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The Manuscript

As the time approached for our joint sessions on the manuscript, I knew Michener and I faced a long, hard trek. Since Jim hadn't seen my line-by-line reports, his estimate of the task ahead was more rose-colored.

When I'm finished the last page of Chapter XV, you will have to come down here for a two-week uninterrupted stint during which we'll go over chapter by chapter, weighing all the criticisms and suggestions. I judge we should be able to handle about one chapter a day, leaving aside the big areas that I can wrestle with separately after you've gone.

Our work would take from September 8 to December 21, 1979, almost four months trekking across a thorn-studded landscape with Van Doorns, Saltwoods and Nxumalos to reach Vrymeer, the lake of freedom!

In his notes on the manuscript of The Covenant, Jim has this to say about our sessions together:

Errol Uys, a South African and an expert writer on South African affairs, did a prodigious amount of editorial work, partly to satisfy his own recollection of events, partly to correct my errors, or sometimes, what he conceived of as my errors. He was very good. We had violent arguments on points, some of which I knew more about than he did; but usually he had a keen sense of what should be done and was invaluable.

 

We read every word of the novel aloud together and then all over again separately, working from 0800 till 2300 for weeks on end. He interleaved each chapter in detail, sometimes unnecessarily I thought and in so doing developed strong feelings as to what should be eliminated or improved or clarified. He was, I believe, the most thorough editor I have ever worked with.

I'd been editor-in-chief of Reader's Digest in South Africa and held various writing and editing jobs for a decade and a half. I knew the joy of a clean manuscript landing on my desk, all too rare as any editor knows. I'd also rolled up my sleeves for massive surgery, sometimes the total rewrite of a story. Nothing I did before could compare with my work on The Covenant which I believe was unique in Michener's relationship with his assistants, made so by my intimate involvement from the conception of the novel.

I was awed by Jim's legendary drive and discipline in turning out the first draft of 1,634 pages, month by month, chapter after chapter, the latter not in sequence. – One of the first big blocks he wrote was the chapter on Apartheid, set in the final decades of the story. – Between September 9, 1978 when we met after his return from South Africa and December 16, 1978 he finished the original Chapter 1 (Diamonds), Chapter II (Near-Man), Chapter XIII (Apartheid) and Chapter IV (Bushmen/San.) Eight months later at the end of August 1979, the fifteen draft chapters were complete, essentially a chapter a month, several running to one hundred and more pages.

Now we sat opposite each other on the sun-filled porch of the cottage on Broad Creek at St. Michaels beginning our work on the manuscript. The first chapter we picked up for review was the story of Great Zimbabwe in the mid-fifteenth century, starting with the boy Nxumalo at his village on the site of the future Vrymeer in what would be the Transvaal and telling how he journeyed to Zimbabwe and its mighty stone citadel. In his story, Jim introduced a character called The Collector. He was an old man who traveled south from Great Zimbabwe to Vrymeer, coming for an annual tribute of ivory tusks, lion skins and rhino horns and with orders to recruit the chief's son for royal service.

There was a fundamental flaw in this idea, which I discussed in my research report: “In all sources I checked, and there were many, not a shred of evidence to suggest that Zimbabwe hegemony extended this far south...The picture given of a collector coming to exact tribute just doesn't have any basis in history/anthropology.”

I remember sitting across the table from Jim choosing my words carefully for I was both nervous and respectful. Of course, Michener was a pro long accustomed to the barbs and stings of blue pencil men, an accomplished writer of twenty books, including the four epic sagas of Hawaii, The Source, Centennial and Chesapeake. I'd done my homework and was well-armed but still felt that I was entering a minefield.

Step by step, I laid out my objections to “The Collector.” I can still see the steely look on Jim's face, and the charge that came into the air between us, like the electricity that presages a thunderstorm on the African veld, when day turns to blackest night and lightning detonates across the sky.

There was no violent argument in this first clash over the Zimbabwe chapter. I read the sections aloud and told Jim why the pages wouldn't work. His first response was to leave them for later and move on with smaller errors more readily corrected. We did this but it soon became evident that the drastic changes needed for The Collector would significantly impact the story line.

We went back to the drawing board. I proposed that “The Collector” become “Old Seeker,” an ambassador at large, an explorer, a seeker, who takes the chief's boy to Zimbabwe, not as satrap's son but a young man out to discover one of the wonders of his world in 1454. Embedded in the new story line were two important markers for the novel, one firmly establishing the Nguni forerunners of South Africa's tribes in the Transvaal, the second foreshadowing the golden treasure of the “Ridge of the White Waters,” the Witwatersrand.

In 2003, author Stephen J. May contacted me for his new biography, Michener: A Writer's Journey (University of Oklahoma Press, 2005,) asking about my work on The Covenant. A part of my response to May dealt with overcoming problems like the one encountered with “Old Collector” that no degree or editing or re-writing could fix:

As the roadblocks mounted and our revision slowed to a crawl, there came a morning when I was left alone with one of these unusable sections. I knew what I had to do but remember sitting there and worrying about Michener's reaction: Would he consider it grossly improper and impertinent were I to write original material for him? I wasn't thinking of one or two re-cast paragraphs but sections of narrative and dialogue running to several pages.

I put aside the questions that dogged me and drafted the new pages. When Jim returned, I gave my work to him. He went into his study and after a while began to type...

And this is how we continued to deal with material I wrote, Michener taking the items with little comment and typing them up for insertion into his manuscript. Some drafts didn't come back to me, but many were returned, as I needed them for working on later sections of the relevant chapters.

Here, I have chosen a small sampling of my contributions to the manuscript. The illustrations are from four chapters:

(VII) Mfecane

(VII) The Voortrekkers

(X)   The Venloo Commando

(XII) The Achievement of A Puritan

Each example shows 1) Michener first draft 2) Uys first draft 3) First paragraph and page references in The Covenant. (Copyright law prevents me from displaying the full published section.)

Chapter VII Mfecane

Mfecane, a Zulu word meaning ‘The Crushing,' depicts the rise of chief Shaka and the expansion of the Zulu kingdom in the early 19th century.

The main problem I found with Jim's original draft concerned the image of a brutal Zulu society and the outright cruelty of its ruler:

The whistling anecdote is confusing... it relates precisely to the sort of action imputed to Shaka in later years. There is very little evidence of such cruelty prior to this.

 

On the contrary, Ritter stresses: “When the time came for the passing of Shaka's father in 1816 it marked the end and beginning of two distinct periods in East Nguni history.” Certainly malefactors were slain, but the transgression would have to be far more serious than this. “Whistling” etc. links with Year of Mourning slayings after Nandi's death. And, so, too, the mutilation. (Ritter = E.A. Ritter, Shaka Zulu)

 

Addressing the chief of the Sixolobo clan as... “Elephant-who-causes the earth to Tremble”: Respect for authority, from childhood up was, and is, at the center of Zulu society, and they may well have addressed him as such but again, strongly suggests Shaka/Dingane era.

 

The whole impression given here pitches us into that period. Ritter: “The art of war, prior to the wonderful efficiency later attained by the martial genius of Shaka, had remained throughout in its most unsophis-ticated form. For on rare occasions disputes did arise between clan and clan, and peaceful efforts providing no remedy, recourse must be had to arms.”

 

Oxford History of South Africa: “From the beginning of his reign Shaka had been a more capricious ruler than the traditional Nguni chief often ignoring the advice of his councilors and ordering the killing of subjects who displeased him for any reason.”

 

Oxford, (p122, Vol.1) depicts a far less “barbaric” society. In fact, looking at the southern Nguni “a society in which disputes were settled in court, trade regulated, and the power of the chief himself bridled . But the records show that there was a lively belief in witchcraft and sorcery; those accused were often tortured to obtain a confession, for the life of the victim was held to depend on such confession, and those convicted were killed.

Michener Drafts

Mfecane, p 1–5

ELU notations, preliminary edits on pages

Click to enlarge and read pages

These pages ignited one of the “violent arguments” Jim recalled in his notes about the manuscript, for he was adamant about a dramatic scene-setting opening for the Mfecane chapter. I saw a solution in making the story turn on witchcraft with a diviner smelling out the evil brought by Nxumalo's father. The divination provided an important foreshadowing of a scene in the chapter on The Voortrekkers, when the Voortrekker leader Piet Retief and his party meet their deaths at the hands of Dingane.

Uys Rough Drafts

Mfecane, p 1-5

Note: Pages from ELU rough handwritten draft

Click to enlarge and read pages

Uys Typed Rough Drafts

Mfecane, p 1-5

Click to enlarge and read pages

Chapter VIII

The Voortrekkers

This core chapter presented some of the manuscript's most challenging problems. This particular section ran into difficulties because of an underplaying of the English role on the frontier and an exaggerated image of the Boer/Voortrekker as hero. As I wrote in my research overview of the first draft:

I am not trying to destroy the ‘heroic' image of the Boer/Voortrekker – just attempting to bring some perspective. The narrow image of ill-done Boer preyed on by English authority is just not good enough for the 1980s. What we have here is a stylized, somewhat mythological Afrikaner interpretation: I could go on for pages, but let's leave it for discussion. To say none of you Boers could have fought/that the town would have been undefended is just wrong. As is this whole suggestion of a war in 1833 in which at scattered farms all along the frontier English wives and children had been slain.

 

And all wondered what the outcome would be when the defence of the town had to depend upon a professional military that simply was not in existence. NO. — Ignores 4-5000 British troops in colony.— In December 34/35 when the 6th Kaffir War broke out, Col. (then) Harry Smith and d'Urban were able to go to frontier…” At the end of March his first troops crossed the Keiskamma River near fort Willshire and entered black territory. Two weeks later Sir. Benjamin (d'Urban) himself led a division across the Kei...” and so on.

 

the English in Cape Town and London will never give up until farmers like the three of us are wiped out But, for example, see the English reaction per Smith/d'Urban when news reached the Cape that 1834 invasion had occurred. It was on New Year's Eve... Harry Smith left immediately riding six hundred miles in six days to take command at the frontier. Within 14 days the Gov. d”Urban was in battle dress at the front... 

At this point I want to reiterate that I am not trying to knock the central theme of Afrikaner history – I am suggesting that the “great tapestry” be coloured with a slightly more subtle hue. The main theme stands, but in a 1981 version so much more material and knowledge is available than was to a man like Nathan in 1936, (Manfred Nathan, The Voortrekkers of South Africa) one has to take account of it.

 

What people tend to forget is that the Afrikaner people were at this point split by the very forces that were to separate them, again and again…The verkrampte (‘cramped') and verligte ('enlightened')forces. At this stage, as today, the verligtes were in the majority.

 

Nathan would ignore, for instance, reports such as this in the Commercial Advertiser, 3 September 1836:

... a preference in favor of land that costs nothing, over land which must be paid for, subject to burdens which are necessary for support of regular government. To obtain land for nothing, and to escape taxation are motives of emigrants. These have in the past carried the colonists from Table bay to the Fish and Orange river and same are now carrying them to Port Natal Delagoa Bay. The same motives will carry them on till they meet some impassable desert.

 

And so one could go on… Some perspective is desperately needed.

Michener Draft

Voortrekkers, p 51-53

(ELU notations, preliminary edits)

Click to enlarge and read pages

Uys Rough Draft

Voortrekkers, p 48-52

New material inserted following draft page 53, covering points about Harry Smith and English, above

Click to enlarge and read pages

Uys Final Draft

Voortrekkers insert, p 48-52

Click to enlarge and read pages

Chapter X

The Venloo Commando

In a letter dealing with the Boer War chapter, Jim wrote: “Johanna van Doorn, born 1880, is becoming a powerful character and will be focal in Chapter XIII (first draft chapter number). That was your idea, not mine, and a very good one."

My mother, Hester Johanna Maria “Joey” Uys, who was seven when the war broke out, inspired Johanna's role. Long before I met Michener, I'd interviewed Joey about her experiences in the war, especially her internment in Bloemfontein Concentration Camp from 1900 to 1902.

Two pages from my notes of those long chats with Joey give a good idea of what she endured.

Click to read Joey's story derived from these notes.

The following example of my work on The Venloo Commando is from the opening section, where I drafted a new introduction to capture the atmosphere on the eve of the conflagration.

Michener Draft

The Venloo Commando, p 1-2

ELU notations, preliminary edits

  Click to enlarge and read pages

Uys Draft

The Venloo Commando, p 1-2

(ELU new chapter lead with edits by JAM)

Click to enlarge and read pages

Chapter XII

Achievement of a Puritan

In Jim's draft, Detleef van Doorn first sees the squalor of Sophiatown going with Micah Nxumalo to take relief supplies to the Afrikaners during the Rand Rebellion. At the end of the rebellion, the family of Troxel, a poor white Afrikaner, returns to Vrymeer with Detleef and occupies the de Groot lands. In the 1930s, Micah's son, Moses Nxumalo, is living in Sophiatown, Johannesburg. Moses works as a house servant for the liberal-minded Saltwoods of New Sarum in a northern suburb of the city.

Moses gains much from attending meetings of African intellectuals similar to those that actually took place at the Bantu Men's Social Club in Eloff Street. Returning from one of the meetings, Moses is attacked and stabbed by a gang of tsotsi thugs. He survives and during his recuperation evaluates his experiences in the city, including his perception that the poverty and dispossession of Africans and the Afrikaner poor are similar. The contact with young African intellectuals makes Moses vow that if he has a son, he will enroll him at Fort Hare, then the only university college for Africans.

Jim ended the section there. I saw an opportunity to send Moses from Johannesburg to Hemelsdorp, the Village of Heaven, showing what life meant to the black people of Johannesburg twenty years before the advent of “grand apartheid.” The story begins when Moses walks down Eloff Street and is stopped by the police.

Michener Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 111

ELU notations, preliminary edits)

Click to enlarge and read pages

Uys Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 111

Click to enlarge and read pages

Michener Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 132-133

ELU notations, preliminary edits

  Click to enlarge and read pages

Uys Draft

Achievement of a Puritan, p 132-133

  Click to enlarge and read pages

The Long-Distance Writers – A postscript

On December 2, 1979, Jim and I lunched at Longfellows on the waterfront at St. Michaels, three weeks before our work together ended. On our daily walks I often spoke of ideas for novels: Brazil (As a first step, Jim urged me to read Gilberto Freyre's Masters and Slaves, which I did long before sitting down with Professor Freyre in Recife:) How Peace Came to Europe (the displaced and the dispossessed after World War II;) and a book about the blacks of South Africa from 1600 to the present, a counterpart to the story of the Afrikaner Van Doorns.

At lunch, our table talk turned to those ideas. – Interrupted by “Jim the food critic,” rating the local crab cakes, a task he took very seriously, his highest rank a “9-plus” going to a couple met during his Chesapeake days; when we dined with the them I saw Jim's written accolade in a silver frame on their sideboard! – I later summed up what Jim said at Longfellows:

Every excerpt, every page you have written for my book these past weeks shows that you are a writer with a superb use of the English language, a remarkable vocabulary and a very special turn of phrase. You are as ready to write your book on the black people of South Africa as you will ever be. If you waited five, eight, ten years you'd be no better. Get started tomorrow.

 

I never normally go this far, but I would say that you are virtually guaranteed acceptance. Work up the synopsis and write two chapters – they have to be damn good mind you – and you'll definitely get an advance on them. I will give you any help you need in getting it placed with a publisher. I believe this book – and others you've mentioned like How Peace Came – will be a great success.

Ten months later, I wrote to Jim telling him that I was leaving Reader's Digest to write Brazil, and recalled our exchange at Longfellows. Jim responded with these encouraging words:

 

I note that you wrote to me on the same day that you wrote Thompson,(Ed Thompson, editor-in-chief of the Digest ) so I judge that between the two letters I have a full picture of your thinking. It's quite gallant, and the most important thing for me to say is that I stand by all I said in your reconstructed note of our December 2 luncheon at Longfellows. I think this is important because you will need constant assurance in the months ahead.

 

You unquestionably have the talent to write almost anything you direct your attention to. You are a great researcher, as your copious notes prior to our work sessions together indicated. And you know how to put words together most skillfully as your work on the manuscript proved. With such talents you stand a remarkably good chance in whatever you try. You have also, from what I gleaned in our conversations on the long walks, an acute sense of timeliness in subject matter. That's a rare combination, the most promising I've met with in years of talking with would-be writers.

I appreciated this acknowledgement of my work on The Covenant, for as we tackled the last chapters in late November 1979, we clashed over my role in the novel, one of the most difficult moments in our long and intimate working relationship.

In his notes on The Covenant, Michener says: “I wrote a most graceful and accurate dedication, but for reasons I won't go into, it was rejected. So we decided on no dedication. Instead we used a fine, accurate statement about the contribution of Errol Uys and a note in the acknowledgement about Bateman.”

The reasons we fought concerned a proposed dedication to “Philip Bateman and Errol Uys...two loyal sons of South Africa without whose assistance it (this book) could not have been written.” Bateman had indeed assisted us greatly, a superb guide for Jim's on-site five-week research journey and subsequently as local liaison and researcher. He was paid handsomely in fees and expenses, but as I told Jim at the time there was no doubt in my mind – every scrap of paper in that room bore me out – for every hour Bateman put in on the project, I put in ten.

The question of Bateman's role in the book was only one of several issues in that stormy session on December 2. Afterwards I sat down and wrote a letter to my wife, Janette, describing what happened:

The upshot of my showdown came with Jim asking the Digest to pay me a $5,000 bonus. He scrapped the dedication and added an author's note to the novel:   

On December 21, 1979, I wrapped up my work on The Covenant and bade Jim farewell heading home for Christmas. A parting with a wry Dickensian twist, for Jim presented me with a wild goose from Mari's larder, for my family's festive table. The bird turned out to be inedible, riddled from stem to stern with lead shot.

I was back at my desk at the Reader's Digest in February 1980, when out of the blue I got a broadside in the shape of what I've come to call “the Avenick letter.” Jim had previously told me that Joseph Avenick, who assisted him with Sports in America, was going round saying that he'd ghost-written the book. Michener had sought to dismiss Avenick by suggesting he was lost in a miasma of letter writing to the President, the Pope, Ted Kennedy et al. In his missive to me, Michener threatened me with the same woeful fate should I claim to have done more than vet his manuscript.

What I chose to do, of course, was leave the Digest at the end of 1980 and devote myself to my writing. My historical novel, Brazil, was five years in the making, with Simon & Schuster giving me a $45,000 advance, my only income over this period. On four occasions, I asked Jim for financial help, which he never refused nor did he ask repayment. For his support in seeing Brazil to completion, I remain ever grateful.

Prior to publication in November-December 1980, The Covenant was banned in South Africa. This judgment was largely based not on the novel itself, but two condensations published in Reader's Digest focusing on contemporary apartheid issues. A slew of Afrikaner critics weighed in against the novel, W. A. De Klerk calling it “pretentious literary trash,” not worth a banning. Jim and I could take heart though from another reader who saw the book in a different light: “White South Africa is a society corrupted by racism,” said Alan Paton, author of Cry, the Beloved Country . “Michener sometimes exaggerates and over dramatizes, but he is exaggerating the truth...I cannot call this anything but an extraordinary book.”

There was a special bond between Michener and I that went beyond the words we wrote. Neither of us knew our birth parents and had grown up in genteel poverty. At nine, Jim was scouring the Doylestown woods for chestnuts to sell to neighbors; my first enterprise was selling peaches in the street outside our house. From the age of eleven until he was a young man Jim worked at many jobs from paper carrier to ticket taker at Willow Grove amusement park outside Philadelphia. I was eleven when I started my mini-career as salesman in a Johannesburg toy store and pitchman at the Rand Show. As teenagers, Jim and I both hit the road and stuck out our thumbs, hitchhiking thousands of miles and beginning the life journeys that would see us walking together on a road in Maryland. Neither of us would publish our first books before we were forty.

Our collaboration on The Covenant was unique, different from any other assistance Jim had in producing his works of fiction. I remember my excitement in coming to work with America's best-loved writer, sharing my passion for storytelling and my hunger to let the world know the story of South Africa. I see us wrestling with all those grand ideas on our mighty journey through history, Michener and the boy who wrote Revenge.

I hear laughter as we swap ideas for the red-haired terror Rooi Valck and Mal Adriaan, Crazy Adriaan, who found the lake called Freedom. I feel again the sorrow we knew at the death of Old Bloke dying like a dog in the road when a WHITES-ONLY ambulance won't pick him up. I see Van Doorns, Saltwoods, and Nxumalos, moving forward with The Covenant , character-by-character, scene-by-scene, until the day when their story was told. I see it all as clearly as if we were back in the cottage beside Broad Creek on Chesapeake Bay.

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