While Tom knew that Logan had been probing Michener’s book, as he had Mister Roberts, for a dramatic line, he had no idea he was so far along with it, nor that he was to be firmly excluded. This was especially painful since he believed Logan’s interest in the Michener book owed much to Mister Roberts, that in Heggen’s Elysium Logan had first seen the dramatic possibilities within the Northerner’s dream of paradise.
Tom tortured himself rereading the article. Calta, the Times’ theater man, was equally surprised by the suddenness of Logan’s decision, for the director had only just confided he had no immediate plans. Tom wondered if the announcement could be a reproof and public humiliation for him.
So a bleak sky encroached on his day of triumph. With every critic in town pillaging the dictionary for superlatives to bestow on his play, Tom was indifferent to their praise. Worse, with his masochistic nerve laid bare, last night’s raves now seemed patronizing.
The reviewers seemed to agree that his own contribution was the lesser, a springboard for the Logan acrobatics. In the Times, Brooks Atkinson observed that the play had been cast with so much relish and directed so spontaneously that it gave the impression of not having been written at all, but improvised on the stage during rehearsals, ‘under Mr. Logan’s idiomatic direction.’
In the News, John Chapman wrote that since he [Logan] was one of the very best directors in the American theater and knew just what sort of material a director needed, every line of the dramatization bore the “signature of Mr. Logan.”
The Time magazine review was dominated by the photograph of a quizzical, wrinkle-browed Logan. It was framed by comment that as a story and a show, Mister Roberts was not much and was not meant to be, but as a human picture it was magnificent, due largely to coauthor Logan’s brilliantly telling direction.
Time summed up the collaboration: ‘Author Heggen brought his successful short novel to Logan last August after deciding he didn’t like his own stage version. For three months they hacked away at it together. Says Logan: “Nothing could stop it. It got up on its two feet and walked by itself.” More accurately, 6 ft.- 2 in., 200 pound Josh Logan got the play into shape.…’
Logan, wholly immersed now in South Pacific, tried to interest Tom in it, persuaded him to read the script and offer suggestions. When he returned it, Tom pointed out a line, ‘Hey, fellah,’ and said it struck him as a sentimental and unlikely way for one sailor to hail another, and that ended it. Tom was not a part of South Pacific and he wanted none of its scraps. He never went to a rehearsal and just being around the South Pacific people was torture to him. At times he thought he would choke on his jealousy.
He could not help feeling that South Pacific was the bastard child of Mister Roberts, that the Pacific was his ocean and they had snatched it away without so much as a thank you.
And then began the downward slide: after the divorce from Carol Lynn, casual affairs with a succession of women, a fugitive trip to France on a tramp steamer in an attempt to recapture the ecstasy he had once discovered on old ships—a photographer was sent along in hopes of a magazine story, but the surly crew would have none of that nonsense—and finally the collapse of everything and a tail-between-the-legs retreat back to America.
Now, stuck away in actor Alan Campbell’s apartment while the owner is in Hollywood, he gains release only in solitary drinking and rebuffs any friends who try to help. At the age of twenty-nine he finds himself completely alone, for he has suffered two ego-shattering blows from girlfriends, each of whom he vaguely wanted to marry. An American girl, finding it impossible to lure Tom into any kind of social life, goes alone to a literary cocktail party given by Jim Putnam of Macmillan in honor of Arthur Koestler just in from London, takes one look at the newcomer and waltzes off with him, abandoning Heggen forever. Even more shattering, Leueen MacGrath, the Irish actress he had courted, informs him over the phone that she is marrying the famous dramatist George Kaufman, author of innumerable hits, who is sixty years old.
Tom, at twenty-nine, finds himself completely isolated in the empty apartment, and there in shadows he stares into the future and cannot tolerate what he sees: his talent frozen, his mind a blank, his hopes destroyed, his friends alienated. Tom goes to the bathroom, arranges his pills so they will be handy, draws a hot bath, slips in and invites the soothing water to bring him peace. The coroner’s report was concise: ‘Submersion in fresh water in bathtub. Probable suicide, Contributory cause, overdose of barbiturates.…’
Almost immediately after the unprecedented success of South Pacific, with Logan garnering a Pulitzer Prize for his share in writing it, a short article appeared in one of the New York papers to the effect that Mr. Logan was now turning his attention to his next work, which could very well be a Broadway adaptation of Barnaby Conrad’s Matador. On reading this startling news I felt a spasm of great pain flash across my chest. South Pacific was the biggest thing on Broadway, the most monumental success in years, and how could one of its creators turn his back on it and go gallivanting after some chimera about a bullfighter in Spain? Logan had an obligation to South Pacific and, by extension, to me, and the thought that he was not only leaving it but the country was devastating. I could hardly credit this dismaying news, and without knowing it at the time my reactions were an exact duplicate of Tom Heggen’s when he learned that Logan was deserting him for me.
I spent several days in unhappy confusion—much shallower, of course, than the anguish that assailed Heggen, but as I wandered about the streets of New York after work or trailed aimlessly into the Y for volleyball, I was rescued by my old and trusted friend John Milton, whose final lines to his great poem Lycidas I recalled:
At last he rose, and twitch’d his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.
From my first reading I had made the last line one of the guiding points of my life: ‘Well, that’s over. Let’s get on with the job.’ It is, I think, one of the profoundest of guidelines, the one that keeps us from festering in our defeats or becoming hubristic in our victories. Neither Lockridge nor Heggen was able to slam his book shut and walk away from his tremendous success. In their inability to turn resolutely to fresh woods and pastures new they condemned themselves to tortures unimaginable to one who has never experienced them, and although most writers escape the full torment that these two brought upon themselves, even the finest have felt twinges of self-doubt: What if I can’t produce another good one?
As I traced the careers of Ross and Tom I became aware that in the first days of their success they were spending their royalties so wildly that soon they would be faced with the problem of what they had to do next to keep the money flowing. One successful book rarely ensures a life of ease; the customary requirement is a series of books, and even they provide only a reasonable degree of security. Nor can the young writer believe the speed with which he can dissipate that first flood of income. When he starts a new day he asks: ‘Now what?’ and at midnight the sweating begins, with the idea of suicide creeping in as a solution.
In striving to understand these lives, one must consider the two men’s experience with fame, which they were granted so abundantly and suddenly, and which Lockridge pursued so shamelessly. Neither handled it well, Lockridge becoming vainglorious, Heggen obstreperous. It turned out to be fleeting. The new Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, doesn’t even list Lockridge, who considered himself superior to Joyce. And of course, it doesn’t mention Heggen either.
Both Heggen and Lockridge were dead by the time the editors of Time-Life invited me to one of their glamorous lunches at which a dozen and a half senior editors sat about the table to get to know and interrogate some figure who had lately come into the public eye. Sitting rather stiffly, eating little, as was my custom at such affairs, and answering questions politely and briefly, I made a poor impression. One editor asked bluntly: ‘Mr. Michener, how do you think the great success of South Pacific will affect you personally?’ and I remember well my response, for
it would come back to me repeatedly in later years: ‘I hope not at all. I certainly do not want to become involved in the hysterical world of Josh Logan, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein and, especially, Leland Hayward, all of whom I admire and to whom I am deeply indebted. And I shall remain off to the side by myself because I believe that to do otherwise would destroy me.’
My little speech caused a couple of gasps, and before nightfall they had obviously been communicated to the men I had referred to, because in succeeding days each in his own way challenged me about it. I made my apologies and said that I hoped we would remain friends, which in fact we did. Logan would later prove himself a resolute friend in certain difficult litigations we were involved in as partners; Hammerstein was a neighbor and friend; Rodgers before his death wanted to start a new venture with me; and Leland Hayward once engaged me daily over a period of three weeks when he was in his seventies and agog with a wonderful concept for a new musical on which we could collaborate. But in the vital years of my writing career, the ones when survival itself was at stake, I consciously refrained from the errors that had destroyed Lockridge and Heggen.
I am sorry that John Leggett did not add a third portrait to his study of young writers, because I wish I knew more about the life and death of John Horne Burns, who was to play a major role in my life and still does. In the years that I prowled the literary-club circuit as a public speaker while striving to accumulate enough money to make a stab at being a full-time professional writer, I offered the committees that hired me a choice of three topics. The South Pacific was the most popular; Our Young American Writers was the one I enjoyed most; and neither the title nor the subject matter of the third can I remember.
In the lecture on the literary scene I reviewed the work of some half dozen writers but with special emphasis on two who had captured my imagination and for whom I had great hopes. I sold a lot of books for these two young men. The first had attended Princeton University and was either contemplating or beginning a career in the Presbyterian ministry in which he would later excel. Frederick Buechner had a style of great elegance, so highly polished that he reminded me of Wharton at her best. He liked long sentences dealing with, for example, the sensibilities of urbane parents who sent their sons to places like Princeton, and I used to read aloud with great effect several passages from his novel A Long Day’s Dying, in which single sentences ran on for half a page. At the end of each segment I would tell my audience: ‘I could not in a hundred years write like Mr. Buechner, nor would I want to, but I esteem him as one of the best young writers today and feel sure he will maintain that reputation in the decades ahead.’†
In order to provide contrast, I next read hilarious passages from Frederick Wakeman’s delightful Shore Leave, which told of rowdy Air Force pilots in the Pacific War, and The Hucksters, which lampooned the advertising business and was soon to be made into an extremely popular movie with a glittering all-star cast, headed by Clark Gable. This part of the lecture was quite popular, and as the tour progressed I started playing all the roles in Wakeman’s lively tales, using such dialects as I could muster.
But the highlight of my performance came when I spoke with serious affection of what I reported as the best novel to come out of the war so far. It was The Gallery, by John Horne Burns, and it told in unusually sophisticated style of American G.I.’s on duty in and near the famous domed shopping gallerias of Naples. Here people of great diversity meet, know one another casually, drift on, some to their homes, some to their encampments, some to their deaths. One of the most attractive features of the novel is the arbitrary insertion at the end of each chapter or isolated story of a section called ‘Promenade’, in which Burns keeps us moving through his galleria, seeing the sights, smelling the aromas, sensing the cross currents. In my talks whenever I read one or two of these remarkably poetic passages, the audience applauded with tremendous enthusiasm.
In the late fall of 1947, when I was giving my first series of lectures, the public was not yet prepared for someone like me, a stranger in the community, to discuss the undercurrent of homosexuality in Burns’s novel, so I avoided that aspect, feeling that it would probably alienate readers who would otherwise enjoy the book. Nor did I care to say that I liked the book because of its daring subject matter, finding it an American equivalent of E. M. Forster and André Gide. When I sat around at night with booklovers who knew the works of these two fine writers, I would often bring up Burns as an American writer who stood a chance, judging from his Gallery, of one day reaching their stature. ‘It’s about time,’ I would say.
Whenever during the tour someone asked me to predict who among my young lions might win the 1948 Pulitzer for literature I invariably responded: ‘John Horne Burns. He’s clearly the best of the lot,’ but I sometimes wondered if the judges would ignore the brilliance of his writing because of the delicacy of his theme.
During the period when I gave this lecture in all parts of the country I had not met Burns and knew nothing of his appearance or background, but I did come upon either a newspaper clipping or an ad for his book that showed a handsome, somewhat feisty-looking face some years younger than mine and with the half-sneer of the detached and amused observer. There was also a brief text saying that he had gained high marks in literature at Harvard and had taught for five years at Loomis Chafee. He had seen military service in Italy, but beyond that I knew nothing, nor would I ever know. However, my agent, Helen Strauss, forwarded a letter Burns had sent me, thanking me for the good things I had been saying about him. The letter came from New York.
I closed my lecture with an enthusiastic account of how young Gore Vidal had utilized his enforced service in the dismal Aleutians as a basis for his very good novel Williwaw, which demonstrated, I said rather sententiously, ‘how a man sentenced to a bleak, stormswept island in wartime can convert that experience into a strong creative statement.’ I hoped that the audience would make the connection to the case of a somewhat older man who had been sentenced to lonely islands in the South Pacific and had also used them to advantage.
When the time approached for announcing the 1948 Pulitzers, I must confess that I was not even aware that they were being awarded, but friends later told me that it was generally thought, especially by those who took literature seriously, that John Horne Burns was sure to win with his The Gallery. When the prize did not go to him, he was, I am told, almost savagely disappointed, and from the moment of the announcement he conceived a blazing hatred of me, feeling with justification that I had robbed him of a prize that was rightfully his, an opinion in which I have always concurred.
Shortly thereafter Life magazine conceived the idea of gathering together at one spot some twenty young writers who had done books about the war, and the editors asked me to write a longish essay about the group, making distinctions and allotting kudos. The project was under the editorial supervision of Josh Logan’s sister Mary Lee Weatherbee, a woman of shrewd judgment, and when I submitted my copy, prior to the photography session, she said: ‘You’ve left out the one we at Life considered the best prospect of the bunch, Saul Bellow and his Dangling Man.’ When I said: ‘I haven’t read it,’ she said: ‘You should.’
She also explained with some firmness that one paragraph would have to come out: ‘That one where you praise Pearl Buck, about her having won the Nobel Prize and being an object lesson to younger writers who want to write strong novels.’
‘But all I said was true. You can check it.’
‘True, but not advisable. Henry Luce has given us strict orders. We must never say anything favorable about Pearl Buck. Some fight his parents and hers had when they were missionaries in China.’ She dropped her voice: ‘He also thinks she’s a Communist.’
Under pressure from the Life people, who apologized for their employer’s monomania, I had to remove Miss Buck’s name from my essay, even though she and I were personal friends. I felt I should inform her of what I had been forced to do and she laughed: ‘Old enmities die hard. Mr.
Luce’s power to evict me from his empire satisfies some ancient missionary grudge,’ and she forgave me.
The twenty-odd writers were assembled one day in a New York armory and arranged on a platform with three levels so that everyone’s face could be seen, and some two dozen shots were taken with a big camera under half a dozen lights. Alas, my story never ran in Life, I received a small kill fee for my efforts, and the photograph was never printed. It must still be in the files at Life, or in some photographer’s attic, and if it could now be published as a ‘Where Are They Now?’ reminiscence, with text to indicate what each accomplished since the shot was taken, it would be a fine piece of Americana. My essay, which may or may not have been perceptive, is not recoverable, unless Life still has a copy forty years later.
The reason why I have spent so much time on the photograph is that when it was about to be taken Logan’s sister tried to introduce me to Burns, who refused to take my hand and stalked away, even though he had told me he was indebted to me for having spoken of him so widely and sold so many of his books; the corrosive sense of unfairness over the Pulitzer obscured that debt. And as Mary and I stood on the sidewalk waiting for a cab, she said by way of explanation for Burns’s rudeness: ‘He’s quite a faggot, you know,’ and when we turned he was standing less than a foot behind us, his face an ashen gray.
Less than a week later, Norman Cousins, editor of the prestigious Saturday Review, phoned with deep regrets: ‘Michener, we have bad news. We had plans to run your picture on the cover next week. But the review of your new book, The Fires of Spring, just came in, and frankly, it’s devastating. John Horne Burns wrote it, and there is no way we could soften it, because not a single paragraph is even slightly favorable. We’d look crazy with a glowing blurb on the cover and his review inside. So we have to knock you off. I’m sorry.’