I am aware that most publishers could not afford to spend the time on each manuscript that Random does on mine, and that most writers would not want them to, but when one looks at the results of this hard work in my case, it seems the effort was worthwhile. If my books have received wide acceptance and a certain longevity, it is due in part to the care with which they have been written and published, and half the credit goes to the publisher. I did bristle, however, when a sharp woman writer from The New York Times asked me: ‘Is it true, what I’ve heard, that when you turn in a manuscript to Random, they hand it over to a roomful of their experts who rewrite it and make it publishable?’ Whoever told her that had confused traditional editorial care with company-sponsored ghostwriting. I write every word of my books and sometimes they’re the wrong words; it’s the editors’ job to point that out.
When the book finally appears, almost without exception on the first day I look at it, I find two misspelled words. So much for infinite attention paid by infinitely careful editors. Worse are the one or two errors of fact that seem to be inescapable. In Centennial five readers who know English history well did not catch me having Winston Churchill’s father, Randolph, wooing an American heiress long after he had married her, and in the late pages of the book I called my Mexican hero Triunfador Marquez when it had been well established earlier that he was Tranquilino Marquez. Such errors are mine. They have been at a minimum, I am glad to say, but each is woefully embarrassing.
After years of diligent apprenticeship and assistance from a strong publisher, my books reached that enviable status which almost guaranteed they would leap onto the best-seller lists on publishing day, and sometimes well before, remaining there a gratifyingly long time. As mentioned before, I have never spoken of myself as a ‘best-selling author’ and am amused when others refer to me as a ‘commercial writer.’ My books have certainly been commercial, despite what my first agent predicted, but not because that was my aim. I have written difficult books on difficult subjects, and the reader has to have a certain degree of willpower to get through to the final pages; the commercial success has been a fortunate accident, and I believe that a writer is better off with some success than without it.
I have affection for a different phrase and am always pleased when it is used in relation to one of my books: ‘a minor classic.’ This is a book of limited sale that is promoted quietly by word of mouth.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by the German mystic Robert M. Pirsig, is such a book. Upon publication it achieved little notice, but so many devotees cherished its pertinence to their emotional problems that they formed a subterranean cult which forced the book upon the attention of others. Oliver Statler’s Japanese Inn was a similar case, an essay so charmingly presented that if anyone took the trouble to look into it, he or she was captivated and told others about it. A small nothing of a book, Wings at My Window, by Ada Clapham Govan, an amateur ornithologist, enjoyed enormous popularity among bird-watchers, and even professional scientists have admitted that they acquired their first interest in ornithology from reading this cheerful, informal book. Some years ago another curious but lovable book was promoted by its devotees to the rank of minor classic: 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff, acquired such a cult following that it was later presented as a poetic motion picture, which gained a whole new group of supporters.
I have written three books that could possibly be considered for this honor because they conform to the definition of having been read not by the general public but by ‘everyone who ought to have read them.’ The first is The Floating World, my loving account of how Japanese prints were made and introduced to the Western world. I am amazed that I had the brashness to attempt such a book when I knew no Japanese nor any of the great traditions of the art. Today I would not have that courage, but I’m glad I did when I was younger.
My book on athletics, Sports in America, received little notice and few sales, but it became a source of great interest among university sports directors, coaches, newspaper sports writers and those civilians concerned about the destiny of sport in a society that seems not to know how to handle it and its manifold problems, some of them extremely ugly. I spent a long time on that essay with little expectation of success and am increasingly glad I did, because to find even one class in a university’s athletic department using it as a provocative text is ample reward.
But a book of mine that best fits the definition of minor classic is Caravans, which again created little stir when published, but which fell into the hands of almost everyone who had an interest in obscure Afghanistan and the curious things that happen there. Wherever I go in the world I meet people who tell me that they would never have gone to Afghanistan had they not stumbled upon my book, or that when they were there, someone had a dog-eared copy that was passed from hand to hand because, better than anything else available, it introduced them to Afghan mysteries. It is a book of which I am quite proud, even though its sales would excite little envy.
A fourth book in no way qualifies for consideration as a minor classic. The Bridge at Andau, depicting the Hungarian revolution of 1956, recounts my adventures, often behind Russian lines, in rescuing Hungarian refugees from Communist terror. With the help of a wonderful Catholic priest, I became a specialist in getting Jewish rabbis to change their identity: to shave off their beards, learn how to answer a few questions and pass themselves off as devout Catholics, a deception made necessary by the fact that the United States accepted so few Jews while admitting a large number of Catholics. Since the Catholics were clearly not going to fill their quota, the priest and I made temporary conversions on the spot. I was also the principal expert in teaching Jews how to become Presbyterians, for their quota also had vacancies. Today, wherever I go to whatever corner of the world, someone comes knocking on my hotel door to remind me how I had helped him or his mother or his sister cross that rickety bridge at Andau and to find later refuge in America or Venezuela or Australia.
The most memorable plan for a rescue we effected that cold winter was made right in the heart of Vienna in the hotel Bristol, which was the base for Russian spies, Polish émigrés, American Red Cross workers, future senator Claiborne Pell and American journalists. I had organized a supersecret courier service that operated not at the big crossing from Hungary to Austria at Nickelsdorf or the little one at Andau, but at the way station near Sopron. There, for a hefty number of dollars that others like me collected and doled out, heroic Hungarian refugees would undertake to filter back into Budapest and rescue some family member left behind when others had fled to safety in Austria. It was risky business and costly, but it saved enough lives to warrant keeping it going.
One afternoon a remarkable man from Hollywood flew in from Amsterdam: Tors Istvan—known in America as Ivan Tors—the ingenious fellow who had pioneered underwater photography and produced a sensationally popular television show, Flipper, about dolphins. Tors demanded to see me and wanted to know about the rescue chain we had established. The fee was to be five hundred dollars, and the object was to bring Tors’s mother the long distance to Sopron and out to safety in Vienna and then to America. Being both a Hungarian and a Hollywood producer, he questioned the reliability of everyone, including me, and at the end of his interrogations he was not satisfied. Grabbing the phone, he told the Austrian operator: ‘Get me Budapest,’ and I gasped because Russian tanks were parading that city even as he spoke. In a surprisingly few minutes he got Budapest and shouted into the phone in Hungarian, which he later translated for me: ‘Momma! This is Istvan. Yes, things are pretty good in Hollywood. I’m in Vienna. Momma, I’m sending a young man in with five hundred dollars to bring you out to safety. I’ve told him to meet you at …’—he gave a full address—‘and you come along with him. He’s an honest man, I think, and I’ll wait here for you.’ He gave us the money for the courier, I drove down to Sopron and saw the young fellow disappear over the border toward Budapest. Because I was then diverted to a more serious problem,
I never learned the outcome of this brazen strategy of calling directly to the capital of an occupied nation and arranging over an open phone for a criminally illegal act.
My attention had been diverted to a wretched situation. My colleague on my sorties behind Russian lines was a fabulously daring American photographer, Dickie Chapelle, whose willingness to test the Russian occupation forces made me look like a milquetoast. About thirty-five and the veteran of many escapades, she had come to Vienna as a stringer for Time-Life, but when they saw the crazy adventures into which she was throwing herself they more or less cut her loose, and when I allowed her to hitchhike a ride with me during the long trip to the Hungarian border I was able to bring her daring excesses down to a manageable level.
We would have an early evening meal in Vienna, leave the city about nine-thirty and reach Andau well before midnight. There we would scout the bridge to see how many Russian guards were on duty, then slip over the border and try to make contact with the incoming refugees from Budapest, ninety-odd miles to the east. I have since suspected that the Russians were not unhappy to see these dissidents leaving the country, for they certainly could have stopped them had they wished, but, timing our work carefully, Dickie and I could collect the refugees—parents, children and a few hangers-on—and wait till the Russians were occupied elsewhere, and then run them swiftly to safety. At about four in the morning, when the stream of Hungarians slowed, we would drive back to Vienna, where my wife would be waiting with hot chocolate and cold beer.
It was an arduous regimen, and Dickie and I rescued hundreds, but she became so daring, so contemptuous of the Russians that she terrified me, and I begged her to be cautious. When I learned that she insisted on going behind Russian lines without me I warned: ‘Dickie, you know you’re not immortal. You go banging around deep into Hungary on your own, and carrying all that photo equipment, they’re bound to grab you and charge you with espionage.’
Dickie was the bravest person I would ever know, man or woman. She had served in battle with the Marines, had parachuted with invasion forces, had tramped Cuba’s revolutionary fronts, and had sought danger wherever it might be found. One colleague in Vienna, watching her operate when I wasn’t with her, said: ‘She’s a one-woman attempt to prove she’s as good as a man.’ I think that was the secret: Dickie Chapelle was a dedicated feminist far ahead of her time, and one of the finest.
Busy with my heavy workload of rescuing people at night and teaching them to be Catholics and Presbyterians through the day, I am ashamed to say that I forgot her, but my wife, fortunately, did not, and when two days passed without anyone’s hearing from her, Mari grew nervous and started making inquiries. Yes, Dickie was gone. Two newsmen had seen her heading into Russian territory but had not seen her return, and with that ominous news my wife swung into action.
It is painful to report that none of all our friends and agencies in Vienna but only Mari bird-dogged this thorny situation. Time-Life authorities pointed out, quite accurately, ‘Chapelle wasn’t actually an employee, you know,’ and washed their hands of her. Officers from the embassy said that ‘everyone knew she was hotheaded and would sooner or later get into trouble.’ But Mari struggled on, fighting red tape all the way and finally receiving word, from what quarter I never knew, that Dickie had been captured by Russian troops far behind the front and was now in solitary confinement in a Budapest jail, where she would remain for a very long time.
Again most people in Vienna dismissed the case, but Mari did not, and as I watched her tireless efforts, badgering this official and that, I thought: ‘If I ever disappear I want her on my case.’ Because of her insistence, and undoubtedly with pressure from others more highly placed, the Russians belatedly allowed Dickie to regain her freedom. Feeling responsible for her, Mari and I invited her to recuperate at our home in Bucks County, and there I loaned her my office and typewriter so that she could write her story and sell it to the Reader’s Digest.
That started her on the upward swing of her career: more work with the Marines, more battlefronts in Africa and elsewhere, more parachute drops, and finally, as we had all anticipated, a backward step into a Communist land mine in Vietnam and instant death.
It is from such tangled incidents and experiences that writers accumulate material they use in their books, and the searching, the listening, the comforting are incessant.
I have been speaking only of my small books, those that were never important except to readers who took special interest in the particular subjects I was dealing with. I now come to what probably seems the more important period of my writing life. As mentioned before, the advent of television convinced me that readers would be hungry for longer books of substance, and with this conclusion firmly in mind I launched a number of big novels that would lift me from the ranks of proficient but struggling writers to the level enjoyed by a relative few who are able to earn a comfortable living from their writing. It is always sobering to reflect on the plight of many fine writers who have not been able to support themselves by writing alone but have had to rely on other sources for their major income: Herman Melville was a minor clerk in the New York Customs House, Thornton Wilder a schoolteacher, Robert Penn Warren a college professor; and any number of excellent poets held jobs that were irrelevant and draining. To think of them is to remind oneself of how capriciously and unfairly the rewards from writing are distributed.
In selecting themes for my big books, I have had but one goal: to write a book that I myself would like to read, and to do it on a topic that will have more than passing interest. I have tended toward heavy, comprehensive subjects because I want the reader to spend time on ideas and concepts that matter, and I have been willing to fill my pages with a wealth of data in order to give the reader the pleasure of becoming more knowledgeable.
Having these somewhat lofty aims, I have been able to ignore the lurid themes that are popularly supposed to guarantee best-sellerdom. I have refused to deal in extreme violence, exhibitionistic sex, pornography, kinky psychological aberrations used only for shock effect, or sadism. I felt that such writing was beneath my dignity and not necessary to attract the readers I sought. I was convinced they would be interested in the aspirations and defeats of ordinary people, in the exploration of ideas, in the depiction of far regions, and in the time-honored themes of good storytelling: the maturation of a human mind, the challenges of young adulthood, the struggle for existence, the accumulation of years with dignity or despair, and the mystery of death. I would seek to deal with all human passions: my characters would fall in love, have babies, engage in adultery, experience betrayal by others and face grave moral choices. They would know warfare and economic depression and great victories, all the emotional traps that engulf real people; only a rare few would be heroes or heroines and none would be faultless.
I have endeavored to center my writing upon ordinary but memorable characters whose lives shed a kind of radiance, whose behavior, good or bad, illuminated what I was striving to impart, and whose noble, craven, godlike or hellish deportment stood surrogate for the behavior of human beings the reader has known. I have tried every device I know to breathe life into my characters, for there is little in fiction more rewarding than to see real people interact on a page. How the writer achieves such a result remains a mystery, but sometimes it happens, and when it does, it is a wonderful thing.
A writer who has become relatively well known is asked to participate in many ventures, none stranger than one that overtook me during the famous bullfights in Pamplona. One evening while many of us lounged at Bar Choko three bright young women from Australia came to my table: ‘Mr. Michener, we hear that after this you’re heading for Tangiers. There’s an English girl there who’s near death from drugs and abuse. Would you look her up and try to get her back to her parents in England?’
When I reached Tangiers she was already dead, and I helped ship her corpse back to England, after which I plunged into the heavy drug scene in Marrakech. The resulting book, T
he Drifters, irritated many of my readers, who felt it too sharp a deviation from my usual work, and infuriated others who objected to any adverse comment on drugs, but in the years that followed, no matter where I appeared in public, at the end of my talk I would be approached by anguished parents—judges and their wives, college professors, lawyers, clergymen, ordinary housewives—who would take me aside and ask what they should do about a lost son or daughter. Invariably I said: ‘From my experience, eighty-five per cent of these young people will come back into orbit, and maybe as much stronger persons than when they left.’
‘The other fifteen percent?’
‘They’re dead ducks.’ I used that ugly, ungracious phrase time and again, hoping to shock these good people into the realization that their children might truly be lost, either to death or to permanent disorientation. But always I ended with: ‘Eighty-five safe, fifteen lost, those are not bad odds. They justify hope.’
I had hit upon a subject of tremendous meaning to thousands of parents, and the book had a more significant reception in countries like Germany, Sweden and Holland than in the United States, for the phenomenon of wandering youth was more prevalent in those countries. It was, I judge in retrospect, one of the most valuable books I would write, for it provided illumination and hope to many.