The Michener Companion

By Sue Binkley Tatem

The book is a reference guide to James Michener and his work. A general section about Michener relating to his origins in Bucks County is followed by synopses of Michener’s books. The focus is on information that does not appear elsewhere and a bit of a tour of Doylestown. Meet a Michener you may not have met before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9781477172889

Sue Binkley Tatem

The Toet (H. Randolph Tatem III, MD) wrote about Varmint, our beloved cat. Varmint was an odd-eyed white long haired cat. Sue Binkley Tatem, Ph.D. wrote about the colors and illustrated both stories. Sue also illustrated other childrens’ books: The Reluctant Racehorse by Kyra Knoll, and A Thousand Eyes by Paddy Fleming (a dog story set in Africa).

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Copyright © 2001, 2009 by Sue Binkley Tatem, Ph.D.

ISBN:                    Softcover                            978-1-4500-0600-2

                              eBook                                  978-1-4771-7288-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 08/22/2019

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 THE WORLD IS MY BUCKS COUNTY

Bucks County

Prehistory

Lenape Indians

Canals and Conchs

Children of the Corn17

Quakers and Presbyterians

Fair Warning

Widows and Orphans

Fathers and Sons, Speculation

Henry Chapman Mercer

Moravian Pottery and Tile Works

Fonthill

The Museum

Dickensian Childhood

I Led Three Wives

Michener and Death

Michener’s Humor

Handwriting analysis

Pen Names

Word Play

Micheners’ Government Work

More beyond

CHAPTER 2 MICHENER’S BOOKS

The Future of the Social Studies

The Unit in the Social Studies (1940)

Tales of the South Pacific

The Fires of Spring

Return to Paradise

The Bridges at Toko-Ri

The Voice of Asia

Sayonara

The Floating World

Hawaii

Adickes, A Portfolio with Critique by James A. Michener

Iberia: Spanish Travels and Reflections

Presidential Lottery, The Reckless Gamble in Our Electoral System

Facing East

The Quality of Life

Kent State, What Happened and Why

The Drifters

A Michener Miscellany, 1950-1970

Centennial

About Centennial, Some Notes on the Novel

Sports in America

Chesapeake

The Watermen

The Covenant

Space

Collectors, Forgers—and a Writer

Poland

Testimony

The Bridge at Andau

Rascals in Paradise

Selected Writings of James A. Michener 1957

The Hokusai Sketchbooks: Selections from the Manga

Report of the County Chairman

Caravans

The Source

Hemingway, Ernest, The Dangerous Summer, Introduction by James A. Michener

Texas

Legacy

Alaska

Journey

Caribbean

Six Days in Havana

The Eagle and the Raven

Pilgrimage, A Memoir of Poland and Rome

The Novel

The World is My Home, A Memoir

James A. Michener’s Writers Handbook

Mexico

My Lost Mexico

Creatures of the Kingdom

Literary Reflections: Michener on Michener, Hemingway, Capote, & Others

Recessional

William Penn

Miracle in Seville

This Noble Land: My Vision for America

Century of Sonnets

Matecumbe

CHAPTER 3 PLACES

Aggie Grey

Barnes Foundation

Bucks County Jail 1884

Aldie Mansion and Pet Cemetery

Fonthill

Relation of the Michener Art Museum to the Mercer Museum

History of the Michener Art Museum

Michener Art Museum, the garden

Michener Art Museum, the Alcove, Doylestown

Michener Art Museum, Art

Michener Art Museum, The Mari Michener Wing

Michener Art Collection, University of Texas at Austin

Texas Center for Writers

James A. Michener Society

Library of Congress

Greeley

Michener Archives (Greeley)

James A. Michener Library (Greeley)

Web Sites

CHAPTER 4 BOOKS RELATED TO MICHENER, ANNOTATED

Anderson, Lois R.

Baldwin, James.

Becker, George J.

Bush, George S.

Day, A. Grove

Dybwad, Gay Leon and Bliss, Joy Vernelle

Fell, Derek

Gemmill, Helen Hartman

Grobel, Lawrence

Groseclose, David A.

Hayes, John P.

Kings, John

Latham, Harold S.

MacReynolds, George

James Mastrich, Yvonne Warren, and George Kline

McNealy, Terry A.

Mead, Margaret

Mercer, Henry Chapman

Piercy, LaRue W.

Rajs, Jake

Reed, Cleota

Roberts, F.X., and C.D. Rhine

Schiddel, Edmund

Severson, Marilyn S.

Shaddinger, Anna E.

Silverman, Herman

Sue, Eug[e`]ne

Toomer, Nathan Jean

Uys, Errol Lincoln

Vavra, Robert

Wister, Owen

CHAPTER 5 CHRONOLOGY

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated Laurel Grace Baker,

Connor Bryce Baker, Chloe Anita Knoll,

Victoria Helene Knoll, Charles Randolph Knoll,

and Maecie Naughton.

PREFACE

This book is meant as a reference for Michener readers, fans, and those of you who might just wonder who he was.

The first part of the book places Michener in relation to the Bucks County environment in which he spent his childhood and some of his later years. John Hayes, describes Michener as an enigma in his biography. Michener is full of hidden meanings. I spent years trying to locate and solve the puzzles. I think I shed some light on the answers to the riddles.

The second part of the book consists of noncritical thoughts of each of Michener’s books in chronological order. Michener’s chapter lists are included.

The third part of the book is places arranged in alphabetical order.

The fourth part of this book is devoted to Michener source material arranged alphabetically and is meant to lead readers to interesting related material.

For those who wish to make a short dip into Michener, I suggest the romantic novel Sayonara (243 pages) or the adventure novel The Bridges of Toko-Ri (146 pages). Make Michener your tour guide—read Hawaii on the plane to Hawaii.

Christmas Eve 1994 I had an odd, but memorable nightmare. I dreamed I was typing. My skin began to tingle, as if a magnet were pulling at its hairs. Suddenly a force grabbed my forearms and made me type at his will. Why me? I asked this ghost. Because you can type. It was the voice of an old man that I’d heard before. It was the voice of James Michener giving me my marching orders.

Michener’s life spanned the twentieth century. He was born just after it opened, and he died just before it closed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For conversation, argument, information, and tours of Henry Mercer’s castles and the Michener Art Museum, I thank: David April, Site Administrator, Fonthill; Cory Amsler, Curator, Mercer Museum and Fonthill; Aspen Writers’ Foundation; Roiann Baird, James A. Michener Endowed Archivist, James A. Michener Library, UNCO; William E. Brown, Coral Gables; Bucks County Library; Beth Collins, Swarthmore College; Ed Cowman, President, James A. Michener Society; George C. Davis; Douglas Dolan; G. L. Dybwad and Joy Vernelle Bliss of The Book Stops Here in Albuquerque; Linda F. Dyke; Derek Fell; Jeff Flannery, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division; Edwin Lou Fleck; Dr. Bruce Fretz; Barry Gerjardt; Lawrence Grobel, author of Talking with Michener; David A. Groseclose; Barry Gerhardt (Moravian Tile Works); Helen Gemmill Hartman (deceased); John Hayes; John Hirsch; Jean Salwen; Ann and William Kleinsasser, author of Splendid Torch; Amy Kwei; Robert Machesney (Macmillan) and Dr. Elizabeth James (Macmillan); Eve Measner; Linda Milaner, Michener Art Museum; Jim Moske, Manuscripts Specialist, New York Public Library; Mary Jane Myers; Frank X. Roberts, reference librarian, literature, Professor of Library Science, UNCO; Herman Silverman; John Kings; Libraries that sent inter-library loans (Mesa County Library, Durango Public Library, Denver Public Library); Mary Linscome, University Archivist, James A. Michener Library, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley; Michener Art Museum (Linda and Birgitta H. Bond); Helen Palmer, Pitkin County Library; Barbara G. Reilly, Register of Wills, and Sue Yahrling, Tax Mapping, Bucks County Courthouse, Doylestown Bucks County Courthouse, Doylestown; Cleota Reed; Charles D. Rhine (science and reference librarian, Professor of Library Science, UNCO); Willis M. Rivinus; Mary Shively; Beverly Spicer, Austin; Spruance Library (Donna Humphrey, Betsy Smith); Lester Trauch (deceased) ¹; Lynn Taylor, architect; Mike Zoglio, Tower Hill Press, book publishing and packaging consultants; Stevie Wooten (Starquest Expeditions, Around the World with National Geographic, for tip about Aggie Grey); Errol Lincoln Uys (author of Brazil and essay on Working with Michener on Covenant); fellow explorer and Michener fan, Dick Boera; for legal advice Ms. Kyra Knoll.

CHAPTER 1

THE WORLD IS MY BUCKS COUNTY

This book is nonfiction. While accuracy is a legitimate academic standard, when it comes to fiction, it can miss the point, a point made in particular by James Michener in Return to Paradise. Sometimes a fictional story can capture a time and place and people in a way that a straightforward telling of the facts cannot.

Michener wrote both fiction and nonfiction. In one book, Return to Paradise, he alternates the two. This is a key to Michener. He understood both fact and fantasy, and he blended them effectively.

What I have chosen to include here are tidbits that I think probably influenced Michener in some way and that, obviously, captured my interest during my research. An author’s work is of value not only for what he intended, but for what the reader gets from the work, which depends as much on the reader as on the author.

Michener’s Hawaii was the first long book I read. I wrote a book report on it in Miss Hartley’s English class (now she’s Mrs. Wallis in Berea, Ohio) when I was a junior at Broomfield High School in Colorado. At that time, in 1960, I had no idea how my own path would cross and recross that of Mr. Michener. My small feet followed Michener’s seven league boots. I went to the University of Colorado in Boulder from 1962-1966; he taught in Greeley, Colorado. I earned my Ph.D. in Austin, Texas, in 1971; Michener spent his last years in Austin. I lived in Rockville, Maryland, while I was a postdoctoral fellow at NIH; Michener wrote about the Chesapeake. I moved to Philadelphia and later to Solebury in Bucks County; Michener began his life in Doylestown and Bucks County and was there during some of his later years. I live in Maui parts of the year. My daughter went to Michener’s alma mater, Swarthmore College. In 2008 I flew around the world and stopped at Apia, Samoa. Wherever I went, he was there before me.

When I wrote that book report circa 1964, Michener was an invisible figure. There was only the book, Hawaii. Since then I learned that I shared with him a love of research and a writing experience. I, too, published books and played with words. I have written nonfiction (four published books under the name I used in academia, Sue Binkley), fiction (half a dozen novels), short stories, poetry, grants, scientific papers, and even a historical fiction novel. My own writing experiences give me insight into the ways that writers play with words and interact with their environments that I can use in discussing another writer. Now Michener seems like an old friend, my teacher, and my intellectual father.

When I received my first James A. Michener Society Newsletter, I was pleased to see a picture of James wearing a bandana and holding a straw hat from the Centennial days. There were other pictures, but most were of old men. The articles were by men and Michener’s biographers are men. Michener, though, liked girls, had three wives, and wrote with sensitivity and love about women and their contributions. I think that the sexual lopsidedness explains why some of the writings about Michener are a little dull. Where they see only an old man (like themselves?), I see a young man, the man full of exuberance and adventure.

Do not miss Michener the creator. Michener did not write history books. He wrote fiction. History was a tool. One of his last books was not titled The History. It was titled The Novel. Novelists may use facts, but they live with their words and in their imaginations.

Bucks County

Michener’s books always tell us about the geography. Michener himself had his own geography.

Buck’s County, Pennsylvania, was Michener’s childhood land and it provides the basic geography for Michener’s larger view of the world. Michener’s autobiography is named The World is My Home, but I think it could well have been given the title, The World is My Bucks County. The places, people, and stories told by Michener, wherever they are set, have links to Bucks County.

The county is north of Philadelphia and roughly rectangular. Its eastern boundary is the Delaware River. In the county seat, Doylestown, Michener lived in eight houses. The last of them is now a Dairy Queen.

I have my own geography with an amazing amount of overlap with Michener. I lived in Bucks County in the township of Solebury in the 1980s and 1990s. When I researched the previous ownership of the land, I made the eerie discovery that it might be land once owned by Michener’s maternal Grandmother, Mrs. Robert Haddock, mother of Mabel Michener.² My contemporary home was on the gray gravel road that followed Cuttalossa Creek which winds its way through a valley of skunk cabbage and jewelweed under a pointed cathedral arch formed by the oak and tulip poplar trees. It is a place of four seasons.

Summer in Solebury is thick with fireflies and all the imaginable colors of green. Rolling fields of corn are interplanted with sunflowers whose huge heavy heads faithfully turn in unison to follow the sun. Between the fields, golden afternoons light patches of forests of hemlock and tulip trees. In June, native rhododendrons bloom along the creeks and rivers.

Fall is a riot of yellow and orange and red and fields dotted with orange pumpkins. Pungent smoke rises from burning leaves and harvest moons are orange as the pumpkins.

Winter has mauve sunsets behind a spidery lace of bare deciduous trees. The shiny, banana-shaped, rhododendron leaves curl and droop vertically. Snow falls. Thin plates of gray ice form on the smaller creeks and ponds. Ice storms encase every branch in a quarter inch of clear crystal.

Spring is a procession of blooming bulbs beginning in March with the snowdrops and crocuses. The daffodils are usually beaten down by a late snowfall. The tulips are splendid but are a favorite food of the Virginia white-tailed deer. Red columbine inhabit crevices along the Delaware cliffs. A twenty-five foot diameter patch of lilies of the valley in my woods bloomed every second week of May.

When I lived in Solebury, Virginia white-tailed deer slept in my yard. Iridescent black wild turkeys peered in the window of my writing room. I fed sunflower and thistle seeds to squirrels, cardinals, blue jays, American goldfinches, juncoes, chickadees, and titmice.

Sadly, from my point of view anyway, Solebury Township, like the rest of Bucks County, is rapidly being replanted with housing developments.

During 1996 and 1997 I explored Michener’s haunts in the vicinity of Doylestown. There are three Mercer buildings. A pair of canals bookends the Delaware River. At the time I lived in Solebury one could canoe on the canal on the New Jersey side of the Delaware, and one could ride mule drawn barges from New Hope in the canal on the Pennsylvania side. I hear that the canals have been damaged by flooding.

Bucks county has a castle and a prince.

Prehistory

Many of Michener’s books begin in prehistory. So, what is the prehistory of Bucks County?

The valleys were shaped by water erosion and glaciation and glacial ice melt. 150,000 years ago the Illinoian glacial stage penetrated Bucks County near Riegelsville. 10,000 and 67,000 years ago, valley terraces were formed from the Wisconsin glacial stage. The Reading Prong of metamorphic, igneous, and sedimentary rock made ridges and hills rising to hundreds of feet above mean sea level. Rattlesnake Hill in Durham Township grew to 460 feet. To the North there was the Triassaic Border Fault line. There were small earthquakes. The dirt was highly erodable, a silt loam, and it was later to be considered prime farmland.

The hills were forests then—rosebay rhododendron, Norway maple, Chinese chestnut, hackberry, white ash, ginkgo, black walnut, red cedar, tulip-poplar, umbrella magnolia, sour gum, sycamore, white and pin and chestnut oaks, and hemlock. The river is now called the Delaware but was known to the Indians as the Lenapewihittukthe. It flows into Delaware Bay where the horseshoe crabs lay their eggs on Reed’s beach and joins the Atlantic ocean at Cape May.

Lenape Indians

Many of Michener’s books begin with stories of the natives that lived on the land before history was recorded. The irony is that the Indians are gone from his home in Bucks County, despite considerable interest in their artifacts.

The Indians³ of Bucks County were the Lenape Indians.⁴ They were also called the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians or Munsees. Their name means Original People or Real People and has been translated We The People. Their territory stretched from the Hudson River to the Delaware Valley, Lenapehoking.

They lived in wigwams. They hunted wild turkeys and deer with bow and arrow and fished for shad and sturgeon. They gathered nuts and berries. They were the children of the corn—they planted maize (corn). A meal was hominy (ground corn), smoke dried fish, squash, and beans. Many of their things were made from elk and deer hide that did not survive. They wore leggings, wrap around skirts, and belts. They had dugout canoes. The lasting traces of their presence are few—arrowheads ploughed up by farmers, a stone ax, and a stone last for making moccasins. They made some pottery by using coils or pressing clay into gourd molds. They scratched geometric designs and faces onto the pots and fired them in pits. Wampum beads were made using European steel awls. White beads were fashioned from the white shell of clams or whelks, black beads from the hard thick purple part of shells. The beads were woven into belts on which a diamond symbol worked in white beads symbolized the peaceful council fire. I saw no Indian descendants in Bucks County, for there were none to see, though I fancied the mounds in my yard might hold their bones.

A story told by William J. Buck, that may be nonsense, was about a little Lenape girl from an Indian Town named Quatilosee in Solebury Township that was still in place June 11, 1705. The town had gardens, round wigwams (tepees, teepees), and long houses covered with grass and bark.⁵ The townfolk used periwinkle shells, which are plentiful on New Jersey beaches, strung on strings for money. The little girl might have had a pouch worked in tiny shell beads—white, turquoise, yellow, rust, black—and in it she might have had an Ohtas, a Doll being, a doll with a face made of red clay, a doll that represented a spirit with healing powers. The story holds that the little girl fell into Cuttalossa Creek. The creek’s name (variously spelled) was said to derive from the mother calling her name, Quatie, and wailing her loss. Over a year later, a corpse was found near Indian Rock. If you visited today, you would probably eat dinner at the Cuttalossa Inn, where Cuttalossa creek drops over a fall to join the Delaware River. And where did I live? I lived on Cuttalossa Creek.

Of particular interest is the text of the Walum Olum. The Walum Olum is supposed to be a translation of the Indian’s text. The Great Spirit, or Creator, was Kishelemukong, who imagined a great tortoise out of the ocean. The turtle ate and ate and became the land. A tree grew on its back. The tree bore fruit. The fruit were men and women. A woman fell on the back of a turtle. Her daughter, virgin Dawn, bore twin sons, and became Day. The light Good Son named Sapling born between her legs became the Creator. The dark, barren, destructive twin Flint came from her armpit. He killed his mother and she became Night. The south warm wind was the grandmother; the winds from east, west, and north were grandfathers. Weather was a game of chance—spring arrived when grandma won. The Walam Olum, or Red Score, was translated by Rafinesque and published in 1836.⁶

Exposure of the Lenapes to Europeans that they called salty people⁷ began with an Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazana, in 1524 and in 1609 with Henry Hudson.⁸ Wars, alcohol, and diseases demolished the Lenapes in the 1600s. Moravian missionaries converted some of the Indians to Christianity and named them by their matrilineages: Unamis of the Turtle clan, Wunalachticos of the seacoast turkey Clan, stone country Monsees or People of the Minisink of the Wolf clan. The reason I saw no Indians during my years in Bucks County was that the Lenapes relocated to reserves in Ontario, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. The last of them was Peg Tuckemony who made baskets until her death in 1828.⁹ The Indians’ linguistic family is