The Novel

by James A. Michener

  Yvonne, feeling that she must defend all writers, asked: ‘Has anyone met her?’ and a shiver went down her spine when Emma replied: ‘I did. Reminded me of certain girls I knew at Bryn Mawr. The type that took few baths.’

  At about four the faculty wives in the Yoder farmhouse caught sight of a tall, rangy girl coming up the walkway as the car in which she had arrived started to drive off. Yvonne had the best glimpse of her: unkempt hair, floppy skirt with an uneven hem, and a bold red T-shirt emblazoned with heavy black lettering. She saw no more, because Lukas went to the door, spoke briefly with the young woman and said sternly: ‘No, you may not come in, wearing a thing like that,’ and he dismissed her, slamming the door. Fortunately, the driver of the car, whoever he was, had stopped to assure himself that this was the Yoder farm, so she was able to catch a ride back to the college, but as she was about to climb in, Lukas, ashamed of his rough treatment, reopened the door and shouted: ‘You’ll be welcome when you’re properly dressed.’

  When the women asked: ‘What was wrong with her dress?’ he blushed furiously and said: ‘Written right across her chest were words in bold outline: SCREW YOU … OR ME, except that an even filthier word was used.’

  ‘Lukas!’ Yvonne said reprovingly, ‘we’re grown up, you know,’ and he said: ‘I do apologize for ruining your day, Ms. Marmelle. I suppose that’s the last we’ll see of Miss Sorkin, and maybe that’s good. She seems a disagreeable lot.’

  He was wrong because in the time it took for the car to speed at seventy miles an hour over to the northern tip of the Wannsee and back, Miss Sorkin was at the front door, knocking politely and calling to her driver: ‘Better wait, to see if I get kicked out again.’

  She was admitted, but only because Emma reached the door before Lukas. When she invited the young woman to enter, she burst into laughter, for across her chest this time stood the bold letters IN CASE OF RAPE, THIS SIDE UP. Yvonne told me: ‘When I saw the message, I chuckled, then guffawed, but Lukas was outraged and refused to shake hands.’

  His embarrassment increased when Emma shared with Jenny and the faculty women a revealing story of her courtship with Lukas: ‘He’d come down to Bryn Mawr to see me—it’s only a short distance—and found himself amid a collection of girls from Penn and Vassar and Mount Holyoke. Maybe some Smith girls, too. It was an assembly on the rights of women, as I recall, and as Lukas and I were walking through a grove on campus, we crept up, unintentionally, on a group of visitors, and they were singing what they said was the Vassar alma mater. I’ll never forget the jingle:

  “The first of May, the first of May!

  Outdoor screwing starts today.

  Hooray, hooray, hooray, hooray!” ’

  When the others chortled, she told Jenny Sorkin: ‘Of course, they were singing the more vulgar word, the one Lukas intimated was on your first T-shirt.’

  ‘What happened?’ Yvonne asked, and Emma said: ‘Lukas, as you might expect, was mortified. He blushed a deep red, realized that the girls from the other colleges had seen him, and fled, leaving me standing there.’ Reflectively she added: ‘I’ve always thought, Lukas, that your novels might have carried a bit more contemporary zing if you’d not been so self-conscious about sex.’ And he was still so self-conscious that again he fled the presence of chuckling women.

  When time came for tea, Emma said: ‘I’ll see if we can lure Lukas back.’ When he came, rather sheepishly, he took one look at Jenny Sorkin’s chest and broke into laughter: ‘That’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. What’s the purpose, may I ask?’

  ‘Kids call it “a barrier breaker.” A girl’s whole problem is to get boys to notice her, to start a conversation. Anything that achieves that is a tremendous aid.’

  ‘But you’re no longer a girl,’ Lukas said, and Jenny replied: ‘You’re a girl, in habit and thought, until you snare a man.’

  ‘You deem it that important?’ Lukas asked, suddenly interested in this strange young woman who presumed to be a writer.

  ‘Even more than I can explain. You don’t have to grab the man, but you do have to make him want to grab you.’

  ‘And your proposed book. Does it consist mainly of football players grabbing?’

  ‘Mr. Yoder, some of the best parts deal with a man who is as different from you as a man can be, my father, a football junkie, a dear galoot, and a consummate horse’s ass.’

  Turning to Yvonne, Lukas asked: ‘And you think you can tame this wild thing into being a writer?’ and Yvonne replied: ‘If there’s potential growth to work with, I can tame anything. It’s when things are totally static that I have no chance. This one’—she looked approvingly at Miss Sorkin—‘I do believe I can help tame her, but only if she cares to cooperate.’

  ‘Cooperate? I’d rewrite every page, if you said the word.’ Jenny paused: ‘But you haven’t said the word, have you?’ When Yvonne shook her head, Miss Sorkin asked in a subdued voice: ‘Would you be willing to consider my manuscript?’ and Yvonne nodded.

  The explanation I gave for not attending the rowdy tea at Emma Yoder’s was the truth—I did have a seminar at Temple—but not the whole truth. I had gone there primarily to meet with a committee of three deans, but neither they nor I wished that fact to be known.

  What had happened was this. I had received a letter from Dean Mendel Iscovich of something called the School of Social Communication which contained astonishing news:

  Our professors who have attended your various lectures and followed the track records of your graduates and your own scholarship attainments have impressed me with what a valuable addition you would be to the program we are developing here at Temple.

  Thanks to an unexpected grant of some dimensions from Walter Annenberg, whose offices in The Philadelphia Inquirer are down Broad Street from us, and from two generous gifts from other city industrialists, we find ourselves in a position to offer three new faculty members of established reputations positions in an exciting educational adventure. Would you care to meet with our deans to explore possibilities that could prove to be of mutual interest?

  I did not want to leave Mecklenberg, and I certainly could not imagine teaching at Temple, which was in the midst of a turbulent city, but I did owe Dean Iscovich the courtesy of a response, and although my letter clearly indicated that I was happy in my present position, it was sufficiently collegial so that a committee of three Temple deans drove north the forty-odd miles to meet with me in an Allentown hotel, where they surprised me with their graciousness and knowledge in my fields of expertise. In fact, they made the intellectual and social challenges of moving to Temple so inviting and the funding of the school to which I would be attached so reassuring that I simply could not bluntly reject their enthusiastic invitation to visit them in Philadelphia. The result of what I again intended as courtesy led to my visiting Temple one weekend under the guise of conducting a seminar, and although I saw that all they had promised me was in position, the big-city setting was so alien to what I thought a great university should be that all I could promise when I left was: ‘I’ll need time to consider this dazzling invitation.’ Actually I knew that I would require only a few minutes to reach my negative decision. When we parted, Dean Iscovich, a youngish man with degrees from North Carolina, Wisconsin and Harvard told me: ‘Professor Streibert, do not take this invitation lightly. You’re at an age when you ought to grapple with some big task, one you can grow with for the rest of your academic career. You’re nearly forty. You have a quarter of a century left before retirement. Make those years count.’

  The remainder of 1989 was turbulent for all of us, sad, but also rewarding. Jenny Sorkin was hammered at from two quarters: at college I labored with her, trying to clarify and simplify her syntax, while on her trips to New York, Yvonne was relentless in demanding greater depth.

  I was present at one of Jenny’s sessions with Yvonne. The editor wanted the six men in Jenny’s novel differentiated in every regard ‘so that a blind man could identify each on a dark night,�
� but Yvonne had only limited time she could devote to any one of her writers. ‘The days of Maxwell Perkins hand-holding is gone. I can tell you what I think is wrong, but you have to fix it.’

  ‘Tell me straight out, Yvonne. What’s wrong?’

  Quietly and looking straight at Jenny, Yvonne said: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you called me Ms. Marmelle—until your first two best-sellers?’ And then she smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s the kind of thing I came back East to learn.’

  ‘We need …’ Yvonne’s use of that pronoun betrayed the fact that she had already adopted Jenny’s manuscript as her own and would fight till she dropped from exhaustion to see it properly launched. ‘We need six marvelous portraits. Funny, human, aggravating, pompous, macho. The portrait of your father and his crazy ways, perfect. And do you know why? You knew him. I don’t get the feeling that you know your five football players. The Missouri poet? Well, yes, maybe.’

  At lunch one day, Yvonne asked: ‘Did you perchance ever sleep with one of your Big Six?’

  ‘I avoid football players.’

  ‘There’s the trouble, you write about them ambiguously. You try to make them heroes, but you can’t put your heart into it. Lay off the hero stuff, pin them to the pages of your notebook as if they were insects in your biology class. Sharpen, sharpen!’

  Whenever Jenny tired of the hammering and the lack of specific instruction from her two mentors, she remembered something I had said at an informal party with advanced students: ‘The sad fact is that most of the kids in the big class will never make it.’ She was determined not to be one of that tribe, and one morning after having struggled with the portrait of her man from Oklahoma State, finally getting him into shape at two in the morning, she phoned Yvonne, telling her jubilantly: ‘It feels so good, seven sheets reworked the way you and I wanted. All crud gone. Just the muscle, the music and the meaning.’

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like a professional,’ Yvonne said.

  Regarding Timothy, who had started so brilliantly and whom I had promoted to be my assistant in teaching the writing course, I wondered if he would be qualified to head the department if I ever moved on. He seemed to lack the patience required for sustained administrative work, and this was a difficult judgment for me to reach, because it was I who had recommended him for his present appointment and fought for him when older faculty members complained that at twenty-one he was too young. But one day when I returned unexpectedly to fetch some papers and found him lecturing, I was startled. Though young, he was so at ease and so obviously attuned to his students that I left wondering how these attributes came so naturally to him. He seemed to have absorbed all I had taught him but had transformed this knowledge with his natural gifts.

  One afternoon as I walked across the campus I saw him in a rowdy game of touch football. All of a sudden he leaped high in the air like a young Icarus to snag a pass, and it was then that I understood that if his novel had vitality while mine did not, it was probably because his life had vitality and mine didn’t. Now at twenty-two he was a full man, while I at nearly twice his age remained only a partial one. When he made number five on the tennis team he played with such grace that I found myself thinking: He’s an Apollo and I’m some grape-stomping clod, and against my will I began to envy him I had started our relationship as his mentor; now I saw him poised for flight, and realized I had to let him go. The thought of losing him was almost painful.

  A few days later I suffered a crushing loss. One of F.X.M. Devlan’s associates at Oxford had written in late 1988: ‘He asked me to inform you that he was too weak to write and that the end seemed to be closing in. I felt it proper for me to alert you, because he weighs no more than 120 pounds and the decline of powers cannot be halted. His spirit is bright, his attacks against mediocrity continue unabated, and he sends his love.’

  Because I could visualize Devlan so clearly, still valiant in his dying moments, still firing shafts of mordant wit at the follies of the world, I sent him three long letters in three days, reminding him in each of the joy we had known in Greece and of the supreme influence he had been in my life. I wanted to fly to Oxford to comfort him, but could devise no excuse for making such a trip. I didn’t feel I could simply abandon my classes, and if I did get permission and it was circulated through the student body and the alumni that I had left to console what they would have termed ‘his gentleman friend,’ or, what was worse, ‘his close male associate,’ I might be fired. And so I stayed at my job, feeling miserable about doing so. As I walked through the peaceful groves of the college and along the shores of the Wannsee I saw myself in Oxford, walking to the digs in the eighteenth-century stone cottage in which my friend lay dying, and the pain became more than I could bear.

  Finally, I burst into President Rossiter’s office unannounced and looking rather disheveled, and blurted out: ‘Sir, I must fly to Oxford immediately.’

  To my astonishment he said quietly: ‘Of course. When I learned about your friend’s illness, I suspected you’d have to go. Tull has said he’d be proud to take your classes, give him a chance to test his skills at a higher level.’

  ‘But what about the college community?’

  ‘Streibert, if it were your father who was dying, of course we’d encourage you to go. Or when Anderson’s wife was dying of cancer? Where else should he be?’

  Totally unprepared for this degree of understanding and acceptance, I reached for a chair. ‘May I sit?’ and when he nodded, I’m afraid I burst into tears, for these had been confusing days. After a while he led me to the door, put his arm around my shoulder and said: ‘Streibert, long ago the older faculty and the regents satisfied themselves that you posed no embarrassment to the college, you and Professor Devlan, I mean. That was settled long ago.’

  At the door I said: ‘I came here prepared to resign,’ and he said: ‘I’m sure of that,’ and he suggested that I use the college car and its driver to speed me to Kennedy Airport.

  By the goodwill of God I reached Oxford when Devlan was still alive and found him a shriveled little fellow weighing a hundred and two pounds, but still surprisingly lively. I believe he drew upon his last shreds of energy to talk with me, and the things he said almost broke my heart: ‘What would I like to do in the time remaining? See the Uffizi again. Hear Lohengrin. Meet with my seminar one last time to share with them …’ His voice faded, and when I leaned close to hear, he added: ‘To hear the Agamemnon in Greek, in the old temple …’ There came a long pause during which he took my hand: ‘And to walk among the olive groves. We did once, did we not?’

  He was buried in an Oxford cemetery, his grave marked by his associates with a small stone that says DEVLAN CRITIC, which is what he had directed me to provide.

  Upon my return to Mecklenberg I fell into a malaise more depleting than I had known at the death of my parents. My hurtful experience with Cistern, whose weaknesses Devlan had spotted from a distance, had made me suspicious of my own self-direction: ‘I too need helpful guidance just as Timothy Tull and Jenny Sorkin do. For no writer ever knows enough about his language, his characters or his art. Oh, Michael, I needed you then, I need you now.’

  I had thought, as Devlan lay dying, that perhaps Tull could become the inheritor of the Leavis-Devlan-Streibert chain of insights and become master of the dialogue between elites. Certainly he was bright enough to fill that role, and after six or seven years at Mecklenberg he might be ready for a major appointment, especially if in the meantime he took his Ph.D. at some prestigious school like Yale or Oxford.

  Mention of the latter name prompted a lively thought: With his record the lad could win a Rhodes Scholarship! But when I investigated I learned that students were eligible for only a limited number of years after graduation from college, and Tull had passed that date.

  Then I smacked my brow in irritation: What am I thinking about? With his grandmother’s millions he doesn’t need a Rhodes. He could easily pay his own way at Oxford. Indeed, an article had re
cently appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer pointing out the injustice in having Tull’s Kaleidoscope on the best-seller list and coining more money for a young man who was already heir to his grandmother’s millions, while two equally gifted mature authors in the city could barely earn a living with their writing. When I finished the insulting article I asked aloud: ‘Who says they’re equally gifted? More likely one-tenth as gifted.’

  But even as I uttered this vigorous defense of Tull, a warning whispered: Streibert, don’t make Timothy more important than he is. He’s no more than one of your students who’ve displayed certain aptitudes. He’s not a god. Let him find his own level himself.

  Despite this sensible warning there was one aspect of his life about which I had to be concerned: I did not want to see him make some dreadful mistake by marrying too young—in haste—and to the wrong woman. Such as Jenny Sorkin, to whom he seemed attracted. This apprehension was intensified by a fact I could no longer mask: I actively disliked Jenny Sorkin, who constantly baffled me. Whenever I thought she was becoming civilized she would parade her latest outrage, but when I judged her to be beyond hope she would reveal some new aptitude that amazed me.

  Her brash ways offended, her preposterous T-shirts were an affront to my college, such as the one that displayed an imaginative reworking of the warning that appears on side-view mirrors: OBJECTS HIDDEN BY THIS SHIRT MAY BE LARGER THAN THEY APPEAR. And, I must admit, her reliance on Yvonne Marmelle and Timothy Tull instead of on me for intellectual and artistic guidance was irritating. So one night, seeking only to protect Timothy, I knocked on his door: ‘Timothy, I know I’m butting in, but I’m doing it not as a friend but as the head of a small corner of my college.’