Best-Selling Author John Jakes:
Interviewed by Hank Nuwer
The atmosphere around John
Jakes’ household in Hilton Head, South Carolina, could not be
more serene. Lush coffee table books lie stacked like calling cards. A
Searle original in a quality frame hugs one eggshell-colored wall.
Through a plate glass window, three elderly duffers eye a golf hole
with the seriousness they one gave million-dollar corporate decisions.
Another window offers a view of a half-dozen oaks dressed in moss which
hangs down as elegant as ballroom earrings. A full-grown alligator
holds dominion over a pond alongside the house.
John Jakes has come
a long way since those days up to 1973 when he labored as an ad man [in
Dayton, Ohio] by day and hacked out novels of every genre by night
while jacked up on an overload of caffeine and nicotine.
A large man of English and German stock,
he is the son of a Railway Express wagon driver. His big break came in
1973 when independent book producer Lyle Engle commissioned him to whip
out a series for the American Bicentennial. Engle’s first
choice of authors had been an ad agency buddy of Jake’s named
Don Moffit who turned down the job but recommended his friend. The rest
is publishing history. Jake’s Kent Family Chronicles not only
sold nearly 40 million copies but attracted a lucrative television
contract as well. Jakes’ original contract with Engel was for
a paltry five grand a book, but because the author’s real
name was on the series, he was able to renegotiate the contract when
the series became a national hit. Since that series he has written a
well- received Civil War novel, North and South, that is part of a
trilogy which has earned him an enthusiastic following.
Jakes is interviewed at home after
serving a light lunch to his wife, Rachel, and his interviewer. He
wears a blue button shirt and yellow pants. Around his neck, attached
by a cord, are his reading glasses. He’s somewhere in his
early fifties but has an easy grin and wide eyes that give him the look
of a mischievous adolescent. Leo Durcoher might not have liked his
“nice guy” approach, but Jakes has had no trouble
finishing first in the hearts of his readers.
* * *
NUWER: What is your true profession?
JAKES: Oh, I think novelist and storyteller, although I think novelist
certainly would embrace many more types of writing. Joyce Carol Oates
is a novelist and a fine one. James Dickey’s Deliverance, I
think, is one of the best novels ever written. I think it has almost as
much property as fiction. I suppose if I had to be precise, I would
probably choose storyteller because novelist is a much bigger task.
NUWER: Who else do you read?
JAKES: Of all the books that I’ve read the two that stick
most strongly in mind were [Norman Mailer’s] The Naked and
the Dead, because it was such a powerful wallop, but even higher I
would rank as a personal favorite, The Young Lions. Irwin Shaw was not
only a fine writer, but also a man who kept producing a body of work.
It’s one thing to write one brilliant novel and then hang it
up. But to keep going ahead decade after decade to produce a body of
work as good as his is really remarkable.
NUWER: I read both those books in college. Did you participate in a war?
JAKES: No, I never did. I was to be drafted for Korea as soon as I got
out of graduate school, but I never was. I was 1-A. I went to my draft
board in Chicago, a combined draft board with several boards in one
large room, and it was just a whole mess. There were stacks of files
falling behind cabinets. I don’t know what ever happened. The
war was over about a year after I was due, and Rachel and I were
married then. In a way I have always regretted that at a time I did not
inquire too strenuously about it.
NUWER: Stephen Crane was never in a war.
JAKES: I think it’s possible to write about things
you’ve never experienced because, in another sense, you
really have experienced them. You have experienced the fear when your
stomach is all churning—everybody has in one way or another.
NUWER: Have you ever had any experience with the harsher side of life
in any sort of way, tough neighborhood or anything?
JAKES: Oh, I was raised in a very safe middle class neighborhood, but I
had my share of fistfights as a kid. It was usually because I was the
fat kid on the block. I usually lost them unless I could fall on the
opponent—which I did once in a while. I could always get them
that way. No, I didn’t have the kind of background that some
writers have where they come out of extremely poor circumstances and
it’s kind of like the basketball player or the sports
personality fighting to get up and out. I didn’t have that at
all but I’ve had my share of hard knocks.
NUWER: How about poverty?
JAKES: No, my dad had a good job. I grew up in just an average middle
class household. Not wealthy, not poor.
JAKES: Yes, I’d like to. One of these days I would like to. I
don’t know if that’s ever a dream that will be
fulfilled, but we’ll see. I’ve done eight or nine
musicals, all of which are in the so-called stock play
publishers’ catalogs. I did most of them up in Dayton for a
community theatre group and polished them up. They’re done at
various places around the country and one or two of them earn very good
money. I would like to do a Broadway shoe one of these days.
I’m working with a composer right now, a long-time friend who
lives in New York, on two one-act operas, which is an interesting
project because I’ve never tried that before.
NUWER: Did you ever think of putting it on yourself Off-Broadway?
JAKES: I wouldn’t spend my own money for it, no.
That’s probably conceit and folly. You know the trouble Joe
Wambaugh got into with what is it, the Black Marble? He bankrolled it
with his own money for creative control. I would just as soon that
somebody else pony up the direction money. That’s good enough.
NUWER: Do you have a vision or personal philosophy that you try to get
into your books?
JAKES: Oh, I try to put a great deal of myself into every book. I
don’t write message boards, but I do put myself into each
book.
NUWER: Can you put into words how you feel when you get a scene going
just right?
JAKES: You just bubble. My kids will testify that in the early days of
the first few Kent novels when we were all still together at home, I
would come to the dinner table saying, “I just wrote the most
terrific, gory, gut-grabbing Revolutionary War hospital scene
I’ve ever done.” There really is a terrific
exuberance. People often say that writers in the writing mode are
basically children. There is a kind of joyous scene of play.
You’ve thrown the ring over the bottle.
NUWER: I think one of the hardest things for a writer is to visualize
an action scene and get it down in a few words.
JAKES: Yes, that’s difficult. In fact, one of the most
difficult passages I ever wrote was the naval battle in The Seekers
when Constitution gets her name, “Old
Ironsides”. First of all, I’m not a good sailor; I
understand the parts of a ship only with great difficulty, and I had to
go over and over that battle so that I was able even to explain it in a
very elementary way. I find military actions are particularly
difficult. I have talked to people who have been in combat—a
friend from Vietnam and people like that—and have read enough
to know that, in the Civil War, even the highest commanders had very
little sense of the flow of what was going on. Their sense of the
engagement is just what’s happening all around them.
It’s a very tricky think to describe a large piece of action
through the viewpoint of a single person.
NUWER: How do you feel about critics?
JAKES: Oh, I think it’s a harmless pastime. It’s
not as antisocial as stealing hubcaps. I don’t think
it’s socially very significant. I tend to take a very low
view of most criticism because it’s ephemeral. It’s
really a parasitic operation. Were it not for Harold Robbins,
regardless what one thinks of him, there would be no way to attack
Harold Robbins. Theodore Roosevelt did that wonderful speech about the
man in the arena. The poor guy down there scrapping with his tiger is
really a much more important role than sitting in the stands to
criticize the gladiators.
NUWER: So, you walk away from your bad reviews?
JAKES: Yeah, I think you have to. There’s a wonderful story
that Charlton Heston tells about a play he once appeared in with
Lawrence Olivier in New York. It was a bomb, and they both know it on
opening night. They repaired to Sardis’ to drown their
sorrows, and Heston, after he’d had a couple of belts, came
up with this very profound philosophy which he laid on Sir Lawrence.
“Well, Larry,” he said, “I guess we have
to forget our bad notices.” And Oliver said,
“It’s even more important to forget the good
ones.” Meaning simply, you don’t let them worry you
too much. The short-term pulses or minuses you get from the critics are
like dandelion thistles in the wind. You’re grateful for the
good reviews, you appreciate them, and your publisher puts them in the
files to use. I’m a great lover of Shakespeare, not only as a
poet and storyteller and genius, but as a man of the theatre. If you
look into what little is known about his life you find out that he was
over there mucking around the Globe cranking out plays for the company
in which hw was a participatory shareholder, and he was really getting
critical knocks. His stuff was popular. It was Marlowe and the
so-called University Poets who were getting all the kudos for writing
the really profound, Sunday book review section stuff, and you see how
history turned the tables.
NUWER: Do you get letters from readers who look for mistakes in your
story?
JAKES: Every once in a while they’ll get a little snide.
There were a couple of historian howlers in the Kent books. But
generally I’m appreciative of people who are conscientious
enough to write and say, “Hey, you may have slipped up on
this.” I’m not a computer; it’s
impossible to hold everything in your head, and if the suggestion is a
worthy one, I’ll make the fix and gratefully so.
I’ve had a couple of what I call pedantic letters of the
school-masterish tone. The blunder I use most often is in the third
book in the Kent series. I had one of the characters homesteading in
Ohio around 1802, and in the first version he flushed a pheasant out of
the shrubbery. I had one letter telling me that the pheasant was not
imported until much later, but I changed it and happily so.
NUWER: to what do you attribute your own popularity?
JAKES: I think every once in a while that strange chemistry between an
individual writer and reader takes place, and the writer is plucked out
of the great mass of writers who are doing equal or frequently better
work. There’s some chord that is struck that appeals to the
reader, and it doesn’t lie in their perfection of the work or
even the great sill with which it’s accomplished. I think
there’s sort of a strange intangible feeling that the reader
has for the person who’s doing the writing and the way they
do it. They happen to like that person and his or her opinions,
attitudes, way of selecting detail, style the whole thing. I have a
kind of unprovable feeling that it goes much beyond the written work.
They feel the personage behind the book and respond. I feel
it’s very definitely the case with Michener, that
it’s not only Michener the craftsman, but Michener the man
who generates the great strength of this work. Because he is very much
a part of what he writes, I think that comes through.
NUWER: Is there a special reader you desire?
JAKES: Yes, anybody I can get. The mails tells me that I get people
from all over the spectrum—from extremely well-educated
people to people who have not had much education. Men and women are
about equally split, but I think my audience is probably made up of
people a lot like I am. I consider myself in the very center mainstream
of the country where indeed most of the people really are. Theodore
White, a wonderful journalist, says that the country is governed from
the middle, that’s the great central body of people who are
neither on one fringe not the other. I think there is a certain sanity
and balance in that central group. And I think that’s where
my audience comes from. America is really full of them. They certainly
aren’t the famed Silent majority, bit I think
they’re the good, decent, honorable people who
aren’t too busy to take the time to support their schools and
plow a little back into the world that’s given them some kind
of livelihood.
I have had many, many letters from
people on the Kent books saying that when this character or that
character died they wept. If that’s true—and I have
no reason to imagine that people would simply make up those things just
to be gratuitously complimentary—that’s the highest
compliment they can pay to you.
NUWER: Have you ever wept for any of your literary characters?
JAKES: No, because I’m sort of your literary obstetrician;
I’m bringing them into the world. While I’m very
much interested in them, I have to have a certain degree of detachment
to perform the job. I really care about them at the same time.
NUWER: But you’re not the kind of person that would go to
E.T., the movie, and cry. You don’t get emotional?
JAKES: Of yes, I did. I certainly did cry at the end of E.T. I thought
that was one of the most smashing pictures that I have ever seen.
NUWER: So you can get involved n another’s character?
JAKES: Oh, in someone else’s, yeah. I think that’s
what’s missing from so much fiction today. It’s all
so laid back and doesn’t really touch the great basic cords
that ring in people’s hearts and minds. The guy who was the
best writing teacher I had at DePauw had many funny little maxims that
he would give out, most of which were very good. One that sticks in my
mind is that he always used to pound the desk or the tables in the
lecture hall in the seminar room where we sat around the table and say,
“Write about earth, love, marriage, death, you’ll
never go wrong.” It’s really very true. I mean
these are the basic bedrock experiences, and there’s an
infinity of variations in that framework. I try to create my characters
to play on basic situations, love and hate.
NUWER: How important is fantasy in fiction?
JAKES: I think it’s very important. I think family sagas
about poor people would never succeed. I think an element of the family
sags is that it’s usually about people that are usually very
well off, very powerful. I think it’s one of the secrets of
that particular genre. [Readers] don’t particularly want to
read about “just folks” like us, but the high and
the mighty. I think fantasy there plays a role.
NUWER: What I admire about your career is the way you have stuck to it
through tough times for so many years. You wrote a copy as a copywriter
all day and then sat down at night to write your won work? You rather
endured like Faulkner’s characters did. Did you feel heroic?
JAKES: Just the opposite, Hank. I felt like I was perhaps a damn fool
to do what I did because I always knew there were more attractive
things to do such as play golf. The writing was something I wanted to
do—I needed to do—at a certain stage in my career
to pay for my kids’ college education. Sometimes I felt like
I was a real idiot spending my nights in the basement when we lived in
Dayton. I reached a certain point along about the age of 40 or so when
I had doubts whether I would get anywhere. I thought perhaps I ought to
hang it up. So no, I never felt the least bit heroic. I just felt I was
doing a professional job.
NUWER: Did you feel that you had a demon on your back that kept you
working all those years?
JAKES: Yes, I’m sure I did, I’m sure I did. It was
some sort of personal compulsion, I think, for some kind of
recognition, but it was also financial, I was not really making that
much in the advertising business, and we did have four children. I know
we had to educate them.
NUWER: What did that basement look like?
JAKES: I was told that the room I worked in was a kitchen partitioned
off which was put in for a divorced daughter by previous owners. They
had built an additional bedroom on the second floor and given her her
own kitchen in the cellar. There were no more plumbing fixtures down
there, but it was all what I call wallboard or particle board
– a drab yellow-green color with some shelves. I had a large
desk that I carried around for years that I made myself out of a hollow
door that I’d stained and put on some cheap hardware store
legs. It had the advantage of being seven feet wide. It had a
florescent light clipped to one end of it, and my typewriter set up
beside it. It was rather cramped, but it was well lit, it was warm, and
it had a little space heater in the wintertime. Oh, yes, one feature
that I don’t have here was a six-foot wide bulletin board
– a corkboard I’d put up. I don’t have
that here at all, and I miss that. The rest of the walls were taken up
with bookshelves and piles of books sitting on the floor. There were
two little cellar windows on one side that overlooked the backyard. If
you just craned to look out you could see the kids playing.
NUWER: This is a wonderful house you live in here in Hilton Head.
JAKES: I think, comparatively, if you were to spend a day or two on
Hilton Head, I could send you to a dozen houses compared to which this
one would look like a shack. I mean there are some – not
necessarily in size – although that’s true there
are some big homes – but there are some that are just so
furnished. You know the old saying about the “edifice
complex” is really rampant down here because these
corporation executives come down here and build their dream homes. They
pack them with every bit of memorabilia, sometimes in very good taste
and sometimes not, but obviously wit a lot of money. I think we live
relatively simple. This is a house that I characterize as a house for
all the kids to come home to and live and where we can entertain our
friends. It’s not a museum. There are a great many museums on
Hilton Head. I don’t own any Picassos or Matisse paintings.
NUWER: Your [adult] children have been extraordinarily successful at
college and in the work force. Even though you spent all those hours
working, it doesn’t seem to have hurt the way your children
turned out?
JAKES: I sometimes think I shorted them a little bit on parental
attention, but, on the other hand, I tried to keep my schedule
flexible, particularly when they were growing up through seventh and
eighth grade and high school, which I think are the toughest years.
Three of them – or I guess all of them – were in
various bands and orchestras at high school level, for instance.
I’d try to set up my writing schedule so that I was always
available to go to the “X” number of nights a week,
so that I was always available to go to the orchestra concert or
band’s spaghetti supper. I always felt that my family came
ahead of my advertising job or my writing job. I would have sacrificed
either one of those for the welfare of my family. I always put them
first and particularly in the advertising world, that wasn’t
too popular an attitude. But I didn’t care what my employers
felt; that was the way I felt.
NUWER: Reading a book such as North and South or the Kent books, I get
the feeling that you have a strong love of family. That may be one
reason why readers are attracted to your books.
JAKES: That could possibly be. I speculated about that many times.
People would say, ‘Why do you think the Kent books were
popular?’, and that’s one of the reasons. I think
the family saga as a genre is on the rise again. I had a professor at
one university tell me an interesting thing. He thought their
popularity was due to the fact that so many families are in disarray.
As the number of shattered families goes up, the public interest in
fictional families that are strong and relatively cohesive goes up as
well. Maybe because they like to see some insights into family life or
they like to read about successful families, or at least, families that
stick together despite difficulties. I don’t know if
that’s true, but it’s an interesting theory.
NUWER: Do you find that your writing has changed now that you have more
time to write?
JAKES: Yes, one would hope that it’s better. I think with a
little more time devoted to each book, I would hope they’re a
little better. I take more time editing, cutting out the purple
adjectives, which of course I didn’t do to start out with the
pulp magazines. Everything was a penny a word, and if you could add
five adjectives to a noun, why not? It’s another nickel. So I
would hope they’re somewhat better. That’s what I
strive for anyway.
NUWER: Any kind of daily habits back in those days while you wrote?
JAKES: I would bring my coffee down there, and, of course; it got
pretty choking at times because in those days I was an extremely heavy
smoker. I smoked about three packs a day, which I no longer do; I
don’t smoke at all any more.
NUWER: How did you quit smoking?
JAKES: In 1977, I had a physical, and they found a suspicious spot on
my lung. I went into the hospital finally to have the upper right third
of my lung taken out. I threw the cigarettes away as I walked into the
hospital. I believe that my doctor really believed that I had cancer. I
didn’t, fortunately; there was no malignancy. But coming
through this ghastly operation which was quite painful afterwards for
several weeks, got me over the worst part of the smoking withdrawal,
because I on pain killers trying to get from under the discomfort. But
I was back at work on one of the Kent books two weeks after I got out
of the hospital. The hardest day I had was the day I went back to the
typewriter. The old automatic reaching for the cigarettes with the
yellow paper was very strong, but I got over it, rapidly.
I’ve never had a desire since to smoke.
NUWER: Did you find out anything about yourself when you heard the news
about the spot in those dreadful days before you went into the hospital?
JAKES: Yes, I did. I really went through one of those periods of
settling up with myself. Rachel and I sat down and talked about it a
good deal and made plans in case. You probably know once they find a
malignancy on one X-ray you might as well pack it in. John Wayne was
the one in a hundred thousand to live as long as he did after they
found lung cancer. So we sat down and talked about what needed to be
done in a practical sense. Fortunately, that was when I was working on
the seventh Kent novel, and we had already gotten our kids’
college paid for. But I sort of made peace with myself. I was a bit
younger than 47 in 1977; I would have been 45. So I said to myself,
“If I have to check out now, I’ll do so
reluctantly”, but at least I had some success with writing,
however modest. I felt I had achieved what a lot of people never do
with their lives – I had started out to get somewhere and I
had gotten there.
NUWER: Didn’t you ever consider that you were just arriving
and –
JAKES: - No, I felt the other way around. I had reached a point that I
was fortunate to reach. Many people go through life frustrated at what
they do; they don’t even enjoy their daily work –
that seems to be more and more prevalent today. I had finally been able
to work full-time at what I liked and had had some recognition for it.
NUWER: So you didn’t feel good about the things
you’d turned out before you reached 40?
JAKES: Oh, yes. Occasionally. Every writer has ups and downs about the
work he is doing. I did a great number of children’s books
for high school-age juveniles on assignment that I would not have
picked for myself. I did the best I could but I wasn’t
particularly juiced up. I worked very hard on those science fiction
novels. I gave them everything I had. They didn’t do
particularly well, but I was quite proud of them and I still am of
three or four of those.
NUWER: Which ones?
JAKES: One was called Six Gun Planet, which is still nominally in
print. It came along two years before Michael Crichton did West World,
interesting enough. It was about a planet where the mores of the Old
West had become standard, and robots were running the country. My
favorite was Black in Time – which sank like a rock
– which was a book my editor suggested. It was all about some
white extremists and black extremists struggling for control of a time
machine to try to change black history one way or the other. There was
a sort of middle-of-the-road black professor caught in the middle. It
was kind of a self-taught course in black history, because it flashed
back and for the from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s parlor to
Timbuctoo, the great city-state. I thought it was a little presumptuous
of a white writer to try to write what was on the mind of a black man,
but I tried. I didn’t get any flack, but that book sank like
a rock. It’s completely gone; it’s disappeared
altogether. Then I did one called On Wheels several years before Arthur
Hailey did Wheels. It’s about a future American society in
which about 15 percent of the population lived on the 16 lane freeways
in great, interconnected chains of vans driving all the time. They
never went below 40, and they had clans much like those of North
Carolina’s hill country.
NUWER: Sounds like life was one great tailgating party.
JAKES: It really was. It was a combination of what I would call a
Tennessee or North Carolina mountain folktale flavor with the
automotive culture we had going back in the ‘Sixties before
the gasoline crunch hit. It was inspired by a passage from Tom
Wolfe’s terrific essay [“The Last American
Hero”] about Junior Johnson; that’s where I got the
idea. That [On Wheels} is still in print. In fact, I just got some
money the other day from the French edition. It proved a steady seller
in Europe.
NUWER: How many books have you written?
JAKES: I’ve never stopped to count, but they have been
printed in every market on every continent: South American, all through
Scandinavia, Europe, Turkey, Israel, Japan, Australia.
NUWER: How high a stack would your manuscripts be?
JAKES: Oh gosh! Maybe two or three stories. I’m going to give
all mine to the University of Wyoming. There is even one mystery novel
that I’ve lost track of – that I don’t
have a copy of. It was called This Will Slay You, and it was done under
a pen name. I’ve only used two pen names in my career.
I’ve used Alan Payne back in the ‘Fifties when I
was trying to get that [name] established as a detective byline; I did
a couple of short stories under that name. Then I used Jay Scotland as
a historical novel pseudonym.
NUWER: As a historical novelist, do you notice any mistakes we are
repeating today that were committed in Civil War times and so forth?
JAKES: I’ll give you an example. You know the famous
Santayana quotation about those who refuse to learn from history are
doomed to repeat it. I think regardless of which side of the ERA
struggle one is on we could have saved ourselves a powerful lot of
inflated rhetoric if people had simply gone back and read the rhetoric
of the woman’s movement in the 1850’s. that sort of
said it all and those who were particularly opposed to ERA just trotted
out the same old arguments, slightly modernized. I’m just
strongly in favor of ERA; I’m sorry it didn’t pass,
but I was astonished at the way the same old arguments were trotted out
– with maybe a little more contemporary language about unisex
bathrobes and all that stuff. They didn’t say that when Lucy
Stone and Elizabeth Stanton were campaigning for woman’s
rights, but most of the other arguments were put forth.
I think there are some interesting
lessons to be learned from history. We never seem to have the sense of
where we’ve been in this country, and I think to know where
we’ve been can be very helpful. Another example –
I’ve always been a great admirer of John Adams, particularly
in regard to his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre
before the Revolution in 1770, I think. Although he, of course, loathed
the whole idea of the British presence, he defended those soldiers who
inadvertently gunned down some Americans, because he believed firmly
that ever man was entitled to the best legal defense he could get. That
kind of understanding on the part of a brilliant man who became one
this country’s patriots and a fairly good president helps you
to take a little different position on some of these extremely popular
public trials when somebody absolutely loathsome is being defended. It
helps you to realize that however reprehensible the guy or woman may
be, he or she must be defended however unpopular they are. You may not
like the verdict when it’s rendered.
I’ve kind of wandered from the
question. I don’t know that we have anything as undigestible
in this nation today as the slavery question, although certainly I
think the shock waves are still reverberating. I think
there’s a good deal of the black and white issues within the
debate over the social support programs. I think it’s sort of
under the surface. It’s not spoken, but it’s there.
NUWER: Do you have faith in the great masses of people?
JAKES: I have faith in the great masses, I really do. I have the faith,
I think, that Jefferson had. We as a people are frequently guilty of
making the wrong decision over the short term, but my overview is that
the great central mass is decent and honorable. I think
that’s what the record shows about the way we drifted into
the Civil War. The Southern yeomanry was stoutly opposed to slavery,
but they really didn’t have access to the corridors of power
at all. I think it’s interesting that one of the greatest
leaders that South Carolina and the Confederacy had, Wade Hampton,
didn’t go to the secession convention; he wasn’t
there when the deed was done. He didn’t believe in it, [but]
he believed in his own state and he believed in the South. Once the war
started he was a very fierce fighter as so many of them were
– like Lee, for instance.
NUWER: It’s the idea of doing the right thing.
JAKES: Right, right!