“I’m not happy doing public speaking,” James Michener once exclaimed. “But I do recognize an obligation, if one lives in a community and is occupied at a task which interests that community, at some point to level with one’s neighbors as to what one is up to.”
Indeed, the man leveling inside St. Marks United Methodist Church Hall in Easton on the night of May 17, 1978 was the world-renowned author. Probably age 71 at the time—Michener was an orphan, after all, and his exact year of birth unknown, but estimated at 1907—the celebrity was dryly witty and a tad condescending as he talked about his forthcoming book about the Chesapeake Bay, and previous bestsellers like Tales of the South Pacific, Hawaii, and Centennial.
He confessed to “some apprehension about this novel.” The concern wasn’t rooted in the intrinsic qualities of the bay area, which Michener had first visited, and became entranced by, on a sail from Rock Hall in 1927. Just three years before his lecture, he and his Japanese-born wife Mari had purchased the home in St. Michaels, where he composed his valentine to the region. “Why the Eastern Shore has not been written about a great deal in fiction, I really don’t know,” he said. “It’s a mystery.”
The region challenged Michener’s formula for success in popular fiction. Where his blockbusters had focused on locales of enormous public interest—Asia, Jerusalem, the American West—the Chesapeake of the mid-1970s was still a relatively quiet and remote spot, unheralded. Michener’s private correspondence recorded half-a-dozen instances over the preceding 20 years, where he had told intimates his next writing project would be about the bay.
All he knew during that first public discussion of the book, was that the final product bore structural similarity to past triumphs. Sprawling and picturesque, the weighty tome chronicled several generations of clans and tribes in the selected region: the bay’s landowners and farmers, watermen and traders, Quakers and Native Americans, African American slaves and crusading abolitionists. But would it sell?
Michener needn’t have worried. Published by Random House in hardcover in June 1978, Chesapeake, at 865 pages, became one of the biggest hits of the author’s legendary career: five million sales and, despite debuting at mid-year, the bestselling book of the year.
As always with Michener, popular and critical responses diverged. “Like eating your way through a boxcar full of Rice Krispies with a teaspoon,” pronounced the New York Times’ Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. “As for nutritional value: I could recall virtually nothing of Chesapeake a few minutes after reading its final pages.”
Michener shrugged off such attacks. “I’m a target,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “Chesapeake is one of the most successful novels ever published. Why should I worry that one person didn’t like it when five million people did?”
Crafting the Best Seller
Arriving in St. Michaels in 1975, Michener sat down to his manual typewriter with Chesapeake mapped out in his head. Initially, he rented a home off Martingham Road, then purchased a small old house on a 25-acre plot overlooking a creek that fed into the Choptank River. Visitors blinked at the shabbiness of the setup: green shag rug, a desk of two card tables, safety pins for stuck typewriter keys, a freezer-full of Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks.
Mornings, 7:30 a.m. to noon, were spent in a cramped bedroom with garden view, pounding out the book’s 14 chapters. Afternoons and evenings, with help from Mari and secretary Nadia Orapchuk, saw Michener tending to his diaryand unrelenting correspondence: Would he give the commencement here? Write a forward there? Donate more money, on top of the tens of millions he and Mari, childless, had already given to charities?
The papers from Michener’s cherished time in St. Michaels—where he would write a second bestseller, The Covenant (1980)—he later deposited at the Talbot County Free Library in Easton. There, tucked among the A-list invitations and Western Union telegrams, one finds the appreciative note William F. Buckley, Jr. sent, after receiving his copy of Chesapeake, on July 6, 1978: “How wonderfully thoughtful of you… I shall take it with me to the Bohemian Grove and be the envy of all mere mortals….As always, Bill.”
Despite Michener’s familiarity with the bay, he still undertook his customary mammoth research effort. This encompassed what Michener called “an intimate indoctrination to almost all aspects of water life,” including crabbing, oystering, and boat-building, and such disparate fields as ornithology, dendrology, armament, the slave trade, religions. He also debriefed residents. The Michener papers reveal he struck a major character from the original draft of Chesapeake due to a horrific encounter with locals. “I had always intended,” he wrote in his diary, “to write of a black man called Fingers, and I had spent many hours developing his character.”
“He was a musician who had once danced with Fred Astaire. He knew the big cities and now he was back in Frog’s Neck [Michener’s fictional black neighborhood], trying to teach his son how to cope. He was the finest character in the novel. He picked up spare change by playing piano in the Will Foss Trio, Sharkfin Scudder on bass. I did much work with black musicians and had everything in order, but one night I had a very long session with three black elders…I asked, ‘Exactly how is my trio going to get its job playing in one of the bistros connected with the building of the Bay Bridge?’ And one of the black men snapped, ‘Job? We all drove to the contractor’s office to apply for jobs, and they said, ‘We don’t hire no n*****s,’ and they were busing white workmen in from [as] far away as Boston.’ This statement was so terrible that I had to place my hand over my mouth to keep from showing my trembling lips.”
Out came Fingers and in went a scene modeled on this account. In the author’s eyes, for reasons beyond racism, the advent of the Bay Bridge marked a dark turning point for the Chesapeake. “The announced justification for the bridge was that it would provide an alternate route between Washington and New York,” Michener wrote in Chesapeake, “but the real purpose was to enable Monday-to-Friday bureaucrats in Washington and Baltimore to get more speedily to their summer resorts along the Atlantic Ocean, and this meant the sleepy fields of the Eastern Shore, so long protected from outside influences, would be converted into snarling highways for pleasure seekers. Where gracious living had prevailed, gas stations and quick-food counters would clutter the landscape.”
The Tales Weaved Within
“It turned out really better than I anticipated,” Michener told the audience at St. Marks. Starting in 1583 and snaking the tributaries of American history all the way down to Watergate, the grand narrative in Chesapeake followed six families:
• The Steeds, noble English Catholics who arrived on the bay with Captain John Smith in the early seventeenth century and established themselves as preeminent landowning farmers, traders, venture capitalists, and slave-holders
• The Paxmores, Quakers who fled religious persecution in Massachusetts to become the shipbuilders and moral conscience of the Bay
• The Turlocks, wily “white trash” whose criminality and indentured servitude slowly gave way to pioneering the work of the watermen whose toil would define the Bay
• The Cavenys and Pflaums, hardworking immigrants from Ireland and Germany, respectively
• The Caters, African Americans descended from a heroic rebel slave named Cudjo, whose long journey to freedom began with capture by Arabs on the imaginary Xanga River, off the Congo
Lesser characters included Pentaquod, the stoic Native American whose excommunication from the Susquehannock tribe opens the book; various real-life historical figures, from George Washington to H.R. Haldeman; even a goose named Onk-or and a crab named Jimmy, from whose perspectives the action sometimes unfolded.
The final character, Pusey Paxmore, a former Nixon administration official, lamented the environmental degradation of the bay and the erosion of his own moral edifice in Watergate.
The main character, of course, was the Chesapeake Bay itself. With his trademark voluminous detail, Michener traced the bay’s geologic origins to the Ice Age and recounted the 1886 hurricane that “exploded with destructive fury into the body of the Chesapeake,” raising water levels by five feet and destroying a generation of oysters. He actually dissected the bay: differentiated the Eastern and Western Shores as well as surveyed conditions at the bay’s top, bottom, and middle layers.
The deviations from history were slight. The English settled the Choptank later than depicted, and real-life pioneering families and town names were eschewed—a strict rule of Michener’s that helped him, wherever his novels were set, to avoid locals’ ancient arguments over which family was first, most prominent, or reviled. “The principal locales are so completely imaginary,” he assured the assembled at St. Marks, “that they have been carefully located on land that does not even exist.” With action set mostly on the north bank of the Choptank, Michener effectively took the settlement of Kent Island and moved it 23 miles southeast, creating an amalgam of Talbot and Dorchester Counties.
At all points, Michener’s love of place summoned his finest writing. He imagined how Pentaquod, the first Native American to gaze upon the bay, must have reacted:
He walked beneath majestic oaks until he reached the eastern tip, and there he stood, dumbfounded, for wherever he looked he saw a grand expanse of water forming itself into bays and creeks and coves and even small rivers for as far as he could see. And along the shores of these varied waters rose land of the most inviting nature: at times broad fields, at other times gently rising land covered with trees even taller than those on the island, and everywhere the impression of opulence, and quietness, and gentle living. It was the most congenial place he had ever seen. He judged that in a storm this sleeping body of water might have the capacity for considerable turbulence, and he was certain that before he could possess any part of this wonderland, he would have to contend with its present owners, who might be just as cantankerous as the Susquehannocks, but of one thing he was certain: Along this splendid river he wished to spend the rest of his life.
“How beautiful it was,” Michener marveled,200 pages later, at the region’s wildlife:
[D]eer abounded and beaver; geese and ducks vied for a place to rest; the last bears and wolves in the area made it their home; and in the small marshes at the heads of the embracing streams a thousand different kinds of life proliferated. Once again it was a paradise with vistas of enchantment, and as each night ended, with the sun struggling to break loose in the East, blue herons would fly back to their ancient home, probing the muddy bottoms of the creeks and crying in the darkness when they found succulence.
Near book’s end, the first pilot to fly over the bay became, in Michener’s view, “the first human being ever to have seen it properly.”
What he saw below him was that enchanting mixture of broad estuaries, nestling coves and long finger-like peninsulas providing a shoreline hundreds of miles in length, a magical blend of land and water equaled nowhere else in the United States.
The natural splendor on display in Chesapeake was offset by profound human dysfunction. With a progressivism not always reflected in his personal views—in a letter to a friend, he questioned why anyone “ever really thought George McGovern would accomplish anything but the near-destruction of his party”—Michener made Indians, Quakers, African Americans, and women his most admirable characters.
But the book’s most searing, transfixing passages chronicled the frailties, failings, and cruelty of men. Few scenes could match the sheer brutality of the flogging, in colonial Massachusetts, of Edward Paxmore and Ruth Brinton, brave Quakers destined to marry and, after flight to Maryland, operate a segment of the Underground Railroad. “When the sheriff stripped them both to the waist, with watchers ogling in delight, their common heritage became obvious: each back was flayed and marked with indented scars. There was no man or woman.”
Even more harrowing were the slavery passages. “While some will complain that I have made the slave farm on the Little Choptank too harsh,” Michener wrote in his diary, “I have more than adequate historical evidence to support it.” This was a reference to the fictitious Cline farm, to which reputable figures like the Steeds sent rebellious or intractable slaves. There, the sadistic proprietor, slave breaker Herman Cline, would collect a $150 fee to “reform” errant Negroes through a year of daily beatings and torture. The arrival at the Cline farm of canny, unbowed Cudjo, who had briefly commandeered the slave ship that brought him from Africa, was enough to haunt even the most hardened readers:
When Cudjo was dragged forth, Cline took one look at him and realized that this was going to be a difficult year. He said nothing; simply marched the big Xanga to the wharf, indicated that he was to get into the sloop, and got in after him. But before casting loose, he suddenly swung his club and began belaboring Cudjo over the head, knocking him down with the first blow and continuing to thrash him as he lay in the boat, striking particularly at his face.
Mr. Steed and Mr. Starch, on the wharf, were startled by the violence of the attack, but the latter said, “That’s the way he always begins.”
Reflecting 40 Years Later
I began reading Chesapeake in June 2018, the 40th anniversary of its debut, when my wife and I purchased a home, with our two boys and two cats, on the Eastern Shore. A reckoning withMichener’s monumental tome seemed like a fitting tribute to our new home.
Making the long march through the 1,083 pages of small, dense font in the yellowing paperback edition, a feat vastly more difficult in today’s information-overload environment than in the relative quietude of 1978, I was struck by the extraordinary changes in popular tastes since then. Could anyone imagine a work like Chesapeake, with its one chaste sex scene and lengthy meditations on the intricacies of seventeenth-century shipbuilding, topping bestseller lists today?
Gawking at the girth of the paperback I toted at the beach, in airports, friends asked with scarcely concealed amusement how long I had been reading it, where in history I was up to now, when I expected to finish. It was as if, in between glances at their social media pages, they couldn’t quite believe anyone would expend so much energy on a single book.
At the end, I realized something about myself. My desire for time travel was really fixed on the period when the novel appeared: the leisurely late ’70s, when people actually had time to read books like this and publishers profited from them.
Michener would write several more bestsellers and his celebrity, until his death in 1997, only grew. As late as September 1981, at age 74, he was the featured interviewee in Penthouse. He donated more than $100 million to charity. Michener: A Writer’s Journey (2005), by Stephen J. May, would reveal less enchanting dimensions of Michener’s character, and their emergence when he was writing Chesapeake; but his climb from poverty to wealth will always offer a window onto the American Dream.
Living longer held no appeal to Michener. “I’m quite convinced that I would make all the same mistakes,” he told an interviewer. “I’m not a great fatalist at all, but I do think we’re all foreordained.”
James Rosen is a reporter for Sinclair Broadcast group in Washington.
