Journey (28 page)

It was enchanting material, just the kind of story I had been seeking upon which to construct a Canadian narrative, which would keep my novel about Alaska from being narrowly parochial. It had reverberating overtones, provided correctives to standard accounts, and opened my eyes to the complex role western Canada had played in the gold rush. It was tantalizingly brief, only thirteen pages, but I shall ever be thankful to Berton for including that short glimpse in his book, for had he not alerted me to the Edmonton mania, I might have missed it completely. No other book I used had mentioned it.

However, his material, good as it was, did not provide enough data for my purpose, so, utilizing all the research knowledge of some very fine librarians in Alaskan centers, particularly those of the state historical library in Juneau, I came finally upon a very brief note in a learned journal. It said that the Edmonton story had been told in fascinating detail in J. G. MacGregor's
Klondike Rush Through Edmonton 1897–1898
, and it was obvious that it must hold the very material I sought. Telex calls were spread afar, and when after some days I had received no response, I concluded that the MacGregor book must have been privately printed and that no copies were going to be available. But some time later, the postman arrived with a parcel from a library in a distant city, and when I opened it, there in my hands lay the one book I needed to complete my Canadian research.

This is, I think, an almost perfect example of two aspects of writing: the necessity for a serious writer to keep following even the most tenuous thread, the slightest hint that somewhere in a distant library
a book will be hiding that provides all the information he seeks; more important is the other side of this coin, that anyone who writes anything pertaining to human knowledge must, to complete the task, lodge that material in some library or archival center.

In my writing life I have worked on some of the most arcane subjects, topics on which one would gamble that no one had previously written anything, but with enough searching I have invariably come up with something, and most often with a full-length, well-written work like the MacGregor on Edmonton. I have found that many nineteenth-century English clergymen stuck away in far corners of the world with nothing much to do wrote some of the most valuable books in an amateur style, reporting on their hobbies such as travel or archaeology or the history of strange nations and tribes. German professional scholars, too, have been remarkably far-ranging.

From repeated experience I can confidently state that I doubt if anyone can devise a subject of even the slightest significance but that someone previously has written a substantial book upon it. The accumulation of usable knowledge in this world is staggering, and with the new computerized indexes, even the most fugitive document can be tracked down.

The value of my two books on Edmonton was demonstrated when two professional readers of the
Alaska
manuscript protested my having characters die of scurvy:

Ridiculous. A full century earlier James Cook had demonstrated an absolute cure for scurvy. Surely, seasoned explorers like Lord Luton and Harry Carpenter would know how to prevent it?

Browbeaten and afraid that I had misconstrued something I might have read too hastily, I went back to Berton and found this passage:

Wind City lay on Wind River, and here were camped fifty or sixty men, three quarters of whom suffered terribly from scurvy. When gangrene set in, their toes were cut off with hacksaws; and when they died, their corpses were stuffed down the empty mine shafts….The death toll reflected the internationalism of the camp. On November 30 a man from Chicago died of scurvy; on December 13 a Frenchman died of scurvy; in early January two Dutchmen died of scurvy.

Rarely does one settle an argument so conclusively. Of course my English travelers would have known how to prevent scurvy, and during their first long winter in the arctic, with adequate food, they handled the problem easily. But this was the second winter, and a terrible one it was, with most adventurers penned up in tiny cabins without adequate food or medicine, and scurvy wiped them out.

The MacGregor book was a treasure house of historical information on Edmonton's role in the gold rush, and when I finished my first delighted reading, I saw that the actual men and women who trekked through Edmonton in those days provided such a wealth of character and incident that I was free to construct my group of men heading for Dawson as arbitrarily as I wished. Nothing I could invent would seem preposterous after one read what real people were doing in those wild days.

And here I reminded myself of a curious rule governing writers. We are advised by our lawyers not to read any books of fiction dealing with the subject at hand, because a work of fiction is the exclusive property of the author who invented it and to borrow from it is plagiarism, but the writer is free to refer to scholarly nonfiction research if he acknowledges the source, for it is considered an addition to the general reservoir of human knowledge. I had an amusing experience with this concept some years ago. Readers began writing to me, pointing out that an extremely popular novel had used whole pages from one of my novels, and when a major magazine printed excerpts side by side, the similarity was clear and something had to be done.

But now a curious impasse developed, because Publisher A is very loath to cause trouble for Publisher B about unauthorized borrowing from a work of fiction, because next week A might want to borrow legitimately from B, so lawsuits are avoided. In this case my publisher did complain quietly to the publisher of the offending book, and after some time received a letter of explanation, which deserves to go into the history of publishing as the best possible response to such charges:

My client denies that she has ever heard of Mr. Michener as a writer, or ever read one of his books, or knew in any way that he had written on this subject. But since the similarity between the two excerpts is undeniable, we can only conclude
that both writers borrowed from the same original source, which we have been unable to identify.

Hoping that I might be able to devise a group of five interesting male characters to make the run from Edmonton to Dawson, I hit upon the idea of a group of four interrelated men of London's aristocracy and an Irish servant, and the more I worked with them, the better I liked them. From time to time I regretted that they were not all Canadians, but my knowledge of Canadian family life was too limited to permit that; I had done graduate work at a British university and had personally known moderately well the kinds of men I wished to depict. Besides, the geographical settings would be Canadian, some of the most striking in the world, and my Britons would encounter Canadians on their journey.

Very early in my planning I decided for two reasons that my five men would approach the gold fields by the Mackenzie River route. The overland route from Edmonton to Dawson was so terrible and so impenetrable that my characters would simply be bogged down in tragedy from start to finish, a grinding, grueling, step-by-step descent into oblivion, and I did not wish to write that kind of story. Equally important was the fact that I had conceived a deep interest in the Mackenzie River system, and although I had not traveled upon it myself, I had flown over great stretches of it and had read many accounts of its discovery and exploration. It is a majestic river and one admirably suited to what I wanted to say. Once I focused my thinking, I discarded all other options. My tale would be an evocation of this great, formless, wandering river as it heads for the arctic.

The three components of my Canadian narrative were now firmed: a river I respected, a historical incident of some magnitude, and five characters I understood and liked. With such material a writer is in luck. Holed up in a log cabin in Sitka, Alaska, I wrote diligently for several months, trying to knock my story on the gold rush into proper form, and as I toiled through one version after another, the segment that constantly pleased me was the one on the journey of this group of Britons down the Mackenzie River. I liked my five men increasingly and shared their trials with them. Tears came to my eyes as certain incidents devastated them and me, and I had an amazingly clear picture of the survivors: the Irish ghillie who would become a major character in the remaining portions of
Alaska
,
and the nobleman who would become an aide to Lloyd George during the 1914–1918 war.

—

A manuscript is a subtle affair, and long ones such as those I most often write need to be carefully constructed; components that appear in an early episode are established there to be put to effective use in the latter part of the book, and incidents which seem almost irrelevant may have considerable meaning because they create values which become important later.

I do not mean by this the use of contrived clues, as in a detective story. I mean the inherent components of storytelling, whose proper use is so essential in establishing style and winning reader confidence and participation. And I mean particularly the phenomenon of resonance.

The classic example of resonance used with maximum effectiveness is prepared in one of the early scenes in
Anna Karenina
when in a railway station Anna notices the workman tapping the wheel of the engine with his hammer to ensure the train's safety, a presage of the climactic scene in which she will commit suicide under these wheels.

Almost any component of a narrative, adroitly used, can produce resonance. A novel is an interwoven series of freighted words and images, of characters who behave in certain ways, of a physical setting which carries its own unique identification, and of important incidents in the latter part of the narrative which can be strengthened, or foreshadowed, by comparable incidents that have occurred earlier. I try constantly to introduce words, phrases, incidents and meanings in one part of the narrative so that when they reappear later they will do so with intensified significance. One of the joys of reading is the friendly recognition of these resonances.

Resonance occurs, to the great advantage of any narrative, when the reader comes upon a phrase, a complete thought, a character or an incident with which he or she is already familiar. The reader then enjoys the pleasure of recognition or the thrill of renewed acquaintance or can admire the aptness of the passage. Classical composers of longer musical works relied on this device, Richard Wagner and César Franck with heavy obviousness, Ludwig van Beethoven and Giuseppe Verdi more subtly. Certain novelists use the tactic with marvelous skill—Honoré de Balzac to name one—and few readers
seem to be aware of the extraordinary flood of coincidence in Boris Pasternak's exquisitely crafted
Dr. Zhivago
. Any young writers who are afraid of utilizing coincidence lest they be hit with the famous criticism “He jerks the long arm of coincidence right out of its socket” should read Pasternak and take comfort.

I have thought of my novels as seamless webs which could start anywhere, end anywhere, and that, I suppose, is why some have felt that my concluding chapters are unsatisfying. The criticism is justified. I do not tie loose strings together; I do not want to imitate certain composers of symphonies who start to end their music some four or five minutes early and proceed with a noisy series of crescent-does until they finish with a titanic bang. I prefer to have my novels wind down at exactly the same pace I used in starting them, as if to let the reader know that the basic situation goes on and on, and since it can't all be of maximum intensity, I am forced to stop my orchestra somewhere.

—

When I had finished writing the gold-rush episode in
Alaska
, having edited and cut certain portions that ran too long, I was happy with the result and judged that I had at least brought Canada into the narrative as I had hoped to do. As well, I had introduced certain events in this section of the novel that had been carefully foreshadowed by earlier events or that would be paralleled later in the narrative. But when my New York editor and I began discussing the finished manuscript, he urged me to consider cutting the Canadian segment. For the reader to appreciate why, several important facts about professional writing and publishing must be told because they pertain to the nature of creative work and the editorial process.

First, any publisher who has been in business a long time has acquired a wealth of knowledge about the pitfalls of writing. His editors may not themselves be able to write successful novels, but they can spot with uncanny skill defects in their authors' work. Sensible writers listen to cautions voiced by their publishers, as expressed through their editors; the writers may not accept everything said, but they do weigh it carefully. So when I was warned that the Canadian material was not in the best interests of my Alaskan story, I had to pay heed.

Second, there are writers, and some of the best, who, when they submit a manuscript, tell the publisher: “This is it. Print it,” and permit
no editorial work. There are others of equal merit who not only listen to critical opinion but seek it, even altering their novels substantially if that seems desirable. I fall within the second group. Regardless of the debate as to which attitude is correct and produces the best results, I avidly seek criticism before the book is published. After it's in print I do not, because then it's too late, and I would not have released the book for publication if I hadn't liked it pretty much as it was.

Third, I had from the very start of my Alaska project a self-set determination to keep this novel noticeably shorter than some of my previous works, even though my readers have insisted through the years that my books end too soon. I felt obliged this time to keep the total pages to less than a thousand and, if possible, under nine hundred. I was therefore attentive when one reader warned:

There is a vast difference between a book of 1209 pages and one of 918. Both the critic and the general reader will comment negatively about the former and allow the latter to pass. The critic will cry: “Another thousand-page effort,” and in the bookstore the potential reader will heft the book and look at the last page and moan: “I can't read a thousand pages of anything.” In other words, the length of the book runs the risk of becoming the most important thing about it, and for a writer to allow that to happen, or even invite it to happen, is self-destructive.