Teaching with James Michener
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In the fall of 1990, the president of Eckerd College approached me on the sidewalk near my office. We stood together in the Florida sunshine, and the president said, "How would you like to teach creative writing with James Michener?" Given all that has happened since that sidewalk encounter, I wish I could report that I was excited at the prospect. What I felt that day was . . . fear. Standing there while the president aimed an expression of alert concern at me, I conjured images of myself in a classroom with a writer whose notoriety was oceanic, whose list of publications was Homeric, and whose ego might be a thing of such breadth and majesty as to reduce me to the status of a cigarette butt in the bilge of a great ocean liner coming into port.
I said to the president, "What an opportunity for our students! I'd love to teach creative writing with James Michener!"
The president smiled at my response and said, "I think we may have a commitment from Mr. Michener very soon."
Not long after that, when I learned that Michener was indeed coming, I read some things about him, and I thought about the ownership of my classroom. You see, we professors are a self-reliant tribe, happy, ink-stained gypsies, fools in the eyes of the world but kings in our own classrooms. Our bargain with life exchanges money and comfort for independence and variety. And I am not just a professor, but also a novelist, four times published, critically if not financially rewarded. This makes me a member of an even more unruly group. Writers and artists who teach are always writers and artists first. Our classrooms are extensions of our studios and writing rooms, and any invasion of these sacred spaces is an act of war. That is what I was thinking.
And this is what I was reading: James Michener was born in 1907, probably in New York, to parents unknown. Later, I heard him describe himself as a foundling. It's an interesting word. It means, literally, a child found by strangers. A child left on a doorstep.
In nineteenth-century novels and Hollywood movies of the 1930s and '40s, this is the image we see: It is snowing, no, there is a blizzard. A young woman makes her way down an icy village street. She is coughing and weeping. Her body is amorphous in a ragged black dress and heavy shawl. We get a close-up of her face. It is young and pretty, but pale as a winding sheet. The tears freeze on her cheeks. We get a close-up of the bundle in her arms. She reaches down and lifts a piece of soiled cloth from the child's face, and the little thing blinks in the cold wind. It doesn't cry. The young mother's breast is wracked with sobs as she stumbles on.
The woman passes a house with lighted windows and a lamp above the door. Perhaps she hears music from inside. Perhaps laughter. Something pulls her to the little porch where she swoons, rights herself, coughs, and places the bundled child on the snowy step. If there is a bell, she rings it. If there is a knocker, she raps it hard. This is her last strength. The last good thing she can do. We hear the music stop inside the house. Silence, then a voice: "Someone's at the door."
The young woman must hurry away. Perhaps there is a last kiss for the child. Perhaps she cannot bear this. No film director shows us the scene, but we know she will die somewhere in the snow. If she does not die, few novelists will specify what happens to her out there on the violent roads or in the icy fields. I prefer to think that she dies believing her baby is safe in a place where people laugh and sing. Where it is warm. Where the door is answered because someone is there. In his eighties, James Michener still called himself a foundling.
Michener was raised in the home of a Quaker woman, Mabel Michener. He always called Mrs. Michener a loving mother. He declared that it was a good thing growing up with eight or nine other abandoned children in the home of a loving Quaker woman: they were poor and this taught him that he was nothing special. He never knew who his parents were. After a while, he said, he no longer wanted to know, but I believe the image and the idea of the foundling haunted Michener all his days. I believe that he lived and wrote and acted as he did largely because of this image and this idea.
Here is more of what I read. James Michener attended Swarthmore College on an athletic scholarship and graduated summa cum laude with a major in—what else?—English. He mentioned, to the end of his days, his athletic prowess. He was always thankful for Swarthmore and gave it twelve million dollars as a token of this gratitude. I believe that his love of that small liberal arts college, of the special kind of education it provided, was part of what led him to little Eckerd College.
In 1959, Michener, who had already won a Pulitzer Prize for Tales of the South Pacific, and who had realized a considerable income from South Pacific, the Broadway adaptation of the book, published what he called an experimental novel, Hawaii. He called it experimental because it began at the dawn of time with the volcanic eruptions that made the rocky promontories and with the birds that carried seeds and deposited guano that made the soil and grew the green things that became the Hawaiian Islands. And he traced the histories through many generations of the families who inhabited or invaded the place. The book was a financial success on a scale few books ever achieve. Michener was no longer just a hard-working, successful, and financially secure novelist with a Pulitzer Prize to his credit and best-sellers made into popular movies like The Bridges of Toko-Ri and Sayonara; he had become an industry. The books he wrote after Hawaii, some thirty in all, mostly followed the same format: long sagas featuring many families and illustrating the historical and social evolutions of nations, states, and regions. They were published and purchased in the millions, and Michener became Americastoryteller.
So, I read about Michener and thought about the ownership of my classroom, and the day came when the great ship would arrive in port.
Michener and his wife, Mari, had purchased two adjoining condominiums in a retirement facility near the campus. On the night of my first class with Michener, I did as I was instructed to do. I parked my car under the covered driveway at the condo's entrance and walked to the reception area. I expected to ask the security guard to call Mr. Michener and to wait for him to come down. I had been sure to arrive early, but had not counted on Mr. Michener's arriving even earlier. He was sitting on a bench not far from the guard's station, an old man of medium height and build, with his hands resting on the cane he held between his legs. He wore a white, Cuban-style guayabera shirt, khaki trousers, and heavy orthopedic shoes. I approached, and he stood, rather painfully, and regarded me. His face was hard for an old man's face, not what some writers would call chiseled, but certainly made of lines, angles, and planes, rather than curves. He was bald on top, white on the sides, and his eyes were bright, intelligent, and exacting, and even with the cane and the painful rise to his feet, his bearing was energetic. We shook hands, and I introduced myself. I called him Mr. Michener, and never called him anything but that. He never invited me to call him "Jim," and I don't think I wanted him to.
I don't recall our conversation on the way to my class that first night. Or even if there was one. Michener was a deliberate, thoughtful, and easy talker, but easy in silence, too. When he talked his voice was deep and resonant, his delivery authoritative but never overbearing. He gave me that first night, and always afterward, the impression of a settled, comfortable mind and heart. He never seemed awkward, bothered, or even very much surprised: his characteristic facial expression communicated an expectation fulfilled, or a discovery. He tried hard to relieve others of their awkwardness in his presence.
I had waited until the last moments of the previous week's class to tell my students Michener was coming. Their reactions were not various: to a person they were stunned. After the shock wore off, they were scared and excited.
That first night, as I walked with him into the narrow seminar room, some of them had to rise so that he could pass to the chair on my left at the end of a long table. Michener had suffered a mild stroke, and he'd had hip surgery. There were some physical logistics involved in getting him settled in a chair, heavy steel cane against the wall, cloth book bag on the floor beside him. I think this confusion of chairs and bodies kept some of my students from fainting or being sick. Here was the legendary novelist, majestic in his achievements, but also humble, as we all are or will be, in his physical condition.
I introduced Michener, using some of the fruits of my reading about him, but not going into his history at any great length, (I forgot to mention his Pulitzer Prize that night, and damned myself for it later). Then I asked Michener if he wanted to say anything. He said hello to the students and that he was glad to be with them. He told them he was already impressed with their work—read in preparation for the class—and that he looked forward to reading more. He told them that writing was a noble pursuit, and a fine way to make a living if you had the knack for it. He told them that he had written all his life and would continue to write as long as he could still see the keys on his typewriter. He said that he had been called a genius by some critics and vilified by others, but he considered himself only a hard-working storyteller who had struggled to learn his craft and who was, like them, still learning it. He said that he was not a professor, and here he paused and looked at me with eloquent skepticism, I thought. Then he told the students he would not be grading them, only helping them as best he could with their writing.
We began as usual by reading a student's story aloud. Michener sat through the reading with his eyes closed, listening carefully. When the reading was finished, I began the conversation as usual, asking the students for discussion topics, listing these on the blackboard, then choosing the one I thought would give us the best start. I did not know what to expect from Michener. I liked the man I had met earlier in the condo lobby, but, on the other hand, I had had a great deal of experience with writers. I had met many of them in the harsh light of some stage or panel or podium and had seen what audiences and opportunities to pontificate could do to them. What the hell, I might as well say it: most writers are egomaniacs. Their greatest joy is to compensate for the lonely hours they spend wrestling words to the page by braying their opinions at whomever will listen, at whatever length they can manage, as often as possible. A conversation with a writer is a listening experience.
That night, I feared that I had not yet seen the real Michener. The congenial Jekyll I had met in the condo lobby might be completely transformed in the classroom, a Mr. Hyde of wild surmises, rambling monologues, and boorish jokes. He might make our lives miserable.
That first night when the blackboard held its list of topics for discussion (characterization, point-of-view, diction, and so on), I asked each student who had provided a topic to give an opinion, then asked for agreements or opposing points of view. The discussion went on its lively way. The students and I talked, developed arguments, gave praise and suggestions for improvement, and we all watched Michener. He sat there listening carefully. He took no notes. He had his stack of three stories, corners squared, on the table in front of him. After about twenty minutes, when the expectation in the room had grown as large as a hungry polar bear, I finally turned to him and said, "Mr. Michener, would you like to make a comment or raise an issue?" He simply said, "No." As we learned in due course, he preferred to wait until the end of the discussion to deliver his opinions.
And so the pattern was set. A story read aloud, a discussion, and Michener listening. Then his reading from the typed yellow stick-on note. He always signed the notes, and he signed and dated the stories. I remember thinking that I hoped the students knew enough about fame, and the paper trail it makes, to save these scraps of commentary with Michener's name on them. I don't think I ever told them to do this. I know that most of them did not save his comments. I remember finding some of them lying around the workshop room after Michener was gone.
For a while, I continued to try to draw Michener into the discussions, but I finally gave up. When asked, he would sometimes amplify his typed remarks, but never at length.
Yes, I was relieved to discover that James Michener was not going to be a gasbag or a rampaging egomaniac in my classroom. And, to be honest, I was frustrated with his way of participating. I got over my frustration. And though he never gave me his reasons, at least not directly, I know why Michener operated as he did. The record shows that much of what he has written has not been well received by critics. There are some witheringly bad reviews, some so caustic that they would crush a writer with a small self-confidence. Michener learned early to stick to his original opinions, not to alter his plans to accommodate the ideas of others. He learned, too, that his readers liked the fruits of his plans and opinions, and this mattered much more to him than what the critics liked.
He was asked to visit a class taught by one of my colleagues and to discuss with the students one of his own writings. He refused, saying that he never did this. He did not say why, but I think I know. Why should James Michener give a college sophomore a chance to tell him what is wrong with his work? He'd had criticism enough from professors. Sophomores were not to be suffered gladly. He said once that he never sought criticism from anyone except his editor, and then he smiled and said, "You never win arguments with editors."
Michener was a radically independent writer and personality. He had been successful from the start doing things his way, and he saw no reason to change. He wasn't surly or superior about not changing his mind or taking part in the discussions in my classes: he simply believed that his own fresh, original impression of a student's story, the opinion he had formed sitting alone in his study before he heard what anyone else had to say, was a thing of great value.
Michener and I shared a classroom for three years. He came to St. Petersburg in November with the good weather that brings all visitors to Florida. We never started a semester together or ended one together. He came and went, usually staying about six weeks. He visited my classes regularly, and visited those of three of my colleagues occasionally. He gave only one lesson of his own devising in my class. He brought in a typed, annotated list of reference books he thought every writer should own. I found the lesson extremely useful. The students tried, but they were disappointed. I think they would much rather have heard Michener on selling books to editors, or selling them to the movies, or on traveling to exotic places, or on cocktail parties on the New York literary circuit. But Michener wanted to tell them about research, and he did. His list included these works: "The Synonym Finder (Rodale), Webster's II New Riverside University Dictionary, Webster's Instant Word Guide, World Almanac and Book of Facts, a Ploetz Manual, a World Atlas, Road Atlases of the United States, Canada, and Mexico; A good Rhyming Dictionary." All of these are self-explanatory, except, perhaps, a Ploetz Manual. Here, exactly as he wrote it, is Michener's annotation: "In the last century a German historian named Ploetz put together a list of dates covering all known world history back to the Pleistocene. It proved such a bonanza to literate people that it has been revised many times. I use the latest version, edited by the Harvard professor Langsam and his colleagues and find it of enormous service."
I was happy to find that Michener and I could fall into a pleasant and productive working relationship. I think he liked the way I taught, though he never said so. He always referred to me as Watson, or The Professor. He was respectful of what I had to say, always seemed to listen carefully to me, and often nodded and smiled at my remarks. Certainly, he and I agreed about the fundamentals of fictional craft: the necessities for clarity of language, logical plotting, depth of characterization, and consequence of theme. When I gave him copies of my own books, only days passed before he said he had read them. With anyone else, I would have been skeptical. He said he liked them, but did not elaborate. He and I could not have been more different as writers. I believe he did like my work, but I know there were things in it, notably the four-letter words, that he did not like.
Many people asked him to autograph books while he was at Eckerd. I never obtained any for myself, but I did once ask him to autograph two hardcover books sent to me by friends in California. Once, a student presented Michener with a paperback book for an autograph. Michener refused, saying that he never autographed paperbacks. When he taught with me and a colleague a month-long seminar on writing query letters, outlines, and book proposals, he gave each student involved a free copy of his book: James Michener's Writer's Handbook. He was always gentle and respectful with students. He issued a general invitation to them to come to his condo and talk to him about their writing, but only a few had the temerity to do it. Several of the students I have talked to said they appreciated his generosity, but wished he had been a little tougher with them.
As you might expect, there were some touching and funny moments in these classes. Every undergraduate writing class features a student who resembles the cartoon character Pigpen and whose manuscripts look as though they came from a sty. This student usually proclaims his attachment to the Beat writers and his belief that grammar and other matters of form are manifestations of bourgeois neurosis. My first class with Michener had such a student. On the night when the boy's story was to be discussed—I think it was a science fiction piece—there was an unusual tension in the room. The manuscript was awash in errors and typos, and we all waited to see what Michener would say. When the time came, Michener read from his yellow stick-on note, then lifted his head and said, "Young man, I wish I had your imagination. But you must harness it by learning to use the King's English." None of us laughed, but we were all mightily relieved.
Here in his own words, is Jason Christy's recollection of the night his story was read. "I was a freshman in my first writing workshop, and Mr. Michener showed up unannounced on the night my story was to be read. My story was called, "Fate and Flatulence,"a piece about a kid who wins the girl after grappling with the decision as to whether or not he should fart loudly in a quiet English class. It was a funny story, in a gratuitous way, but it was not very good by real writing standards.
"I am a kid from West Virginia, and this story I have written is to be read aloud, replete with all its grotesque descriptions and immature thought, while James Michener sits in a chair two feet away from me. My story is the last of three to be critiqued. When the time comes for the reading, my classmates, fond of the immature and the grotesque, roar with laughter. Michener is stoically checking through the pages with a pen. I am smoldering with shame as if I had wet my tuxedo on prom night, wondering: What would my mother, my grandparents—who have read this man for years—think if they knew that James Michener was here, listening to this? Many times since, I have wished I had the talents of Hemingway or Joyce, but never as I did that day.
"When it was all read and done, and Michener was asked to comment, the first thing he said was, 'This writer has a talent for comedy, something I never had.' He went on to address the shaky plot structure and a number of careless grammatical errors, things that were lost on me then. But it was not lost on me that he had said, 'This writer . . .' James Michener had spent three hours in an uncomfortable chair in an Eckerd college classroom just to help out. He may have been meeting the president that week, or flying to Tiananmen Square to do research. He may have written an editorial for the New York Times that very morning, but he was in a classroom that Monday night, listening to my story about a high school kid who had to fart.
"I'll never forget that. I kept his copy, complete with comments on a yellow post-it note in the top left hand corner, Michener's signature scribbled at the bottom. I have since taken slowly to the primary lessons he had to offer about hard work, research, and writing, writing, writing. But more than these, I have kept his lesson in kindness. Regardless of what my work might become, I will never forget what it meant to me that he was kind enough to look at it, talk about it, and make me feel it was important."
Here are some of the comments Michener made along the way: He had often heard it said that he did not write his books alone, or that he had a huge research staff hidden away somewhere. Nothing could have been further from the truth. He had, he told us, a single research assistant, John Kings, whose help and friendship had been of inestimable value for many years.
He said more than once, "I am not a good writer. But I am one hell of a rewriter." He said that he often did five drafts of the most inconsequential documents, letters and the like.
Though he tended to concentrate on matters of grammar, syntax, and punctuation, he never talked about the commercial aspects of the writing trade. I think he disappointed students in this way, but it was clear that he had not come to the college classroom to sprinkle glamorous anecdotes about the business side of writing. He wanted to be part of discussions which had intellectual depth, and which made appeals to the best that had been thought and said.
Though he had been enormously successful as a writer, he deplored the way writers were treated in America. He once said that it was a shame that it was possible for a man to be elected to public office because he had played football, but that having writing in your background would not recommend you to the electorate. Perhaps he was making an oblique reference to his own unsuccessful 1962 campaign for the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's Eighth District.
Once, Michener came to class and told us that he had been out walking along the seawall that borders the campus. It's a wild place, and he had fallen and was unable to get up. He had lain there on the ground until a student had happened along to help him. He told the story with humor, and then said, "There I was, the prize-winning novelist, waiting for someone to come along and pick me up like a sack of potatoes."
The last time I saw James Michener, he was leaving our final class to drive to North Carolina with a writer named Roger Bansemer. Bansemer, an artist and balloonist, as well as a writer, was planning a book, Mountains in the Mist, about the people and landscape of the Great Smoky Mountains. Michener had asked to ride along with Bansemer and take notes on what he saw. It was a sad leavetaking, and odd, because the two men were starting such a long trip so late at night. I remember feeling a little fearful for Michener, and feeling that it was not his style to leave anything early. On the other hand, it seemed right to me that he had met someone with whom he shared an enthusiasm, and the two were dashing off in the middle of the night in pursuit of that thing. Something about this is at the heart of the writing urge.
That night I was sure I'd see Michener again. But he did not come back to Eckerd. In Austin, Texas, his kidneys began to fail, and he began the course of dialysis treatments that eventually wearied him to the point that he asked to be taken off the machines. He died only a week after the treatment was stopped. For a long time, Michener's characteristic courage and determination kept him on those machines. The terrible pain of the treatments finally made him ask for death.
One of the students in that last seminar told me that he later received his final manuscript, a book proposal, back with, "Do this," written on it in Michener's hand. The young man was excited for a moment, thinking that Michener had meant that his proposal was a good one. That he should do it. But then he realized that his manuscript had only been on the top of the pile. The words were Michener's note to himself. "Do this." He never got to that last stack of papers.
My own memories of times alone with him have mostly to do with those short trips in my car from his condo to the classroom.
I told him that a proposal I had submitted for the rewriting of the manuscript of what later became my fourth novel, Deadly Sweet, had been accepted by Simon and Schuster. I said, "If I can just find the time to rewrite the novel, they'll publish it." Michener looked at me sharply and said, "You'll be a fool if you don't find the time." I sat there feeling foolish and thinking that few men had ever made more of their time on earth than Michener had.
Once we talked about his wife, Mari. I don't recall how the subject came up. Certainly, I did not ask him if he loved his wife. But in the course of talking about her, he said, "I have loved her every day, every minute of our marriage, absolutely without reservation or rancor. But . . . I would not have wanted to be a Buick salesman in Terre Haute." I did not always take careful notes on our conversations, but I have reported these words exactly. As we drove along, it took me a few moments to catch up with his wit and its implications. Mari Sabusawa Michener, a Japanese-American, was interned during World War II. Michener was telling me that it would have been difficult to have what we would now call a marriage of mixed ethnicities if he had lived the life of a typical, middle-American businessman. Another way to put this extremely important point is to say that the wandering life of the writer, the constant search for new territories, new subjects, new friends, suited the Micheners whose marriage was an enactment of the recurrent theme of Michener's books. Maxwell Geismar, in his New York Times review of Hawaii, stated the theme this way: "Paradise is not a goal to attain, but a stage to which people of many colors and creeds may bring their traditional cultures to mingle with those of the others and create what may truly be Eden at the crossroads of a hitherto empty ocean."
Once, when there was a heavy load of books to carry, Mr. Michener invited me up to his apartment. His study was another surprise. Its austerity was such that it might have been that Quonset hut on a remote Pacific Island where the young naval officer tapped out those stories of Bloody Mary and Bali Hai and Emile DeBecque. I remember functional, mismatched furniture, piles of books, boxes of books, piles of manuscripts. I recall no art on the walls, only the desk, the hard-used manual typewriter, paper, pencils, and the heavy presence of the thing every writer knows a good study must contain: expectation.
After I carried the books up, two or three trips from the car to the condo as I recall, we sat and talked for a moment or two. I don't remember what we said. What I recall is the voice from the other room calling, querulously, "Cookie? Cookie, is that you?" Michener and Mari always called each other "Cookie." It was not the term of endearment that surprised me. I had heard it before. What surprised me was the age, the pain, and the fear in the voice from the other room. I had a sudden, penetrating sense of how old these two were, of how they depended on each other, of how she must have sat there waiting for him to come home. It was, in a way, a literary moment. I thought of Miss Havisham, and Capote's Cousin Randolph, and Faulkner's Hightower. All the lonely voices from other rooms.
Michener looked sharply at the empty doorway and called, "Just a minute, Cookie. I'm talking to the professor."
Like most men, Michener had planned to die first. He gave most of his money to his wife, believing that she would live on after him and give it away as she saw fit. It was a terrible shock to him when she died suddenly in 1994 of pancreatic cancer.
I don't know how to account for Michener's popularity. No one has ever, to my satisfaction, explained what is one of the essential mysteries of the writing life: Why his books and not those of some other writer? Here are some speculations.
An eighteenth-century English lord, sending a cautionary missive to a son who had left the country estate to take up residence in London, wrote, "Avoid the company of prostitutes and drunkards, and of those who read novels." Americans, like their English forebears, have a deeply ingrained suspicion of pleasure for its own sake. They don't like to read anything that cannot be considered improving to the mind. Michener's most popular books are history lessons disguised as fiction. Hard-working, practical-minded Americans can read them without feeling guilty or French or Italian.
Another possible explanation is that Michener was always ahead of what you might call the diversity curve. He knew that the melting pot was the primal American image, and he knew that novels about peoples from far-flung places combining themselves, not without strife but always blown together on the breath of some Dark God of Historical Necessity, would always appeal to the tolerant strain in the American character, no matter how submerged it sometimes was. Speaking as a fellow writer, I have to repeat, as Michener himself often did, that he was very lucky. The luck of the success of the Broadway musical, South Pacific, was stupendous. He rode to riches on the coattails of Rodgers and Hammerstein. And finally, Michener was probably a writer more purchased than read. His big, sober tomes were safe objects to have resting on the coffee tables of middle America alongside the Whitman Sampler candy box, the copy of National Geographic, and the framed photo of daughter Betty's latest baby. Michener worked his magic without frightening or threatening the reader. I think he will continue to be read for many years to come.
James Michener described himself as a foundling. I believe he always lived and worked in the energy and the tragedy of that image and that idea. He was always on the move, always a stranger making friends. He relied on the people he met to give him things, he relied on their generosity. Mostly, they gave him their stories. He dug their stories out of books, or he got them firsthand through talk. And he gave back what he was given tenfold.
Unlike most writers, he was a good listener. Maybe you had to be, growing up with eight or nine other orphans in the home of Mabel Michener. He was infinitely interested in the lives of others. In their lineages and all the strains of culture and history that made them who they were. I believe this is at least partly because he knew so little of his own origins. He wrote a novel about the history of the Jews called The Source, and he never knew his own sources. He once told me that he had always been a liberal and a passionate believer in social justice, "Because I don't know who I am." Here he threw up his open hands in the old gesture of humorous bemusement. It's the way I like to remember him—with that keen intelligence, that quiet humor, and that self-effacing curiosity shining from his eyes. Throwing up his hands and saying, "I could be anybody. I could be Jewish or Catholic, Russian, Polish, German, or Irish."
Indeed, he was anybody, and everybody. He was, as he told us in the title of his memoir, The World Is My Home, a citizen of the whole planet. When the young woman in the ragged dress and shawl knocks on the door on that howling night, it is James Michener she places on the icy doorstep. There is laughter and music inside and a voice that says, "Someone's at the door." And it is Michener, too, who opens the door to that warm world where strangers are welcome.
