In the letter I said: ‘Years ago somewhere in the New Testament I came upon the phrase “the Brook of Kerith” and obviously it stuck in my mind, for I went back to it when I needed a resonant name for my character. So your daughter is named after a beautiful flowing brook in the Holy Land.’
But my memory was poor and each word of my explanation was wrong. Nowhere in the Bible does the phrase ‘the Brook Kerith’ appear. However, the phrase ‘the Brook Cherith’ does appear twice in I Kings 17, verses 3 and 5, but obviously it is in the Old Testament, not the New; it was where the Prophet Elijah was fed by ravens during a time of drought, and it could hardly have been what I described as ‘a beautiful flowing brook,’ because the Bible says specifically: ‘And it came to pass after a while that the brook dried up, because there had been no rain in the land.’
Embarrassed that I had misled my correspondents, I began to cast about as to how I had come upon that phrase I cherished, but to no avail. Finally, however, someone to whom I told the story informed me that the highly regarded Irish novelist George Moore, whose novel Esther Waters I had read with relish, had written a later novel, The Brook Kerith, dealing with the times of Jesus. I had looked into it after having liked Esther Waters so much; Kerith did not hold me, so I did not finish it. I then learned that Moore had stumbled upon the passage in Kings about the Brook Cherith, had liked the sound of the words and changed the ch to k, and so mysterious is the power of words that I have often wondered: would either Moore or I have lingered over this dried-up little rivulet had it been called Cherith Brook or even Cherith Stream? I doubt it. Half the charm of the name comes from the inversion of words and the other half from the unusual spelling; obviously Moore did not like Cherith, but spelled with a K it had caught both his imagination and mine.
I trust that any of the Keriths frolicking about as a result of my novel will paste this correction to the erroneous letters I sent to their mothers and fathers.*
When I recovered from the heart attack, I recovered completely, and with Iberia safely behind me as proof that I could work again, I launched into a concentrated regimen of travel, research and writing that resulted in many books. In my later years, because of accidents in the publishing business over which I had no control, my books sometimes appeared rather rapidly, but they were not written in haste.
A series of bucolic experiences formed my attitude toward what was prolific and what was not. In 1976, when I moved to the Chesapeake Bay area to attempt a major writing effort about that splendid body of water and its surrounding villages, I had the good luck to rent a waterfront cottage. I remember it with special affection because our backyard contained a semistagnant pond occupied by two huge herons, Victor and Victoria, whom we tamed as they prowled our waters seeking fish. They were awkward but noble birds and we grew to love them as congenial neighbors.
The front of the cottage was patrolled by the landlady’s Irish hunting dog, a rowdy beast named Brandy, who learned early on that at dusk I could be counted on for a long walk through the woods. An amber-colored beauty, she galloped at breakneck speed two hundred yards ahead, then doubled back even faster to check up on my progress, then would be off again. I used to become more tired from watching her than from my own exertions.
During our walks I came upon an abandoned farm, which had behind its crumbling fence a very old apple tree that reminded me of the one that had been so important to me when I was a lad. I would consider the large amount of work I was doing as an elderly man and contemplate the charge of being overly prolific that was sometimes thrown at me. But then the tiny library in which I was writing my novel about the Chesapeake provided a definition of what that word really meant. The room I was in was lined with bookcases whose shelves were filled with complete sets of works by the great nineteenth-century novelists: Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley and, most formidably, Sir Walter Scott. Leaning back from my typewriter and contemplating the massive array of volumes made me cry: ‘Get back to work, Buster. By those standards up there you’re positively delinquent.’
Anyone who cares about books and who strives to assess modern trends ought to spend a morning in that little library. He or she will not only experience a claustrophobic shock from being hemmed in by so much literature but will also receive a refreshing reminder that the great writers of the past were preeminently writers; they wrote books, enormous quantities of them, and their tireless efforts have enriched us.
But it was a small book on the shelves by a writer of no consequence that provided the most help in defining ‘prolific,’ for it contained in the rear pages an advertisement from the solid old London house of A. & C. Black, proud holders of copyright on the still-popular novels of Sir Walter Scott. Black boasted they could supply readers with six different sets of the complete Scott novels at 1915 prices, when the shilling was worth twenty-five American cents:
New Popular Edition 25 Vols. 6d [sixpence] each
The Portrait Edition 25 Vols. 1/- [one shilling] each
The Victoria Edition 25 Vols. 1/6d each
Two Shilling Edition 25 Vols. 2/- each
The Standard Edition 25 Vols. 2/6d each
The Dryburgh Edition 25 Vols. 3/6d each
That’s a hundred and fifty different very long volumes kept in print† at prices that were substantial in those days, and there appears to have been a good sale for all of them. They must have made a brave display on a bookseller’s shelves, and that’s my definition of ‘prolific.’
What makes my own output during these years of intense effort noteworthy was the fact that the books were produced while I suffered from an incessant, crippling pain. My left hip, probably as a result of my long hikes when I was young or my tennis on cement courts at an older age, had deteriorated so badly that the ball at the top of my thighbone and the eroded socket in my torso ground against each other without any protective lubrication. This grating of bone on bone produced not only an awkward stiffness when I walked but also an almost unbearable pain whenever I had to stand still. After as little as two minutes’ standing erect, I simply had to move about, or preferably, find some place to sit. Miraculously, even two minutes off my feet alleviated the pain, but as soon as I stood again, it returned in redoubled intensity. Life with such constant pain was not pleasant, and trying to write under such circumstances required willpower. But I take the writing of books with deadly seriousness. It is a noble profession that seeks to both enlighten and entertain.
Now comes the part not easy to explain. When I started asking others about my defective hip, I rather quickly learned about the historic experiments of a Lord Charnley of London, who had cut into the hip of his first patients willing to act as guinea pigs, sawn off the top of the femur, replaced the ball with a steel one whose shaft was rammed down the center of the big leg bone. The deteriorated socket was also reamed out and replaced by a metal cup into which the new ball would snugly fit. Voilà! The patient had a new hip, which not only functioned perfectly but, what was equally important, without pain. It was a miracle operation and it performed miracle cures.
Why, if I was in such debilitating pain, did I not hasten to Lord Charnley and get myself a new hip? The answer is complex, and casts a considerable light on how I visualize the role and responsibilities of a writer.
I first heard of the Charnley operation when I was doing research in southern Spain on bullfighting and the production of sherry. Near Puerto de Santa María a congenial Englishman named John Culverwell had a rancho, on which he produced a fine brand of honey that he sold under the lovely trade name of Oropéndola (Golden Oriole). His petite English wife, Cecilia, had long suffered from the kind of worn-out hip that afflicted me and had been one of the first of Lord Charnley’s patients. The operation had been a great success, but, as so often happens, the patient did not recover well. When I saw her she could not manipulate her new hip and the pain had simply shifted to new locations.
In my interrogations about this phenomen I conducted interviews with twelve friends who
’d had the operation, and eight gave enthusiastic reports: ‘The operation was a great success,’ but there were another four like Cecilia Culverwell, who had dismal negative reports: ‘It has never really worked.’
The chances, apparently, were two-thirds successful, one-third not, and since I had always been ready to accept such odds in whatever I did, why did I not go ahead with the operation? Well, among the eight friends whose operations had been a technical success were four who had suffered the most grievous kinds of unexpected side effects. One developed a horrendous thrombosis in the affected leg and nearly died. Another suffered a pitiful mental derangement. Another underwent a lingering attack of phlebitis, which incapacitated him. And the fourth simply deteriorated.
This meant that of my dozen friends four had failed to get relief in their hips, four had lost the capacity to work at a productive level, and four had had a total success. For a person like me who required maximum control over his mental processes, the odds seemed to be two-thirds negative, one-third positive, and those were odds I did not care to risk.
My thinking was clearly stated: ‘I have a lot of books I still want to write, and I must not take unjustified risks that might render me unable to write them. I’m not required to say whether I’m a good writer or not. What I’ve proved I can do is an immense amount of demanding research and then whip it into such compelling shape that readers in many countries want to share my thoughts with me. I’m not willing to sacrifice that skill before I’m finished, and certainly not merely because it would relieve me of a little pain. Right now the odds against me are too great. Maybe later we’ll do it, when the doctors have worked out procedures that produce better odds.’
On those firm principles, never diluted, I rejected the hip operation and proceeded to the task of writing the series of novels that would be accepted in many countries. But as a prudent man I consulted year after year with the best orthopedic surgeons in the world who always x-rayed my hip and kept me informed on the degree of its deterioration. They were a wonderful group of men, studious, informed and helpful. They all said the same thing: ‘If I were you I’d have the operation right now. But if you can stand the pain you can afford to wait, because this operation works very well with people in their seventies and eighties.’ None pressed me to have the operation and all said: ‘Some morning you’ll try to get out of bed, and your wife will call me and say: “Jim thinks you’d better do it now.” ’ One doctor said after looking at the x-rays: ‘Good God! Are you walking around with that? I’d have had that fixed years ago.’ But while I delayed, brilliant experimenters were coming forward with new improved techniques that necessitated less cutting and with extraordinary new metals for the replacement devices and new plastics with which to hold them in place. The odds I would face when I did have the operation had moved strongly in my favor, not the original two to one against, but something like ninety-eight to two in favor.
Because of this planned postponement, I wrote my major books while attacked by constant pain. On rising in the morning it would nag at me. Whenever I moved about the house pain would accompany me, and if I went out at night there it would be waiting in the street or in the assembly hall. Although it did not increase noticeably week to week, it never diminished. The problem became acute at dusk, when I took my walks, for I was never willing to surrender them; I needed the exercise and the spiritual replenishment that came with a romp with the dogs and the changing views of nature.
Sometimes when I left the house with my cane I would think during the first minutes: I can’t go on with this. It’s just too damned painful. But as I swung into the rhythm of the walk through the woods around the Chesapeake, or the roadways of Cape Canaveral when working on the space age, or the ranches of Texas or the mountain-rimmed streets of Sitka, Alaska, the grating bones would temporarily adjust to one another and I would return home actually delighted with how relatively painless the last portion of the hour-long walk had been. But an hour later the pain would recur.
I have been told that I have an unusually high tolerance for pain, meaning that it has to be fairly strong before I start to complain, and from a variety of experiences I judge this to be the case. Whatever the facts, I continued to work under the conditions I have described, and I would do so again rather than run the risk of a phlebotomy or a diminution of my intellectual capacities.
In 1985 I was confronted with a much more serious problem. Because the fine treatment that had more or less cured me after my heart attack had run its course, I found myself in an ambulance headed for a hospital in Austin, Texas, where a cursory examination showed that I had a dangerous blockage in five of the major coronary vessels that help the heart to function. At a bedside conference at five in the afternoon, I asked some questions.
‘Is there any known fact in my case that might make a coronary bypass unusually dangerous?’ There was none.
‘How many of these operations have you men done before?’ The team of four had considerable experience.
‘How many bypasses do you estimate will be necessary?’ They thought three.
‘Is that standard?’ Yes.
‘Then let’s go for it.’ They did. They made not three but five eliminations of clogged veins, substituting fresh veins from my left leg, the one with the bad hip, and everything worked perfectly.
On the third day after the quintuple bypass I proved to be so unexpectedly healthy at age seventy-eight that I was encouraged to take a few steps in the hall, accompanied by a nurse, and as I did so I found myself facing a black man in his late thirties. With a big smile he asked me how I was doing and I was rather pleased with myself to be able to say: ‘Just fine.’ When the nurse and I returned to my room she asked: ‘Didn’t you recognize who he was?’ and when I said no, she explained: ‘That’s the fellow who had the complete heart transplant. First time ever in this hospital. Twelve hours on the table and he’s almost as good as ever.’
The black man and I became fast friends, working out together on the clever machines in rehabilitation, and he became the principal reason why I was never allowed to feel sorry for myself with my trivial little quintuple.
· · ·
From the day I finished my first book, Tales of the South Pacific, I had always aspired to write a strong novel about Alaska. This stemmed from hearing my Macmillan senior editor, Philip Knowlton, recount his experiences in Alaska in the rough old days. Often in those and subsequent years I toyed with the idea of heading for the far north to tackle Alaska, but always refrained because I felt that at forty I was much too old to brave the horrendous low temperatures that Knowlton had spoken of. One phrase alone intimidated me: ‘Jim, it got so cold and still at Fairbanks where I was that on a clear morning you could see the steam rising from the outhouses twenty miles away.’ I was not ready for such cold, and since I would never write about any place I had not known intimately, I decided regretfully that my Alaska book would never be written, much to Knowlton’s disgust.
But many readers, including officials in Alaska, kept sending me letters: ‘You did good work for the South Pacific. You’re obligated to cover the north,’ and although I never changed my basic decision to avoid involvement in those Arctic lands, I did, when occasion presented an opportunity, route my journeys through Alaska so that I could familiarize myself with what has always been an exciting area for me. For example, when I was offered a fee to give the mid-year graduation address at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks during the middle of winter, I surprised the authorities by saying that I would do it for free if they could arrange a side trip for me to the newly developed oil field at Prudhoe Bay on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. They did, and in this exciting way I caught my first glimpse of that frozen sea; indeed, I walked out about a mile on it to see if one could spot from that distance the difference between land and sea, and I could not.
Equally rewarding was a hunting trip I took to Kodiak Island with my old friend from Korea, Admiral Perry, in search of grizzly bear, and I especially treas
ured the times my airplane on the way to my work in Japan landed at the incredible windswept base at Shemya Island at the far end of the Aleutians. Once during an enforced layover there, with fog so dense that one could not see most of the huts built at least partially underground, I gained a vivid insight into what warfare had been like in nearby Kiska and Attu, held by the Japanese.
But despite my growing knowledge about Alaska, I still considered myself too old at sixty to face the rigors of minus 52 degrees during an endless night. But as I approached eighty with a cleaned-out heart and a left leg that wasn’t any worse than it had been for many years, I decided that if a man had always wanted to do something since age thirty-one and he was now close to eighty, it was time to get started. Once that decision was reached, I never reconsidered. Dispatching my energetic wife to find us a place to work, I remained in Texas to finish some writing I had started there and listened attentively when she called from Sitka to inform me: ‘There’s a wonderful log cabin on the campus of a small college here. Just right for us,’ and promptly thereafter I was in Alaska launching what would turn out to be an entirely new life.
Ignoring all disabilities, I leaped into a travel program that would take me to almost every distinct region of the vast new state. To test myself I began with the toughest of all, the lands north of the Arctic Circle on the shortest day of the year, December 21, when the temperature was 52 below zero and the summer-resort hotel at Fort Yukon had only a meager supply of canned goods left over from September. It wasn’t bad—the only part I disliked was the constant putting on and taking off of the five layers of clothing that such cold required, but when the temperature rose to minus 22 it was so congenial I went about in only a heavy shirt.
I loved Alaska: the terrifying solitude of the empty north, the lonely salmon fisheries of the farthest south, the gold fields on the Canadian border and above all that dramatic chain of little Aleutian islands reaching out toward Russian Siberia. Once when I was visiting Little Diomede, less than two miles from Russia’s Big Diomede, I became so preoccupied with talking about books to the inhabitants and signing the surprising number of mine that they had imported for the long winter nights that I reached the shore to see, with horror, that my cruise ship had already sailed, with no other likely to come by for months. Fortunately some quick-witted Eskimos saw my quandary, revved up the outboard on their sealskin umiak and set out to overtake the departing liner. Someone on board spotted our little craft and asked the captain to slow down. I slipped the boatman ten dollars and was safely back aboard.