Journey: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The reasons for these desires are easy to explain. I had found my first good luck in writing by dealing in a fresh way with the South Pacific and had always wanted to complete the cycle with work on the North Pacific. In the years after 1946, when I finished Tales of the South Pacific, scores of correspondents had urged me to write about either the North Pacific or Alaska or both, but I refrained because I was afraid I did not know enough. However, the urge to tackle such an enticing subject was ever-present, and I visited the area repeatedly to check my understandings in case I should later wish to try.

  My interest in Russian Alaska is duplicated by many American historians and geographers who have knowledge of either the history of Russian, or of British and American, attempts to explore that part of the world. As a young man I had studied the eastward expansion of the Russian Empire to the Pacific with the same avidity that I studied American and Canadian expansion westward to the same ocean. I was moderately well informed about the steps Russia had taken to extend her empire eastward and I had been allowed to travel to many of her Asian frontiers, but not, alas, into Siberia itself. But if books can provide the portrait of a land, and as a writer I had to think so, I had acquired a powerful understanding of and admiration for the great, halting, confused and finally triumphant Russian push to the east. What I did not know very well, and I was dismayed to realize this, were the Alaska-Yukon border region and the events that had occurred there, particularly during the years of the gold rush. In fact, I knew of only three incidents that might be usable in a novel, and that was pretty thin gruel for the kind of book I hoped to write.

  I was aware, as were most Americans with knowledge of our history, that the great gold rush of 1897–1899 occurred mainly on Canadian soil and that the Canadian police had saved the day when the American presence in the region had not yet been fully established. Many Americans, like me, regretted the fact that the boundary between the two nations had not been just a few miles farther to the east, which would have placed Dawson City and the Klondike on American soil, but we accepted its position as an unfortunate mistake that could not be corrected.

  On the subject of boundaries, I had also read many years ago about the hilarious contretemps that occurred in connection with the important Hudson’s Bay post at Fort Yukon, that strategic settlement just off the Arctic Circle where the great Yukon River stops flowing north and takes a ninety-degree turn to the west for its long run into the Bering Sea. When American surveyors got around to checking boundaries in 1869, they learned that this big Canadian post was not in Canada but in Alaska! An amiable agreement was worked out, with never a harsh word, whereby the Hudson’s Bay people would move their trading store the proper number of miles to the east, which would put it safely on Canadian soil. In fact, the agreement was so amicably reached that American military personnel helped the Canadians not only to make the move but also to build a new trading post at a site called Rampart.

  Unfortunately, the Canadian-American team moved the site the proper number of miles not as the crow flies but along the bank of the Porcupine River, which wandered this way and that, so that when the Canadians had finished making the move and were installed in their new trading post, the next team of surveyors found that they were still on American soil. In some disgust the Canadians abandoned their new home, which would be remembered as Old Rampart, and moved a substantial distance into Canada, where they named their post Rampart House. It had been a trivial affair with amusing interest, but hardly the kind of material on which to base the entire episode I wanted to write.

  Of much greater significance was an incident I could use, one which glows in history because of the restraint with which both Canada and the United States behaved. In the years 1877 and 1878 conditions in America’s new territory of Alaska were in dismal shape, primarily because no responsible form of government had been established for the vast territory. Matters deteriorated so precipitously that the few American settlers in Sitka, once the Russian capital and now the American, feared that rebellious Tlingit Indians were about to invade and slaughter all white people.

  Justification for their fear has never been established, but in 1879 distraught citizens, unable to obtain protection from their own government, made a dangerous canoe trip south to the Canadian military outpost at Prince Rupert, imploring the naval command there to dispatch a warship to save Alaska on behalf of an American government that seemed about to lose it.

  A daring Canadian officer made a snap decision to aid his American cousins, and on 1 March 1879 the Canadian warship Osprey steamed into Sitka Sound. This show of force dampened the Tlingit uprising, if indeed it had ever existed, and for nearly two months this Canadian vessel represented organized government in Alaska. When an American ship arrived belatedly, the Osprey courteously saluted and retired, taking with her the gratitude of the American colonists, who would forever after insist that ‘when the Americans would do nothing to protect us, Canadians saved the day.’

  That was the totality of what I had to work with regarding Canada’s role on the Alaskan frontier, and it wasn’t much, but when I started my serious research I came upon an American source which said cryptically that a Canadian writer named Pierre Breton, who from the entry I judged to have long been dead, had written a book about the gold rush, published in the United States as The Klondike Fever, and I asked a research librarian upon whom I often depended to see if she could track it down. In less than five minutes she called back: ‘The author is very much alive. He is one of Canada’s most respected writers. Six libraries in our district have copies of his book, which was published in 1958. And incidentally, his name is Berton.’

  Since I could walk to the library nearest my home, I soon had a copy of this excellent work, one written with a powerful sense of organization and emphasis and in a congenial style, but as I read it in great gulps I realized that Berton was telling me what I already knew about the joint American-Canadian experience in the gold fields. I was not wasting my time reading the book, because Berton was continually throwing up bits of compelling information I had not previously known, but I was not getting much material about the strictly Canadian role in the gold rush. Then, in chapter six, I came upon a section dealing with the comic-tragic stampede out of the Canadian frontier town of Edmonton.

  It was enchanting material, just the kind of story I had been seeking upon which to construct a Canadian narrative, which would keep my novel about Alaska from being narrowly parochial. It had reverberating overtones, provided correctives to standard accounts, and opened my eyes to the complex role western Canada had played in the gold rush. It was tantalizingly brief, only thirteen pages, but I shall ever be thankful to Berton for including that short glimpse in his book, for had he not alerted me to the Edmonton mania, I might have missed it completely. No other book I used had mentioned it.

  However, his material, good as it was, did not provide enough data for my purpose, so, utilizing all the research knowledge of some very fine librarians in Alaskan centers, particularly those of the state historical library in Juneau, I came finally upon a very brief note in a learned journal. It said that the Edmonton story had been told in fascinating detail in J.G. MacGregor’s Klondike Rush Through Edmonton 1897–1898, and it was obvious that it must hold the very material I sought. Telex calls were spread afar, and when after some days I had received no response, I concluded that the MacGregor book must have been privately printed and that no copies were going to be available. But some time later, the postman arrived with a parcel from a library in a distant city, and when I opened it, there in my hands lay the one book I needed to complete my Canadian research.

  This is, I think, an almost perfect example of two aspects of writing: the necessity for a serious writer to keep following even the most tenuous thread, the slightest hint that somewhere in a distant library a book will be hiding that provides all the information he seeks; more important is the other side of this coin, that anyone who writes anything pertaining to human knowledge must,
to complete the task, lodge that material in some library or archival center.

  In my writing life I have worked on some of the most arcane subjects, topics on which one would gamble that no one had previously written anything, but with enough searching I have invariably come up with something, and most often with a full-length, well-written work like the MacGregor on Edmonton. I have found that many nineteenth-century English clergymen stuck away in far corners of the world with nothing much to do wrote some of the most valuable books in an amateur style, reporting on their hobbies such as travel or archaeology or the history of strange nations and tribes. German professional scholars, too, have been remarkably far-ranging.

  From repeated experience I can confidently state that I doubt if anyone can devise a subject of even the slightest significance but that someone previously has written a substantial book upon it. The accumulation of usable knowledge in this world is staggering, and with the new computerized indexes, even the most fugitive document can be tracked down.

  The value of my two books on Edmonton was demonstrated when two professional readers of the Alaska manuscript protested my having characters die of scurvy:

  Ridiculous. A full century earlier James Cook had demonstrated an absolute cure for scurvy. Surely, seasoned explorers like Lord Luton and Harry Carpenter would know how to prevent it?

  Browbeaten and afraid that I had misconstrued something I might have read too hastily, I went back to Berton and found this passage:

  Wind City lay on Wind River, and here were camped fifty or sixty men, three quarters of whom suffered terribly from scurvy. When gangrene set in, their toes were cut off with hacksaws; and when they died, their corpses were stuffed down the empty mine shafts.… The death toll reflected the internationalism of the camp. On November 30 a man from Chicago died of scurvy; on December 13 a Frenchman died of scurvy; in early January two Dutchmen died of scurvy.

  Rarely does one settle an argument so conclusively. Of course my English travelers would have known how to prevent scurvy, and during their first long winter in the arctic, with adequate food, they handled the problem easily. But this was the second winter, and a terrible one it was, with most adventurers penned up in tiny cabins without adequate food or medicine, and scurvy wiped them out.

  The MacGregor book was a treasure house of historical information on Edmonton’s role in the gold rush, and when I finished my first delighted reading, I saw that the actual men and women who trekked through Edmonton in those days provided such a wealth of character and incident that I was free to construct my group of men heading for Dawson as arbitrarily as I wished. Nothing I could invent would seem preposterous after one read what real people were doing in those wild days.

  And here I reminded myself of a curious rule governing writers. We are advised by our lawyers not to read any books of fiction dealing with the subject at hand, because a work of fiction is the exclusive property of the author who invented it and to borrow from it is plagiarism, but the writer is free to refer to scholarly nonfiction research if he acknowledges the source, for it is considered an addition to the general reservoir of human knowledge. I had an amusing experience with this concept some years ago. Readers began writing to me, pointing out that an extremely popular novel had used whole pages from one of my novels, and when a major magazine printed excerpts side by side, the similarity was clear and something had to be done.

  But now a curious impasse developed, because Publisher A is very loath to cause trouble for Publisher B about unauthorized borrowing from a work of fiction, because next week A might want to borrow legitimately from B, so lawsuits are avoided. In this case my publisher did complain quietly to the publisher of the offending book, and after some time received a letter of explanation, which deserves to go into the history of publishing as the best possible response to such charges:

  My client denies that she has ever heard of Mr. Michener as a writer, or ever read one of his books, or knew in any way that he had written on this subject. But since the similarity between the two excerpts is undeniable, we can only conclude that both writers borrowed from the same original source, which we have been unable to identify.

  Hoping that I might be able to devise a group of five interesting male characters to make the run from Edmonton to Dawson, I hit upon the idea of a group of four interrelated men of London’s aristocracy and an Irish servant, and the more I worked with them, the better I liked them. From time to time I regretted that they were not all Canadians, but my knowledge of Canadian family life was too limited to permit that; I had done graduate work at a British university and had personally known moderately well the kinds of men I wished to depict. Besides, the geographical settings would be Canadian, some of the most striking in the world, and my Britons would encounter Canadians on their journey.

  Very early in my planning I decided for two reasons that my five men would approach the gold fields by the Mackenzie River route. The overland route from Edmonton to Dawson was so terrible and so impenetrable that my characters would simply be bogged down in tragedy from start to finish, a grinding, grueling, step-by-step descent into oblivion, and I did not wish to write that kind of story. Equally important was the fact that I had conceived a deep interest in the Mackenzie River system, and although I had not traveled upon it myself, I had flown over great stretches of it and had read many accounts of its discovery and exploration. It is a majestic river and one admirably suited to what I wanted to say. Once I focused my thinking, I discarded all other options. My tale would be an evocation of this great, formless, wandering river as it heads for the arctic.

  The three components of my Canadian narrative were now firmed: a river I respected, a historical incident of some magnitude, and five characters I understood and liked. With such material a writer is in luck. Holed up in a log cabin in Sitka, Alaska, I wrote diligently for several months, trying to knock my story on the gold rush into proper form, and as I toiled through one version after another, the segment that constantly pleased me was the one on the journey of this group of Britons down the Mackenzie River. I liked my five men increasingly and shared their trials with them. Tears came to my eyes as certain incidents devastated them and me, and I had an amazingly clear picture of the survivors: the Irish ghillie who would become a major character in the remaining portions of Alaska, and the nobleman who would become an aide to Lloyd George during the 1914–1918 war.

  * * *

  A manuscript is a subtle affair, and long ones such as those I most often write need to be carefully constructed; components that appear in an early episode are established there to be put to effective use in the latter part of the book, and incidents which seem almost irrelevant may have considerable meaning because they create values which become important later.

  I do not mean by this the use of contrived clues, as in a detective story. I mean the inherent components of storytelling, whose proper use is so essential in establishing style and winning reader confidence and participation. And I mean particularly the phenomenon of resonance.

  The classic example of resonance used with maximum effectiveness is prepared in one of the early scenes in Anna Karenina when in a railway station Anna notices the workman tapping the wheel of the engine with his hammer to ensure the train’s safety, a presage of the climactic scene in which she will commit suicide under these wheels.

  Almost any component of a narrative, adroitly used, can produce resonance. A novel is an interwoven series of freighted words and images, of characters who behave in certain ways, of a physical setting which carries its own unique identification, and of important incidents in the latter part of the narrative which can be strengthened, or foreshadowed, by comparable incidents that have occurred earlier. I try constantly to introduce words, phrases, incidents and meanings in one part of the narrative so that when they reappear later they will do so with intensified significance. One of the joys of reading is the friendly recognition of these resonances.

  Resonance occurs, to the great advantage
of any narrative, when the reader comes upon a phrase, a complete thought, a character or an incident with which he or she is already familiar. The reader then enjoys the pleasure of recognition or the thrill of renewed acquaintance or can admire the aptness of the passage. Classical composers of longer musical works relied on this device, Richard Wagner and César Franck with heavy obviousness, Ludwig van Beethoven and Giuseppe Verdi more subtly. Certain novelists use the tactic with marvelous skill—Honoré de Balzac to name one—and few readers seem to be aware of the extraordinary flood of coincidence in Boris Pasternak’s exquisitely crafted Dr. Zhivago. Any young writers who are afraid of utilizing coincidence lest they be hit with the famous criticism ‘He jerks the long arm of coincidence right out of its socket’ should read Pasternak and take comfort.

  I have thought of my novels as seamless webs which could start anywhere, end anywhere, and that, I suppose, is why some have felt that my concluding chapters are unsatisfying. The criticism is justified. I do not tie loose strings together; I do not want to imitate certain composers of symphonies who start to end their music some four or five minutes early and proceed with a noisy series of crescendoes until they finish with a titanic bang. I prefer to have my novels wind down at exactly the same pace I used in starting them, as if to let the reader know that the basic situation goes on and on, and since it can’t all be of maximum intensity, I am forced to stop my orchestra somewhere.

  When I had finished writing the gold-rush episode in Alaska, having edited and cut certain portions that ran too long, I was happy with the result and judged that I had at least brought Canada into the narrative as I had hoped to do. As well, I had introduced certain events in this section of the novel that had been carefully foreshadowed by earlier events or that would be paralleled later in the narrative. But when my New York editor and I began discussing the finished manuscript, he urged me to consider cutting the Canadian segment. For the reader to appreciate why, several important facts about professional writing and publishing must be told because they pertain to the nature of creative work and the editorial process.