At this critical point I was by no means alone in this forthright evaluation of myself and my life goals; thousands of men I know in the South Pacific were asking themselves identical questions on the lonely islands and during the long night watches on ships or airfields. An astonishing number would decide: I will not be satisfied just to plod along in what I was doing. I’m a better man than that. I can do better. And they resolved when they returned home to become ministers, or go back to law school, or run for public office, or strike out on their own in some daring venture, or become college professors, or work in hospitals. On those remote islands lives changed, visions enlarged, directions shifted dramatically, and it is to the eternal credit of those leaders then running our nation that they anticipated such frames of mind and provided financial assistance after the war to the young men who were determined to alter their lives for the better.
As one who has earnestly contemplated American history and the various acts of Congress, I have concluded that in two instances Congress has indeed helped to improve the quality of our national life. Interestingly but not surprisingly, each was passed during a war, as if the legislators as well as young soldiers and sailors were eager to brighten the future, and each act helped redirect lives.
In 1862, during the darkest days of the Civil War, Congress passed a pair of interrelated bills that I think of as one: the Homestead Act, which gave free land to settlers in the West, and the Morrill Act, authorizing the establishment of land-grant colleges in which tuition would be either minimal or free. These were acts of genius, for they ensured a free, active society in which citizens of good purpose could receive both land for homes and education to strengthen themselves and their nation.
The second laudable act of Congress was passed during World War II. What would become known as the G.I. Bill promised all men and women who had served in the war funds toward the completion of their education after the war ended. Millions of young people availed themselves of this opportunity, and I judge it to have been one of the best expenditures of public money made in my lifetime, for it helped an entire generation of bright young people improve themselves and make an effort to accomplish something meaningful. The burst of achievements in all fields that the United States saw in the decades following the end of World War II stemmed in large part from the flood of energy released by the G.I. Bill.
So I was not alone, there on the Tontouta airstrip that night, in deciding that I was ready for something better than I had been able to accomplish previously. But in another way I was unique, for I had never been ambitious in the usual sense of that word. I had not dreamed, as a boy, of becoming this or that; I had never aspired to wealth or acclaim; and the best description I ever heard of myself was one given by a college classmate: ‘Jim wanders down the road picking his nose and looking for the stars.’
Therefore, my evaluations that night did not resemble those of other men who had a clearer vision of themselves. I did not aspire to be a clergyman, although I believe I would have made a good one, nor did I want to go into a different type of business, for I was happy as an editor at the fine Macmillan publishing company. I had not the kind of profound belief in my own destiny that would have propelled me into politics or public service, and I could see in myself no dormant talent that was waiting to spring into life if I gave it encouragement. Since I had already attended half a dozen of the finest educational institutions in the world I did not feel the need to go to yet another school.
As I walked in the darkness I concluded that I was not dissatisfied with my employment; I was dissatisfied with myself. And I am embarrassed at the decision I reached that night, because when it is verbalized without the qualifications I gave it as soon as I uttered it, the impression it leaves is almost ludicrous. But as the stars came out and I could see the low mountains I had escaped, I swore: ‘I’m going to live the rest of my life as if I were a great man.’ And despite the terrible braggadocio of those words, I understood precisely what I meant: ‘I’m going to erase envy and cheap thoughts. I’m going to concentrate my life on the biggest ideals and ideas I can handle. I’m going to associate myself with people who know more than I do. I’m going to tackle objectives of moment.’
On and on I went, laying out the things I would and would not do, but always I came back to one overriding resolve: I will constantly support the things I believe in. And in the nearly fifty years since that night, I have steadfastly borne testimony to all my deeply held beliefs.
Before the night was out I modified my initial conviction; I would not act as if I were a great man, for that was too pompous; but I would act as if I knew what greatness was, and I have so ordered my life.
Was this powerful experience on the dark airstrip a theophany in the literal sense of the word, an appearance of God to a human being? As I said earlier, had I been devoutly religious I could have avowed that it was, and I might even have claimed that voices spoke to me in the hallowed darkness after the miracle of our safe landing. But that was not the case. I heard no voices other than the inward ones that warned me that I had come to the end of the line in the direction I had been heading and that I sorely required a new path. I had observed that certain men and women lived as if they had shorn away the inconsequential and reserved their energies for serious matters, and I decided to pattern my life after theirs.
Lest the reader suspect that I am overdramatizing the perils of that difficult airstrip, let me report that some weeks later my successor in my work at Navy headquarters in Noumea wangled an aircraft for unauthorized use and, coming back to Tontouta after a jolly escapade, flew smack into the hills I had eluded earlier, killing himself and all my former staff.
How did I behave after my soul-searching experience? In no visible way differently from before. I returned to my home base on Espiritu Santo, resumed control of a vast warehouse filled with papers needed to prosecute the air war against the Japanese, and tried to continue to treat my six enlisted men with special consideration, especially Jim, the shoemaker from Tennessee, and Garcia, the wild-eyed poet from Texas. I flew to all corners of the Pacific carrying my precious wares; and I approached my fortieth birthday without having accomplished anything special.
There was one minor change. As I rode about my own island and the forty-eight others I serviced using the travel orders Bill Collins had provided, I began to listen with attention as men told stories at night in the various Hotels de Gink in which transients lived when on travel orders. I sought out men who’d had unusual experiences or more likely had usual ones that they understood with unusual clarity, and from this mélange of information and observation I acquired a good perception of what the great Pacific adventure meant in human terms. Clearly, almost clinically, I concluded that if you ordered all the young men of a generation to climb Mount Everest, you would expect the climb to have a major significance in their lives. And while they were climbing the damned mountain they would bitch like hell and condemn the assignment, but years later, as they looked back, they’d see it as the supreme adventure it was and they’d want to read about it to reexperience it.
These thoughts led to a clear-cut conviction: Years from now the men who complain most loudly out here will want to explain to others what it was like. I’m sure of it, so I’m going to write down as simply and honestly as I can what it was really like. And then I reassured myself: No one knows the Pacific better than I do; no one can tell the story more accurately. This was not a boast; it was true and relevant to the task I planned to set myself.
Loving movies as I do, and never having come upon one that was so bad I walked out before I saw how it ended, I enjoyed going to see the show each night at seven, when we sat on coconut logs under the stars to see Betty Grable and Ann Sothern and Rita Hayworth and Dick Powell and John Payne go through their paces. I found entertaining even the dreadful Republic Pictures productions shot on a shoestring in the back lots.
But at nine-thirty each night I would repair to my darkened Quonset hut, light a smelly
lantern, which helped keep away the mosquitoes, and sit at my typewriter, pecking out with two fingers the stories I had accumulated as I traveled the Pacific. Sitting there in the darkness, illuminated only by the flickering lamplight—the electricity was cut off in the big sheds—I visualized the aviation scenes in which I had participated, the landing beaches I’d seen, the remote outposts, the exquisite islands with bending palms, and especially the valiant people I’d known: the French planters, the Australian coast watchers, the Navy nurses, the Tonkinese laborers, the ordinary sailors and soldiers who were doing the work, and the primitive natives to whose jungle fastnesses I had traveled.
Rigorously I adhered to my commitment: to report the South Pacific as it actually was. By nature I stayed away from heroics and I was certainly not addicted to bombast; I had seen warfare but I shied away from talking much about it, and I had none of the excessive romanticism that had colored the works of my predecessors in writing about the Pacific: Pierre Loti, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Norman Hall and especially the very popular Frederick O’Brien, author of White Shadows in the South Seas. In familiarity with the various islands I probably exceeded them all, but in narrative skill I was no doubt inferior.
What I did was what I would do in all my later books: create an ambience that would both entertain and instruct the reader, invent characters who were as real as I could make them, and give them only such heroics as I myself had experienced or found credible. I felt then, as I feel now, nearly half a century later, that if I could follow my plan I would fulfill my aim of refreshing the wartime memories of my colleagues in years ahead. For whom did I write as I sat night after night fighting the mosquitoes with those little bombs of insecticide the Navy gave us and pecking out my stories on the typewriter? Not the general public, whom I did not care to impress; not the custodians of literature, about whom I knew little; and certainly not posterity, a concept that simply never entered my mind. I wrote primarily for myself, to record the reality of World War II, and for the young men and women who had lived it.
I concluded after six or seven chapters that my work was achieving more or less what I desired, but I had no assurance that it was and certainly I never cried at the end of a long night—at three or four in the morning because I rewrote a great deal—‘Hey, this is pretty good!’ Since I was figuratively as well as actually working in the dark I decided to seek other opinions, but to whom could I turn?
In the huge building next to mine there was a young enlisted man with a sardonic nature, a fellow drafted into the Navy much against his will, who spent his time collecting cowries, those beautifully formed little shells of lovely colors. He stuffed them with a mixture of cotton and aviation glue and strung them together on strands of silver wire to make delicate necklaces, which other sailors bought for fifteen dollars a strand to send home to their wives and girlfriends. His name was Fred, and if he is still living I hope he will get in touch with me, for I owe him much and would like to repay the courtesy he extended to me.
I could see from watching the lines of sailors who came to his building next to mine that since he was raking in a fortune with his necklaces he must be a rather sharp item. I was about to approach him about reading one of my chapters when he surprised me by saying one morning as we opened our Quonsets: ‘Lieutenant Michener, when I’m working at night making my necklaces I see that you’re over there working at something. What’s your racket?’ and when I told him that I was trying to write an account of what war was like in the South Pacific he said: ‘I’d like to see how you find it.’ Within a minute I had handed him a chapter, then suffered agonies wondering if I had done the right thing.
The next morning he appeared in my building with the chapter: ‘This isn’t at all bad’ was all he said, and later as I fed him one chapter after another he repeated his comment: ‘Not bad, not bad at all.’ He never spoke about story line or character development or style or even the general coherence of the material, but morning after morning he told me: ‘Not bad,’ and once he said about a battle scene: ‘You know what you’re doing.’
His support was invaluable, for only he knew what I was trying to do there in the dark while he was making his necklaces. I never bought any and he never tried to sell me one, but had he ever asked I believe I would have inspected the necklace, admired it, and said as I handed it back: ‘Not bad, not bad at all.’
He never wrote to me after the book, which was called Tales of the South Pacific, was published. I’m sure he felt no need to, for when I needed his assistance most he had generously given it. I cannot express how much I valued his support, for writing in an empty shed darkened with mighty shadows and infested with mosquitoes is a task that cries out for moral support, and he provided it.
· · ·
Thus I started my writing career, and it is important to know certain aspects of my previous life to appreciate the rather unusual kind of writer I became. Three aspects of my upbringing shaped my writing: both as a boy and as a young man I read prodigiously; I had a very wide and vivid experience in dealing with the stark realities of American life; and I had served an intense apprenticeship as a New York editor in one of America’s then strongest publishing houses. The last experience more than any other formed my attitudes toward the profession of writer.
Because of my experiences at Macmillan I have never called myself an author; I am a writer, and I am proud that writing is one of the great occupations in any society. Authors seemed to me to be pompous poseurs who published with the London branch of our firm and who came across the Atlantic now and then to display their grandeur before the American peasants; writers were people like Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather who stayed home and wrote books. Authors were also men of the last century with three names, such as James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had long beards and who appeared in American classrooms as plaster busts; writers were unpleasant people like Melville, Whitman and Upton Sinclair. I was a writer.
Macmillan in those days had three employees who had an enormous effect on my attitudes toward publishing. Harold Latham, the senior editor, was an aloof scholar with a keen eye for the best-seller, who never married and who made Macmillan his bride and heir. He was formidable, not only for his gargantuan size. Although Macmillan published the book I was working on in the South Pacific, Latham never once spoke to me, for I was an editor who worked on textbooks while he shepherded real authors. He was invaluable to Macmillan, and I had great regard for him, because he was the editor who found Gone With the Wind and Forever Amber, two books on whose profits we lived while I worked for the company, and his other judgments were equally sound. He was a powerful man who made me allergic to editors in chief and trade publishers in general. I would never be really close to any editor or publisher: respect them I did; honor them I did for the good services they provided; but they were not my brothers, they were men destined to work with authors, not mere writers.
In those years Macmillan also had one of the most engaging editors I have ever known, a very tall fellow named Jim Putnam who dressed impeccably, spoke with an English accent and was the prototype of the New York editor. Serene, charismatic and never pompous, Jim Putnam charmed everyone he met, especially me, and I have only the warmest memories of him, not as an editor but as a gentleman. Of all the trade-book editors at Macmillan, he was the only one who ever condescended to speak to us textbook slaves on the second floor, even though it was we who earned the company most of its normal profits. I appreciated his courtesies and studied with care his modus operandi.
His principal assignment, so far as I could see, was to appear at work dressed in a fine English suit with homburg in position and to catch a taxi to one or another of the piers in midtown Manhattan where the great liners docked in the early morning after crossing the Atlantic. There he would board the vessel before disembarkation began, seek out the cabin of some author from the London branch of our firm, and escort him o
r her to the building on Fifth Avenue occupied by the New York Macmillan, a much grander place than what our English cousins occupied in London.
Jim would escort his author through the great main doors and up to the directors’ room on the second floor, and I would watch the procession pass my rather grubby office: Jim resplendent in the lead, the self-satisfied author in tow, and the three other trade editors who were to get a free meal that day bringing up the rear. In the boardroom would be waiting a handful of executives, and later there would be a literary luncheon with perhaps one or two New York critics in attendance.
Next day Jim would escort the visiting luminary to Grand Central Station, where he or she would board the Twentieth-Century Limited to Chicago, whence the author would branch out to a handful of American colleges and universities for literary visits. There the guest would pontificate on almost any subject then current, give interviews, and hasten back to London, where he would deliver a second series of lectures and interviews on the barbarity of life in America, the pitiful condition of our educational system, and the general boorishness of the population. It all seemed to me a very silly business.
Here I must digress to report on one of my own experiences on the publicity tour. After I had become moderately well known as a beginning writer of some promise, I was invited to lecture at the University of Cincinnati, now headed by my old Swarthmore dean, Raymond Walter. I was met at the train by two fine-looking men, the head of the English department and his assistant. They were so unbelievably kind to me at lunch, so attentive to every word I had to say that I thought: Maybe there’s something to this writing business after all, and I began to fancy myself as eligible for promotion to author. However, no sooner did the pair deliver me to the lecture hall than they disappeared.
I thought this so strange that when another pair of professors from the English department appeared at the close of my lecture to hurry me to the evening train that would speed me on my way to my next university assignment, I asked about it and the younger man explained: ‘President Walter gave us an order. Whatever department invites a speaker must provide two members to meet the train, take the speaker to lunch, and deliver him or her sober to the lecture platform.’ When I raised my eyebrows, the other man added: ‘We had a succession of four speakers arrive here dead drunk, and Dorothy Thompson was the worst of the lot. We’ll have no more of that. If they’re drunk when they get off the train, we sober them up. If they’re already sober, we keep them that way. But after we fellows on the second team put you on that train, you’re on your own. Now it becomes the problem of the chaps at the next stop.’
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 36
