you to see what happens when a society surrenders itself to a military dictatorship. Spartan children were under military discipline from age seven. All decisions were made by military juntas. Best armies in the world, conquerors of everything. And in the end the dictatorship strangled itself, because free men can always best a tyranny—not defeat it, outlast it.’

  As we probed the area and came upon sad collections of mean buildings, none exhibiting the grandeur of Greece or even the victories of the Spartan armies, Devlan said: ‘When I was in the United States I had the mournful feeling that eighty percent of your people would welcome a Spartan dictatorship if it promised to improve the schools, discipline the minorities, put women back in their place, install a religious supremacy and terminate the silliness of the Bill of Rights. Many modern Americans would leap at such an offer, it seemed to me, which is why I wanted you to see Sparta. Because what you see here is what such a choice always leads to.’

  When we reached Athens, Devlan searched briefly for a small hotel he had frequented on previous visits, and when the owners saw him they ran forward to assure him that the room for which he had wired ahead was waiting. As he led me to it, he said: ‘When anyone who can read, or has heard of history and man’s long struggle to achieve meaning, comes to Greece he feels in his heart: “I’m coming home.” We’re home, Karl, from a journey that started long ago at Columbia.’

  We spent the next ten days in Athens engaged in the most intense and concentrated discussion of my life. It constituted an advanced seminar on the novel in all its aspects, a Socratic conversation that started each day with a breakfast of Greek yogurt, dark slices of toasted Greek bread and a dab of Hybla honey, and ended only when sleep took command at midnight.

  We discussed the novel as if it were a treasure beyond compare, spending one entire day on the problem of how best to narrate a known story—that is, from whose point of view, a subject on which Devlan had acquired firm tastes: ‘Worst of all is the form in which an author interjects from time to time his own sly comments. How objectionable it is when it first breaks the flow of the narrative, how repulsive at the end of a long tale when the convention actually creaks like a poorly loaded hay wain. Never do it yourself, never allow a student to do it, and when you review books, castigate it.’

  From an intense life of study he had acquired mixed views on the novel narrated by an unknown, unspecified, all-wise superintelligence: ‘Godlike figures in any aspect of life bore me. And the infinite intelligence that presumes to explain all human activity no matter how bizarre grows tedious. And yet I have read an occasional book cast in this mold that has enchanted me—Middlemarch, for example.

  ‘I’ve liked books that were told from the point of view of the nameless village idiot who sees all but comprehends nothing. You are never sure who he or she is, but you grow to trust the honesty of the reporting.’

  When he had analyzed four or five alternate approaches, I asked: ‘And what about the most famous of all, the one that Henry James advocated, the concerned colleague, a knowing friend of the family, but not an intrusive participant, who can use the pronoun I and thus inject some humanity into the narrative? Seems to me it creates a curious sense of reality. What do you think?’

  Devlan contemplated this question for some moments, calculating which exact words he should use to convey the nuances he intended: ‘Obviously, that’s the best device of all, but I didn’t want to ram my opinion down your throat. For it carries with it deadly inflections. The temptation is great to have your all-compassionate observer be a nonparticipant not only in the lives of the characters he’s watching but also in the full flood of life itself. To put it bluntly, Karl, men like you and me in telling a story choose a narrator like ourselves—never married—never parenting—never in the army—usually with no defined occupation—never any dirt under our fingernails—superior to everyone we talk about—and damned dull people to spend the six days with that it takes to read the novel.

  ‘If you ever write such a book, you can have your main character a superaesthete like us, but you must have as your observer a man who runs a shop and is trying to pay off a large mortgage before his three children start university.’

  I interrupted to make a stupid statement: ‘I’m not interested in shopkeepers,’ and he replied: ‘Then I fear that no one will be interested in your novel.’

  At another point Devlan said, ‘I don’t believe critics should try to write novels.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we know too much.’

  ‘But novelists are always trying to serve as critics.’

  ‘And usually making a hash of it.’

  We had a long discussion on what themes were effective for a novel, and he made two points: ‘Any activity of which human beings are capable is just material for a novel.’

  ‘Do you mean that—any?’

  ‘I can think of none that I would bar.’

  ‘Even incest?’

  ‘Greek tragedy is replete with great dramas involving incest. Treated with fire and fury and retribution.’

  ‘I don’t know much about Greek tragedy.’

  ‘Well, this summer may be one opportunity to rectify an oversight that could be inhibiting later on—when you come to grips with the inner meanings of literature.’

  His second caveat on theme, forcibly stated, was: ‘Any novel about an abstract concept is bound to be a bad one. If you must deal with an abstraction, write an essay. In your novel, write about people, not prototypes. If you can show them trapped in the abstract principle you may find yourself with a very strong tale.’

  At some point in almost every discussion, when I realized that Devlan was striving to teach me all he knew, I suspected that he had the idea that I might be his successor as a critic who really grappled with the essence of narration, and this suspicion was strengthened when he produced a paperback on the tenth day, one that had been well thumbed: ‘I pass this along as a graduation present, Karl. You’re ready now to memorize it—as a permanent guide.’ It was a long, reflective essay called Mimesis, by a German scholar, Erich A
uerbach, who had collected a series of brilliant narratives starting far before the birth of Christ and ending post–Virginia Woolf. He minutely analyzed each style, pointing out where the writer had succeeded brilliantly and where he or she had foundered. Devlan said: ‘Auerbach does your work for you,’ and later, when I dipped into the essay, I quickly saw what he meant.

  It was then, on the night of our eleventh day in Athens, that I told my mentor: ‘These days have been miraculous, a binding together of scattered and diverse ideas. You’ve taught me at a new level. I’m beginning to think I may be ready to be a professor.’

  Devlan said: ‘You’ve proved it these last few days.’

  Men acquire wisdom in two ways: by patient accumulation and analysis of the evidence available and by epiphanies that in an instant illuminate continents and centuries. My two-week excursion from Rome to Athens with Devlan was an example of the first sort; what happened on the fifteenth day was a stunning example of the second.

  Devlan saw on a bulletin board in the office where he went to cash traveler’s checks that in the theater of Herodes Atticus, near the Acropolis, a touring German company had been invited by the Greek Cultural Commission to give an open-air performance of Agamemnon, by Aeschylus, first performed in Athens in 458 B.C. The poster explained that the play would be given in German, but with Greek flutists and drummers to accompany the chorus. Without consulting me, Devlan purchased two of the best seats and hurried back to inform me of our good luck in being able to see one of the world’s great tragedies in its proper setting.

  As soon as I heard the news, at which I rejoiced, I reacted as Devlan must have expected: ‘Where can I get a copy of the play to read?’

  ‘I told you. It’s to be in German. You’ll understand every word and I won’t.’ But he had carried with him a book that he valued, an American volume, handsomely printed, which contained in modern translation every tragedy that has come down to us from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Since each of the dramatists had composed and put on the stage nearly a hundred plays, for a publishing house to boast ‘the complete Greek drama’ seemed arrogant until one realized that only a handful of tragedies by each of the writers had survived: seven by Aeschylus, seven also by Sophocles, nineteen by Euripides, with scattered parchments containing references by name only to well over a hundred.

  Devlan, who knew the plays well, especially the great trilogy of which Agamemnon was the opening part, gladly surrendered the treasured book that had accompanied him to Greece on three previous occasions, and I spent the afternoon reading and memorizing the characters I was about to see: ‘Agamemnon, the king of kings; Clytemnestra, his adulterous wife; Aegisthus, the miserable cousin of the king, who has become the lover of Clytemnestra during the King’s long absence at the Trojan War; and Cassandra, the beautiful doomed prophetess, daughter of Priam, the defeated king of Troy, and brought back as Agamemnon’s mistress.’

  Well before the time to leave for the short drive to the theater, I returned the anthology to Devlan: ‘I’m ready,’ and off we went to hear the German troupe.

  As night settled over the hills in which the action of the tragedy might have taken place more than two thousand years before, the audience, composed mainly of tourists eager to see a Greek play in such surroundings, watched as the sentinel crawled out upon the roof of the palace, and lay prostrate but hunched forward on his elbows. As the sky darkened and stage lights came on in subdued colors, the watchman began orating in German so strong and clear that I was startled: he could have been shouting at a Lancaster festival, and in that instant I accepted German as the speech of the old Greeks and became one of them as the sentinel spoke words that some German classical scholar in Heidelberg had translated, and which now I converted almost automatically into English:

  ‘I have been lying on this roof for a year like a hound, watching for the Atreides, propped on my elbows. I know far too well these starry skies. Even so I must watch for the beacon fire that shall bring us news that we have won the war at Troy.’

  Then came the powerfully prophetic words hinting at the tragedy soon to envelop the doomed house of Atreus:

  ‘To keep myself alert I like to hum or sing but always my song turns to lamentation for this House, no longer nobly governed as it used to be.’

  Now the stage was enveloped in flames. The signal fires have leaped across the hills. Troy has fallen! The Greeks have triumphed! And great Agamemnon has come home, clothed in glory. But the sentinel knows that tragedy awaits:

  ‘The war is over. The beacon fire has caused my dice to throw three sixes. The King’s dice fall lucky, too. He is home. I say no more. My tongue tells no secrets, an ox stands on it. But if this house could talk, there’d be a tale! My words are only for those who already know, for those that know not, I speak not.’

  His job done, the sentinel vanished and then, for the first time, I saw one of the glories of the Greek stage: the chorus of elders, sages of the district, came forward gravely to chant and sing and dance sedately, accompanied by the flutes, providing the audience with the many historical facts it needed in order to understand the dramatic action that was about to unfold. They told a long and tangled tale covering the past ten years, when members of the House of Atreus were absent from Greece, fighting terrible battles at Troy. So much had to be explained—and there was nothing more sad and difficult than the story of Queen Clytemnestra’s favorite daughter, the radiantly beautiful Iphigenia, whose father, King Agamemnon, sacrificed her at Aulis in order that his Greek ships would receive a favorable wind for passage to Troy:

  ‘The captains, mad for war, showed pity none for her sad pleas, nor listened to her cry of ‘Father!’ Her prayer finished, her father signaled to his henchmen who dragged her off, holding her like a young sheep high above the altar.… What followed next I neither saw nor tell.’

  After this piteous prologue the flutists departed and the dancing stopped. Clytemnestra, one of the most powerful figures in Greek drama, moved majestically onstage, striding like a man, prepared to greet her husband, the king, after ten years’ absence, during which she committed adultery with Aegisthus. When she announced that Troy had fallen, the leader of the chorus, a wise old man, spoke:

  LEADER: What makes you so sure? Does a dream inspire you?

  CLYTEMNESTRA (harshly): I take no stock in silly dreams.

  With that this forceful woman took control of the action with such vigor that the leader said in admiration and envy: ‘Lady, you speak like a man who understands.’

  In my first experience with a Greek chorus, I was awed by the power that twelve old men in priestly robes could exert. I recognized them as a force required in the dawn of fiction when primitive passions were encouraged to run wild among the principals, but only if they could be kept in check by the admonitions of the chorus. And as I listened to their thundering imprecations and warnings, I realized that modern fiction had lost something of significance in abandoning that concept. For me, that night, they were the heroes of the drama. And to hear them in the German that might have been used in the unfolding of a tragedy located in the Lancaster-Reading area—concerning a group of fifteen Amish elders maybe, in the black costumes and flat-brimmed hats of our epoch—created an image that stayed with me.

  In the final words of the great drama, Clytemnestra, like political leaders throughout history, boasts that the House of Atreus has never been on safer ground and that its future prosperity is assured.

  When the lights of the stage went out and those of the theater came on, I remained in my seat, stunned by the artistic vigor of this ancient masterpiece.

  The next day I scurried through the local bookstores, seeking guides to classical literature, and at Devlan’s suggestion I spent time in the British Reading Room consulting the various Oxford and Cambridge dictionaries of classical lore. On improvised sheets of paper I began the construction of a master chart showing the derivation and composition of what I termed The Doomed House of Atreus. When it was complete
, covering two pages, and I felt triumphantly that I had dug down to the bedrock of literature, I had a somewhat deflating experience. One afternoon as we explored the hot countryside south of Athens, Devlan began laughing: ‘You and I would be such bores to an outsider eavesdropping on our conversations. All we do is beat the hedgerows over this or that minute point in literature, while real life, the basis of literature, stands exposed all about us.’ Just then we rounded a bend and there, near some cottages by the road, were three barefoot peasants, two women with their skirts tied about their waists, a man with his trouser legs rolled up. As we slowed to watch they climbed into a huge vat shared by the community, for it must have been costly to build with oaken staves. There they began to trample grapes brought in from nearby vineyards, and they were such a vibrant group that Devlan cried: ‘Voilà! The stuff of literature! The same three thousand years ago as now. You don’t need Greek kings and instructions from Henry James when you have stompers of grapes.’

  When the time came for F.X.M. Devlan to board his plane for London while I took mine for New York, I said: ‘You’re sending me home prepared to teach,’ but Devlan spoke of more important matters: ‘Save your salary and let’s meet here again next summer.’ And on that promise we shook hands, but just before we parted, the Irishman confided: ‘My famous lecture about the good and bad novelists. That wasn’t my idea. It came from a teacher I had. Look him up, he’s worthwhile, F. R. Leavis. But I improved on his idea. I added the four bad ones. Now it’s your job to improve on me. Add the Americans.’

  I began my teaching at Mecklenberg in the fall semester of 1980 and established such immediate rapport with my students that others on campus spoke of me as ‘a sure winner, a powerhouse.’

  It was a custom at the college to offer a February lecture series for residents of the Lancaster-Reading-Allentown axis. There was no fee and three of the best older professors lectured on their specialties, hoping to bring the public up to date on recent developments in these areas, but it was also an opportunity to introduce two younger members of the faculty, always one woman, one man. During my first half year on campus, I was chosen for this honor and the hall was nicely filled when I spoke, for people were aware that I was a local lad who had done well at Columbia.