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 view of two writers and their shared passions on a long and often 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 THREE: AN ENGLISHMAN'S WORD
Alone in my quarters that November night, I returned to The Englishmen.
I heard a distant honking, as a flight of geese passed over Broad Creek and drove forward beneath the stars. The sound quickly faded far into the night. I waited expectantly for the coming and going of another flock of birds but there was only silence.
I was back beside Richard Saltwood, who helped the Xhosa in their national agony. In Michener's fictional story of The Englishmen, the major's aid to the stricken tribe brings him to the attention of Queen Victoria, who seeks his help with a settlement of Germans at the Cape, ex-mercenaries serving England in the Crimea. The major goes to London, where his royal commission makes him the darling of Punch magazine. He orchestrates the marriage of two hundred and forty legionnaires to brides scooped up in Portsmouth days before their ship sails for Africa. He lines them up on deck, men facing women, not a few of either sex listing to starboard. Starting at the top of each row, he pairs them off, for better, for worse, and sees them married on the spot. A Punch caricaturist strips Saltwood of his clothing, throws a diaper around his loins, and christens him “Cupid.”
When Queen Victoria sends sixteen-year-old Alfred, the 
Sailor Prince, on the first royal visit to the Cape in 1860, Her Majesty asks Saltwood to keep an eye on Affie. The major escorts the prince on a grand battue that took place on a plain east of Bloemfontein. A thousand beaters drove tens of thousands of animals across the veld, black and blue wildebeest, Burchell's zebras, quaggas, ostriches, blesbok, hartebeest and springbok, herd after herd charging toward the guns of the prince's party. Six thousand animals died in the slaughter, the only regret for the huntsmen being Affie's failure to bag a single lion.
I had a special interest in the Great Hunt, for just over a century later I stood on the same plains in the Eastern Free State. I pictured the waves of rooigras sweeping across the veld and caught the thunder of galloping herds of game, an echo from the past that soon slid into the depths of my imagination. All I saw was the scarred earth with a canyon-like donga tearing through the desolation. I was a reporter for the
Johannesburg Star and spent six weeks in 1966 crisscrossing a drought-ravaged South Africa for a feature series, which opened my eyes to the man-made denudation and climate change that changed the living veld into a creeping desert. Images I shared with Michener a decade later, not a simple before and after picture but a profound understanding of a fragile land.
For the fictional Saltwood, there was a final royal commission that would earn him a knighthood. It was this mission that kept me working until the small hours that November night, after scrapping Michener's ideas for the section and composing a totally new narrative.
In Michener's version, Saltwood traveled as Queen Victoria's goodwill ambassador to Mzilikazi in Matabeleland, part of the country known today as Zimbabwe. Saltwood's journey north of the Limpopo River did nothing to advance the story or foreshadow major developments in the book.
I chose instead to send Richard Saltwood back to British India where he served as a young man. He arrives at Madras eighteen months after the bloody Indian Mutiny. His commission is to contract laborers for the cane fields of Natal, a delicate negotiation in a crown colony still smoldering from the fires of insurrection...
"Saltwood was to hear endless stories of the Mutiny, and of the heroism of men, English and Indian, who had fought against the rebel regiments. He was furiously busy during his weeks in Madras, ironing out the hitches in the labor contracts, consulting with district officers and recruiting agents but he was able to accomplish all he set out to do and finally he stood in a great compound south of the town where 900 Indians squatted on the ground, all hoping to fill the 200 posts offered in the first ship to Natal. Within two hours the list was closed, but as Saltwood strode out of the compound the three Desai brothers arrived at the gates.
‘Please,sahib, master, we go too.'
CLICK to enlarge and read pages
Introducing the Desai family fixed the Asian element in the South African crucible. There was another compelling reason for the story that went to the core of the work Jim and I did in our initial plotting sessions at St. Michaels in May 1978.
To depict contemporary apartheid, I came up with the idea of six vignettes involving people linked to past generations of families in the novel. In this manner, we would show how apartheid affected the lives of all citizens from the day you were born to the day you died.
Each section would deal with effects of a particular law, such as the Immorality Act that forbade sex between the races – Craig Saltwood, a descendant of Sir Richard, and a beautiful Coloured woman are trapped in bed by the Immorality Squad and punished for making love. – There was the Group Areas Act that determined where you could live. The law applied to all races but was mostly used to clean up so-called “black spots” that were a blot on areas mapped out for white occupation.
My rough notes from those early sessions show Michener and I discussing a notorious mass removal at Sophiatown in 1955, a black slum knocked down to make way for a housing tract for white Afrikaners that would be called Triomf, Triumph.
On the day the bulldozers move in, two Indians watch the destruction from a hill. Barney Patel and Peter Desai, later re-named “Woodrow” by Jim, live in nearby Pageview, a “Coolie location” granted to Indians seventy years earlier by President Paul Kruger of the Boer republic.
In showing how the Desais got to South Africa, I provided the ideal antecedent for Woodrow, grandson of one of the brothers, who came to work on the Natal cane fields. Woodrow's father moves to Johannesburg, where the family establishes a thriving grocery store and builds a fine house in Pageview. Woodrow is apprehensive as he witnesses the destruction of Sophiatown. He fears that the same blow will fall on the Indian community. He's right, for not long after this, Pageview's five thousand residents are ordered to pack up and move to Lenasia, a ghetto twenty-two miles away.
My Saltwood-Desai story appears here as I wrote it. Michener edited my words before he typed them up and pasted them into his manuscript. I kept my notes and drafts for the Desais, as well as other major writing I did for the novel. – The title came to me as I was compiling notes from our first planning session. – I held on to every scrap of paper in the sure knowledge that one day I would sit down and tell the story of my collaboration with Jim Michener on The Covenant
GO TO PART 4 -- A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
(C)2007 Errol Lincoln Uys
Visit the online lterary archive that tells the story of The Making of the Covenant with hundreds of items from my person collection
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Comments: 7
Ten unsolicited points from the world's worst connection. Merry whatever you celebrate!
The Long-Distance Writers
Biographer Stephen May (quoted above ) devotes a chapter to the making of The Covenant in his new Michener biography. A French professor has also done her dissertation on the authorship of the novel: University of Rennes Thesis
As I note elsewhere in these comments, I've laid it all out in my online literary archive and leave it to readers to draw their own conclusions.