Substitute mission completed, and with the sun high and a feeling of elation in our plane that I could detect on the intercom, we headed home, and now came one of the unequaled thrills of aviation. Our heavy plane, fairly but not perfectly responsive to the pilot’s wishes, comes out of the clouds at high altitude, sees the aircraft carrier below, which looks hellishly small, loses altitude, makes a beautiful, controlled 180-degree turn, and from an aft position moves toward the carrier as slowly as possible. In the last vital moments a man strapped into position at the rear of the carrier makes an informed guess: ‘Looks like he can make it!’ The great carrier steadies for just a moment, the plane adjusts to achieve a perfect heading, and forward motion is slowed to a minimum. ‘Good! We’re down!’ But at that moment the man at the rear of the carrier is totally in charge, and he sees something he doesn’t like, some error in either the approaching airplane or the position of the carrier that could prove fatal, and here comes the wave-off. Go round again, and when the power is poured on the plane rises rapidly to attempt another approach. This time ship and plane synchronize their movements, and the mighty plane dives at the moving deck, slows unbelievably and glides gently onto the landing area. A scream of brakes as the grabbing wire of the cable engages the landing hook dangling from the bottom of the plane, and a stoppage so swift and violent that if you are not strapped in you go headfirst right out of the plane. All that tremendous power that catapulted you into the air two hours ago is now exercised to strip the bomber of forward movement; it is a halt so total that it makes your teeth rattle.
In those days of research for Toko-Ri I would participate in catapult takeoffs and cable-grabbing landings many times. I never knew which was worse, the sudden leap forward to get us aloft or that instantaneous stop when we came back down, but I cherish those experiences as among the most exciting I’ve ever had. When the time came to write the novel, I knew what would be happening in the airplanes and how the pilots would be reacting. I strove to capture each violent action and its significance.
When The Bridges at Toko-Ri appeared complete in one issue of Life, a woman reviewer wrote: ‘Life magazine says it commissioned a major novel from Mr. Michener, first time this had happened. The question is: “Did they get one?” ’ Her opinion was that they did not, but the novel achieved a noble record and lasting approval from men who fly. A recent summary by an exceptional group of critics of all motion pictures ever made about the Navy—and there have been some stunners, including Mister Roberts and The Caine Mutiny—judged that Toko-Ri had probably been the most honest and the truest.
But the significance of Toko-Ri to me was not that a meaningful story had been brought to life but that I had tried to write with complete control a short novel that observed both the Aristotelian unities and the principles of the well-made English novel. It looked as if I might in time be able to master the intricacies of that demanding form. I thought that I might learn to produce one such acceptable novel every two or three years for the rest of my life, and in later decades I would often wonder if I might not have enjoyed more critical approval had I pursued that program.
But there was no chance I could work in that vein. The tight scope of Toko-Ri, which required close attention to the novel’s structure, gave me no satisfaction. I imagined an entirely different kind of book on which to focus, and when the time came to launch the prodigious research effort that would lead to the writing of Hawaii, I was emotionally prepared to attempt something almost epic in range.
At this crucial moment of my life—as I turned my back upon more established modes of writing to attempt books as massive as Hawaii and The Source—I awakened to a distressing fact: that I knew as much as one can of the publisher’s point of view, the editor’s and the reader’s, but I knew little about the intellectual problems that confronted the writer.
Fortunately, at this juncture, I stumbled upon three books that answered my need. The first was about the art of writing. By the greatest good luck I overheard a knowledgeable friend say: ‘If one has only Auerbach, one has all the instruction needed about the narrative form.’ Never having heard of this writer, I hurried to the library and learned that Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) was a German librarian who during World War II found himself marooned in Istanbul with nothing to do; relying only on his prodigious memory, he wrote an extensive treatise titled Mimesis, about the art of using words to imitate or indicate human character and behavior. More simply, mimesis meant storytelling. Starting with Homer and moving in an orderly way to Virginia Woolf, Auerbach selected some two dozen prime examples from the world’s best storytellers—Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Stendhal—and elucidated the devices they used to achieve their wonderful results. Since it was a summation and dissection of the art I proposed following, I devoured the book, and I have returned to it repeatedly.
The second book, called I Wanted to Write, was written by Kenneth Roberts (1895–1957), the sensationally popular historical novelist of the thirties, forties and fifties and a renowned conservative. In 451 ridiculous pages he lays bare his innermost thoughts about his experiences and beliefs. He explained how he progressed from being a writer of humor at Cornell University, a bits-and-pieces expert on a Boston newspaper and a struggling underpaid beginner, to becoming a virtual mainstay of The Saturday Evening Post and a frequent contributor to the book clubs and Hollywood. When he finally reaches stardom he begins vilifying some of his employers, ridiculing his colleagues, revealing his envy of others who enjoy greater popularity at the moment, and demonstrating in exquisite detail the ups and downs of the writing trade. A sample of his complaints: ‘Can’t find [my] Arundel on any list of bestsellers, but can find Zane Grey’s Fighting Caravans, an unspeakably terrible piece of tripe; while the non-fiction list is led (for the fortieth consecutive week) by Chic Sale’s The Specialist. Fearfully depressed that Arundel should sell only a few hundred, while the most ephemeral drivel is bought by the hundreds of thousands.…
‘Nowhere in [Thornton Wilder’s] The Bridge of San Luis Rey* have I ever been able to find anything remotely suggesting the wholesome atmosphere of American life, or of Peruvian either.’ In another passage he points out that in 1938 a poll of America’s most powerful critics predicted by an overwhelming plurality that his Northwest Passage would surely win that year’s Pulitzer Prize. Instead, John P. Marquand’s The Late George Apley took it.
One passage was both startling and personally reassuring. When I recently said that before I released a manuscript to the publisher I had read it word for word at least twenty-five times, this occasioned hoots of disbelief, but Roberts says: ‘I have no record of the number of times the book Arundel was read in longhand manuscript, revision, typescript revision, galley proof revision, page proof revision and then again for the revised edition. Certainly it was read more than ninety times.’ He is speaking, of course, of his own readings, and we can probably accept his report, because he kept meticulous records of everything, including a record to the odd dollar of the income from each of his books; in one amazing sequence of ten full pages he lists more than eight hundred letters he wrote in the year 1935 while engaged in twelve-hour days working on Northwest Passage. I commend I Wanted to Write, for I know of nothing that competes with it as a detailed portrait of a writer at work. If an aspirant hopes to produce books like the best of Roberts’s output, he must expect to match the kind of work Roberts did.
The third book, Writing—From Idea to Printed Page (1949), was compiled by faculty members of the University of Missouri’s well-regarded school of journalism in conjunction with the editors of The Saturday Evening Post. In a big format it reproduces photographically the actual typed pages of the author’s original notes and trial runs, the first typescript, the publisher’s editing and the many revisions.
The virtue of this book, which I recommend to the beginning writer, is that it demonstrates with inescapable clarity the amount of hard work, revising and honing required of any writer who aspires to be
a professional. Pristine pages fresh from the typewriter are hacked to bits by either the author or the editor, false starts are killed, descriptions are sharpened and story flow is improved.
Of course, the book is more or less a manual, light-years removed from Auerbach’s cerebral analyses, but it does have considerable practical value. Auerbach gave me dreams of grandeur; Roberts showed me that tough, ordinary men wrote books; and the Missouri essays dragged me back to the desk. I would have been an infinitely poorer writer had I missed any one of these remarkable books. My autobiography as a writer can end at this point, for the rest concerns my adaptation of these three lessons.
To illustrate the practical aspects of publishing one’s writing, I am inserting here facsimiles of four different versions of the opening page of one of my novels, accompanied by brief notes of explanation.
* * *
* It had just won the Pulitzer Prize for 1928. Roberts, frantically jealous, would never win one, despite his thunderous approval by the public. This oversight seems preposterous when one compares his work with some of the books that were honored.
EDITING A PAGE OF COPY
A. Carbon copy of page 1 of the novel Caribbean as it came from the typewriter. Typed with two fingers by me on an old-fashioned, elite Royal. This copy, made to protect against loss of the manuscript, is filed untouched and forgotten, but it does represent my original thinking as to what I sought to accomplish. Words underlined later indicate those that will survive until the final printed version. Note the incorrect plural Mayas and Yucatan with no accent.
B. This shows what I send to my secretary for word-processing, after three careful revisions of the original copy of page A. If you could see the paper on which this has been typed you would note that two different kinds have been used and pasted together, indicating where original copy was thrown away and new substituted. The amount of editing is standard for a third version, and I liked my new opening sentence, but alas, it would not survive.
C. This is what a first-rate professional editor in a major publishing house in New York does with a pristine page of copy, which the writer has already edited heavily. In this case it was Kate Medina, a senior editor at Random House. Apparently she is a tiger on word placement and the shortening of long sentences. However, the six additional emendations within circles are proposed improvements in her editing made by her editorial assistant. Of course, I have to approve each proposed change and most often do.
D. Final version as retyped by Bert Krantz, brilliant copy editor, who monitors style. She has worked with me for decades, saving me from horrendous gaffes. After the manuscript went to the printer I underlined here and on page A all words that survived from the original version into the final. How limited in number they were!
When I was able to complete Hawaii pretty much as planned, the book was well received by readers and I had made a cautious start on producing a series of rather long books that attracted many who were interested in exploring various parts of the world. As each book in succession found a niche that it could occupy with dignity, I gained additional courage to attack the next major assignment to which history, not my own imagination, dictated that I pay attention. The Holy Land, South Africa, Poland and the exploration of the moon! Had any writer ever faced more glorious and challenging subject matter on which to test his abilities?
Those three decades from Hawaii in 1959 through Caribbean in 1989 were a thrilling time for me because not only was I constantly learning about the peoples of the world but I also had the privilege of communicating to a large number of intelligent readers my interpretation of the past and present of those peoples’ lives. My attitude was invariable: I believed in the brotherhood of man, the merit of an honest life, the right of everyone to a job and a decent standard of living, and the virtue of striving to keep society peaceful and stable. My books would promote those values, and with each successive novel I would affirm them more vigorously. When I started writing, I would have been arrogant to assume that I would be able to write even one book with the breadth of The Source or Centennial; to have been allowed to write a dozen such books seems miraculous.
There has always been considerable interest in how, having just finished a book, I select the subject matter for the next. I have in this respect what seems to me an ordinary approach; numerous writers of all types face and solve this problem pretty much as I do, so there is a certain universality to my method.
My mind is unbelievably prolific in generating ideas for stories and books; wherever I go I see possibilities for a dramatic development or a situation that could be explored. I am sure many other writers have the same experience. Where do these ideas originate? From the workings of a fertile brain, from listening to the conversation of interesting human beings, and from speculating on the state of society. And some are of such force that they seem to insist on being put to use in the writer’s work.
Do I ever, at the end of a big demanding task, decide to stop writing for a while and lie fallow? Never. I am exactly like Anthony Trollope, who said that if he finished writing a novel in the morning, he started the next that afternoon. The need to write is so pressing for me and the act itself so delectable an experience that with little pause I move eagerly to the next assignment; the ideas are impatient to leap from the prison of my mind. But writing a long book will require at least three years’ work, so I must be careful to choose a subject that will sustain my enthusiasm over an extended period. Flashy ideas need not apply.
Do I ever start a project and find myself forced to abandon it? Yes. This has happened at least twice: I planned for a major novel on the siege of Leningrad, on which I did a great deal of work but had to halt because of poor health, and what seemed at first a viable idea for a little novel about a professor turned out to be too precious to retain my interest. Fortunately, at the time of terminating each of these projects I had just enough income, from South Pacific to enable me to jettison the effort, even though I had invested much time and money on it, and never did I regret the decision.
At what point in the writing of a novel is it safe to start thinking about the next? At no point. It is perilous to think about anything of moment while still engaged in the creation of a given work, and I have rigorously tried to avoid this pitfall. Of course, when the first task is essentially completed or nearly so, it is to be expected that one’s mind will begin to speculate on what might come next, especially if, as in my case, this will necessitate a physical move to a new site. However, when I submit a finished manuscript, as good in content, organization and style as I can make it, my New York publisher will still require about fourteen months of hard work before the finished book appears. One does not waste such a span of time, so there is a gradual phasing out of the old project while the next is slowly introduced, and not infrequently I have been well into the new before the old appears as a published book.
Except for a few full-length books written rather speedily on some major events, such as the Hungarian revolution or the bloody tragedy at Kent State, I have almost never dealt with a subject that I had not been brooding about for years or even decades, so that I usually start my work from a fairly high and solid plateau of knowledge. My notebooks show that I have not infrequently contemplated a subject in one decade before coming to grips with it in another, and the time has not been wasted because my understanding has had the chance to mature and the subject has been illuminated in ways not previously apparent.
But one day, at the conclusion of such introspection and evaluation, I decide that of three or four potential subjects I will focus my attention on the one that seems most viable at that time. I roll a sheet of paper into my machine, and below the date I type a brief statement of what my thinking was in selecting that subject, and I outline in chapter headings the entire book as I perceive it at that moment. Never do I get all the subheads right; never do I get more than one wrong. This then becomes my guide for the next three years, and with surprising accuracy I foresee at the time of mak
ing the decision the whole grand design and the interrelationship of the parts.
Having made the big decision, I never look back or spend time regretting that I didn’t choose one of the other alternative subjects, but obviously I keep the rejected ones in my mental file against the possibility of returning to them later. My immediate task is to make myself as competent as possible within the broad field I have selected, and about which I have been fairly well informed for some years. While I am still trying to decide which subject to choose, my reading in all the competing fields is quite extensive, but I do not take notes or try to remember specifics. Later, when I am hard at work on my chosen subject, I will experience considerable irritation: ‘I remember reading that, but in what book? What did it actually say?’ I cannot remember and am powerless to recall which specific book had the data I seek. The second type of reading comes after I have decided firmly upon the subject, and now it becomes so fiercely pinpointed that I will remember with clarity almost everything I read, in which book an important idea occurs, about where in the book, and whether it is on a verso or a recto page—this last is helpful because I can quickly scan the book looking at only half the pages to find the sought-for entry.