The Novel

by James A. Michener

  With other students he was not shy, but he did not seek companionship during his first semester; what he did was study furiously to see if he could keep pace with others who were somewhat older, and when he quickly satisfied himself that he could not only keep up but excel, he was ready to make his move.

  I was astounded by the forms it took. He went out for the tennis team and made the indoor squad. He played a noisy game of touch football, and he attended all the school dances, where I often was one of the chaperones, and performed steps I’d not even seen before. He gave the appearance of a typical Joe College freshman, but this masked his drive for a powerful accomplishment far beyond his years. In the period between semesters in the winter of 1986 he approached me like any student with high marks in English who sought permission to enroll in my advanced writing class, and I conducted the interview as if I had never seen him before. But in a twenty-minute discussion he displayed such a command of English and interest in writing that I finally said: ‘Of course I remember those two term papers you shared with me when I met with your grandmother, but we have a requirement that applicants like you must submit work you’ve done last semester. So type something up and let me see it.’

  ‘I don’t type, sir. I use a word processor.’

  ‘Do you do much correcting? By pen and ink I mean, on the printouts?’

  ‘I would never submit a first draft. Sometimes they’re pretty awful.’

  ‘Could I see some of them? Maybe they’ll fill the requirement.’

  ‘Yes. I save everything,’ and he disappeared for a few minutes to retrieve a small file of material on which he had recently worked. I saw that he corrected heavily by hand, then processed it twice. ‘He’s already a professional,’ I said to myself. ‘He could be publishing within a year, if he has anything to say.’

  I told him: ‘My class for the winter semester starts Tuesday at ten, my room, and you’re welcome. You understand that you’ll be much the youngest there, and the topics about which the others will be writing may be out of your reach, but if you want to—’

  ‘I work, Professor Streibert. If I get really interested in things, I work.’

  ‘And you’re interested in becoming a writer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Suddenly I felt a keen desire to know more about this boy and his unusual skills. ‘How did it happen? Your father, your mother, were they heavy readers?’

  ‘Both basically illiterate. Both killed when I was six. Grandmother took over and she read to me every night. Not children’s books, and she encouraged me to write my own stories.’

  ‘What kind did you write?’

  ‘Every kind. Whatever kind I heard her read—if I liked it.’

  ‘Do you still have any of those stories?’

  ‘I never throw anything away.’

  Accepting that what the boy said was probably true, I asked: ‘When you go home next time, could you bring me—’

  ‘I have a box of them in the dorm.’

  ‘From all periods?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could you let me have three—early, middle, late?’

  ‘I would be honored to have you take the time, sir.’

  ‘Where did you learn to say sir?’

  ‘The Hill. Grandmother was afraid I might be getting into trouble in public high school. I wasn’t, just experimenting with different things, like motorcycles and word processors. Not studying much. So she sent me to The Hill, and they’re pretty strict.’

  ‘Were you on the school paper?’

  ‘I wrote most of it. I’ll bring you some copies,’ and a few minutes later, when he placed before me three long stories and three copies of the newspaper, I accepted them formally and said: ‘I shall read these with considerable care, because if you’re as good with words and ideas as you appear’—I looked directly at Tull—‘you’re going to have a revolutionary time in my class.’ I rose, shook hands and said at the door to my office: ‘Get your affairs in order, Tim—’

  ‘I don’t like that name. Timothy, if you’d be so considerate.’

  ‘Get your papers in order, Timothy, because we shall make a vital test—to see if you really are a writer.’

  It was ironic. In the 1986 fall term, after I had declared war on Lukas Yoder, I was thrown into a dramatic confrontation that made me feel more charitable toward him as a person while remaining strongly opposed to his inane style of writing. One morning President Rossiter telephoned me while I was still in my room unshaved: ‘I’m going to need you in the Regents Room almost immediately. They asked specifically that you be present at this meeting, but I must say, I don’t know why.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lukas Yoder and his wife. They do rise early, I must say!’

  I shaved with such nervousness that I nearly cut myself, for I could not imagine why the Yoders would want to see me after that attack I’d made on him in The Martin Luther. Had they come to complain to President Rossiter, and was I, judging from the peremptory manner in which he had summoned me to the meeting, in serious trouble? ‘Damn the Yoders,’ I grumbled, for I had an abiding distaste for meeting my adversaries in public; I much preferred fencing with them through the published word. And this confrontation could become ugly because I’d been told that whereas Lukas himself was mild-mannered, his little wife was a tiger in defense of his reputation, which I had certainly attacked. I did not go optimistically to my early morning meeting.

  Fifteen minutes later as President Rossiter and I looked out the window from the Regents Room we saw a sight familiar in the Dresden district. Up the brick footpath strode Mrs. Yoder, small and lively with a strong show of aggressiveness looking back now and then to be sure her husband was tagging along. And there he was, a colorless fellow with a half-smile plodding along, hesitating now and then to look at some bird or flower. Like Rossiter, I could not imagine why they were coming.

  When they entered the paneled room I expected at least a coldness, more likely an immediate attack, but to my relief, they greeted me almost warmly: ‘Good morning, Professor Streibert. Sorry to roust you out so early.’ I breathed more easily.

  Mrs. Yoder led the discussion: ‘Lukas has had a striking success with his novels since Hex, and the officials at Kinetic, especially Ms. Marmelle, his personal editor—’

  ‘Mine and fifty others’,’ Lukas broke in.

  ‘They believe that he can do two or three more books, if he keeps them in the Grenzler series. The first four are having a rebirth—sensational, they tell us.’

  ‘That must be the most gratifying part,’ President Rossiter said, but Emma, who had studied economics at Bryn Mawr, corrected him: ‘The most gratifying is a sale of almost a million copies of The Creamery, and Ms. Marmelle feels certain his next one will break that record.’

  ‘There will be a next one?’

  She reached over to knock her knuckles against wood. ‘If he stays healthy,’ and Yoder added: ‘If we both stay healthy.’

  Rossiter said: ‘Yes, that would be necessary, wouldn’t it? But you Pennsylvania Dutch farmers live forever, thank God.’ He could think of nothing to add.

  But Emma could, and she did so, boldly: ‘We’ve been thinking. Lukas feels he owes everything to this college, and I agree. So we’ve decided to share our good fortune with you. We want to tithe, as it were, a share of the rewards he’s earned from his past books, a promise of more if his next ones do well.’ Before Rossiter could respond she added firmly: ‘Of course, you’ll understand that a share, not half by any means, will have to go to Bryn Mawr. I did help earn the money.’

  ‘I heard about the years you spent in the Souderton schools,’ Rossiter said, smiling at her, and Lukas said: ‘Remember I do work at home, and that’s demanding of a wife. She’s earned half.’

  ‘I don’t want half,’ she said, ‘but women’s colleges need funds, too, and I’ll see that mine gets some.’

  ‘Admirable idea,’ Rossiter said, eager to know what figures they had in mind, but too poli
te to ask.

  At this point I still had no clue as to why I had been invited to this session, and since neither Rossiter nor I knew what size of gift the Yoders were proposing, each of us waited in awkward silence. Then Emma spoke: ‘We’ve brought you a check, President Rossiter, with the promise of another next year, when we see how things turn out.’ She produced it, but kept it in her hand.

  When she finally handed it over and he saw the figure, one million dollars, he gasped and cried in honest confusion: ‘Goodness me! Lukas, I knew you had affection for the college, but this is staggering.’ Then he broke into a nervous laugh: ‘No one told me that books sold like that,’ and Emma said: ‘Most don’t. We’ve been lucky and we know it.’

  The Yoders spent half an hour detailing the operating rules governing this gift and those that might follow. Emma did most of the speaking: ‘No public notice. Only the regents to know. We don’t want our names on anything. And most important of all, it must not be used for buildings, no kind of building. Others can be approached for that, promise them their names across the front.’ At last she got to me: ‘Our money is for books and all that relates to them—the students who will write them later on, the libraries in which the books are kept. Considering all these aims, we believe that Professor Streibert ought to have a major say in how the income is allocated.’

  ‘Of course!’ President Rossiter said. ‘He’s our resident expert.’ Then he added quickly: ‘Just as Lukas is our alumni expert.’ But then his smile faded, driven off by a question he must, as president of the college, ask: ‘There’s no bad blood between you, is there? We couldn’t sponsor a situation that might explode, to the college’s detriment.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Yoder said brightly.

  ‘I mean, that public difference of opinion about Longfellow?’

  ‘Academic fencing,’ Yoder said. ‘Lifeblood of a good college.’

  ‘And the rather forceful letter Professor Streibert wrote to our college paper?’

  ‘I didn’t see it,’ Yoder said, his Dutch face wreathed in innocence. Mrs. Yoder explained: ‘I saw it and I didn’t like it, but Lukas tries never to read things written about him, so I didn’t show it to him.’

  I was staggered. I had thought I was dueling with a significant adversary over a significant point, the nature of poetry, and he wasn’t even aware that I had fired. What was even more incredible, as my intellectual foe he was offering me custodianship of one million dollars, as if nothing had ever happened between us. I felt dizzy, and then I realized that this quiet little man really did live off by himself, ignorant of everything that he did not accept as touching him in a significant way. He was a primitive artist, totally self-directed and impervious to criticism. I was awed.

  Now he spoke: ‘We’ve drafted a memorandum covering the stipulations my wife has just spelled out. We mean every one of them—we mean them rigidly. Call in a notary and let’s notarize this now,’ and when the assistant registrar arrived with her ink pad and seal, Yoder placed a white sheet over the body of his letter so that the exciting information could not be read, and the formalities were concluded.

  In moral confusion I watched. I had rejected Yoder because he represented the literary standards I despised—popular culture, novels empty of significant content, and a writing style I found boring—yet here he was giving me a million dollars to speed the work in my department. I was too perplexed and ashamed to thank him, but President Rossiter took care of that.

  When he and I walked the Yoders to their aged Buick, which few students would care to own, he told them: ‘All colleges receive gifts, thank heavens, but rarely so generous in amount and never more generous in spirit.’

  ‘There’ll be more,’ Emma said, ‘if I can keep him at his typewriter,’ and as they drove off, the President said to me: ‘Streibert, we’re giving you a lot of fresh responsibility. Don’t foul the nest any more than you already have.’

  In 1987 in those nebulous weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas when nothing substantial seems to get done, Ms. Marmelle took up residence in the Dresden China without any professional reason for doing so; she was on vacation, and for the first time I caught a hint of what was driving this extraordinary woman. Her life in New York had become routinized. Her parents were dead and she had few personal friends, only business associates. What was of considerable importance was that the city had become dangerous for a woman living alone, with the result that by comparison our quiet little town must have seemed a refuge, especially during the holiday season when people seek companionship. In addition, she had two of her writers near the town and, through my recommendation, was about to acquire two more. It was obvious that she’d decided to make Dresden her emotional home.

  Her ostensible reason for coming was that Yoder had informed her that he had finished the first draft of his seventh Grenzler novel, a dreary thing called The Fields, and suggested that she take a look at it with a view to publication in 1988. Calling me to say that she’d be at the inn with time to see me briefly, she rushed down, hurried out to Yoder’s farm, picked up the manuscript and scanned it avidly back in her Meissen-ware corner.

  When I found her there reading, she said: ‘It’s standard Yoder,’ adding quickly: ‘And very good.’

  Then, as if to assure me that I too played a significant role in her plans, she said: ‘Your letter about the young man of promise in your class excited me. It’s a situation New York editors dream about. A trusted teacher of writing at a good university sends an enthusiastic message: “I believe I’ve uncovered a really fine writer. Please take a look.” ’ This time it was I who had sent her the message: ‘This lad’s only nineteen but he could be the new Truman Capote. Same kind of saucy mind. Please call me the next time you drift this way.’

  My wording had been exactly right, a lure to any editor who had dreamed of spotting the new Gore Vidal or a clone of Françoise Sagan. As Yvonne had once phrased it: ‘To get a real talent launched, and a fresh one, would be a relief after processing the predictable schlock ground out by tired hacks in their fifties who never had anything original to say, before or now.’

  I told her: ‘His name is Timothy Tull. His grandmother is the grande dame of these parts, quite wealthy. Her daughter—that is, the boy’s mother—made a horrendously inappropriate marriage to a nothing named Tull, who sired a son, then killed himself and his wife in a drunken auto accident. The boy—he and his grandmother will be here in a moment—was precocious, almost busted out of one school, excelled in a better, and fell into my hands two years ago. I’ve done little to mold him, actually. Totally self-propelled, and to my astonishment has come up with a completed manuscript, which is going to startle you. I think it’s publishable, right now, but after you pick yourself up off the floor when you finish reading it and go into a dead faint, you may say “Not quite yet.” ’ I halted my first frenzy of words and said with more restraint: ‘But sooner or later, this boy—’

  ‘You told me how old he was, but I don’t remember what else you said in your letter.’

  ‘Almost twenty.’

  ‘He’s eligible. But I always remember the case of the Putnam boy. Great start in his teens. Fizzled. Same with the young daughter of the South Seas writer, Frisbie. I’m cautious.’

  Before I could add to this portrait of my prize pupil, Timothy Tull and his grandmother entered the lobby and walked directly to where Ms. Marmelle and I waited. Timothy introduced himself and his grandmother and said with no hesitancy or embarrassment: ‘It’s rather silly of me, isn’t it, to bring my grandmother along? But she runs things, including me.’ I could see that Ms. Marmelle liked him immediately.

  But she was not remotely prepared for Tull’s manuscript. It had been elegantly typed on 256 pages of expensive white paper that almost crackled, it was so heavy and costly. The pages were not numbered in any visible way, and appeared with the text in four positions: upside down, sideways, sideways upside down, and in the ordinary right-side-up position. They had been typed in six diff
erent typefaces, six different spacings between the lines, with now and then a whole page in italic, another in boldface. They formed a magnificent jumble, each page a complete item in itself, beginning in the middle of an undefined sentence and ending the same way. Most important, they were not arranged in any kind of order. Any one page could fit in anywhere. They were an astonishment and justified the title the young man had given them.

  ‘I call it Kaleidoscope,’ he said, as if naming a new baby of which he was proud. ‘That toy in which fragments of glass and metal at the far end of the tube seem scattered and variable, but as you turn the tube and look at them through the magnifying glass at the near end, they form patterns that can be beautiful.’

  ‘Have you written that description down?’ Yvonne asked, and he replied with an airy brush of his hand: ‘It’s in there somewhere.’

  ‘You hope to be a writer?’ she asked, and I interrupted: ‘He already is one.’

  ‘I asked Mr. Tull,’ Yvonne said, and Timothy replied: ‘I’m determined to be one.’ And I added: ‘And Ms. Marmelle’s the one to help you.’

  After some polite conversation, the boy and his grandmother took their leave, Timothy smiling at us as they left the room.

  I lingered and was sorry I did, for she gave me a shattering report on my recently completed novel: ‘Karl, our people have labored over your manuscript and, to put the best face on it, they have doubts about it.’ When I just stared at her she hurried on: ‘No one likes the title, The Empty Cistern, and for a sound reason as Jean pointed out in our editorial session: “It’s a temptation for some smartass reviewer to chirp: ‘The cistern isn’t the only thing that’s empty.’ ” And that kind of snide crack we must avoid.’ She had the decency to refrain from telling me what I learned later: it wasn’t some fellow editor called Jean she was quoting; she herself had said it.