The Novel

by James A. Michener

  As the book lay in my lap opened but unread I was chastened to think that I was now accepting the very reasoning for which I had rebuked Yvonne when she said: ‘Lukas Yoder with his sentimental novels depicting the Dutch milieu and Jenny Sorkin with her amusing description of the football arena are writing interesting books that anyone with a grammar school education can read and enjoy. Streibert, Pound and Timothy were reaching for a communication far more powerful.’

  It was toward two that morning when I saw the frightening consequences: Streibert was right. If the popular novel of today stands where popular poetry stood in 1850, then our novel will surely follow the destiny of our poetry: better and better novels read by fewer and fewer people. Such a prospect for a devoted reader like me was so depressing that I could not sleep, so I remained in my chair, the book of poems unattended.

  New Year’s Eve did not end on that mournful note, for as I was about to go upstairs to bed, my phone jangled and a voice cried: ‘Mrs. Garland?’ and it took me a confused moment before I realized that Yvonne Marmelle was speaking. ‘Where are you, dear?’ I asked, and she said: ‘At my house. May I drive over?’

  ‘At this hour of the night? It wouldn’t be safe. But we do have much to discuss.’

  ‘When Karl drove me home, I hoped he would come in, and he did. We spoke first about the good work he’d done on Timothy’s manuscript. And although he’s always been suspicious of Jenny Sorkin, he seemed honestly pleased when I told him that Book-of-the-Month quietly slipped me word that if we can delay publication of her Big Six till the start of football season they’d probably take it. What a start for a beginning writer!’

  ‘You didn’t call to tell me that.’

  ‘No. I was as agitated as a schoolgirl who’s about to be kissed for the first time. Didn’t know how to start, but finally blurted it out: “What Mrs. Garland said made sense—you could quite properly move in there—there’s a big enough difference in ages so that there wouldn’t be gossip.” ’

  ‘What did he say?’ I asked and she said: ‘Nothing. Just stood there. I don’t think he heard me. I believe he was thinking of his great god Devlan, for he took out his handkerchief and dabbed his eyes.

  ‘ “For God’s sake,” I cried, “blow your nose like a man.” It was a horrible thing to say, but out it came.’

  ‘He must have reacted to that!’

  ‘No. He asked a question in a very weak voice: “Are you lonely, too?” and I replied as gently as I could: “Terribly. Why else would I have moved to Dresden? To find someone real like Zollicoffer. Or Mrs. Garland. Or you.” ’

  ‘And then what did he do?’

  ‘He stepped back and studied me, and as I looked at him I saw an entirely different man. No more the tentative intellectual crippled by the death of Devlan. No more the young professor traumatized by the murder of his star pupil. He seemed taller, straighter and his voice was certainly stronger.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘You won’t believe it. Oxford University has invited him to come there for a full academic year to teach American literature!’

  ‘How wonderful! I’m so glad for him.’

  ‘And Temple has received additional funding for his department. He’s to have three Ph.D. students to assist him.’

  ‘And his return to Mecklenberg? Did he react in any way to our invitations?’

  ‘He rejected them both.’

  When she heard me express my disappointment, she broke into robust laughter.

  ‘You couldn’t possibly guess what he said.’

  ‘It must have been something sensational or you wouldn’t have called at this hour.’

  ‘He said, and I quote exactly: “As Mrs. Garland said, you and I need roots, so three days ago I purchased an apartment in that new condominium at the edge of Dresden.”

  It was now four in the morning, and as I looked through the big window to the valley beyond I was driven to impose my gnawing sorrow on another: ‘It was at this hour on that other night when we found Timothy down there on the lawn, and grief chokes me when I think of what you and I have lost in his death.’ Then, forcing myself to turn from such thoughts, I asked: ‘What do you think Karl will do with his newfound vitality?’ and she replied: ‘After he gets to Oxford and weeps at the gravestone he erected for Devlan he’ll begin to think: “Those are two bright women back in Dresden. They know what they’re talking about.” And he’ll begin weighing the two invitations you extended. The more important question: What do I do if I’ve grown to love the gentleman? The new gentleman, that is, the one who’s painfully made himself into a man?’

  She asked this with such obvious hunger for guidance that I concluded her long-ago lover must have been a self-pitying whimperer, and I wanted to lend her the courage to take another shot at life: ‘Yvonne, you wait. The good things in life are like the birth of a child. Ninety percent waiting.’

  WEDNESDAY, 15 JANUARY 1992: Yesterday I had a sobering experience. As my recent notes will show, I’ve been engaged in an intellectual struggle to judge honestly what I think about the writers who have come to mean so much to me. Some years ago I thought Lukas Yoder was the dean of storytellers, but then Professor Streibert with his penetrating evaluations forced me by the sheer brilliance of his logic to question that early opinion. My grandson opened my eyes to what a newer, bolder type of writing might offer, and I felt in Jenny Sorkin’s brash irreverence a clean new wind blowing away old cobwebs. And fundamental to all was the reasoned judgment of Yvonne Marmelle, whose task it was to keep a great publishing house on course. She served as my cicerone, offering her developed opinions and fortifying my nascent ones.

  I really believed I had fathomed the secrets of literature and wrapped them in neat bundles. But yesterday when I stopped by to chat with Emma Yoder about the gifts she and I are making to the college, I asked as we sat in her kitchen: ‘What’s Lukas doing these days?’ and she said: ‘You’d be interested. In this quiet period following the festivities he applies himself to what he calls “my burden.” ’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Answering his mail. An enormous amount piles up after publishing a new book.’

  ‘Stone Walls came out months ago.’

  ‘Yes. But his earlier books keep getting printed in various countries. To those readers they’re new.’ She took me to his crowded study, where he sat at his typewriter, studiously engaged in sending letters to all parts of the country. ‘This is also part of the profession,’ he told me as he paused over the keyboard of his old-fashioned manual Royal.

  ‘Do you really answer all of these?’ I asked, indicating a waiting pile of at least eighty.

  ‘I do. These are the people,’ he said, tapping the letters beside him, ‘who’ve kept me going.’

  ‘May I read some of them?’

  ‘Read them all,’ he laughed. ‘I do.’

  And that began my introduction to a world I had not known, the world of hundreds, thousands, of people much like myself to whom the reading of books was a precious experience. I knew that I thought so; I had not known there were so many like me.

  In the warm sunlight of a winter’s day in Dresden I began first to skim the letters, and then read them, and saw that they fell into three categories. There was obviously a lot of junk mail in the batch, students asking him to tell them ‘all about writing,’ mature men begging for autographed photos for their collection, and a surprising number who had found in one of his books a character who bore the same German name as they: ‘Could your storekeeper have been modeled after my uncle Isaac Schmandtz? It’s not a common name.’ But the more serious letters were a revelation.

  The first group, but not the largest, said simply that through the years the reader had come to trust Yoder as the teller of honest stories based on the experiences of men and women of significance whom the reader would have liked to meet and who lived in places worth visiting. Such writers were apt to say: ‘You are my favorite author, probably the very best writing today, an
d I eagerly await your next book.’ I had the suspicion that some of these correspondents had not read widely the works of other writers.

  The second group moved me deeply, because each could have been written by my husband when he was alive:

  I work with such concentration in my business that I truthfully have no time for reading. My wife heckles me about this, says I’m allowing myself to degenerate into a typical redneck. Some years ago when your popular novel Hex came out, she talked so much about it, assuring me that I’d like it, that in self-defense I had to give it a try.

  Your book knocked me off dead-center. It was so good, so real, that I asked: ‘What else has he written?’ and she told me about The Shunning, said it was even better than Hex. She was right, and I’m proud to tell you, Mr. Yoder, that I have now read all your books, and those of other writers, too. You brought me back to the world of ideas bigger than those of my business, and for this I thank you. Ten times I thank you.

  That was precisely Larrimore’s experience. He had read little but steel-business reports until I practically forced him to read Hex. Then he too went back and read the others, and more besides.

  But it was the third group of letters that stunned me—so many I could scarcely believe the readers had written in almost identical phrasing:

  When I approach the closing pages of one of your novels, a feeling of profound regret comes over me, for I realize that I am about to sever a relationship with characters I have grown to love. And to abandon a corner of the world in which I have spent rewarding weeks and even months, for I read slowly and carefully. I feel, when the pages dwindle, as if something good were being stolen from me, something precious that would not be replaced.

  You may laugh at what I say next, but when I realize how few pages are left I ration myself, only so many each day, and when the final one looms, and I close the book, I stare at the back map for many minutes, aware that something precious has touched my life.

  Pushing the letters away, for they were in a sense painful to read, I looked at Lukas as he typed away. He did not look like the sort of person who could evoke such reactions.

  ‘Have you always received such mail?’

  ‘It started with The Shunning. Since then it’s never stopped.’ He pinched his upper lip as if embarrassed by this admission, then pushed another pile my way, smaller than the first, which he said he would be answering tomorrow. I was surprised to see by their colorful stamps that they came from all parts of the world, every continent, from nations large and small. And it was interesting to see that the writers, having come to his books in a nonchronological way, depending upon when some publisher in Germany or Brazil or Sweden had translated an individual book, wrote to him about novels he had published decades earlier as if he had written them yesterday.

  It was as if all his books were alive this week, as if they had just now sprung off the press, for a book comes to life not on the date it was published in New York, but on the happy day when it falls into the hands of a reader in Johannesburg or Buenos Aires or Istanbul, three cities that happened to be represented in the letters I held in my hand at that moment.

  I was humbled. When I saw the passion, the identification my quiet little Dutchman had been able to evoke in all sections of his own country, and in various nations of the world, I had to look at him in a different light.

  ‘You wield a powerful pen, Lukas.’

  ‘I’ve been lucky to come along when I did. And especially lucky to have found a woman like Yvonne Marmelle to defend me.’

  ‘Do letters like this’—I indicated those from foreign lands—‘mean a lot to you?’

  He leaned back from his typewriter, reflected for several moments, then smiled in his almost wizened Dutch manner: ‘Well, when Professor Streibert’s rather harsh review came out in the Times, the one that agitated you and Emma so sorely, you asked me how I had reacted. I told you I hadn’t read it, nor had I reacted when Emma did read parts of it to me.’ His smile became the infectious grin of a schoolboy who has caught on to a secret: ‘Mrs. Garland—’

  ‘For God’s sake, call me Jane. We’re practically partners at the college.’

  ‘Well, Jane, when a man receives a batch of letters like this almost every mail day of his life, he can afford to ignore criticism. They fuel an inner fire that keeps him warm.’

  I left his littered study an enlightened woman, for I had been allowed to see a new world of writing, and when I returned to Emma’s kitchen I said: ‘Maybe a man or a woman who can paint fine canvases or write good books is obligated to keep on doing so—as long as the fires last.’

  ‘You think Lukas should try one more?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Looks as if you’ll get your wish.’ She said this while tending a pot bubbling on the stove, and when she turned to face me, I could see that she was quite tired. As she joined me for a cup of lemon tea, she said: ‘It was on New Year’s Eve that I finally saw I could no longer oppose him. I didn’t want him, at his advanced age, to tackle another major novel, especially since the Grenzler series had been so nicely put to bed. But after we and the Zollicoffers had greeted the New Year at their place, we drove home, and instead of going to our room, Lukas went to his study. Last thing I heard as I fell asleep was him typing.

  ‘It must have been about two in the morning when something wakened me, and when I heard him still typing, I went in to his study and cried: “Lukas! What are you doing?” and he shoved at me a handsome map he’d drawn and colored of the area between the Fenstermacher farm and Windsong, extended to show Neumunster, Dresden and the shore of the Wannsee where the murder weapon was found.

  ‘I shivered when I saw the map, for it meant that he had finally committed himself to writing an entire novel in some bold new way that critics like Streibert would approve of. It also meant that even though both of us are older now and failing in energy, the grand chase for facts and characters and significance has once more begun.

  ‘So there I sat as three o’clock approached, looking at his notes for the novel. He’d already chosen the title, The Crime, and identified its central figure as someone like Herman Zollicoffer, an adherent of the old ways. The villain would be a repulsive slob like Applebutter but with a less ridiculous nickname. Lukas had two traditional Amish alternatives penciled in—Strong Jacob and one that had been widely used among the Dutch, Huddle Amos—but he said he didn’t feel happy with either. In the center of the novel would be the tragic figure of a man like the elder Otto Fenstermacher, who had always intended good but who had lost his way, selling off bits of his farm while proving himself unable to keep his insolent son from getting involved with drugs.

  ‘I could see it was going to be a powerful novel, but at three-thirty I said: “Lukas, have you any idea what time it is?” When he looked up it was clear he had been lost along the back roads of Dresden and I said: “Time for sleep.” On the way to our bedroom he put his arm around me and said: “Thank you. I have great hopes for this book. And do you know why?” He laughed at himself in the way that makes him so easy to live with: “Remember how we used to dismiss Streibert and his pompous Imperative of the Now that no one understood? Well, he was right. I’m driven by the very impulse he described. I no longer want to write about my colorful Dutch as they used to be, but the way they are now. How a chain of wrong choices and obstinate behavior can lead to murder.”

  ‘Despite my reluctance to have him start another major book, I was happy to hear him speak with such conviction. In the early stages of his other books he had spoken that way, so it was a good omen. I still felt as tired as I had in the argumentative days before Christmas, but I remembered his cry: “Writing is what I do. I have to do it,” and when he climbed into bed I leaned over and tucked the blankets about him.’

  BY JAMES A. MICHENER

  Tales of the South Pacific

  The Fires of Spring

  Return to Paradise

  The Voice of Asia

  The Bridges at Toko-Ri
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  Sayonara

  The Floating World

  The Bridge at Andau

  Hawaii

  Report of the Country Chairman

  Caravans

  The Source

  Iberia

  Presidential Lottery

  The Quality of Life

  Kent State: What Happened and Why

  The Drifters

  A Michener Miscellany: 1950–1970

  Centennial

  Sports in America

  Chesapeake

  The Covenant

  Space

  Poland

  Texas

  Legacy

  Alaska

  Journey

  Caribbean

  The Eagle and the Raven

  Pilgrimage

  The Novel

  James A. Michener’s Writer’s Handbook

  Mexico

  Creatures of the Kingdom

  Recessional

  Miracle in Seville

  This Noble Land: My Vision for America

  The World Is My Home

  with A. Grove Day

  Rascals in Paradise

  with John Kings

  Six Days in Havana

  About the Author

  JAMES A. MICHENER, one of the world’s most popular writers, was the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tales of the South Pacific, the best-selling novels Hawaii, Texas, Chesapeake, The Covenant, and Alaska, and the memoir The World Is My Home. Michener served on the advisory council to NASA and the International Broadcast Board, which oversees the Voice of America. Among dozens of awards and honors, he received America’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1977, and an award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities in 1983 for his commitment to art in America. Michener died in 1997 at the age of ninety.