Writing Phenomenon Auel Makes Prehistory

The Jean M. Auel Phenomenon--it needs some explaining. Just how does a woman who’d never written a word before she turned 40 break all previous publishing records with a pre-publication sale of 1 million books? And how is this business-oriented, ex-credit manager, MBA holder, from Portland, Ore., with five grown children and a successful marriage, managing to nudge James Michener into second place with novels about the Ice Age?

In late 1985, Auel’s newest book, “The Mammoth Hunters” (Crown Publishers Inc.: $19.95), was No. 1 on every best-seller list for hardcover fiction. At the same time her first novel in the “Earth’s Children” cycle, “Clan of the Cave Bear,” which came out in 1980, was back up there as 10th on the B. Dalton hardcover list, while her second, “The Valley of Horses” (1982) was in 15th place. And this, despite the fact that her first two books are available in paperback.

Scores of her fans lined up for her recent autograph session at Hunter’s Books in Beverly Hills. Some clutched the hefty (645-page) novel lovingly, while still others, weighed down with as many as four copies, explained that they made perfect gifts.

Staying Up Late

Donna Stieghan, employed by an electronics firm in Long Beach, said she can’t help staying up until 3 or 4 a.m. reading Auel’s latest, even though “it plays havoc with my early work schedule.”

Housewife Patricia Pollock credited Auel for her new-found enthusiasm for history: “I can barely wait to get at this one. There is a realness and good feeling about her version of the past. It’s not like what I remember from school. . . . I actually found myself buying a copy of National Geographic the other day. Do you know why? Someone told me there was an article about prehistoric society in it and I thought, I can follow that now, I feel quite knowledgeable about Paleolithic people. That’s Auel’s books. They’ve done that for me.”

For writer Shawn Derrik, Auel’s Cro-Magnon heroine represented the very “core of woman,” someone “inside every one of us” and one who gives her “the courage to get through life.”

Joan Travis, a co-founder and trustee of the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation, said she seldom reads novels but makes an exception in Auel’s case because, “She’s done her homework. Never mind the soap-opera aspects that are, after all, part of telling a story. She makes it all live, and that’s what’s important. Think of all the people for whom she has invented this distant world of origins, with her exact and graphic details of its everyday life.”

Expressing bewilderment about her popularity, Auel admits to “a little bit of the didactic in me,” adding, “when I make some discoveries, I feel the need to share them.” She cannot account for the growing adulation and those record-breaking sales but she does believe that people want to be educated.

“It’s an evolutionary survival trait, a sense of wanting to know origins, comprehend their own relations with society, or the universe, a way to know better how to cope with it,” said Auel.

Notion of a Short Story

Having begun with the notion of doing a short story about a prehistoric woman who finds herself “different” and “despised” for it, a person whose physical and mental capacities are more advanced than the Neanderthal society that adopted and shielded her from the elements, Auel soon found herself catapulted into another realm as well. A passing fancy, she calls it, which became an obsession.

Not only did her short story idea flower, and her characters take shape, but what emerged was the germ for not one novel but a series of them: her Paleolithic cycle of “Earth’s Children.” She’d already written 100,000 words before she understood what had happened. “I didn’t have one book, I had six.”

Now in her third volume, Auel’s heroine, Ayla, the foundling of the Neanderthal Cave Bear Clan, emerges as a blonde beauty, an intelligent, humane being with extraordinary healing powers and the ability to tame wild beasts--something of a demigoddess. Along with her statuesque, redhaired lover, Jondalar, she wanders over the steppes of Eurasia. They join a band of Mammoth Hunters, Cro-Magnon people like herself. And before they are through, the two will have coped with almost every modern-day problem.

Tireless in her research, Auel’s compulsion to write comes, she thinks, from the fact that she started so late. Married at 18, she was the mother of five children by the time she was 25.

“I’m a product of the Betty Friedan generation,” she said. “I’m the very person she was talking to. When my last child was born I stayed home a few years to do the things that women in the ‘50s were taught to do. Not only did I take care of the children and the house, I was also helping my husband through college. (Auel’s husband, Ray, a former computer plant manager, has quit his job to manage his wife’s writing career.) Oddly enough, when he began bringing history or comparative religion books home, I read along with him, explored and learned. I discovered Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, and next moved to contemporaries like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. And then along came Betty Friedan’s book. I thought, ‘She is giving me permission to use my intellect.’ What she told me was that it was OK to learn what I wanted to learn.”

Auel was back at night school before she was 28, studying mathematics and physics. She attended night classes at the University of Portland for 12 years, and received her master’s in business administration in 1976. She attributes her choice of subjects to her growing curiosity to know origins.

Something More Meaningful

“I quit my job (as a credit manager) just after I got my MBA. I began hunting for something else, something more important and meaningful to me in the business world. I admit I was at a loss, and confess to not trying very hard. In fact, somehow I knew that I was stalling, spinning wheels, sleeping through the day. My relatives even worried about my sanity.

“What had happened was simply that I had started to invent characters and write about them. I found in this a kind of excitement I simply had never experienced before. It was like opening a forbidden door and seeing into another place. I wanted to know everything about these beings--what they looked like, what they wore and how they kept warm. I could barely make them out as hunting and gathering people at some distant, undetermined time, but instinctively I knew that my heroine would guide me. Actually, I knew very little else. And before I got very far, I found myself paralyzed by my lack of knowledge and, worse, by my total ignorance of the writing process itself.”

Auel set out to remedy her deficiencies. She pored over anthropology, archeology and prehistory books, spending days and nights at the Portland library. She also was determined to teach herself the techniques of novel writing and publishing in the same way. Working through every how-to book she could find, she learned the rudimentary lessons: how to set up a scene, how to build suspense, keep the reader’s attention or gain credibility, and how to invent each of her characters, then step away from them into an acceptable descriptive and informative voice.

Two things seemed clear to her by then. Despite the fact that she had been offered a high-paying job as a credit analyst, the business career she had worked so hard for was no longer important to her. She knew she must pursue this newest passion--writing.

“Every time I thought about not writing the story, I’d find myself in tears. Then just the realization that I was not going back to a job hooked me to writing, and I wouldn’t let go. I was obsessed! I couldn’t not do it. I’d get up mornings and could hardly bear to take time to shower before sitting down at the typewriter. It was 10, 12, 16 hours per day and seven days a week.” Nowadays, while keeping this ferocious pace, she prefers to work through the night in the stillness of her Oregon beach home.

Is she locked, then, into the Ice Age for all her writing career?

“Not at all,” she responds. “Wouldn’t it be a kick to do futurist science fiction as my seventh book? Remember, I’m a novelist, not an archeologist. I tell stories, so I consider the future as much my territory as the past.”