I worked with James Michener on his South African novel, The Covenant, involved in every stage of the book from its conception and plotting to final manuscript.
This unique look at what went into the making of The Covenant gives an intimate glimpse of two writers and their shared passions on a long and testy journey together.
The collaboration leading to Michener's blockbuster spanned two years, its controversial aspects recently highlighted by biographer Stephen J. May.( Michener: A Writer's Journey, 2005, Oklahoma University Press) Concludes May: "Michener committed a scarlet literary crime and used his celebrated status in publishing to get away with it."
PART TWO: A DAY IN ST. MICHAELS
At four-thirty that November day, Michener and I downed tools to take a walk as we did every afternoon. Our workday started around seven in the morning, neither of us interested in breakfast or small talk. I was staying in a studio apartment on the property and grabbed a coffee and cigarette before going over to the house. We put in five hours before lunch at twelve-thirty.
On some days, Jim's wife, Mari, made sandwiches for us but several times a week we drove four miles to the town of St. Michaels, where we dropped into a café on Talbot Street. Michener had been going there for three years since settling on Broad Creek to work on his novel, Chesapeake, and was greeted like a regular. He could be one of the watermen he'd got to know well, perhaps a crusty old crabber come in from the Choptank. After lunch, we went back to the house, Jim snatching half an hour for a nap before returning to work until late afternoon.
Before we stepped out, Jim selected one of several handsome wood canes given him by friends. I picked up one, too, the pair of us heading up between the loblolly pines like a couple of country squires out for a stroll. Jim needed the cane because of a deteriorating hip that racked him with pain. He could be in agony as he started out but drove himself forward, until there was a rhythm to his stride and the pain receded. I favored a gnarled hickory cane of menacing appearance, for I was at heart a city boy and none too happy about the dogs that rocketed off neighbors' grounds. They were old pals of Jim and I was never bitten but still glad to be armed.
We were an hour coming and going that November evening walking on into the dusk. This was worrying to Mari Michener, who never let us leave the cottage without wearing clothing easily picked up in headlights. Most drivers knew Michener and gave us a friendly wave. Once or twice a week an idiot came tearing along oblivious to the two figures at the side of the road and forcing us to scramble onto the verge. I didn't want to think of the headlines in Post or any other paper were we slain in a hit-and-run crash. Jim's only concern was that Mari not be told.
The cars and pick-ups came and went and we tramped on. Rarely did we meet another person out for a walk on that country road. I remarked about this to Michener, how back in South Africa one could be driving a hundred miles from the nearest dorp. “Not a house in sight, not a hut, not a living thing moving out there, and then just over a rise, this African comes jogging down the road. He's not carrying a gas can, nothing like that, just walking along, only God knows where he's coming from or headed for.”
We stepped away from our typewriters with the idea of taking a break but they followed us out between the loblolly pines, Nongqause and Mhlakaza and witnesses to their danse macabre. Men like dashing Major Richard Saltwood, one of the main protagonists of The Englishmen. Well bred, courageous, Richard was the quintessential officer and gentleman, who served six campaigns in India before immigrating to the Cape Colony in 1820, four decades before the cattle killing. The major did everything in his power to stop the madness and when the dying began, he led the relief effort to save the Xhosa, his enemy in three bloody frontier wars.
I knew Richard Saltwood and his three brothers intimately, for I plotted many of their exploits, when Michener and I were putting our heads together to people The Covenant. The Saltwoods hailed from the ancient bishopric of Old Sarum near Salisbury, where their ancestor Nicholas Saltwood, captain of the Acorn, put down roots after making a fortune on a voyage to the Spice Islands in the seventeenth century. Peter, oldest of Richard's brothers, was a respected Member of Parliament, despite holding the seat of Sarum, “rottenest of the rotten boroughs,” where voters were as invisible as ghost-warriors of the Xhosa. David, youngest of the Saltwoods, was a rebel who turned his back on John Bull and went to America founding a branch of the family. Hilary was four years older than Richard and reached the Cape a decade before him, a godly son of England serving the London Missionary Society. He was a darling of the Hottentots and ardent defender of the Xhosa against depredations by Dutch Boers. Reverend Saltwood's path was studded with thorns that lacerated and finally killed him and his wife Emma, a Madagascan convert with whom Hilary found sweet redemption.
Uys Plotting Notes for Saltwoods
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On our walks, Michener often chided me for incessant chatter. “You're not getting any benefit, all this talking while you walk. You're not putting air into your lungs.” Jim pumped up his long stride and surged forward. He never stopped me talking and I never held back for I knew we'd a vast and empty veld to populate.
Never once did I say, ‘So now we have this Englishman at the mission station in 1819. How does he get to the Orange River?' without Uys having nine or eleven possibilities, all good, all logical, all beautifully coordinated. Often I would say, ‘too complicated for our boy,' or ‘I doubt our boy would go so far,' but just as often I would say, ‘That might be just what he'd do.'
He showed such a mastery of and predilection for plotting that again and again he came up with dazzling ideas which immediately attracted my attention. I am no good at plotting, hold it to be almost an excrescence, and pay far too little attention to it, so that Uys's bold suggestions were often appreciated… I judge that he could plot six novels a year with intricate beauties; he should've been in G-2 in some complicated war situation. — James A. Michener, aide-memoire, 16 April 1979 |
Even I couldn't have dreamed up the circumstances that saw me on that Maryland road in 1979 or the coincidences that drew Michener and I together. Jim was a very private person, who was happy to parade a cast of thousands in front of the world but kept his own universe under wraps. I, by contrast, was known to stay up until the cows came home gabbing with anyone who would hear my stories or share their own adventures. I could never see Michener in one of the smoky dens on Cape Town's waterfront or a Johannesburg dive like my uncle Henry's “Rendezvous.” Of course, more than three decades earlier, Jim sat for hours with the Quinn's Bar gang on Tahiti and at Aggie Grey's, where the goddesses of the South Seas danced siva-siva and nights were enchanted.
There were no juke joints on Broad Creek and besides I was there to wrestle with big ideas, not sit gossiping with one of the great minds of America. Still, there were times when the talk turned to two characters only, ourselves. On my first visit to St. Michaels in May 1978, I told Michener how I happened to bear the name of a proud Afrikaner family, having been adopted as a baby.
“I was adopted,” Jim said.
“I never knew my birth parents.”
Nor did he, said Jim. Mabel Michener, a widow, took him in. There was no man in the house.
“When I was six, Uys left my mother. I wasn't told I was adopted until I was twelve. I'd had some idea, nothing specific, just a feeling I wasn't Joey Uys's child.”
“How did you find out?”
“My mother and I fought like cat and dog. One day she screamed at me. ‘You're not my son. You're trash picked up in the gutter.' I told her I knew I was adopted. That made her angrier. ‘Who told you?' No one, I said. I just knew.”
Jim told me about a member of the Michener clan, who started sending him letters after he began to win recognition. Jim wasn't a real Michener, the anonymous writer said, but a bastard and a disgrace unfit to bear the name. Year after year, the letters kept coming, their poison more and more vitriolic. Every advance Jim made, there'd be a missive filled with rage and vituperation.
“I've not the slightest idea who he is.” Jim had a notion that the writer was a man. Where were the letters from? I asked. Philadelphia, but that meant little to Jim. One thing that his detractor wrote rang true for him: “‘Just who the hell do you think you are, trying to be better than you are?'”
“He got that right,” Jim said. “I've always tried to be better than I was.”
Dark and dismal memories for Michener and me but there were happier recollections of two boys growing up decades and continents apart yet remarkably alike. Our mothers both lived from hand to mouth, with never a penny to spare. At nine, Jim was scouring the Doylestown woods for chestnuts to sell to neighbors; my first enterprise was selling peaches in the street outside our house when I was six. From the age of eleven until he was a young man, Jim worked at many jobs from paper carrier to ticket taker at the famous Willow Grove amusement park outside Philadelphia. I was eleven when I started a mini-career as salesman in a Johannesburg toy store, hawking hula-hoops on Eloff Street, the city's Fifth Avenue. Every year I joined the pitchmen at the Rand Easter Show, the country's premier exposition, pushing anything from teddy bears to “miracle” bottle openers. As teenagers, Michener and I both hit the road and stuck out our thumbs hitchhiking thousands of miles around our countries, beginning the journeys that would see us walking together that November evening in 1979.
We walked back to the cottage and put in another hour before dinner. It's a fact that when I returned home to Westchester, New York that Christmas, my family stood aghast at the scrawny creature that greeted them. No one was more solicitous than Mari Michener when it came to caring for the welfare of her man, keeping the cottage squeaky clean, running errands for Jim, answering phones and fending off callers who could interrupt his writing. Michener had a heart attack twelve years earlier and Mari kept tabs on his health, making him take a nap each afternoon and watching his diet.
And there was the rub, for when Mari made meals for the three of us, she served her guest the same lean fare. The portions were beautifully presented, as one might expect from a hostess of American-Japanese heritage, but very small even for a thin man like myself. I was far too polite to ask for more, and besides, Mari had no real interest in cooking. It was fortuitous that one of Jim's close friends was Edward “The Big Fishcake” Piszek, owner of Mrs. Paul's Kitchens. Ed shipped boxes of frozen fish sticks to Broad Creek, as well as more exotic dishes from his test kitchens. Mari had a freezer stuffed with Mrs. Paul's largesse which she could've dispensed bountifully but stuck to her frugal meal plans. Packets of Heinz ketchup that Mari garnered from restaurants complemented Ed's fish sticks, a thriftiness that also kept their table supplied with mustard, soy sauce and a variety of sugars and sweeteners.
The three of us ate dinner in the kitchen, not much there to linger over but we passed the time pleasantly enough. Michener and I never spoke about work in Mari's company beyond scheduling issues, when he had to leave St. Michaels to fulfill other obligations. Some trips were to Cape Canaveral for he was already thinking of his next venture, which would be into space.
On days when Jim and Mari were both away, I was given the keys to a storage room and a freezer stuffed with frozen fish sticks and other provender. Mari kept the larder locked against long-fingered workers suspected of raiding her supplies. I was encouraged to take as much food as I wanted. Knowing how carefully my hostess portioned out her dishes, I gave myself the same sparse rations. Besides, if I got desperate, I could drive to a greasy spoon in St. Michaels. In 1979, the place was still a working watermen's town with a few upscale spots like Longfellows, not today's bivouac of boutiques and bistros where Washington warhorses make camp.
Go to Part Three: An Englishman's Word
Part One : Warriors in the Mists
(C)2007 Errol Lincoln Uys
Visit the online literary archives that tell the story of The Making of The Covenant with hundreds of items from my personal collection.
The Long-Distance Writers -- A Postscript
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Comments: 7
Ten unsolicited points from the world's worst connection. Merry whatever you celebrate!