by Tom Shroder
John got off with a $5,000 fine, with the stipulation that he remain in jail until it was paid.
Mack was later told that, when he had managed to raise the money and make the payment, John’s first move was to take the judge to lunch.
By then, Mack, his mother, and his sister were all back in Iowa. They didn’t hear from John again for years.
FOUR
I became a journalist not out of love but desperation.
I was nineteen years old. What I wanted to be was a fiction writer, a novelist. It would never have occurred to me to add the words “like my grandfather” to that thought. It would not be accurate to say I believed my literary ambition had no connection with my grandfather. That would indicate I thought about a possible connection to him, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, and rejected it. In fact, I never considered the possibility at all. As far as my ruminations about motivation were concerned, he might as well have been a plumber.
If I had been forced to specify an aspirational role model, I would have said Harry Crews.
Harry Crews died in 2012 at the age of seventy-six, dissipated by a lifetime of hard living, too many drugs, oceans of alcohol, and an uncounted number of fists to the face. I couldn’t recognize the hairless, bloated, toneless seventy-something man in the New York Times obituary picture, the man described as a “little-known” but larger-than-life novelist with an enthusiastic cult following, a writer of “dark fiction” filled with southern grotesques and wild violence. The Harry Crews I remembered was fixed in a thin slice of space-time, a stretch of six months or so in Gainesville, Florida, forty years ago. He was in his short-lived “speed freak phase.” He’d given up drinking—very temporarily, as it turned out—but he was definitely on something that turned up the wattage. He’d become a serious runner possessing almost zero body fat and a Mr. Clean gleam, both on his shaved skull and in his eye. He had recently published a novel about a man who eats an entire car, piece by piece. Just because.
In the fall of 1972, I managed to get into one of his University of Florida creative writing seminars as an undergraduate, a sophomore no less. I don’t remember if I had to produce a writing sample, though I must have. I can’t imagine what it would have been, aside from a few embarrassing fragments of adolescent attempts at poetry. For someone who longed to write fiction, I can’t recall that I had actually written any. But whatever thin wisps of prose I possessed, I offered up.
Crews was a writing god in 1972 Gainesville. “Little-known” he may have been in terms of a New York Times obit, but then and there he was the most famous man in town, a swashbuckling Hemingwayesque figure who made flesh the cliché of living legend—at least to an eighteen-year-old with dreams of literary fame and fortune. I do remember being summoned to a one-on-one interview in which Crews studied me the way a hawk must study a chipmunk. He accepted maybe a dozen students into his seminar that semester, a three-hour marathon one night a week that was less of a class than a performance. I have no idea why I was among the chosen ones, but I have been forever grateful for that fluke of luck.
Crews spoke in great roiling torrents, extolling us like a tent revivalist doing his unlevel best to save a particularly sorry bunch of sinners. His gospel was the nakedness of truth, the necessity for a writer to peel away all egotistical posturing, to abandon caution and conceit, and care only for revealing his inner world in all its sick and twisted glory. That we were all sick, twisted, and glorious was the basic tenet of his faith.
He made it quite clear he had no use for convention in life or literature, and appeared to us as the embodiment of Bob Dylan’s creed “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”
There were periods in his pedagogic career when he was not the most attentive teacher. He’d show up late and half-baked to stumble and mumble around. Or, fully baked, not show up at all. Twenty years on, when I was editor of The Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, I assigned a talented young woman to go up to Gainesville and profile him. He showed up for the interview wobbling drunk and propositioned her within the first ten minutes. Before she could even react to the lewd suggestion, he peed his pants and vomited expansively on the upholstery of her car. So: not always the model of professorial rectitude. But in the brief moment of time in which I sat at an old-fashioned wooden writing desk in an antiquated second-floor classroom, the syrupy scent of jasmine drifting in the open windows, he was an exemplar. Sometimes he’d begin by reading us something he’d been working on—it would eventually become a novel called A Feast of Snakes—raw passages ripped from his typewriter only hours earlier. This was thrilling, terrifying, and disconcertingly intimate. He read with such fierce energy and conviction, we were all swept up and carried away in the flood of prose, each and every one of us forever embedded with the desire to write as if we were dancing around a ring, trying to deliver a knockout punch.
That was the downside of his charisma. We weren’t so much students as disciples, and to this day his manic rhythms throb in some recess of my brain whenever I sit at a keyboard.
Here’s the upside: One night he walked into class with a twenty-page manuscript in his hands and announced that he was going to read a student piece. He set to it with the same drama and passion he’d delivered for his own work. His reading was so riveting, it wasn’t until several sentences in that I realized that it was my story he was reading, the story I’d suffered and strained over, finishing only shortly before dawn on the day it was due, having grown to detest each and every word.
I think now it wasn’t all that bad. I’m certain it wasn’t all that good, either. But as Crews read it, pacing manically before us, flailing his free arm and belting out my words as if they were fists of fury, I could see my classmates leaning forward in their seats, rapt. And for the first time, I truly believed I could become a writer.
I went off to Europe the following summer, just turned nineteen, for a year abroad. I brought a blue spiral notebook in my scant luggage, imagining that I would fill it with prose sketches and short stories inspired by my ensuing adventures, which indeed turned out to be abundant. But the great bulk of pages in that notebook remained stubbornly blank. I tried sometimes, even managing to scratch out a few (pretentious) sentences or (derivative) paragraphs with a groaning effort completely unjustified by the result.
Over the Christmas holiday, two friends and I paid $75 each to nearly freeze to death in the back of an unheated, unlicensed truck from Amsterdam to Barcelona (we hid behind mattresses at the Spanish frontier while the driver bribed the border guards). From there, we hopped on a ferry to the island of Ibiza—still semirural in 1972 and not yet fully transformed into an Iberian Miami Beach. Landing at the docks of the one large town, we purchased a plastic tarp, a loaf of black bread, garbanzo beans, and wine sacks filled with cheap red wine, then set out to make the three-day walk from one end of the island to the other. We arrived at the opposite coast on Christmas Eve, improbably discovering the ruins of what had once been a substantial beach house set on high ground above a small cove surrounded by mounds of wave-thrashed volcanic rock. On the walls of what had once been a living room someone had writ large in red paint, Dommage petit oiseau, tu va mourir. I had enough French to translate: “Too bad, little bird, you are going to die.” The Charles Manson–ish vibe, just three years after the satanic drifter and his disciples had butchered the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, was disturbing enough on its own, and made rather worse when we lifted a bucket from an abandoned water well in the courtyard to discover it contained the moldering corpse of a cat.
Nonetheless, we spent Nochebuena, the Good Night of Christmas Eve, in this decidedly no bueno shelter, dragging seaweed up from the beach to soften the concrete floor beneath our plastic tarp. All night, the tarp rustled alarmingly every time one of us tossed or turned, which was continuously. In the morning, nauseated from lack of sleep, we discovered an additional cause for our nocturnal misery—the seaweed beneath the tarp had be
en infested with stinging sand fleas, which had left painful red welts liberally distributed across our unwashed bodies.
Merry Christmas to us all.
Understandably, we’d each grown grumpy and more than a little weary of constant companionship. We walked into a small town not far from the house and found some blissfully dark, powerful coffee. Fortified, I left my friends sitting on a wrought-iron bench in a date-palm-lined square and followed the small road out of town, where it almost instantly became a dirt path winding steeply uphill past terraced gardens and tiny mud-walled homes, the fragrant scents of people’s breakfast wafting from sun-baked brick ovens.
As I climbed, the terraced fields gave way to woods and a few clearings with larger, more prosperous homes. At the extreme limit of habitation, as I made a hairpin turn on the steep switchback path, I heard a child’s voice crying, improbably in English, “It stands!” I pivoted and saw three children of stair-step heights standing back to admire a small Christmas tree they had erected in a clearing. I had a powerful sensation that I was not looking across a few feet of space, but through years of time, back into my own childhood. I stood, hidden by the tall pines of the forest, staring as the children romped excitedly about the tree, laughing and placing decorations. I remembered with astonishing clarity a Christmas morning at my grandfather’s house fourteen years earlier. My brother, three years my senior, woke me in the dark and led me into the living room, where the tree rose, bristling with colored glass balls and tinsel that shone dimly in the light of a tropical moon. But even that dazzlement could not wrest my attention from the object rearing up before the tree, a red ribbon perched like a cherry atop the handlebars: a pristine red and white Schwinn bike, with an old-fashioned bulb horn and training wheels. I felt lifted on a billowy cloud of joy, no less awestruck than I might have been at nineteen if I awoke to find a ribbon-bedecked Ferrari roadster parked outside my front door.
I did not know then—would not know for years yet—about the cruelty of my great-grandfather and the promised bicycle that never materialized. There is a photograph taken later that morning—I couldn’t go back to sleep, no surprise—when my grandfather took pity on me while my parents slept interminably. He brought me out to the crushed-shell driveway to take my first tentative spin on my new bike. In my uncle Tim’s photo, my apple-cheeked face is alight, gleaming with the prospect of a life filled with ecstatic surprise. My grandfather stands well back, pipe clenched in his jaw, fists propped proprietarily on his hips. He gazes at me intently. A touch of pride is unmistakable, but there is something else, something deeper and unreadable.
Knowing what I know now, I’m sure he had to be thinking of it, how could he not be? The bicycle he never got must have once gleamed as brightly in his little-boy imagination as mine did in reality. Perhaps no small portion of the pride, the satisfaction so visible on his face, arose from knowing that he could make possible for me what had not been so for him.
That day in Ibiza I wasn’t thinking of my grandfather’s past but my own. That sudden, unexpected transport to my childhood had a powerful effect on me. Like Proust, rung like a gong by the redolent taste of a tea-dunked cake, “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”
Suddenly everything connected, became meaningful. I had an overwhelming need to convey this sensation, to make of my own past, so puny yet so vivid, a story worthy of the emotion bursting inside of me. I kept climbing, wheels spinning round and round in my head.
The path petered out and I found myself scrambling up or around a series of large boulders, clinging to roots and slender trunks to make my way higher.
The day was cool, and cooler still, as I gained altitude, but now I had begun to sweat with steady exertion, which shut down the whirring in my head. I can’t say how long I had been thrashing forward, my heart pounding and breath sawing in and out, when I broke from the trees and realized that I was looking downhill. I spun around. Through the trees in the far distance, a shocking blue. I’d been climbing so long, so deep in my own head, I had forgotten I was on an island. The entire southwest coast of Ibiza stretched before me, sheer rock cliffs plunging like daggers into the seething sea, white-foam breakers icing at their base, so distant they seemed frozen, unchanging.
I found a flat-topped boulder and sat, feeling a million miles away from the house of horrors below, just as far from my friends waiting in the town, and even farther from the life I had led to this point. I thought: Not one person in the world knows I am sitting here on this hilltop gazing out over the waves that bore Greeks and Romans on their way to world conquest. I took out the blue notebook from my rucksack and opened it, reading the few pathetic entries that seemed nothing more than empty posturing, and mourning all the empty pages beyond. I picked up a pen to try to scratch onto the page what I was feeling, but every word I chose seemed labored. I felt that grinding void I often felt when trying to write, a combination of nausea and terror. I shut the notebook as if I were twisting away from physical pain.
Then a voice sounded in my head; I heard more than thought the words “You want to be a writer, but you don’t write.”
The image of Harry Crews proclaiming my story like a sermon popped into my mind. Not a great story, but it had at least been a finished one, something I’d conceived and brought to fruition. Why had I been able to do that and no more?
Another word materialized: deadlines.
I knew where I could find deadlines, and plenty of them. The college newspaper. I cringed. I had always imagined journalists to be as they were portrayed in old movies, crude buffoons who ran roughshod over subtlety and sneered at sensitivity. The thought of becoming one myself made me slightly ill. But I knew then, with no doubt in my mind, that when I returned to Gainesville that summer, I would join the paper.
—
Early on in my forays through the documents in the file folders at the Library of Congress, still in the single-digit box numbers labeled FAMILY AND BIOGRAPHICAL FILE, I came across a letter from Mack that surprised me. It was dated 1922, when he was just eighteen, under the letterhead WEBSTER CITY DAILY NEWS, addressed to his mother and sister.
“Apparently this is the first time I was left in sole charge of the Daily News,” he wrote in his annotations.
I had been vaguely aware that, early in his career, Mack had contributed short pieces to a Chicago Tribune column called “A Line O’ Type or Two,” but I never realized he had started out as a newspaper reporter. Another surprise: Atop the very stationery on which Mack wrote the letter, the “Daily News literary editor” was listed as E. M. Kantor.
Effie.
As I began to look around for context on these surprising facts, I stumbled on yet another vein of gold, a book fully digitized on the Internet that my grandfather wrote in 1944 after he’d already had several best-selling novels—enough success anyway so that a publisher thought there would be a market for Author’s Choice, a collection of forty lesser-known pieces of short fiction he’d written for magazines. But once again the gold in this mine, for me, was not so much the pieces themselves but the explanations he’d appended to each story, or as he put it in the subtitle: With copious Notes, Explanations, Digressions, and Elucidations; the Author telling frankly why he selected these Stories, why they were written, how much Money he received for them, and of his thrilling Adventures with wild Editors in their native Haunts.
A “digression” following the reprint of the first story he ever published explained his tenure at The Webster City Daily News like this:
On June 20th, 1921, my mother [then forty-two] took up the editorship of The Webster City Daily News and I was at her side from the start.
Mr. Fred Hahne, who owned and published The Daily News, had asked my mother to be his editor a couple of months before, and she had told me previously that she would consider the proposition only if I promised to go back with her to Webster City, our native town, and help her with the paper. She di
dn’t like some of the people I was running around with in Des Moines, and wanted to lure me into what she considered the comparative sobriety of a county seat town before I got into any more trouble than I had already gotten into, which was plenty.
I found a richer view of that moment in the pages of Mack’s unpublished autobiography.
He resisted at first. “I felt that I was a man, there was no reason for me to be tied to my mother’s apron strings.”
But Effie insisted. “I won’t leave you in Des Moines.”
Mack protested that he knew nothing about covering news. Then he recounted a long speech from Effie, which he clearly couldn’t have remembered word for word, but it was a sentiment that he later repeated dozens of times as his own view of the matter: “You want to write fiction—that’s the thing you want to do in life. It seems to me that in order to be any kind of writer at all, you’re going to have to write lots of words. Words, words, more words! Social notes, news notes, things that happen in local courts; people, people all over the place, doing trivial things, doing big things. People trying to live . . .”
They were back in Webster City within the week, Effie ensconced at the editor’s desk squarely in front of a wide storefront window.
Which left me wondering. I had learned early in my research about Effie’s somewhat desperate stints emptying bedpans and manning cash registers. How had she suddenly become the editor of a daily newspaper?
I found the answer in But Look the Morn. Effie’s lively mind could not be fully occupied with her menial tasks or exhausted by the life of a single mother. She was a passionate amateur local historian. Mack remembered the “days she spent driving along country roads, searching out some decrepit millwright who had a story to tell.”