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 offers an intimate glimpse of two writers and their shared passions on a long and testy journey together.
Our collaboration spanned two years, its more 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 FOUR: A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH
I arrived in the United States nine months before meeting James Michener, my passage to these shores paid by Reader's Digest. I joined the Digest in London in 1969 after working on newspapers in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London. In 1972 I was appointed the first editor-in-chief of the Digest's South African edition and held the post for five years before being offered a position as senior international editor at the magazine's headquarters in Chappaqua, New York.
At noon one day, five months after putting down roots at the Digest's head office, I stood outside the main 
entrance of the handsome red brick Georgian building waiting for a fellow editor who invited me to stroll through the grounds with him.
The bells of a Flemish carillon in a cupola began a medley of inspirational music. I looked up and beheld four winged horses poised to take flight to the four corners of the earth. I felt a thrill gazing up at Pegasus, symbol of Reader's Digest, spirit of the Muses and war-horse on whose back Bellerophon rode against the Chimaera.
Fulton Oursler, Jr., the magazine's managing editor, liked to exercise between a miniature orchard that appeared overnight on the grounds years earlier, full-grown and bearing fruit. God's little apple trees, one editor called the miraculous plantings, only one small corner of a glorious landscape with oaks and dogwoods and fields of blooms, a veritable Eden with eighty rolling acres of lawns, gardens and orchards. Another wag suggested that this paradise showed “what God could do if He had money.”
The bells in the cupola were still ringing, when Fulton
Oursler Jr. met me outside the entrance, wearing a pair of ancient plimsolls stained with dirt. Before we took one step, a cigarette was in his mouth and he continued to chain-smoke as we roamed between God's little apple trees.
"Tony," was in his mid-forties and had the appearance of a well-scrubbed choirboy, despite the grimy shoes. There was zeal in Tony's dedication to the ideals of DeWitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace, founders of Reader's Digest. Since 1922, when the first issue asked, “Can We Have A Beautiful Race?” – An article that agonized over ugly women in America, “especially the type built like draft horses and arriving in the millions at Ellis Island.” – the Wallaces strove to make the world a better and more beautiful place. Tony carried on the good fight, especially in thwarting communists, a cold war editor whose writers cast a wide net for Soviet spies and plotters.
As we walked between the apple trees, Tony quizzed me about Reds in South Africa. Was there a Party? Blacks? Whites? Was Moscow involved?
I said the Communist Party was banned in the early Fifties. The South African government severed ties with the U.S.S.R and kicked out the Russian embassy.
“Pretoria still sees a communist behind every bush. They blame Moscow for stirring up blacks across the continent.”
“Is there going to be a revolution?”
For as long as I could remember, I said, there was talk of a bloodbath. It hadn't happened yet.
“What's preventing it?”
A simple answer was the might of South Africa's security forces, its army was the most powerful in Africa, its secret police the most dreaded.
“It's more than the iron fist,” I added. “The Afrikaner believes apartheid is God's plan for South Africa. Go to any Dutch Reformed Church on a Sunday. You'll find it packed with worshippers. Their families have been in Africa for three hundred years. They rejoice in a promised land.”
I sensed Tony's mounting interest as we roamed the orchard, where not long before a flock of local geese had come to forage on apples that fell from the trees. A Digest executive responsible for the grounds tore out of his office and rushed around pell-mell sending geese flying. Bird lovers on the staff expressed outrage at the man's attacks. This inspired some editors to write a fictitious letter of complaint from a woman said to live at a pond where the geese made their home. “I was so mad at your Mr. So-and-So that I wished those birds would peck him on his you know what,” said the dame. The missive ruffled the feathers of higher-ups who took pains to maintain pleasant relations with Digest neighbors. Down came an order that the geese were to be allowed as many apples as they were tempted to take. – Experience taught Tony to exchange his Florsheims for battered plimsolls before venturing between God's little apple trees.
Time passed quickly as I spoke about the history of the Afrikaners. Their forbears shared much in common with American pioneers. They trekked into the wilderness with their wagons, their guns and their Bibles, and a messianic faith in the destiny of their people. Again and again, their God forsook them and they were hammered in bloody battles with Xhosa and Zulu. They gathered the remnants of their volk and moved on until a day when they were victorious. Their struggling republics were just getting on their feet when the Anglo-Boer War broke out. Their armies battled the British Empire to the bitter end and when all was lost their commandos stayed in the field, the first guerillas of modern time.
“The timing is perfect for a book on South Africa,” Tony said.
I couldn't agree more. I'd been brooding over a South African novel for a long time and had brought a bulging file of notes with me to America. In the months before leaving Cape Town, I haunted bookstores and scoured market stalls on the Grand Parade for hundreds of works. – The shelves in Michener's study at St. Michaels would come to be filled with this eclectic collection of Africana.
A sparkle came to Tony's eye as we spoke of diamonds and gold and thunder on the veld, and all the other possibilities we saw in the story of South Africa. There were man-apes and battles between Australopithecus and Pithecanthropus; Bushmen, Hottentots, Strandlopers and Bantu migrants; Phoenician voyagers, Arab slavers and Portuguese navigators; Dutch East India Company men, French Huguenots and English settlers; Griquas, Xhosas, Zulus and Matabele.
We began 65,000,000 years ago and moved through the eons when the living veld was still a paradise uninhabited by man, and on to the 1970s when time was running out for the white tribe of Africa.
How to tie all this together? The answer lay in the soft, waxy kimberlite, a blue-colored volcanic rock that flowed to the surface at the end of the Cretaceous period. Trapped in the kimberlitic pipes was the richest diamond ever found, which Tony and I dubbed “Star of Man.” From its creation to its discovery and sale – to the Shah of Iran! – the diamond served as link to stories of men and women whose lives were touched by the gem.
“I'll put my thoughts on paper,” I told Tony. I leapt at the chance to begin work on a novel I'd been dreaming about for years.
I used the working title The Star of Man and planned a 
novel with ten major characters linked to the diamond, their multi-generational story coming down through the ages to a dramatic finale with the sale of the precious stone at Christies in New York. I spent the Christmas holidays drafting an outline, which I readied early in the New Year and took to Tony. I went back to my office far down the corridor from Murderer's Row and eagerly awaited his reaction.
Tony liked my notes for the South African book.
“Who can we get to write this?”
When Tony asked this question, I remained mum. Like many journalists who would be authors, I had my share of unpublished manuscripts hammered out while working at newspaper jobs. I said nothing about my hopes of becoming a novelist knowing what the answer would be.
Instead I heard Tony say: “It's a subject that could interest Jim Michener.”
Michener was among a galaxy of writers edited by Oursler, including Alex Haley, whose quest for Roots was backed by the Digest, Lowell Thomas, Theodore H. White, Henry Hurt, and Edward J. Epstein. Jim had been writing for the magazine since the early Fifties, handpicked by DeWitt Wallace who wanted him to join the staff. He opted to remain independent but contributed dozens of articles as a Digest roving editor and wrote several Digest-sponsored books. Tony was instrumental in Michener's Kent State, which investigated the May 1970 shootings at the university in Kent, Ohio.
It was mid-March before Tony sat down with Michener and broached the idea of a South African book. They met in New York, where Jim and his editors at Random House were correcting final proofs for Chesapeake. Tony told Michener how the idea for The Star of Man was born and offered some background about me.
I can picture Jim studying Tony as he spoke, an expression I would often see, a far, far away look that told you the mills of James A. Michener's mind were grinding away, stripping the waste, sifting the detritus, picking out the lodestone.
“I've been thinking casually about such a project for several years,” Michener said. “I'd like to meet your man and learn what's on his mind.”
*******
A week later Tony hosted a second lunch with Michener which I attended, the three of us getting together in the wood-paneled elegance of the University Club, a Renaissance palazzo on the sunny corner of 54th Street and Fifth Avenue.
Jim and I hit it off immediately, just how well I would find out as our working relationship grew but within minutes of sitting down, we were away and running. Or, I should say I was, for Jim did the listening and I, the talking. He'd been thinking casually about a South African book since meeting the country's warring tribes seven years earlier. I was ten years old when I wrote Revenge, a forty-page settler saga penned on the back of worthless share certificates tossed out by my mother.
I look at this grim tale in the pencil strokes of a child's hand and I think of the boy who would come to share a thousand stories with Jim Michener a quarter-century later. The setting of Revenge and The Englishmen are the same but to get from one to the other was more than a journey in time and place. I had to leave the laager and seek a path beyond a dry stony veld that hardened the hearts of many in South Africa.
Michener had spent a month in South Africa in October 1971 and earlier made short trips to Mozambique and Angola. Out of his South African sojourn had come a ten-page New York Times Magazine article, “The Five Warring Tribes of Africa.” (New York Times, Jan 23,1972.)
Michener's trip to South Africa in 1971 left him with as good a picture of the country as any visiting writer
including his exposure to irrationalities of so-called “petty” apartheid, as opposed to the grand plan for separating the different tribes. He encountered bizarre rules such as one that permitted whites and blacks to play tennis together on private property, provided the court wasn't visible from the street where passersby might glimpse the match. But our first meeting revealed that Jim also had a long trek to make across that stony veld before he came to know the people living there.
There was, for example, his perception of the Zulus. On his 1971 visit, he toured Kwazulu in Natal province, the tribal homeland created under grand apartheid. The New York Times feature has a photo of Jim on a gold mine outside Johannesburg watching Zulu miners perform traditional dances, their work clothes exchanged for furs and skins. The dances delighted tourists though not nearly as much as the Zulus themselves, for like today's hip-hop generation, the songs of the foot-stomping miners jabbed at the belly of umLungu, the white man.
“My thinking is to bypass Natal and the Zulus,” Michener said at lunch. He wanted to do justice to the black tribes and planned to focus on the Xhosas. “I can get all the value I want out of them.” The only interest he had in the Zulus lay in the fact that they'd driven the Xhosas south to the Cape frontier, where his readers would find them.
I can't recall exactly how I put it, for I was after all a minnow swimming in waters deep as the ocean sea. I told Jim that it was impossible to write a book such as we had in mind without the Zulus. What of Shaka, the black Napoleon who forged a warrior nation out of a patchwork of Nguni clans? And Dingane, his treacherous half-brother, a bloodthirsty tyrant who murdered Shaka and sat on the throne when the Voortrekkers, the Boer pioneers, crossed into Natal? What of Blood River where the Boers made a vow of obedience to God on the eve of battle, four hundred and sixty four against twelve and a half thousand Zulus? What took place on the morning of December 16, 1838 was the defining moment for the Afrikaner people, a victory that determined their future in a land they believed God set apart for them.
I remember telling Jim about my heritage, adopted and raised by an Afrikaner family whose roots went back to the Voortrekkers and long before the Boer migration. My line of Uys's were related by marriage to the Voortrekker commander at the Battle of Blood River. My mother, Hester Johanna Maria Uys, was seven when the British invaded the 
Boer republics: she survived two years in concentration camps at Bloemfontein and in the Cape Colony.
A decade after penning my childhood Revenge, I was sitting with Joey Uys taking notes as I listened to my mother's stories of the African veld.
“Dammit, Errol, must you ask me all these questions?” Joey would complain.
“Yes, mother.”
Whether we spoke about an Orange Free State farm in the nineteenth century or the English prison camps, the notes I kept show just how persistent I was.
A.M. (1) Woken with enamel cup of coffee and big boerebeskuit. Dipped into coffee. ‘Raw' coffee roasted in outside ovens where they made bread. Round oven built of mud. Bread baked in paraffin tins. Three loaves to a tin. Coffee grinder screwed to kitchen table. Beans pushed in with spoon. Smelled beautiful, fresh, aromatic. Fruit trees. Dried peaches and tamaletjies – dried fruit rolled in fat and wrapped in muslin. Biltong hung outside in trees. Fridge under tree. Double-sided box with gravel-like stones in recess. Zinc pan with holes on top. Water dropped onto stones. Wind blew through holes to cool. A.M. (2) Mother washed girls in brass basin. Long calico nightgown. Rubbed teeth with a cloth. Soap made from fat. Put on dress and combed hair with big comb. Square framed mirror on table. Still dark, cold. Adults up and dressed. 6 A.M. Dining room. Family Bible with names, births, brought to table. Leather cover. Brass clasps on back and front. Large wooden table. All seated as uncle reads from Bible. Still seated, sing a psalm. Then on knees around table and pray. A white tablecloth for breakfast. Bread on table. Butter in soup plate. Enamel dishes. No porcelain. Knives, forks with steel handles. Scoured with sand. Plain white enamel jug. Milk. Mielie pap. Yellow sugar. Children silent. Had to ask if wanted anything. Fearful. Prayers and singing after breakfast. Then children play outside back door. |
“So many questions, my boy," my mother said. "Why are you asking me all these things?”
Today I know the answer. So did James Michener, who never met the child of the veld, though her story came to mean so much to him.
**
Michener, Oursler and I left the University Club that March day with a loose plan on what to do next. Jim was going to give serious attention to a South African epic. Tony's mission was to find a modus operandi between Reader's Digest and Jim's publisher, Random House. I was to continue polishing my outline.
I'd no part in talks between the Digest, Random House and Michener's agent at William Morris Inc. They agreed that Michener would engage my services as editor/researcher and pick up my Digest salary and expenses for as long as he needed me. No monies would pass hands, the fee to be written-off against future payments by the magazine for rights to Michener's book.
The negotiations were still underway when I finished my first draft outline and sent it to Jim at St. Michaels in late April 1978. He replied immediately:
St. Michaels, MD 22 April 1978 For Tony Oursler and Errol Uys, About an hour ago Mari brought me the mail and I had the pleasure of reading Uys's notes about a proposed book on South Africa. I was impressed by his organizing ability, his thoroughness, and his keen insights into the problems of arranging a mass of material so as to be usable, especially in fictional form. It became immediately apparent that he is prepared to start talks with me right away, because we have both done a great deal of thinking on this matter, along our separate lines, and we have come up with striking parallelisms, as I suppose any two reasonably intelligent persons would, faced with identical data. I therefore think it prudent that Uys and I meet as soon as possible, down here in Maryland, to spend seven or eight days together wrestling with big ideas...Read more |
It was the beginning of my covenant with James A. Michener.
Our collaboration on The Covenant was unique, different from any other assistance Jim had in producing his works of fiction. I remember my excitement in coming to work with America's best-loved writer, sharing my passion for storytelling and my hunger to let the world know the story of South Africa. I see us wrestling with all those grand ideas on our mighty journey through history, Michener and the boy who wrote Revenge.
I hear laughter as we swap ideas for the red-haired terror Rooi Valck and Mal Adriaan, Crazy Adriaan, who found the lake called Freedom. I feel again the sorrow we knew at the death of Old Bloke dying like a dog in the road when a WHITES-ONLY ambulance won't pick him up. I see Van Doorns, Saltwoods, and Nxumalos, moving forward with The Covenant , character-by-character, scene-by-scene, until the day when their story was told. I see it all as clearly as if we were back in the cottage beside Broad Creek on Chesapeake Bay.
(C)2007 Errol Lincoln Uys
Visit the online literary archive for the full story of The Making of the Covenant with hundreds of items to view from my personal collection.
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Comments: 10
This was a great treat for me! What an interesting time in your life! Thanks for posting!
Coincidentally, I'll be returning to South Africa for a visit this month, my first trip back since The Covenant. Of course, I've kept up with events but no doubt have much to discover... And still, the conclusions Michener and I came up with stand the test of time.
Ten unsolicited points from the world's worst connection. Merry whatever you celebrate!
You know, we are all praising Michner, which is his due, but it is only just percolating mentally that you must be one hell of a writer to partner with him in writing.
Thanks, Judith, for the kudos. I tell the story of how I wrote my own epic, Brazil, on my website. The Making of Brazil
That trek took me five years - alone. A year on the move and four years at the mast, every word written by my own hand in the old fashioned way, with pen and ink!
Can anyone lead me to a site that might have a map of these places?
Your copy of Covenant should have maps on the frontispiece?
Try this Univeristy of Texas site:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/south_africa_1885.jpg
You might also query "Zimbabwe" maps via Google.
Any problems finding suitable references, contact me directly.