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Chapter 11C
THE IMPORTANCE OF READING
Reading is Educating

I believe to a great extent that public relations, or call it publicity, is what create many writers. You have a good publicist and half the battle is won. How many good, unheard writers are out there and have never been read? That is the real tragedy. An artist at least has a visual he can hold up, the mirror lo his thoughts, and either you like what you see or you don’t. It’s much more difficult for the writer if it doesn’t do him good to hold up his book for all to see and ask if one likes it or not. I do not mean, however, that publicity is all that is needed to make a writer. The writer must have something to offer to begin with; he cannot be a hack hoping for recognition. Given the chance, it’s always possible the writer might be read without having done any publicizing but not likely, except for a handful of friends who might buy a copy. Nevertheless, that’s the rub, and I call it only by chance that they are read. Truman Capote fits into this category. Publicity created him.

Capote was not a prolific writer; compared to his contemporaries, he wrote little. But what he did write was well publicized, and much of that publicity came not from his written words but from the celebrated man-about-town that he was. Born in New Orleans, he was thought by some to be a Southern Gothic novelist. His novels, though very few, were Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), The Grass Harp (1951) and his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood (1966) that was made into a film the following year. His 1958 novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s was made into a movie and gave him both name and notoriety. Where credit is due, he did write short stories, “A Tree of Night” (1949) and two short stories that were adapted for television: “A Christmas Memory” (1956) and “The Thanksgiving Visitor” (1968). Capote knew how to cash in on publicity. Life played him up big when the magazine covered his million-dollar New York party which scores of Hollywood celebrities attended.

Not all writers have the need or the inclination to go out and seek publicity to sell their books. Hemingway never appeared on TV at a time when the blue tube was becoming popular. Nor did he do radio shows. You couldn’t hear him on Lux Radio Theatre, although actors like Orson Wells and James Stewart often portrayed his books on the air. Such appearances for him seemed totally out of character. For his Nobel Prize, he had someone else attend the ceremony and read his acceptance speech for him. I wondered about this, why he never went public at a time when television was becoming the vogue and talk shows were the latest thing. Hemingway would have made good copy, as they say in the media .. The reason, I believe after meeting him in Spain, was that he considered public appearances-television shows and radio talks-not his forte. He was a writer, not a performer, although he did fancy conversations in bars and restaurants with friends. He preferred not to be in the public limelight and let his publicists make a name for him. We know for a fact when F. Scott Fitzgerald pleaded with him to come to Hollywood and write for the movies he turned down Tinsel Town for his fishing boat and his finca in Cuba.

When my book At Home in Asia was reviewed, a critic noted that all but one of the dozen or so characters I wrote about had college educations. He inferred that I bad a chip on shoulder, that I myself didn’t have a college education, and wrote about rough and tumble types to illustrate that a college education is not important. That was not my point at all. At Home in Asia turned out the way it did without any conscious effort on my part to choose who had college degrees and who did not. I am not advocating that higher education is not necessary. My attending college did very little to advance my writing career, but it did force me to read books in a hurry-Ulysses by James Joyce, Animal Farm by George Orwell and The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams.

Gertrude Stein would have done well in television, but there were no blue tubes in Paris in her day. Still, without Steve Allan and Jack Parr parlaying her on the “Tonight Show” she did all right for herself. She advanced William James’ Principles of Psychology in his “stream of conscious thought” and changed literature forever. Many young writers became victims of this “stream of consciousness thought,” that literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, a kind of interior monologue. For me, it was important to understand “stream of consciousness thought,” but not to emulate it. Too many beginning writers have attempted to use the style but end up with confused, unintelligible sentences. The style was part of the modernist movement preached by Stein to her close group of followers in Paris in the early 20s. James Joyce mastered it in his epic Ulysses. Ernest Hemingway followed Gertrude Stein’s advice and used it in nearly all his novels. Further examples of the development of this style, which are important reading, are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote only a few novels compared to his contemporaries. But his The Great Gatsby is truly a masterpiece, a simple and straightforward tale. It’s a book I pick up from my shelf and begin reading pages at random. A book makes for good reading when you can do this, begin reading any page in a book, find it interesting and want to continue. The Great Gatsby can do that.

All good books have messages to tell-The Great Gatsby, An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. If I am going to read, I might as well read what is good and learn from what I read. There are no car chases or fire bomb explosions in these books nor in John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, but they are welcome reading nonetheless.

A writer from whom I learned a great deal was Thomas Wolfe. He is not to be confused with the flamboyant man in a white suit, Tom Wolfe. John Humphrey, the dean at a private school where I taught for a spell after college, turned me on to Thomas Wolfe. “You want to I learn to write, then read Thomas Wolfe,” he said and handed me You Can’t Go Home Again which he took down from the school library shelf. After I started reading the book I wondered how I had ever skipped reading his works. He taught me that to write I had to be observant, to keep my eyes open. Subject matter is not something in that far off city or over the horizon. It is everywhere around us, in the very same room in which we live. It is the duty of the writer to make that “something” obvious.

Wolfe wrote four mammoth, highly autobiographical novels which present a sweeping picture of American life. In 1929, under the rigorous editorial guidance of Maxwell Perkins, he published his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. After the appearance of its sequel, Of Time and the River (1935), he broke with Perkins and signed a contract with Harper & Brothers. Wolfe died at thirty-eight, from complications following pneumonia. Harper & Brothers arranged, from the material left at his death, two novels-The Web and the Rock (1939) and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940)-and a volume of stories and fragments, The Hills Beyond (1941). Wolfe’s other publications include From Death to Morning (1935), a collection of short stories; and The Story of a Novel (1936) a record of how he wrote his second book. I found inspiration in all his books.

Another author who had a great influence on me is Jack London, and he too, like Thomas Wolfe, died at a young age, forty-one, but he did manage to tum out fifty-five novels in less than twenty years. London was a self-made writer, and there’s no question about it-he wrote for money. He wanted a yacht to sail the South Sea, and he wanted a big house and the finest horse and carriage money could buy, and he got everything he wanted, by working hard at his writing. He had to tum out books to

pay for his toys, but one thing you cannot say about Jack London is that he was a hack writer. He put his full, ear• nest effort into his work. He labored over every word no matter how hard his creditors pounded on his door. He wrote from the heart.

London had very little formal education and taught himself to write by emulating the masters. He tells it all in his semi-autobiographical novel, Martin Eden. As I mentioned previously, when I first read The Cruise of the Snark as a kid on the farm, I was enraptured. After I had built my schooner Third Sea and was in Hawaii planning my voyage to the South Seas, I had in mind to sail from Hawaii to the Marquesas which I did. London had influenced me and I didn’t even know it. This is what I meant when I said when you read a book it becomes a part of you.

For books about the sea, there is no master like Joseph Conrad. People like to compare him to Somerset Maugham. There is no comparison. Maugham was a master at vivifying those people he met on his travels, civil servants and district officers, snobs and high society socialites. But when it came to capturing the feeling of the sea, he fell short. Perhaps because when he sailed the seas, it was aboard ocean liners upon which he spent his leisure at the bar or else reclining in a deck chair. Conrad served as a seaman before the mast, and you can feel it when you read his seafaring books-Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and certainly Lord Jim. In my opinion, Lord Jim is his finest novel. I never tire of re-reading it.

Another great master writer of the sea was Herman Melville. Like Conrad, he was a seaman who served before the mast. Imagine the impact his novel Moby Dick had on me when I read the book while laying on a cabin top aboard a trading schooner sailing the Pacific. Had a whale appeared, I would have been first to jump into a longboat and go after him with a harpoon in hand.

I hold two other Melville books to be equally as important as Moby Dick, especially for those interested in the history of the Pacific. One is his fictionalized travel narrative called Typee. It’s an account of his stay with cannibals in the Marquesas Islands. Another is his sequel to Typee, one titled Omoo, based on his adventures in the Polynesian Islands. It’s an excellent account of early Tahiti when the island was still in the hands of the British before the crown sold out to the French. Few people, I imagine, have read Omoo.

I enjoy most seeking out and delving into the works of forgotten writers of the South Pacific. One such writer was Louis Beck. He penned some wonderful short stories that are right up there with the classics. Another is Captain James Cook, not that he’s forgotten, but few people ever read Narrative of the Voyages Round the World in six volumes. Voyages are helpful for the writer interested in history. I use these well-worn books of mine for references. The writing is archaic but the descriptions of the islands and the people are excellent. If you want to know what the natives ate and how they dressed, or didn’t dress, two hundred years ago these are the books. Also from the pages of Narrative I found some reference which changed my entire thinking about the migration of the Pacific islanders. In the text, they appear a in significant references but they pack a wallop.

A writer of Pacific lore who truly captured my heart was Robert Dean Frisbie. An American, Frisbie moved to Puka Puka atoll in the remote Cook Islands in 1924 to become a storekeeper and to seek isolation from his post-World War I trauma. I often wonder what he might think of our civilization were he alive today. Nevertheless, his island Puka Puka is still very remote and difficult to reach, even in our modem day. Frisbie fell in love with an island girl, married her, and they had three children. His wife died while she was still in her teens and, refusing to abandon his children, he raised them alone. He turned to writing and immortalized Puka Puka in his books The Book of Puka Puka and The Island of Desire.

I learned about Frisbie when I read James Michener’s Return to Paradise. After reading about this incredible guy, I had to find his books. When I did, it was a great discovery. The Book of Puka Puka is one of my favorite books. Amazon.com has original copies for sale starting at $1,500. Frisbie’s daughter, Johnny Whiskey Frisbie, has written a delightful book about growing up in the islands with her father. It’s a book packed with emotion and feeling.

When I launched my schooner Third Sea and entered the Pacific, the two places I wanted to visit were Puka Puka and Suvarov. Puka Puka was where Frisbie fell in love with his island sweetheart, and Suvarov was the island to which he fled with his children after his young wife had died. It was here in Suvarov that Frisbie and his children survived a full-blown hurricane by tying themselves in the high branches of an Ironwood tree. In Return to Paradise, Michener tells how he met Frisbie on Tongareva. Frisbie was dying of consumption. Michener managed to get him to a hospital in American Samoa by arranging passage for him aboard a Navy PBY seaplane.

I made Tongareva an island stop on several of my voyages across the Pacific. Captain Andy Thompson, the trading boat skipper who carried Frisbie to Puka Puka, had a wooden frame house on Tongareva where he lived part of the year during the hurricane season. The island has a safe, well-protected lagoon from tropical storms, The islanders allowed me to enter Andy’s house, and still on shelves was Andy’s vast collection of books, many autographed by James Hall and James Nordoff. There was one, autographed, by Robert Dean Frisbie, The Book of Puka Puka. The tragedy was the next time I went to Tongareva, years later, I found all Andy’s books in ruin, eaten by white ants.

One writer whose books have truly captured the South Pacific is James Michener. During his lifetime his novels sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide. He had but two literary awards. In 1948, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Tales of the South Pacific, and on January 10, 1977, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Gerald R. Ford. No Nobel, but his books on the South Pacific are some of the finest books ever written on the Pacific. I read his Return to Paradise and I realized no one can ever write an equal. I feel much the same when I read his Tales of the South Pacific, and see the movie South Pacific. I never tire of seeing the movie over and over. Michener captured the heart and very soul of the Pacific. Earlier, I mentioned his novel Hawaii. It is a masterpiece and is so well written that it documents the history of the Pacific islanders. It has been taken for gospel.

When it comes down to reading, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s comment: “The most common form of diversion is reading. In that vast and varied field millions find their mental comfort.”

It is the duty of writers, indeed, to give people that comfort.

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Chapter 11B
THE IMPORTANCE OF READING
Learning Never Stops

In Paris, I had another wakening. My education was slow and painful. From security guard I was assigned to be the orderly for Ambassador Jefferson Caffery. From this experience, years later, I wrote a novel The Tower & The River. Although it was fiction some of it was based on my acquaintance with the ambassador. During lulls in the business day, when life for Ambassador Caffery became boring, he would call me into his office and have his secretary bring us coffee, which she wasn’t too happy doing. Nevertheless, she did as ordered. I was the ambassador’s kind of sounding board. He wanted to know what was happening around Paris. He wanted to know where I hung out at night and on weekends, the bars I visited, the restaurants where I ate. He wanted to know about the people I met, the women I dated. I realized he was living vicariously through me. I told him about a Paris he was no longer a part of, nor could ever be again. Aside from being his orderly, I served as his bodyguard when he traveled. We made frequent trips around France. One such trip was a visit to the American Consulate in Cannes. With time to spare, the ambassador wanted to visit the old medieval castle at Aigues-Mortes, We went by embassy car. While there, we had dinner in a dusty restaurant in the basement of the castle. The pleased management, happy to have the American Ambassador dine in their restaurant, brought some very fine and rare bottles of Cognac from the wine cellar. Unfortunately in those years I didn’t have what you might call an “educated palate” and, like a good Marine, drank imply to be sociable. Beer and whisky were the same. Wine was either for winos or snobs. But this time with the ambassador, I held my own, drinking like a connoisseur. On about our fifth glass of Cognac, the ambassador looked at me and said, “Stephens, are you happy with your work?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “This is an honor.”

He looked at me eye-to-eye directly across the table.

“Hogwash,” he said, and I was speechless for a moment. He then continued, and what he now had to say really baffled me: “Would you not like to be me?”

What could I say? I was a sergeant in the US Marines, and he was the American ambassador to France, hardly equal peers. I smiled. Maybe he just had too many Cognacs. He continued: “The only thing that separates you from me is education.” He said little more after that, but he did have something in mind.

When we returned to Paris, Ambassador Caffery relieved me of most of my duties so that I could go to school. I took classes at the Sorbonne-French history and literature. Fortunately, in those days, there were so many GI’s going to school on the “GI Bill,” wearing their old field jackets with division patches on the sleeves and still wearing their clodhopper military boots, many classes were held in English. When I returned to America after my tour of duty in Paris, Ambassador Caffery got me an appointment to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He went on to be the U.S. Ambassador to Greece. Ironic, but again, this was another missed opportunity on my part. I did little to learn who this man was. Not so long ago a biographer, Kevin McCarthy, contacted me asking information about Jefferson Caffery. Kevin was writing a biography about Ambassador Caffery. Only when Kevin passed on bits of information to me did I realize what a great illustrious man Jefferson Caffery had been. Things that I had forgotten about him came back when the writer began probing me for information. I began to recall the ambassador explaining to me about the beauty of French architecture, and he would actually have the chauffeur stop the car to point out a particular facade on a building which he found interesting. Then there were the interesting anecdotes, like when he was a student in Paris in 1908, before automobiles, and to get around he had to travel by horse and carriage. Carriage drivers had to stop often, as required by law, to pick up their horse’s droppings. How much he could have told me had I listened.

At Georgetown, required reading were the classics like The Education of Henry Adams and George Orwell’s 1984. But my serious reading came after I graduated. I frown when I hear a college student saying he or she can’t wait until they graduate, when their studies will come to an end. What foolish thinking. Real studies, I learned, begin after college. I got through Georgetown in a record breaking two-and-a-half years by going to both day and night school. But my education was only beginning. College taught me what I had yet to learn. For a while after graduating, I took a job teaching at a junior college, which I enjoyed as the school had a great library with shelves of books from floor to ceiling.

I could do a lot of on-the-job reading. But as much as I liked my teaching job, I had been groomed for a career in the Foreign Service, and I was compelled to quit teaching and take up a government job in Washington. With my experience in China and my working with the American ambassador in Paris, I was assigned to the National Security Agency. This was not what I wanted in life-working behind closed doors, sealed off from the world, bound to a badge hanging on a chain around my neck. It was a prison badge with a mug shot and even a number like a condemned man gets when he goes to prison. More than losing my freedom, my desire to write burned strong, and it grew stronger every day. I had to break free, to get away. My wife agreed to a divorce, and I went to Tahiti to live and become a writer. I made sure there would be no turning back. I burned every bridge behind me. Tahiti was about as far away as I could get.

That was before Tahiti had an airport. Those who did arrive by air back then did so by flying boat, those wonderful old China Clippers, but not everyone could afford the fare. The other choice was to travel by freighter or by deck passage on a cargo boat. Having little money, I took a bus down through Central America to Panama and there boarded a Messagerie Maritime ship for passage across the Pacific to Tahiti. What a grand feeling. Here was the South Seas at last. Here was Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Nordoff and Hall, all coming alive. I no longer had a prison badge, nor like Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, an albatross around my neck. Now all I had to do was write, and read, read what I wanted to read, and read for as long as I wanted to read. I carried my Hermes typewriter, a camera, and for my reading pleasure, one hundred paperback books, all classics. To cut down weight, I tore off their covers.

As mentioned, a long time ago, I made the discovery that everything I wanted to know I could find in books. When I was a kid, I wanted to raise rabbits. I found a book in the library on raising rabbits, with everything from the size of a cage that was needed to rabbits’ mating habits. I found books on how to make bows and arrows, how to build an adobe house and how to skin an opossum without destroying the skin.

When I began building my schooner, a mammoth endeavor, the vessel being more than seventy-feet long it was books that got me through it. People would ask, rather sarcastically, “What do you know about building boats?”

My answer was simple-“I can read.”

Everything I needed to know was there somewhere in print. All I had to do was find it. Even information about such obscure and complicated things like dolphin strikers, whisker booms and futtock shrouds was available in books. Indeed, had I wanted to build a rocket to the moon, the information was there somewhere in books.

The reading has never stopped. When I built my schooner Third Sea I set up a library aboard with five hundred books, all references, histories and, of course, the classics from Stevenson to London. On one of my later Pacific crossings I signed aboard my nephew, Robert Stedman, as first mate. Robert had sailed the Pacific with me on a previous voyage, and now when he wrote to me and said he was dissatisfied with college, tired of debts and bills, tired of working for Saks Fifth Avenue in the men’s department selling neckties and shirts to get him through college, I cabled him stating that I needed a good first mate for the voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti and across the Pacific to Singapore. I didn’t have to ask him twice. He joined me aboard Third Sea a few days later in Honolulu, after selling his car and everything else he could sell, and after bidding his girlfriend goodbye. In the next nine months he read eighty-six books in the ship’s library, more than he ever would have read in college and even in graduate school. He got into the reading habit and now goes through a book or two a week. After the voyage, he turned to photography and writing and has a design studio in Singapore. He wrote a wonderful introduction to my book The Last Voyage, The Story of Schooner Third Sea.

I love going to libraries. I like to browse about, taking down book from the shelves, contemplating their contents before I even open their covers. What mystery, what store of knowledge do these books hold? Here on these shelves is all the wisdom of the human race, preserved forever in the written word. I scan the authors-historians, poets, philosophers, saints, scags, scientists, all whose thoughts dominate mind and spirit. I think of all the wonderful tales that these books have revealed to us, and all the wonderful tales there are yet to tell. As I stand in the library, looking up at the rows of books on shelves, I know I cannot read them all, that is for certain, and so I put them back on the shelves. Perhaps I don’t know what is in them, but I at least know where they are. I don’t get the same feeling when I look at a computer as I do when I look at a shelf of books in a library.

When it comes to reading, the question is what to read. What authors make the best teachers? I know some people who read voluminously, which we might think is admirable, but that’s not necessarily so. If these people read trash, then they have nothing to gain. Why read junk when there is so much good stuff available? Why read Valley of the Dolls when it could be The Great Gatsby? When getting into the reading habit, it’s just as easy to read good books, the great books, as it is to read dime novels.

Good reading training begins with short stories. Much can be gleaned from short stories. For a start, consider O. Henry. He was a prolific American short-story writer, a master of surprise endings. O. Henry was the pen name for William Sydney Porter. He was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, but he wrote mostly about New York City and life in the big city. One another marvelous short story writer that should not be by passed is Guy de Maupassant, a French author who is generally considered the greatest French short story writer of all time. Try to think up a plot for a short story with a surprising end in and you will probably find it comes from one of these two authors.

l will venture to say one of the greatest short stories ever written was “The Lottery” by American author Shirley Jackson. It’s been voted as one of the Twenty Great American Short Stories in the Library of American Literary Classics. “The Lottery” is a dark, unforgettable tale of the unthinking and murderous customs of a small New England town. Shirley Jackson is also the author of several American gothic novels such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House. Her atmospheric stories explore themes of psychological turmoil, isolation, and the inequity of fate.

At a very young age, I discovered William Saroyan. I liked his writing, and I liked the man for what he stood for. He wrote novels, plays, essays, short stories, biographies, everything. He is most famous for The Daring Young Man On The Flying Trapeze, The Human Comedy and The Time Of Your Life. I especially liked his short story about a boy who had never driven a car in his life but who took on the task of chauffeuring a car for a rich Cibawa Indian. For those who want to study dialogue, Saroyan is the author. Through dialogue alone he could move a story. In some stories, he ended each line of dialogue with “he said” or “she said.” He never used adjectives, only nouns and verbs. He was a master of style.

William Saroyan was more than a writer. He should serve as an inspiration to aspiring writers everywhere. He decided at the age of fifteen to become a writer, and he taught himself to write. He began by reading, and he learned to write entirely on his own. A few of his early short articles were published in The Overland Monthly. Many of his stories were based on his childhood experiences among the Armenian-American fruit growers of the San Joaquin Valley of central California, or else they dealt with the rootlessness of the immigrant. The short story collection My Name is Aram, an international best-seller, was about a young boy, Aram Garoghlanian, and the colorful characters of his immigrant family. Written years ago, I find it appropriate for today’s readers.

As a writer, Saroyan made his breakthrough in Story magazine with The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. The protagonist is a young, starving writer who tries to survive in a Depression-ridden society.

Among Saroyan’s best-known plays is The Time of Your Life, set in a waterfront saloon in San Francisco. It won a Pulitzer Prize. Saroyan refused the honor on the grounds that commerce should not judge the arts, but he accepted the New York Drama Critics Circle award. In 1948, the play was adapted into a film starring James Cagney.

Saroyan also published essays and memoirs in which he depicted the people he had met on travels in the Soviet Union and Europe, such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, and Charlie Chaplin. During World War II Saroyan joined the U.S. Army. He was stationed in Astoria, Queens, but he spent much of his time at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan, far from Army personnel. In 1942, he was posted to London as a part of a film unit and narrowly avoided a court martial when his novel, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946) turned out to be pacifist. “Everybody has got to die,” he had said, “but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Of all forms of writing-novels, essays, poetry, biographies, histories, short stories-I like writing short stories the best. There is more truth that I can write in short stories than I can in novels and certainly in biographies. Plots run wild though a writer’s mind continuously, or at least mine, and most of them come from real life experiences, I had no sooner completed Tales From the Pacific Rim, tales which I had begun gathering for ten years, than I began plotting my next collection from my every day thoughts. Sometimes I feel like Walter Mitty. Remember him, Walter Mitty, the fictional character in James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”? Walter goes through life in deep thought, to the annoyance of his wife, with his vivid fantasies. He imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. Unfortunately, the character’s name has come into more general use to refer to an ineffectual dreamer, and I hope I haven’t slipped into the same category. Nevertheless, dreaming is what creates writing. And I repeat, without dreaming, we wouldn’t have writing.

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Chapter 11A
THE IMPORTANCE OF READING
Start Early at Home

I had a sister four years older than me, and she was a genius. She could talk to animals. She had regular conversations with them, and she had them give answers to all the questions that I, an eight-year old wide-eyed boy, had to ask. Aside from being able to talk to animals, I marveled that she knew how to speak French and Spanish and she could communicate with witches and elves. She read to me every day, and I listened to her, and I believed her. What a marvelous advantage to have an older sister, or brother, who reads to you and turns you on to books and the mysteries of the written word.

At a very young age I found that a book is like food. You read it, you devour it, and it becomes part of your body. The contents become you, flesh, ‘bones and cells. It affects you in more than one way. It becomes part of every pore in your body. You can’t shake what you read. You can read something else, however, that may conflict with what you read earlier, something you wholly believed, but nevertheless that original thought remains there forever. As a kid, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books did that to me. I read his Tarzan of the Apes, and I was hooked. The story became real to me, and no one could say it wasn’t so. After reading the first book in the series, I devoured every one that followed-The Return of Tarzan, The Beasts of Tarzan, Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan and The Forbidden City, The Son of Tarzan and a dozen more. I tried to imagine the life of a boy growing up in the jungle, with only apes and wild beasts for friends to guide him. I built tree houses and made swings of vines. But I was discovering that Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books were more than fantasy. They were a study of anthropology, of human nature. Edgar Rice Burrough has stayed with me all my life.

The book Tarzan of the Apes may sound simple, even juvenile, but as a young lad, it fired up my mind and got me thinking. Still, I had to hide the fact from my peers that I was reading Tarzan. Many looked upon Tarzan as a comic book hero. But for me, he took on a real meaning. Could a boy raised by apes ever learn to walk on two feet? Even more uncertain, although he could talk with the apes, could he talk like a human being? Tarzan could. How did this happen? We have to understand his background. The ship that carried Tarzan’s mother and father was shipwrecked on the coast of Africa. His father was Lord Greystoke, and his wife was expecting a child, thus they were carrying children’s books and learners. Lord Greystoke and his wife were the sole survivors, and they were able to salvage much of their belongs. As castaways, Lord Greystoke built a cabin at the edge of the jungle. It was there that Tarzan was born. But his mother died in childbirth, and great apes that came upon the site killed his father. The apes carried the infant boy off into the jungle and raised him. When he was still a boy swinging through the trees be discovered his dead parent’s cabin and by studying the pictures in the books he taught himself to read and write. Was this possible, especially when he couldn’t talk? It was all so intriguing, and great food for thought. Today, I can’t look at a tree without thinking about a child swinging through its branches who could read and write but not talk.

Learning how to write without having read books would be like wanting to be a jockey in the Kentucky Derby and not knowing how to ride a horse or joining the high school swim team and not knowing how to swim. Wanting to write without reading is the same; they go hand in hand. A student can have the best teachers in the world, and study at the finest university, but unless he or she reads, it’s pointless to continue dreaming.

My sister kept the fire for reading burning even after I left home. When I was in the Marines serving overseas in the Pacific, she sent me books to read about the Pacific by Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. When she learned I was on my way to China, she sent appropriate ones, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth and several of the works of a Chinese writer/scholar named Lin Yutang. By getting me to read Lin Yutang, my sister developed my interest in philosophy. Lin Yutang, as did Pearl Buck, opened doors for me, and when I arrived in China with the Marines, I knew something about the country, the people, their habits and customs and their religion.

Books can do everything. I was always interested in sailing, even long before I ever saw the sea. In the libraries I found books on sailing. I read one book about three brothers who had a schooner and sailed the South Seas, and I longed to do the same. I vowed that I would one day, and then when I read Jack London’s Cruise of the Snark, I knew it was possible. London taught himself to sail. I could do the same. And later in life I did. These were wild ideas for a kid on a farm far from the sea, but without ideas, hopes and dreams, what do we have? Take away a man’s dreams and he becomes like an albatross without wings, a life without goals.

My reading in earnest began in Paris. After I returned to the States from China, and fearing the outside world, I signed up for another hitch in the Marines. The Marine Corps made a mistake, however. Instead of assigning me to a naval base or sending me to shipboard for duty, they shipped me to Paris as a security guard. Take the farm boy to Paris and things will happen. For me, it was my growing up period, my awakening. I went there as a young Marine, fresh from the battlefields of the Pacific. I was innocent. I always wanted to be a writer, that was true, but I had no idea where to begin. Like I said, I wanted to join the swim team, but I couldn’t swim. My education was limited, a ninth grade high school dropout. Now, like a miraculous flower opening up, Paris’ doors of learning opened up to me. It was exposure to the arts and the people who created them that did it. My awakening came when I met an old Marine Corps buddy from boot camp. His name was Van Beverly, and he was studying painting. A rough, tough former Marine studying to be an artist! Was he serious? He was most serious. He introduced me to the student world on the Left Bank. I saw what art meant to students who were serious. The lack of money was no hindrance to them, and I envied them.

Paris after the war was a great place to grow up. The unfortunate tragedy, and it didn’t became apparent until years later, was that I didn’t realize at the time how much was slipping through my fingers. I remember going into Harry’s New York bar one evening with another Marine from the embassy, Jack Walters. There was a bearded guy sitting at a table at the back of the bar. “Who’s he?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s some writer I suppose,” Jack replied.

The bartender spoke up. “He’s Ernest Hemingway. You don’t know him?”

“Yea, I heard the name,” Jack said, lying.

Andy, Harry’s son and bartender, pointed out other characters in the bar. Sitting in a booth in a comer was a Frenchman with thick glasses. “And who’s he?” we asked.

“Jean Paul Sartre, a philosopher and literary genius,” Andy answered.

And there were others, so many more, and I had the chance of meeting them but I didn’t.

As the years passed, and I got to know Andy better, we often joked about those days. And later, in Spain, I did get to meet Hemingway.

As I think back now, there was all this exposure I had in Paris, and I took little advantage of it. There was another writer, however, who didn’t pass up the opportunity of living in Paris. He, too, was a former Marine who had fought in the Pacific. His name was Art Buchwald. He was kind of loud and boisterous but a likeable sort of guy. It was fun being around him. You knew when he was coming through the door at Harry’s Bar even before you looked. He entered with a bang, a grin on his face and a joke ready to be told. He was the kind of guy that when he told a joke, you laughed even before he had finished it.

That was a long time ago, when the world was much different. Parisians then rode to their offices on bicycles, and they had yet to patch up the bullet holes in the Hotel de Crillon next to the American Embassy on the Place de la Concorde. The year was 1949, and the war was over, and we were all part of the grand experience of living in Paris, living in a nameless era between the Lost Generation (Paris in the ’20s) and the Beat Generation (Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury in the ’60s.)

I had met Art earlier that year at a dinner party at the home of Leonard Thornton, the district manager of TWA in Paris. Art was a humorist even then and kept everyone at dinner laughing with his antics. I have to admit, I envied him, for he had already launched his writing career in Paris with the Night Owl column while I only had hopes of becoming a writer. The difference was Art knew what he wanted, and went after it. At seventeen, Art had run away to join the Marine Corps and spent three-and-a-half years in the Pacific during World War II, attaining the rank of sergeant. After his discharge he entered the University of Southern California but dropped out in 1948 and went to France, where he landed a job as a correspondent for Variety just as his money was running out. A year later, when I met him, he began writing a column on speculation for The Paris Herald Tribune called “Paris After Dark.” It was an overnight success, and the Tribune hired him full time. Art Buchwald had made it, and we were all thrilled.

Now, with his name behind him, it was fun doing the haunts of Paris while he gathered bits and pieces for his column. There wasn’t a dive we didn’t know nor a jazz joint that passed our scrutiny. Then in 1951, Art started another column, “Mostly About People,” that featured interviews with celebrities in Paris. He was moving up the ladder. The next year, Paris Herald Tribune introduced him to U.S. readers through yet another column, “Europe’s Lighter Side.”

Paris in those day was good training ground for writers and artists, and Art was a part of it all. I regret I didn’t take more advantage of the times. The city was a magnet for Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Orwell, Hemingway and many more of the illuminati. As I mentioned, at Harry’s you could find Ernest Hemingway sitting on a stool and, if you found a seat next to him, he took the time to chat with you. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir sat in a corner, more standoff, but James Jones at the bar willingly talked about his latest chapter in From Here to Eternity. They all became Art Buchwald’s fraternity and they knew him by first name.

Art returned to the United States in 1962, and our two worlds parted. I put my writing on hold and started college. I met Art once at a party in Washington, D.C. at the home of the Travel Editor of the Washington Post, but that was the last time. But I could never forget him. He arrived in Washington at the height of the Kennedy administration, set himself up in an office two blocks from the White House and began a long career lampooning Washington’s elite.

Buchwald was a humorist to the end. He died of kidney failure at home, surrounded by family, nearly a year after he stunned them by rejecting medical treatments aimed at keeping him alive. He had been told by his doctors that his end was near. One would have to admit, he made the most of every last minute of his life. Instead of dying, he resumed his twice-weekly column and wrote Too Soon to Say Goodbye, a book about the experience. He worked book-signing parties in Washington and New York from his wheelchair.

Art lived another year and was eighty-one when he died. Paris, and certainly Washington, will never be the same without him. He was an inspiration for anyone who wants to write. We thought he was crazy when he gave up Paris, where he was known and respected, to move to Washington to start a new, uncertain career. But he knew what he wanted, and he went for it.

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Chapter 10C
The Price of Plagiarism

The price writers pay for deceiving and plagiarizing, and they pay sooner or later, is heavy. Kaavya Viswanathan knows. A teenage author, she made the best-selling list with her book How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, published by Little, Brown and Co, which signed her to a hefty two-book deal. Viswanathan’s book tells the story of Opal, a hard-driving teen who earns all A’s in high school but gets rejected from Harvard because she lacked social life, an INY League college prerequisite. The book was on the stands when Harvard Crimson reported Viswanathan’s book had similarities, citing seven passages, with Sloppy Firsts, a novel that Random House had published, written by Megan McCafferty, a former editor at Cosmopolitan and the author of two other novels.

When confronted with her misdeed, the seventeen year-old author created a plagiarizing storm when she admitted she had borrowed ‘language’ for her best-selling book, but that it was “unintentional and unconscious,” according to the New York Times. She said she had read books by Megan McCafferty who writes youth-oriented literature and is quite popular in high schools.

Vanessa Juarez of Entertainment Weekly posed the question: don’t publishers check facts? She called her article “Joining the Liar’s Club,” and she was writing about Margaret B Jones, the latest memoirist to be ousted as a fraud. In Love and Consequences Jones claimed to be a half-white, half-Native American girl who grew up in South Central LA running drugs for the Bloods. Her real name is Margaret Seltzer, and she went to an elite private school in North Hollywood. When Vanessa began querying publishers, Riverhead Books, the publisher of In Love and Consequences, declined to comment, but noted in a press release that it “relies on authors to tell us the truth.”

As a rule in the publishing business, all nonfiction authors sign contracts vouching their books are accurate, and books flagged as potentially libelous get legal vetting. But there’s more to it than said. Little, Brown and Company Editor-in-chief Geoff Shandler claims, “No publisher has the financial resources to mount a massive investigation of every single book before publication.” But another top industry executive says of Seltzer,: “Publishers, regardless still, have the responsibility for what they print.”

I am beginning to wonder about the public fascination for memoirs. Is it not the same for the popular TV reality shows. Both, it seems, allow us to peek into other people’s lives for the sole purpose of being entertained.

So why do writers steal? Other than being just plain lazy, we may have a deadline to keep and the pressure is on. We become desperate. Our editor is waiting. It happens. We snitch a story, or parts of one, which someone else had written and pass it on as yours. There is no excuse, but it happens. Let me confess what happened to me. As I said, it can happen to any of us.

I had just begun writing for Thai Airways as their travel correspondent, It was my first assignment and an important one. The airline was opening an international route to Bali. The management sent me ahead to write a series of six promotional stories on the island. I had to travel overland across Java and then take a ferry across a narrow and turbulent strait to reach Bali. It was a tough trip, but I was there when the first Thai Airways jet liner landed. It was an exciting moment. The airstrip then was quite short, and to insure a jet would stop in time, the pilot popped a parachute out the stern to bring the plane to a halt. I couldn’t write about that of course, but I did write about the culture, the arts, the music, the dance and anything else that would tell the public about this hardly known island. After a month, I returned to Bangkok, quite pleased with my results. “But you didn’t write anything about stone carving. Stone carving is very important ” the assistant to the assistant director in advertising said’. No one had told me I should write about stone carving, but I learned way back then you don’t argue with the one giving the assignments.

“Never mind,” I said. “I have the material, and I’ll write about it.”

But I didn’t have the material. I had to do something.

I began my research and uncovered a travel article about Bali with a few paragraphs the author wrote on the art of stone carving. Not much, just a couple of paragraphs. Who would ever know? So I borrowed. I wrote how the stones of Bali are soft and easily malleable, and I told how these pieces of art were made. It was a good piece.

Bali became a big commercial hit for Thai Airways, and the management ran my six stories on the arts of Bali in media around the world. I never expected them to have the worldwide exposure they did. Everyone was reading about Bali, and I was the expert. More assignments came, including stories on stone carving. I cringed at the thought of what might happen had I been caught. But a year passed, quietly, and then the next, and it was forgotten, or so I thought.

Three years after the articles appeared, Thai Airways opened the first flight to Kathmandu, and travel writers from around the world were invited. A big reception was held at the Dusit Thani Hotel on the comer of Silom Road in Bangkok. Everyone of importance was there-Thai Airways management from the home office, magazine editors, the press, radio and TV. And there was someone else. I had never met him, but when his name was mentioned, I immediately remembered-the writer from whom I had “borrowed” my stone cutting story.

I tried to avoid him, moving around from one group to another, trying to avoid even his stare. But my meeting with him was inevitable. It happened when the Public Relations Director at Thai Airways, Mrs. Chittdee, saw me standing in the background and called me over. With her were a few writers, including Mr. X from Los Angeles Times. Mrs. Chittdee introduced me to everyone. I knew I was as good as dead when my name was mentioned. I saw the look on Mr. X’s face suddenly change. I was in for trouble. My writing career was over, finished, ended because of one miserable story on stone carving on Bali. And sure enough, Mr. X said, “I want to talk to you.” Perhaps I was saved. He was sparing me from public disgrace. We excused ourselves from Mrs. Chittdee and the others and headed to a far, secluded comer of the conference hall. I was preparing in my mind what I would tell him. I would make a clean confession and appeal to his sympathy. He spoke first, before I could begin.

“Look,” he began, “I wanted to talk to you. I have felt baldly about this for a long time.”

He felt badly. What was he talking about, that he felt badly? I was the one who felt terrible. I was about to interrupt him, but it was most fortunate that I didn’t.

“I am sorry, for you see, I was rather in a hurry, and I had to borrow some of your writing.” I wanted to say ‘my writing’ but I held out. He continued. “I had to get the copy in, and I used your work on stone carving on Bali and I have never done that before, I feel terrible.”

I couldn’t believe it. He had stolen the text from some place he couldn’t remember and, when he saw my story in print, he thought it was mine. He asked if I would forgive him.

“Don’t worry, I said. “I won’t tell a soul.” And I never did, until now that is.

Plagiarism can be a little more complicated than meet the eye. What happens when you steal from yourself? It happened to me. An in-flight magazine in Hong Kong wanted a story on the Hill Stations in Malaysia. The editor was rushed and asked how soon could I get a story in. A week later, he had my story, and a few days after that came a letter accusing me of plagiarism. The editor was really nasty. He didn’t want me to ever write for him again. What had gone wrong?

When publisher Hans Hoefer began his new series of Insight Guides, his first guide on Bali was highly successful. He asked me to write the second guide on Malaysia. I never realized how difficult and time-consuming writing guides to a country could be. Hans and I covered every mile of road in Malaysia, every beach and resort, and we even traveled deep into the Jungle on expeditions with the game department. One section I covered was on the Hill Stations. I did a great deal of research, even into source material written by the Englishmen-Fraser and Maxwell-who founded two of the stations. I spent long hours crafting the script, and I was rather proud of the writing when it was completed.

Now back to the in-flight magazine in Hong Kong. When I sat down to write the article for the editor on the Hill Stations of Malaysia, the words flowed from my typewriter. They came naturally and easily. When we write history and anecdotes from the past, they do not change. History is constant. In doing the piece for the Hong Kong editor, I checked with some of the new hotels and accommodations and restaurants from the Tourist office in Bangkok, entered them into the text and sent the story off with all my historical background included. The editor sent the script back to me, and accused me of palatalizing. Am I guilty or not? Can a writer steal from himself? That was years ago, and I have never been invited to write for the magazine again.

But what happens when others steal from you?

When I wrote Malaysia, the second guidebook in the series, I spent hours on the text about the Malay jungle. I made up catch phrases like “the jungles of Africa and South America are adolescent in comparison to the Malay jungle.” Since then, I have seen that phrase in print, taken by other writers, a dozen or more times. What is disheartening is when someone reads the section on the jungle in the guidebook I had written, and they say “Oh, I read that somewhere before.” Do I tell them it is mine? Hardly. They wouldn’t believe it anyway-just our grapes they’d say.

Something else that is disheartening is when someone calls your writing a work of fiction when it is not. Editor Tony Waltham at the Bangkok Post began a section called “Sunday Magazine” and commissioned me to write a weekly piece for the magazine on any subject I wanted. Those are fun stories to do, and I put a lot of effort and time into them. Much of what I wrote was far out. I wrote about living in a haunted house in Delaware on the American East Coast, about how not to fire a cannon (I actually fired a real antique cannon for the story), and about an interview I did with a genuine pirate chieftain. There were stories about my meeting with a witch doctor in the Philippines, and other pieces about movie actors and actresses I had met and wrote about over the years-Marlon Brando, Burt Lancaster, James Mason, Mary Martin, and Bea Arthur, to mention a few. One day when I took my story in to Bangkok Post, Tony was off for the day, so I gave it to one of the sub editors to give to Tony. I made a casual remark when I handed it to him: “This sounds more like fiction than anything.” He looked up at me, and in a sober voice said, “Isn’t all the stuff you write fiction?” That came as a mighty hard blow, especially after I labored so hard to present stories as they really happened. I discovered, after that, many readers thought I was turning out fiction. I cringe at the thought of what readers might think after they read my collection of short stories in Tales From the Pacific Rim. I found I could tell the truth better when I wrote it as fiction.

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Chapter 10B
When and How Discovered

Let’s look at the facts. We read books that have been recommended based on the message they have to tell. We rely on the publishers, not necessarily book critics, to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work.

Like everybody else, I go to the bookstore. I see a book I like. If it says memoir, I know here may be some names and dates changed, but I don’t expect it to be fiction, portrayed by the imagination of the author. I don’t like to be cheated. And with Frey the public was cheated. Winfrey hailed Frey’s graphic and coarse book as “like nothing you’ve ever read before.” She stayed up late at night reading it. In emotional filmed testimonials, employees of Winfrey’s show lauded the book as revelatory, with some choking back tears. Said damp-eyed Winfrey, “I’m crying ’cause we all loved the book so much.”

Frey’s deception was a masterpiece. His runaway hit sold more than three and a half million copies and, thanks to Winfrey, had made it to the top of the list of The New York Times nonfiction paperback bestsellers for fifteen weeks. Next to the latest Harry Potter title, Nielsen Book Scan reported, Frey’s book sold more copies in the U.S. in 2005-1.77 million-than any other title, with the majority of that total coming after Winfrey’s selection.

For Frey, the bubble burst when a website called “The Smoking Gun” announced his best-selling nonfiction memoir is filled with fabrications, falsehoods and other fakery. The Smoking Gun is a website which posts obscure or unreported legal documents, arrest records, and police mug shots on a routine basis. The intent is to bring to the public information which is damning and shocking.

I believe if you can’t tell the story faithfully, don’t tell it at all. We are bound by the rules of nonfiction, the first of which is: Tell the truth. When readers learn a work of nonfiction is partly fictional, they become angry. But a good writer can turn this situation around. When readers hear a work of fiction is autobiographical-that it has nonfiction elements-they get excited. They ask endless questions, demanding to know which parts of the novel are “real.” When Somerset Maugham published his collection of short stories, East Meets West on Southeast Asia, people tried to read themselves into the plots. With Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the author’s followers are still trying to discern who was who in the novel.

I found myself in a difficult predicament when I wrote Take China, The Last of the China Marines. The book is ninety-five percent factual, but I embellished parts of the ending to dramatize it. I had to call the book a novel which actually hurt sales. By calling my work nonfiction (which, strictly speaking, it is), I would be lying to readers when some sections were not factual. I also thought it best to change some names. A few readers, who in the beginning wanted to remain anonymous when they passed on information to me, came back and asked, “Why did you change my name?” It was too late. I went to my notebook and looked up lines from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam that I marked down years ago:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

It’s true, once you put something down in writing, it’s there forever. The truth will come out, eventually. It always does. How dreadful to be found out to be a fraud.

Frey’s memoir isn’t the first bit of fiction passed off as truth. Remember Jack Kelley at USA Today. Kelley was a long-time USA Today correspondent and nominee for the Pulitzer Prize. Then the truth became known that he had long been fabricating stories, going so far as to write up scripts so associates could pretend to be sources. I saw some of this happening when I was a war correspondent in Vietnam for the Bangkok World. I met reporters who never left the bars in Saigon. They got their information from the men in the field who came to Saigon for R&R. At least their source was generally accurate. At least they never claimed they were with the grunts in the field-Kelley did. Investigators sifted through stacks of hotel records to determine if Kelley was in the locations he claimed to be-Cuba, Israel, and Jordan. The scandal led to the resignations of several key staff at the newspaper, including editor Karen Jurgensen in April 2004.

An honest non-fiction writer holds to the belief that anything purporting to be non-fiction should be true. When he must change small details-such as names-he lets readers know. He spends hours interviewing people on both sides of the stories. He double-checks statistics. Such writers want to be right because they know trust is what carries readers along.

While James Frey may have hedged on the truth, writer Clifford Irving created what is perhaps the biggest literary hoax ever conceived, the unauthorized biography of Howard Hughes. Billionaire tycoon, aviator, playboy, eccentric and Hollywood legend Howard Hughes, who had turned hermit, was the subject of great intrigue in America and the world throughout most of his life. In his later years, during the late 1960s to mid-1970s, the mystery surrounding him intensified when he became a recluse and hid himself from the outside world for more than a decade.

The public, understandably, was hungry for information concerning Howard Hughes. Realizing what an opportunity this was, Clifford Irving set out to do what no one else had done, write his biography. He convinced his publisher, McGraw-Hill, that Howard Hughes commissioned him to write his biography. He said he would write the book based on interviews conducted with Howard. Clifford hopefully believed Howard Hughes was too ill to come forward and repudiate the book. Howard had not been seen publicly since 1958 and, as far as they knew, he could have even been dead. Clifford forged letters and legal documents allegedly written by Howard in order to make the deal appear even more genuine. He had obtained actual handwriting samples from various sources, which he used as a model for his own letter. McGraw-Hill executives were impressed. An agreement was signed, using a forged signature made by Clifford. The contract stated an advance of $500,000 would be paid, of which $100,000 would be paid up front. Clifford was to receive a total of $100,000, whereas the remaining $400,000 was allotted to Howard.

On top of that, Time-Life Magazine offered $250,000 for serial rights to the manuscript, and Dell Publishing Company offered a further $400,000 for paperback rights. But Howard Hughes wasn’t ill, or crazy, or dead, as some suspected. He was very much alive, and very much annoyed. On January 7, 1972, he spoke to the press via the telephone. It was the first time he spoke publicly in fourteen years. He announced his biography was a hoax.

The next day, Howard’s attorney, Chester Davis, filed suit against McGraw-Hill, Life, Clifford Irving and Dell Publishing Company, citing they had violated Howard’s right to publish his own autobiography. Howard had been pushed too far. He demanded his privacy, and he was not about to let Clifford or those who supported him interfere with his basic human rights.

In the meantime, Swiss police investigated a suspicious bank account under the name H.R. Hughes. Within a short period of time, over $750,000 passed through the private account only to be whittled away down to approximately $150. Clifford stood trial and was given a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence of which he served fourteen months. He is still writing books today. But it’s still not over as far as the public is concerned. Miramax Films has released The Hoax starring Richard Gere who plays Clifford Irving. I guess the saying applies when it comes to movies-”Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”

Editors are responsible for what their publications print. But even with big publishers, they can sometimes go astray. In April 1983, the popular West German magazine Stern made a shocking announcement that it was about to publish Adolf Hitler’s diaries. The magazine claimed sixty two handwritten volumes of secret diaries written by the founder of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler, had been discovered in East Germany. According to Charles Hamilton’s book, The Hitler Diaries, the volumes were reported to be one of the most significant historical discoveries in recent history.

The “priceless” diaries were said to have been discovered several years earlier by an East German who had learned the artifacts were in the possession of farmers living in the village of Boernersdorf. Apparently, they were rescued from a downed Nazi plane which had crashed and burned in April 1945. The documents were reported to have survived the inferno because they were supposedly protected in a metal-lined container. Following their discovery, it was stated the documents were kept in a secret location, then eventually smuggled out of the country and kept secured until they were publicly revealed to the world years later.

Historical accounts further supported the sensational story, which were based on the memoirs of Hitler’s chief SS pilot, Lt. General Hans Baur. Baur claimed the plane, piloted by Major Friedrich A. Gundlfinger was carrying Hitler’s private archives when it was shot down en route from Berlin in April 1945. The evidence was enough for some to believe the diaries were indeed genuine artifacts. However, time proved the manuscripts instead were one of the biggest hoaxes of the century. The price to be paid was that Stern magazine lost its credibility.

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Chapter 10A
PLAGIARISING AND DECEPTION

You go to a bookstore and buy a book. It’s an expensive book, but you don’t mind, for it is a book you have always wanted. It is a book for you to keep, to cherish. Yes, it’s yours, all yours. You take it home, settle in a comfortable chair and open the cover. That first page leaps out at you. “This book is copyright under the Berne Conventions. No part of it may be copied or used.” You suddenly realize this book is not yours at all. It might be in your possession, and legally it is yours, but the only right you have i to read it.

No, you don’t own books. The person who wrote the book is the owner. You only bought the right to read it. Or you use it for anything other than for your own reading pleasure, and you do use it, any part, even a sentence, you will find yourself in a court of law.

It might sound strange, but we can say the same thing for all property. We buy a house, our name is on the title, and we move in. We are so proud. We own a house, and it is all ours. No one can touch it. We think it is ours, but we are wrong. The state owns it. If you don’t believe it, don’t pay your taxes for a year or two. The state will take your house away from you. That’s a fact.

So what do we own that we can call our own? Fortunately, there is one thing, and that is our ideas. Intangible thing like an idea, and it is ours, all ours. If we have an idea, we can register it, and no one can take it away from us. Ideas are infinite, endless. No idea is too foolish, too outlandish. If someone approaches me with an idea, I never turn him or her away. Ideas are ours, and if someone copies our words, our ideas, without our permission, we call that plagiarism. Another term, stated more harshly, is stealing. Stealing is punishable by law, and so is plagiarism.

Writers commit plagiarism whenever they present words or ideas taken from another person as if they were their own. In our capitalistic economy, words and ideas are regarded as property. We plagiarize when we don’t give credit to the person whose idea it was. The rule is we cannot pass off someone’s ideas or thoughts as our own. The solution is to depend on other people’s words as little as possible.

I make sure when quoting someone to put what they say between quotation marks. Then, I’ve been told, it’s not plagiarizing. But I find the overuse of quotes, the over-reliance on quotations that is, can undermine an author’s writing. I get the feeling that he is unable to use his own words to articulate his own thoughts. I like to use quotes, but I attempt to use them sparingly.

Yet in spite of the law, or moral issues, we continue to steal and we try to get away with it. Often in the literary world when we do copy another’s words, we call it borrowing. Writers forever borrow from one another. They say there are no original ideas, that all ideas have all been conceived at one time or another. That belief becomes an absolute; there is no originality. I find that hard to fathom. I contend that an artist or a writer is original when he is being himself. I find that even an absolute can be affected by personal judgment, training and habit. One would think when an object is recognized as beautiful, it would contain enough merit to retain its beauty for us indefinitely. We know it doesn’t. We get tired of it. Familiarity breeds indifference.

We can say then that there are writers who have their own original thoughts regardless of whether or not someone else thought them up before. Take a look at some of the master writers. Take a look at James Michener whose list of books covers a couple of pages. He was a great writer, admired by many and some seventy-five million of his books went into print. As we know, several were made into movies-Hawaii, South Pacific, Sayonara. The one I liked most was Hawaii. He told in detail how the islands were formed, and he related the “universal savagery of the sea.” Wonderful stuff.

Then I picked up Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. It was like reading Michener again. It was all there, how islands and atolls are formed, and about the universal savagery of the sea. Melville came a hundred years before Michener. Did Michener steal from Melville? Hardly. He borrowed. And then I made another startling discovery. Melville was an avid student of the Bible, and he got much of his material and ideas from the Bible. Low and behold, Melville had found out from reading Genesis in the Bible how islands and atolls are formed and passed it on to his readers. Perhaps the Bible is where it all begins, and where it stops. You can’t get much more original than the Bible.

Jack London admits he learned to write by reading Robert Louis Stevenson. He proved that there is no better training for the would-be writer than to read a passage every day from a classic, by a noted author, but more than read it, devour it, study it, and then close the book. Without looking at it again, hours later or, best, the next day, attempted to reproduce it. Nothing can be more demanding upon our memory. Jack London followed this method by reading and studying Stevenson. He read a paragraph or two, closed the book and then tried to put down from memory on paper what he had read. Maybe it wasn’t direct plagiarism, but I do believe that somehow borrowed thoughts do become engrained in our minds and sooner or later, we find ourselves, as writer and thinkers, using them. I remember as a kid reading The Cruise of the Snark. What an inspiration that was to a farm boy who had never seen the sea. I read with abandonment how London had built his own schooner, which he called Snark, and sailed it to Hawaii. From there he continued on to Tahiti, via the Marquesas. The leg from Hawaii to the Marquesas is a near impossible passage, against fierce winds and unyielding currents. It took Snark a month of beating into the wind, but his tiny 43-foot schooner made it. When I had my own schooner and sailed to Hawaii with plans to sail to Tahiti, I had to make the same passage. I didn’t know why, but I just wanted to do it. Everyone thought it was an insane idea, but nevertheless, I drove the crew to what almost became a mutiny. But we made it in a grueling twenty-nine days. Why did I have to do it? Because Jack London had done it, and yet I had completely forgotten about London’s passage. But it was there in my subconscious mind. When I re-read The Cruise of the Snark, I realized it then.

But where do we draw the line? When does borrowed writing become plagiarism? Since words and ideas are regarded as property, as I mentioned, when are these words considered public domain? If individual knowledge is capital, a term the legal pundits use, when then is it public domain? The legal boys call it group knowledge, a suitable name. Group knowledge includes dates, events, facts, general information and those concepts that belong to the public. No individual owns the facts about geography, current events, history, physics, social behavior and society’s common culture and traditions. Here I reached the bottom line: what the public knows collectively constitutes common knowledge. Nor can I assert or claim, as an individual, even if it’s publicly, theories, opinions, studies, research projects, and the likes, to be my own. It’s Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 all over.

It always makes news when an author uses deliberate deception in his work. When discovered, the press loves to play it up. The sad part is it seems we have reached a point in our society where deception and stealing is acceptable. Take the example of James Frey. He wrote his memoir called A Million Little Pieces. Oprah Winfrey reviewed it on her talk show, and the book became an instant success. It was then discovered that some of it was fiction, made up, but Madame Winfrey didn’t care about that. She had passed judgment on it and gave it the good seal of approval. She couldn’t go back on her word, and she had to defend what she said about the book. The press went wild. Matt Liddy, a journalist, wrote: “Frey, Oprah stands by controversial memoir.”

James Frey stood by what he called the “essential truth” of his memoir. Even after accusations were leveled that significant parts of the Oprah-approved best seller were fabricated, Frey went on CNN’s ‘Larry King Live’ show to defend his memoir. At the end of the show Winfrey phoned in to say that she remained happy to recommend the book, despite the controversy. Does this mean that Oprah Winfrey believes it’s all right to lie, that she believes in Machiavelli’s “The end justifies the means.” It seems so.

Frey used the excuse the book is 432 pages long, while the page count of disputed events is a mere eighteen pages, less than five percent of the total book. “You know,” he said, “that falls comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir.”

That is one man’s sordid interpretation of the rules of plagiarism, but it is not the accepted norm. A lie is a lie. Frey would have been all right had he maintained, as he did in the beginning, his book was fiction. In fact, he shopped the book as a novel, and it was turned down by publisher after publisher. The publisher who did finally buy the right to the book thought the best thing to do was publish it as a memoir.

In his warped reasoning, Frey contends his book is “a long tradition of what American writers have done in the past, people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.” He argued at the time when these books were published by famous authors, the genre of memoir didn’t exist. “I mean,” he told Larry King, “the genre of memoir is one that’s very new and the boundaries of it have not been established yet.”

There is no question that Winfrey was misled. Yet she sidetracks the issue. When she includes a book in her book club, an endorsement by her, it is virtually guaranteed to become a best-seller. She admitted when she read A Million Little Pieces, it had stunned her and moved her. After hearing Frey’s interview, Winfrey told her “old friend” Larry King she would still recommend A Million Little Pieces.

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Chapter 9
HANDLING THE CRITICS

Bob Varva is a photographer, and a very fine one. Born in Glendale, California, he was living in Spam when I got to know him. His specialty was photographing animals and, in particular, the fighting bulls of Spain. When author James Michener saw his photographs, he became so impressed with Bob’s work that he commissioned him to illustrate his book-Iberia. Michener was in Spain doing research for a book he planned to write on Mexico. His research included bull fighting which resulted in his meeting a number of matadors, including the American matador John Fulton Short and the greatest of all master matadors Juan Belmonte. Michener became so enamored with Spain, and with the people that he met, he decided to write Iberia instead, and he put Mexico on hold. In lberia, published two years later, he wrote about meeting John Fulton and his photographer friend Bob Varva.

One day when I went to Bob’s apartment on Colon Street in Seville, he was rather distraught. A critic had attacked him, saying his photos were too sanguinary to illustrate a book by Michener. We were discussing the matter when Michener arrived to go over details in the book. Introductions were made. This was the first time I had met Michener. There were other times, many, but this was the first. My immediate thought when he entered the room was that he too had read the critic’s remark. Was he going to be sympathetic and sick: with Bob, or would he agree with the critic? I soon found out. Michener looked at Bob, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “Forget it.” That was it-forget it. Michener then explained his reason. He told how critics had panned his first book and it was almost enough to make him give up writing. He was concerned that the first printing, only a few thousand copies, might not sell.

Michener got his taste for writing when he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II, assigned to record the history of the Pacific war. During this time be wrote a few magazine articles, nothing much, and these were mostly about the war, about the men and women fighting in it. When he decided to put all stories together into a book, which he titled Tales of the South Pacific, the critics had a good laugh. They laughed but the last laugh was on them. The book became a best seller. The critics laughed again when Broadway planned to turn the book into a musical titled South Pacific. The Broadway musical was a tremendous success. “You would think they would have stopped laughing by now,” Michener said, “but they didn’t, and it got worse when Hollywood decided to make a movie from the play. The critics really went wild.” The movie, as we know, became a classic. From that time on, Michener stopped paying attention to critics. “Rely upon your own judgment,” he told Bob Varva. I made up my mind then that I too would do the same. It was a pretty wild commitment on my part, considering, at the time, I had had only one story published and that was hardly Pulitzer Prize stuff, a story for The Writers Digest.

I must say James Michener was very encouraging. He knew I was interested in writing and he wished me luck. He was not like Mr. Sullivan at Life magazine in New York. When I met Michener again, years later, he asked how my writing was doing. We met several times over the years.

A critic, I discovered, can destroy a writer, deliberately or unintentionally. We might rightfully say a critic’s opinion doesn’t really matter, but for a beginner, as I was at the time, it did matter. Unfortunately, this was before I met James Michener. When I began writing my first novel, I envisioned it making the bestseller list with reviews in Time and Newsweek. I didn’t share this thought with others, especially my wife, who was convinced I was wasting time. She particularly didn’t like it when I got up long before her every morning and put in an hour or two on my novel which I had titled The Tower & The River. I had based the book on some of my experiences when I worked for the naval Attaché in Paris, about the same time that America announced its astronaut program. The military was going to put a man into space. l decided to set my plot in Paris, a city I knew something about. Then I imagined myself as a test pi lot who successfully made the first space flight. Naturally, as a gung ho Marine, I made the protagonist in my novel a Marine fighter pilot who had his eyes on the moon. In my storyline, he was certain to be chosen for the program, especially after his short but successful flight in space. But the brass at the Pentagon had other ideas. I had them send my hero to Paris instead of space, for propaganda purposes. I was sure my novel would be a success, and I devoted much of my time and effort in the manuscript.

At the time, I was teaching at a college preparatory school in Washington, D.C. The mother of one of my students was a writer. I don’t know what type or writing she did, but her daughter thought she was the greatest writer that ever lived. She was the kind of daughter that every writer wished he bad.

One day, between classes, I had my novel on my desk when the student came into the room, saw the manuscript and asked what it was. I told her I was writing a novel. She became very interested, and it was then she said her mother was a writer.

This went on for a while, and the student kept asking how the writing was coming along. After about a month, when the student asked me again about my book and how the writing was doing, I casually mentioned that writing a novel wasn’t easy.

“If you would like,” she said, “I can have my mother look it over and give you her opinion.”

At first, I was against the idea, but then I asked myself what was I hiding from? Why not let another, an unbiased writer, make some criticisms? Of course, I had in mind the positive. Writers like to be praised, especially those who are just beginning. They have tough enough battles ahead, and any compliment is most encouraging. Compliments can make us feel good, giving us a sense of accomplishment. Approval can make us want to improve our writing even more. What I learned from that experience is disapproval is also a factor. I didn’t consider that a cold response, a critical remark, could crush my spirit. I hadn’t met Michener yet to encourage me. I discovered then what others think of us could have a profound effect on whether or not we continue our efforts at writing. I had to take the chance, and I lost. I had turned my manuscript over to my student to give to her mother. That was the toughest thing I ever had to do, but I rationalized thinking that I had nothing to lose. But I was wrong. I had a lot to lose.

It was about a week later, a week of agonizing waiting and prodding, when the mother of my student sent the manuscript back to me. Attached was a short note. It was brief, and regrettable. It said I should get someone to teach me how to write. It was the cruelest thing someone could have said to me. I was deflated. Maybe I could never write a novel. Maybe I should have given her daughter a better grade. Maybe my wife was right; it was best I quit wasting my time. I put the manuscript aside. I didn’t touch it for twenty years. I don’t know what compelled me to take it out of hiding, except it may have been that I had just read The World According to Garp. Garp wanted to be a serious writer, but his mother looked at all writing to be nothing more than lackadaisical verbiage. To prove a point to her son, she wrote a book on her own, and it became an instant success. Was this the same? Was my student’s mother laughing at me? Was she a competent critic? Had I made a mistake? I dug out my novel and looked at it. When I did, I liked it. It had merit. Of course, it needed more work. What I had shown to my student’s mother had only been a draft. That was a terrible mistake. And how wrong it was to give a manuscript to someone I didn’t even know. I never questioned who this woman was. Was she truly a writer?

I spent the next few months working on the manuscript, completed it and sent it to Wolfenden Publisher under the title The Tower & The River. It was accepted and six months later went into a second printing. I had wasted twenty years thinking I’d never make it as a novelist. I now follow the advice of Mario Puzo who said, “Never show your stuff to anybody. You can get inhibited.” He then went on to say when you become inhibited, your creativity suffers. How true that is. The point is, I learned to be careful about who I show my work to, no matter what business they’re in. Puzo had another bit of advice to writers. “Above all,” he insisted, “never try to make a publishing deal on the basis of an outline whether it’s a novel, a play or a movie script.”

What I learned from that experience is never let anyone evaluate my work until it is ready for publication. I cannot expect someone else to whip me into shape. I have to do that myself. A writer knows when it’s wrong, and to know it’s wrong and do nothing about it is shear laziness. That’s what Michener was trying to tell Bob Varva and me. You are your best critic, but you must be honest with yourself. Don’t gloss over a story or manuscript and say, “That’s good enough.” Good enough is not acceptable. It has to be the best you can do. As my papa on the farm used to tell me when I was a kid, if a horse has a loose shoe, it is never good enough; that shoe could come off and hit you in the head.

I know not to mislead myself. Writers can benefit when editors check their work. However, I must exercise good judgment in choosing whom I turn to for criticism, and I must react sensibly to their opinions. I am also aware too much praise can be destructive. “Praise shames me,” wrote Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet. And then be added: “For I secretly beg for it.” We are all that way, but it’s false praise that does the most harm.

I have in my latter years refrained from giving a manuscript to a non-professional to look over. Also, even the professionals, by their very nature, feel compelled to make some criticism, whether it is valid or not. I remember this so well when I accepted a government job in Washington, D.C. I had briefs and letters to write, and each and every one of them had to be checked by my immediate boss. He had to find some error, even if it was a comma out of place. If he didn’t, he felt he was not a competent boss. And on up the line it went. The guy at the very top bad to make his mark, and down it came to the bottom to begin all over again. Thus, I learned to beware of those who have to find fault just to show their own importance. In the end, I have to be my own judge.

As I mentioned, a good way to judge the weight of a story is to talk it over with friends, but don’t tell them what you are doing. You might discuss the theme of your idea to see what their reactions are, but stop there. I often do this with friends at dinner. And when I give a talk or have a book signing, I like to feel out my audience. I see what interests them. Without fail, I will be asked what is my next book, my next project, my next adventure.

People don’t like to listen to retired folk, to has-beens, no matter how knowledgeable they might be.

I constantly have to remind myself it is not possible to please everyone. I don’t even try anymore. Seasoned writers learn to ignore comments by the critics, as Michener indicated when I met him in Spain. Success comes with a lot of envy. I had to arm myself by being prepared to shun cruel and cutting comments.

What’s that adage, “When you fail, try again.” I like what Michael Crichton had to say about that-“Books aren’t written, they’re rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.”

Perseverance is what he was saying.

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Chapter 8
MY BEST TEACHER

My best teacher is experience, and experience is what I gain by trying. I can’t learn to swim by reading books. I have to get into the water; I have to get wet. I learned a long time ago not to wait for things to happen. I learned to swim, and to write, by diving in. I have met many young writers who are held back due to the lack of confidence. It’s something we all must overcome. Confidence comes with experience. Psychologists tell us we’re born with only three fears-being crushed, falling and loud noises. All other fears we learn along the way by association with these three basic fears. A child is not born to fear the dark, but fear the dark he does. Why? The good doctors tell us that most likely when the child was put to bed, there followed a bang as the door was closed. The association leads to a fear, fear of the dark. The fear of failure, the fear of rejection or even the fear of success are developed fears and can be overcome. For the writer, the greatest enemy is fear itself, for fear keeps him from doing the very thing he wants to do most, and that is to write. The fear here is the loud noise when the postman drops a rejection slip into their mailbox.

Doubt is the first cousin of fear and precedes it. Like the fear of the dark, we weren’t born with doubt. Our habit of doubt has grown throughout our life. If we dwell on a doubt and give in to it, it then grows into fear. I remember as a young Marine recruit at Camp Pendleton we stood on a platform, with full gear, helmet and rifle included, and had to jump into a swimming pool far below. The drop was thirty feet but it appeared to be more like a thousand. That leap was real fear. We learned to overcome it by not thinking about it. “Just do it,” the drill instructor shouted.

I guess we were more fearful of the drill instructor than the thirty feet of space that separated us from the water below. I do the same when I begin a new story or another book. I just do it and get started. The beginning is the hardest part. What follows is routine.

It follows to reason, if our fears and doubts are what we developed along the way, then we can “unlearn” them by becoming masters of our thoughts. I once heard motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, quote Mark Twain when he said, “True courage is not the absence of fear; it’s the mastery of fear.” The people who live the life of their dreams have just as many fears as those who live miserable, unfulfilled lives-they have just learned to master their fears instead of allowing their fears to master them.

Let us not have a doubtful mind. It’s a matter of encouragement vs. discouragement. In Western society, there is a tendency to make the arts seem like some unattainable dream. University professors and teachers are no help. We are told we must try to find the motives behind an artist and his works if we want to understand him. What is it, they ask, that makes an artist stand out from all others? We put successful artists and writers on pedestals. A person writes a book, and it reaches the best seller’s list. Suddenly the author is invited to appear on Letterman and Jay Leno and the Good Morning America show. Maybe even Oprah. He is asked his opinion about the war in the Middle East, what are his thoughts about the death penalty, and should candidates for the president of the United States not be required to be born in America. This baffles many foreigners, especially Asians. For instance, the people in Asian countries are deeply rooted in the arts. A rice farmer on Bali plants rice all day long, and in the evening, he plays with the village gamelan orchestra or spends his time painting beautiful pictures. A Thai farmer in northern Thailand wins the prestigious Southeast Asia Writers Awards for his poetry, and he never attended school. In America, you never hear of a coal miner writing a great book, not because he is incapable, for certainly he, too, has deep feelings and emotion, but society prevents him from doing so. Coal miners are not expected to be intelligent. You have to have a college degree to be a successful writer or be a graduate from a school of journalism. If you have that degree, and still can’t find success at writing, then you are told you had better find another profession.

Sometimes some of the stuff I write I think is lousy. It likely is, but no matter what I write, I never throw it away. Time does something to wine, and it does it to writing too. I mentioned when I was on Tahiti, I spent days writing about anything that came to my mind, even though nothing I wrote back then sold. I did have one obsession that I pursued, which was researching old sea mysteries and shipwrecks. I gathered information and put together copy I thought would be a good story, about three unsolved sea tragedies. I spent endless hours writing the story and ended up with a solid 5,000-word story and sent it off. No editor wanted it. I threw it on the shelf and forgot about it. Not so long ago, the editor of a yachting magazine contacted me and said he was desperate. A writer didn’t come through with his assigned story. Did I have something interesting, maybe a sea mystery?

I found the old story. It wasn’t bad. The details were all there, and the facts. A new lead, a little rewriting and, in a few hours, the editor had a story, and soon after, I had a check. I could have thrown the manuscript away, but I didn’t. I have stacks of unpublished stories which one day, I might tum into something readable. Or maybe someone after me will do it for me.

I have of late concluded that I was my best teacher. I never expected others to whip me into shape. I had to do it myself. But I didn’t discount that my work needed editing. Every writer needs an editor. Thomas Wolfe, the author of You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward, Angel, worked closely with his editor, Maxwell Perkins. They had some heated battles. Often, Perkins would tell Wolfe to go home and re-write a passage. Wolfe would return in a few days, not with a re-worked, cut-down version, but with another fifty pages. Instead of his books becoming shorter, they grew longer. He wrote some beautiful prose.

Given the choice, I like writing books over magazine stories because I can say what I want in a book without reservation. For memoirs and biographers, this is most important. There is a difference between the memoirs of public figures and those of private citizens. With a public figure, I have to be as accurate as possible. But with a private person’s story, it is very different. I prefer to call them autobiographical novels. I can write, for instance, page after page of dialogue, and readers are willing to accept fictionalization. Still, accuracy, even in dialogue, is important. In writing a biographical novel, For the Love of Siam, about a Greek shipwrecked sailor who became foreign minister for King Narai of Siam, I had to make certain the dialogue matched the time. How does one avoid anachronisms, placing people and their dress and their surroundings in the wrong time frame? This is most difficult and takes intense research. It can be a simple thing, like saying “he waited half an hour.” When in history did the hour become a unit of measure?

For interviews my tape recorder is my best friend. I can say that for capturing actions as well. After all, what better way is there to capture a storm at sea than when it’s happening? Or rafting down a jungle river? Or climbing a mountain? This is when a tape recorder is needed. I capture the action as it is happening, it is real. I find if I write an experience after the event, I write it not as it happened but as I thought it happened or should have happened. There is a difference.

Of course, I can’t very well capture the action by jotting down notes in a notebook, not while driving a Jeep bouncing over rutted, potholed roads. That’s when a tape recorder is indispensable. Over the years, I have made hundreds, no thousands, of tape recordings. I made a point to index the tapes immediately after making them. If I don’t index immediately I may never do it and end up with a stack of meaningless tapes. The indexing is important for it gives me easy access to the information when I need it. The tapes I prize most are those that I made of people who have long since passed away. Some were important personalities like Burt Lancaster, James Mason and Mary Martin. Others were lesser known but nevertheless they are still important.

Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, relied heavily on tape recording. His best-selling oral histories that celebrated the common people whom he called the “non-celebrated” were the results of taped interviews. In his 2007 memoir, Touch and Go, Terkel wrote: “What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands. Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust.”

Terkel would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: “Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am.”

Studs Terkel died in October 2008. He was 96.

I recall one tape I made that I can never forget. Bill Frew was a South Sea Island trader who had a store on remote Fanning Island in the Line Islands that lay between the Hawaiian Islands and French Polynesia. Bill was the only white man on the island. He was in his late sixties, had an island wife and a dozen kids and was quite a raconteur. I taped away one evening as he sat upon his verandah, rolling cigarettes and spinning yams about the old days. I sailed away the next day, and it wasn’t until a year later that I learned that Bill got up from his chair on the verandah one evening just after we left and went for a walk. He was never seen again. He vanished completely. I played the tapes over and over, trying to detect something that might give a clue to his disappearance but could find nothing.

I like most to use a tape recorder when doing interviews. Without the need to jot down notes, I am free to concentrate on my questions. Of course I have to ask the person beforehand if I may use a tape recorder. I find if I use a simple recorder and not one of those professional looking devices, the person I am interviewing doesn’t seem to mind it. I set the recorder in the open between us, and then ask if l may tum it on. After a minute or two, people forget the recorder is on. It certainly avoids people coming back and saying, “I never said that.”

Rewriting is the secret. I rewrite to make it simple, as clear and easy as possible for the reader to understand. Rewrite, polish, rewrite again, that’s my obligation. These are what makes one’s writing the best it can be.

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Chapter 7
PLEASING THE EDITOR

Somewhere along the line, I learned not to try to outsmart the editor. Wasn’t it Shakespeare who you even though said in one of his plays, “I believe you even though I know you lie.” That’s the number one rule I follow; although editors lie they are always right. They, at least successful ones, know what they want, and as a writer, it is my task to give them what they want. It’s that simple. I know some writers who insist that editors don’t know what they want. That may be true, editors may be fumbling and uncertain, but they don’t like to be told that. I make a point not to disagree with an editor. Never. They are the ones who are giving the assignments, and they are the ones who tell the accountant to write the checks.

Editors don’t necessarily own or have a vested interest in the publications they work for. They are there, hired to edit. It’s a consolation when I tell myself editors can be difficult but they are not permanent. They change like magazines change covers. Here today, gone tomorrow. I have to remind myself an editor’s first duty is to please the owners, and that means for editors to bring in the money. To do this, editors must satisfy advertisers. I am referring here to magazine editors not book editors. They fall into different categories. For a magazine editor, a wrong or misleading story can cost the loss of an advertiser. In this regard, editors know what they want or what the magazine requires.

I give editors what they want, but I am leery of those editors who are also writers. It’s as certain as night follows day, the stories or articles an editor writes for the publication will be placed before mine. It doesn’t matter that my copy might be better than theirs.

Generally, my practice is to query editors about a story before I write it. The trick is to get editors involved, to get them to make suggestions, and then they feel they are part of the story. To do this, I have several choices. One, I can write and post a letter; two, I can send an e-mail; or three I can make a phone call followed by a visit in person. As for sending a letter, letters prove to be more effective than e-mail. The best way to query an editor, hands down, is to make a phone call for an appointment and then make a personal appearance. I make every attempt I can to see an editor in person. And when I do, I have something in hand to show them. I find it important not to remain silent, not to sit there like a dunce. I keep talking. I lead my ideas and don’t give up. I am insistent but not overbearing. It nearly always works. Editors are, after all, people, and some are even human. When it’s face to face, it’s difficult for an editor to say no. If l go in person, perhaps when I am just back from a trip, a small token of a gift helps. Nothing expensive. A letter opener from Thailand or a carved tiki paperweight from Tahiti. It’s always satisfying to return to the office one day and see the paperweight on the desk.

It is always a concern that editors might steal my ideas. I learned to accept it, for they do, and that is a fact. It’s a chance all writers have to take. Editors steal our work.

Query letters are a must, and they are an art. I write a query letter in such a way that I make the recipient want to read more. Let’s say I’m planning to go to Paris. Never would I contact editors and simply tell them I am going to Paris. Many countless of hundreds of such letters cross an editor’s desk each working day, letters that are tossed into the trashcan? Before ending a query to the editor, I give some thought to the place I am going. If it’s to Paris, I ask myself what would I like to read about Paris? I do my homework before sending that letter. For instance, I don’t tum to guidebooks for information. Every would-be writer does that. I take from the library all the books I can find by noted authors who wrote about Paris, How about Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or The Moveable Feast. They are about Paris. I read them, but I read between the lines. Hemingway loved the bars and cafes of Paris. He wrote magnificently about them. But what about “The Bar that Hemingway Didn’t Like.” Anyone who reads that title would be interested. In one of his books there must be one of two bars or cafes he didn’t favor. What else on Paris? “The Day the Eiffel Tower Almost Fell Down.” You could build a story around that lead, and a little research could do it. Then “Getting Lost in the Sewers of Paris.” Paris had miles of sewers. If the editor agrees, take a sewer tour when you go to Paris.

An editor approached me one day and said he needed a story on the Bird Park in Singapore, but he wanted something fresh and different, not the general run-or-the-mill stories about how many birds there are in the park, and how big it is, and how many people visited it each year. So what does one write about a bird park that would be fresh and interesting? I sat down to a cup of coffee, came up with an idea and approached the editor. He liked it. My story appeared: “How to Treat a Sick Bird at Jurong Bird Park in Singapore.” I managed to talk to the veterinarian about treating sick animals, and in the article, I was able to work in how big the park is, how many birds it has, and how many people visit it every day. It was much the same, as I mentioned before, when I queried Argosy and said I wanted to expose the way the French were turning the Tahitian islands into an atomic testing ground. The idea was rejected, and I was told to write about the famous Quinn’s Tahitian Hut, the wildest bar in the South Seas. I wrote it and managed to tell that the French were testing super bombs, not too many miles away from Quinn’s, and the effect it was having the islands and the people. I got my point across.

It’s not the big picture that editors want. It’s the small interesting bits that make up the whole. This is the only case I can think of where it pay to think little rather than think big.

There was a magazine that I wrote for in Tokyo, The Far East Traveller. It was a fine magazine, and it paid very well. Over the years, I wrote over a hundred articles for the magazine. I was treated well by the editor and on several occasions when I was passing through Japan, I stopped at the office to give my regards to the staff. The editor arranged hotels at no cost to me, and obtained tickets to the kabuki theatre, sumo wrestling matches and many other events taking place in Tokyo. I felt I was part of the family. All was going well with the magazine until one day I received a letter from their new editor, a zealous man with new ideas. He wrote to say he appreciated my work, what I had done over the years, but he was developing a new policy which he believed would improve the magazine. Instead of depending solely upon freelance contributions, he was appointing stringers stationed in major cities throughout Asia. He was still interested in my work, he wrote, but only for the offbeat and unusual that I might come up with. I would need to send it in and then he would consider it.

I knew the routine, from experience. New editors always have grandiose ideas for their magazines. This editor was no exception. Rather than throw up my arms in disappointment, I wrote a nice letter to him, thanking him, and sat back and waited. Six months later, I wrote to him again with six story ideas, and he wrote back accepting five of them. It was obvious his stringers in the field were not coming up with ideas. I continued writing for the magazine until they went out of business a few years ago.

I dare say magazines, like editors, do come and go. There’s a saying, if you want to lose money, open a restaurant or start a magazine. I don’t know about restaurants, but I do know that very few magazines find success unless they are subsidized by private businesses such as airlines, credit card companies or hotel chains. Still, it’s amazing how many new magazines suddenly pop up, fired up by the enthusiasm of someone with dollars to spend and who, most likely, is on an ego trip. They open the new publication with flair: press releases and lavish cocktail parties. A year or two later they fold, leaving creditors and writers unpaid. I don’t know how many times I have been approached by editors of up-coming magazines who ask for my help by contributing article with promises that I will be paid when the magazine is solvent. Please, they ask, would I help, as a favor? Most of those editors I gave in to and did help by contributing a story along with photos went bust in a very short time-and I never saw a cent. I learned to tactfully turn down such requests.

Of course, there are exceptions. Hans Hoefer, the creator of the successful APA Insight Guides is one. He asked me to write a guidebook on Malaysia and forego payment in exchange for stock in the company. The guide I wrote was his second in the series, and I preferred to get cash rather than stock. It took me years to get paid, and I should have taken stock. Today Insight Guides have over 200 titles, and Hans sold out for what I was told to be near to ten million US dollars. I don’t even want to think of what my share might have been had I taken advantage of his offer. But I have no regrets. I am not a businessman; I am a writer. I wrote the full story about Hans in my book At Home in Asia, the book that’s in the time vault at The Oriental Hotel.

I must tell another story here about Hans. In the beginning years he had a house that was also his office on Bukit Tima Road in Singapore. We were putting together the Malaysia guide when a young Australian came up and knocked on the door. He was a very pleasant guy, a bit gaunt, and he wanted to know something about the guidebook publishing business. He and his wife had written a guidebook for backpackers called Southeast Asia on a Shoestring. A guidebook for backpackers, it was the complete opposite of the concept that Hans had for his Insight Guides. Hans was aiming for upmarket travelers, people with money to buy expensive books. Backpackers don’t have money. The young publisher-to-be wasn’t perturbed by Hans’ comments. Hans wished him well and sent him on his way. The young man published his book, and thirty years later has over six hundred titles to his credit. His name is Tony Wheeler and his books are the Lonely Planet Guidebooks. Down through the years I never forgot that incident and I often wondered if Tony would remember it. Then, at this writing, the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok announced that Tony Wheeler, the co-founder of Lonely Planet-his wife is the other founder-was having a talk and book signing in the Author’s Lounge for his latest book, authored by him-Bad Lands. Of course, I had to attend, and when I talked to Tony, he did remember the incident. Hans’ comments hadn’t deterred him one bit from his ultimate goal. In fact, it only spurred him on, he said.

The curious thing about editors is that they all feel they are indispensable. But it’s the writers, in fact, who outlast editors. Book publishers, newspapers and magazines change editors faster than hotels change general managers. If l find an editor who’s difficult to deal with, I will stay in there and bide my time. Chances are in a few years, he will be gone. I have found this to be without exception and, over the years, I have dealt with some very earnest editors. They just don’t last. Most of them move on looking for a better job. No matter how successful an editor is, perhaps even if he has turned the publication around and made it first class, the owners are never happy enough. Unless magazines are sponsored-by credit cards, airlines, hotels and the likes-they then are privately owned, and when they are, there’s always the owner’s nephew just out of Harvard Business School or from a Princeton Journalism Class who has ideas and has impressed his uncle. He gets the job. It happens all the time. I can think of a number of magazines that were successful, and then for no apparent reason, a new editor was assigned. In the next issue, the owner’s relative appears on the credit’s page. Or, in the case of airlines, an in-flight magazine will be doing well, but a new president or a member of the board of directors will have to make his mark and will decide to revamp the airline structure, and the first thing they attack is the in-flight magazine. When the publisher’s contract is up the management will put the contract up for bid and hire someone else, and it won’t necessarily be because they are better. Graft and payoffs often enter the picture, but this is getting into delicate territory, and I will refrain from making further comments.

In pleasing an editor, trust them, even though you know that they lie.

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CH6
GETTING INTO THE MOOD

How does one get into the mood to write? My reply is quite simple. When the bank balance is low, I get in the mood. That doesn’t mean I write solely to earn money. No, writing is a profession, and I made up my mind long ago to treat it as such. I concluded if l had my old office job in the government, or had I still been working in a factory, or a steel mill, or a coal mine as I once did, or I did whatever I had to do to earn a crust of bread, and I decided I didn’t want to go to work the next day because I was up late or I had a headache, I would have had to answer to the boss. If I kept it up, missing work, I’d get fired. It’s that simple. My mother-in-law needs me to help paint the kitchen is not an excuse.

The fact is, we squander valuable time, time we spend watching TV or playing video games when we could spend the time behind a word processor writing stories. Or reading. When I made up my mind to be a writer, I had to determine my priorities, and I had to stick to them. No more excuses.

It’s a fact that outsiders, those not in the writing business, never treat writing as serious stuff. In the beginning years, before I put my foot down, I was asked to do things for friends and relatives that they wouldn’t dare ask if I were sitting in an office or in the mines digging coal. “You are only sitting at a desk. Why can’t you give me a hand?” they would ask. I had to learn to be nasty. “What’s wrong with him?” now they would say. I remember watching the painters sitting at their easels in Montmartre in Paris. They seemed oblivious to the world around them, and never answered questions asked them. I then noticed many of them had earplugs. Maybe that’s what we need when we sit at our work place and someone comes in and sits down “to watch us write.” It’s most difficult to teach others to respect your writing habits. But it was something I had to do.

A writer must learn to write every day, day in and day out. That’s a tough lesson I had to teach myself I learned, from necessity, not to say “never mind, I will make up for it later.” There is no making up ever for lost time. You can never make up for lost time. Time lost is time gone forever. Developing discipline is essential. The toughest time I had teaching myself discipline was when I was living on Tahiti. I had a grass hut at Point Venus on Matavia Bay, where the original HMS Bounty anchored, and every day without fail, my Aussie friends arrived on their Vespas, with their sarong-clad vahines sitting behind them, holding on tight, their long hair blowing in the wind. They would come charging up the drive full of fun and life. From a pandanas sack, they would pull out a demijohn of red wine and put it on the table with half a dozen coconut shells for cups. The girls would take a guitar and begin strumming. The guys would go for a swim, laughing and shouting. They always called for me to join them. I couldn’t. This took discipline, real discipline. I had work to do, my writing. I sat in my front room with its open front, watching my friends frolicking in the sun, while I pounded away at my Hermes. They often asked what I was writing, but I wouldn’t tell them. I was too embarrassed. I was writing down what they were doing, playing on the beach. 1 took down their conversation, attempting to capture their way of speech and their dialect.

I copied their jesting, their jokes, their four-letter words, everything. When I looked back at my written pages, from Tahiti alone, I had over 400,000 words. It wasn’t until years later when I returned to Tahiti and met Leonie, one of the girls who had been a frequent visitor at my house, and since had married one of the Australians, that I was reminded about my work habit. “You were always at your typewriter,” she said. “You never stopped.” She brought back all the memories. No wonder everyone thought I was a bore, working all the time. I may have been a bore to them, but by no means was I bored.

It was difficult, at times, but I had to get into the habit to sit down and write. I had to get into a routine. I liked the routine Hemingway had developed. He got up at dawn, wrote until noon, had lunch at one, with wine of course, and fished all afternoon aboard his yacht Pilar. He drank with his pals in the evening.

As a travel writer it is somewhat more difficult to develop a routine. I have to travel first and write later. That means working late at night to meet deadlines. People I know often accuse me of being a workaholic when they see me burning the midnight oil. The chances are that I had been traveling all day, or else I was doing interviews, and it was at night that I had to put in my time writing. I can’t let it wait until the next day.

Getting into the mood is getting into the habit. When I started writing, I had a friend who also wanted to be a writer more than anything else in the world. He wrote every day. He never talked about it, nor did he show me what he was writing, but he worked hard at it. The only thing he admitted was that it was a novel. He knew T wanted to achieve the same goal, to be a novelist. After all, that’s what every writer wants to do, write a book. When I sold my first piece, an article on technical writing, he criticized me terribly. How could I stoop so low? I was prostituting the art of writing. I don’t know if he ever finished his novel and got it published, but I do know my writing for technical manuals and for low-paying magazines was my stepping stone to better things.

And so I write, and continue to write, and don’t stop. As Edward Harriman, the railroad builder once said, “Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more.” I let that be my motto.

A writer has to overcome the great capacity for procrastination. One excuse is the lack of tools. It’s so easy to do, to put the blame on something or someone else. Maybe it’s your computer. The ads tell you that you need a new computer. Yours is not fast enough. Then there’s the Internet, and you have to check to see if you’ve “Got Mail.” Maybe your chair is uncomfortable, and you think you need a better one; or the lighting above your desk is not good; and so it goes. You can find all kinds of excuses, endless excuses. With all our modem conveniences, it seems life gets more confusing, not better. Before computers and word processing, our biggest worry was that our typewriter ribbon was wearing out, or even before that, that we would run out of ink.

I have to think of the masters. Nothing stopped them. Tolstoy wrote in a freezing, unheated studio, warming his fingers with a candle. Hemingway hurt his back in a plane crash in Africa, and it pained him so much, he had to write standing up. Thomas Wolfe was much the same when he wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. He, too, had hurt his back from slipping on the ice in New York, so he placed his typewriter on top of his kitchen icebox -he was 6′ 4″-and wrote standing up. Stevenson wrote with a pencil, and the stubs were often so short, he could hardly hold onto them. They all still wrote. I staunchly believe that computers make life easier for us, but they do not make us more productive. In the past, I produced just as many stories and books every year with my little, much-battered Hermes typewriter as I do now. I spend more time logging and sorting and playing around with these new machines and systems than I need to. Perhaps for research they may come in handy, but there is nothing like going to a library with its rows of books. A library is an inducement to writing. A book in your hands feels good. Pages slowly turned are a revelation. I never hear anyone say that about a computer.

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