The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  It was hard work but it was fun. I doubt if ever a mother and her son enjoyed a professional association more heartily than did we two, in those years of the early 1920s.

  Each week I had perforce to write thousands of words: obituaries, sports, civic happenings, social activities, everything that went on around the town which my mother thought I might be capable of covering. On the whole I think that Mr. Hahne was pretty long-suffering, and so was Webster City. Of course some folks thought it highly indelicate—practically obscene in fact—for a seventeen-year-old youth to come baying after their news. Occasionally I editorialized, too, but neither the townfolks nor Mr. Hahne knew that. They thought it was Mother. She took considerable blame for mistakes which I made, but was serenely confident that her firm shoulders could carry the load.

  When I was sixteen, Mack published a series of essays and stories about small-town America for a book called Hamilton County—there are ten counties in America by that name, some distinctly rural, some containing large cities, but all essentially middle-American, and that was the point. The text was accompanied by photographs taken by my uncle Tim, who at that point had become a professional photographer with some national magazine credits. Some of the photographs featured teenagers, and Mack wanted to imagine authentic-sounding dialogue to go with them—but didn’t believe he was in touch enough with my generation to produce it. So he asked me to write some up. I did—three separate pieces of dialogue suggested by the photos. I am afraid to read them now, but as I handed him the few typed pages, I felt that, after a somewhat disconcerting struggle with the empty page, I had actually come through and produced something that more or less worked. I remember watching his face as he read, holding the pages with his right hand and his pipe with his left. I could see his eyes switching right, then left, as they moved down the page. His focus on the words seemed complete, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Then he looked at me and smiled. He said nothing, but he transferred the pipe to his mouth, reached his free hand into his back pocket, and pulled out his well-worn billfold. Now he needed two hands. He put the pages down, reached into the wallet, and handed me three crisp $20 bills. This was long before the era of ATMs on every corner, and crisp bills were a novelty. The feel of the cash in my hands, conveyed for words I had somehow conjured from nothing, then put on paper, had a “Jack and the Beanstalk” magic to it. The bills weren’t the seeds, but the words were. From something that had seemed so tiny and inconsequential had grown something miraculous.

  Months later, I received a copy of the book in the mail. I remember opening it to the title page where it said that “three generations” had been involved in the making of the book, and there was my name.

  There is an odd, hard-to-explain, and impossible-to-duplicate thrill that comes from seeing your own name in a print byline. However slender a slice of prose it is attached to, however likely it will be seen only by the tiniest fragment of the larger world, it is still your name, preserved to some degree, creating some infinitesimal but real possibility of the immortality shared by the likes of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway.

  At least, it is license to dream.

  For me, those dreams never included working for a newspaper.

  A few months after Hamilton County came out, in the fall of my junior year of high school, Mack played his celebrity-writer card to persuade the local newspaper to offer me a job as a weekend copyboy. I was willing, reluctantly, until I discovered the hours included Saturday nights. Giving up date night was not a sacrifice I was prepared to make, so I turned it down. Mack, of course, was embarrassed and disapproving. I cringed at his back-of-the-throat grumbling. I felt guilty for letting him down. But all of that was nothing beside the prospect of losing my Saturday evenings with that cute blonde.

  Only as I read the letter from the teenage Mack on Webster City Daily News letterhead did I grasp the true significance of my grandfather’s gesture. In arranging that newspaper job, he wasn’t just doing a favor for his grandson, he was seeing himself in me; was, in his own way, trying to share one of his fondest, most formative memories—by finagling me a job in a newsroom, just as his beloved mother had done for him.

  I felt guilty all over again, decades after the fact, for turning down that Saturday night job, and was rather amazed that he hadn’t been even more upset than he was—the incident was almost immediately forgotten.

  It wasn’t long before I came across something else he wrote—an explanation for his tolerance of my venality, and a reprieve for my guilt. In one of his annotations for the Library of Congress, he wrote about a high school job he had clerking in a downtown shop where he was supposed to work until ten every Saturday night: “Never once did I work all of a Saturday evening.” When his boss saw how antsy he grew as date night neared, “he would kindly let me go. I would jabber a word of thanks and get out of the store as fast as possible without knocking down any old ladies.”

  That letter he had written from The Webster City Daily News in 1922 was a joy to read. He was all of eighteen when he wrote it, working at a local paper in a rural state in a time that is long gone. Yet the attitude of the amused observer, already cynical and aloof like a jaded pro journalist laughing at the multiple ironies of his situation, is so familiar to me. He mentions, sardonically, that Fred Hahne, the paper’s publisher, who is listed at the top of the letterhead, above Effie, had placed both of his stories—stories that Mack clearly felt may not have completely deserved it—on the front page. “Of course! Why not?” he snarked.

  I had faced just such humiliations and frustrations as a beginning reporter, not much older than Mack was when he wrote the letter. I worked for a bureau chief who had been making a reverse career commute—from The Washington Post to The Miami Herald to progressively less impressive papers until he wound up chain-smoking foul-smelling low-tar cigarettes and sucking his dentures loudly in the tiny strip-mall office of the Cape Coral bureau of the Fort Myers News-Press. Every day he’d wander next door to the bar sometime before noon, and I would be left alone to generate the required three news stories and three briefs a day on such earthshaking events as city sewer and swale commission meetings. Once the boss decamped, my only company was a middle-aged southern lady who handled the society news. Underneath a patina of syrupy sweetness, she had the disposition of a barracuda and the ethics of a hyena. To survive the triviality, I developed the same sort of appreciation for the absurd I saw in Mack’s letter, in which he tells his mother, “No great difficulty came up, except when I called that bird—John Young—who [here he handwrote an m to make it whom—a distinction that troubles me still] you told me to call about someone having their tomatoes stolen. I said—‘We were told you could give us some information about some tomatoes which were stolen.’ I guess he thought I was insinuating that he had stolen them. He got pretty mad. But I couldn’t get anything out of him.”

  Around the borders of the stationery, he had sketched ink drawings illustrating various points in his letter; a man with a burglar mask carrying a bag overflowing with tomatoes, for instance. The style of the primitive but somewhat charming little sketches leapt out at me like some hand reaching from the void. This was the selfsame style of cartoon drawing with which, some forty years later, my grandfather would decorate the hand-inked birthday cards or kiln-fired painted ceramic cups and bowls he distributed to us grandchildren on our birthdays, some of which I have preserved in dusty frames or kept propped on shelves in the back of a closet. As I thought of these corny, sweet gifts, wondering if I could find any of them, an image popped into my head: a cartoon figure he drew of me on my fourteenth birthday. In the identical style of that ninety-three-year-old letter, he portrayed me seated at a desk wearing long hair and blue jeans, a pen in my hand and a roll of parchment before me. The caption he wrote was: O God, we fear he will be a writer.

  FIVE

  In the summer of 1974, I returned to Gainesville from Europe, grimly det
ermined to carry out my pledge of joining the college newspaper. The Independent Florida Alligator was a feisty student newspaper that had been kicked off campus by the university administration the previous year after the student editor engaged in an act of civil disobedience, defying Florida’s antiabortion laws by publishing a list of abortion clinics. The charter separating the newspaper from the university was punitive—administrators had cynically designed it to force financial failure, with the ultimate goal of entirely eliminating the irritating voice of a student press while maintaining deniability in its demise.

  Inadequately capitalized as it was, the only office space the Alligator could afford was the unrenovated kitchen of a defunct fast-food restaurant just across University Avenue from the oldest part of campus. The “front door” opened off an alley usually populated by homeless men sleeping off drunks, empty bottles of Mogen David 20/20 scattered about. On a sweltering, suffocating day in late June, I walked through that door for the first time. The space was long and narrow, big enough to fit a one-lane bowling alley, with a glass office at the end where the bowling pins would be. Along one wall was a continuous counter supporting a row of manual typewriters that hovered suggestively above aluminum folding chairs. It was early afternoon, the slow part of the day for a morning newspaper. One or two reporters sat at typewriters, pressing the keys without any particular urgency. On the other side of the room, beneath an industrial-size stove hood still caked with years of blackened, crusted burger grease, a student about my age sat behind a massive desk. The desk was scarred and dented—an obvious castoff from one of the classroom buildings across the way—ornamented only by a long-legged girl in tight, tiny blue-jean shorts perched on the front edge, sucking languorously on a chocolate-coated frozen banana.

  The guy sitting behind the desk watched me react to this unlikely tableau with an amused smile. He wore a faded T-shirt and blue jeans. His brown hair fell to his shoulders, framing a droopy mustache. I might have been looking in the mirror.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “I want to write,” I said.

  “Do you have any experience writing for a newspaper?”

  “No.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  I may have done a visible double take.

  When the silence stretched to a breaking point I asked, “What does matter, then?”

  “Just show up,” he said.

  Beginning the very next afternoon, that’s what I did.

  I was expecting to have to hold my nose and dive in to an uncomfortable and unwelcoming environment, but the opposite was true. From the minute I walked through that door, I knew I was home. These were my people.

  It was a heady time for journalism. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at The Washington Post had taken down a corrupt president. Writers like Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Hunter S. Thompson were injecting the excitement of narrative technique into nonfiction reportage, making their accounts of everything from politics to cultural turmoil read like novels, rippling with memorable characters, action, and psychological depth. Many of my new colleagues at the Alligator shared my reverence for making the world comprehensible through the telling of stories, and they shared my irreverence and suspicion of authority, as well as my sense of humor. I had always been a bit of an ugly duckling in those creative writing classes. Except for that one electric moment when Harry Crews performed my story for the class, I felt like a fraud among frauds. My fellow students struck me as effete and pretentious. After one student read a dark, self-involved, self-consciously literary piece that was all too typical of the group, I was called on to comment. I’m afraid I made no friends with my assessment. “What it lacks in clarity,” I said, “it makes up for in obscurity.”

  I knew that critique was cruel and, worse, hypocritical: My own work was equally full of hot air. The painful truth was, I never felt I really knew enough to write a convincing piece of fiction. What did characters feel inside? What motivated them? Unless they were all stand-ins for me, how could I know?

  In Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer, the protagonist, an aspiring writer and obvious Roth stand-in, is invited to stay at the home of his idol, a literary lion of the first order. The idol has a pretty secretary a generation his junior, and the aspiring writer begins to suspect theirs is more than a business relationship. Staying in the downstairs guest room, he hears raised voices in the master bedroom above him. Compelled to eavesdrop, he decides to push a glass to the ceiling to amplify the sounds. He looks around for something to place atop the bed as a stepladder, and all he can come up with are the thick, collected works of the man he is spying on. As he stands on the books of his idol—literally elevating himself atop the master’s lifework, his ear pressed against a glass pressed against the ceiling—an astonishing secret is revealed. He sees himself as if from the distance, and realizes exactly why he will always be a second-rate novelist.

  “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!” he cries. When I read that line, I felt an electric shock of recognition.

  Now, as a journalist, I could search out the facts that real life outrageously invents. Instead of trying to spin a story from the closed-loop redundancy of my own mind, I could dig it from reality, fact by fact, observation by observation. I would no longer stare, defenseless, at the blank page in the typewriter. I would have notebooks filled with material with which to build. My aim was still to tell a tale—I couldn’t really bring myself to care about simply delivering information—but now, instead of inventing a story, I could discover it.

  I have been happy and fulfilled as a journalist my entire adult life, but have never completely dismissed my regret that I failed my early ambition of writing a novel of the type that has supplied me with my own most memorable reading experiences, the type of fiction that manages to attain a reality somehow truer than actual events. At one point early in my journalism career, my narrative news pieces won an award that paid what at the time seemed like quite a bit of money—the equivalent of almost six months of the tiny salary I was then making. I decided to use the windfall to attempt to write the novel I still dreamed of. I was living in a soon-to-be-demolished relic of Old Florida, a cottage on the banks of a river shaded by groves of mangoes, coconuts, oranges, and grapefruit. I set my typewriter up on a card table on the back porch and sat on the increasingly sticky vinyl couch as the heat rose through the day, stripping to my shorts as sweat began to drip from my forehead and splash on the keys. Frequent breaks to eat frozen condensed orange juice out of the can with a spoon did little to cool things off, or jump-start my novel. I did type, painfully, slowly, filling a few pages of blank paper, but once again I felt that old fraudulence, that frustrating inability to break through to an imagined truth. I could feel my arms, and heart, grow ever heavier, until I simply ground to a halt. The six months disappeared, leaving nothing to show for the time but a handful of pages I couldn’t even bear to read through.

  That basic failure of imagination would not prove to be a problem for my grandfather, who would go on from his first newspaper job to write hundreds of short stories, novellas, screenplays, stage plays, and even songs—not to mention the novels that made him, for a time at least, an American celebrity—many of them from the broad cloth of his own invention. When I first read through the simple list of titles of his published work in the Library of Congress index, a list that went on and on and on, my stomach clenched with envy and self-criticism. From the time he was a teenager, his career thrived by the fertile use of just that facility I seemed to lack.

  The letter he wrote from The Webster City Daily News was dated 1922, the same year a short story he wrote called “Purple” won a contest sponsored by The Des Moines Register, earning him a few inches of newsprint and a check for $50.

  I discovered Mack’s account of that momentous achievement in his Author’s Choice annotations. The first summer that he worked with Effie at the Webster City dail
y, he wrote:

  Mother kept after me to enter the Register short story contest. I had quite an inferiority complex despite her encouragement and her faith in me, and I protested a lot before submitting my work. I said that I didn’t think the Register contest amounted to very much; probably I was only afraid that I couldn’t make a decent showing. But eventually my ambition overcame my reluctance and I did write two new stories. I remember doing part of the typing on ‘Purple’ while sitting under a wild grape arbor in our backyard, with a portable typewriter on an old wash bench . . . smoky Iowa dusk coming down to deaden the page before my eyes: the long dusk of late summer, with children calling at their games in distant yards and cars buzzing in off the prairie.

  He submitted the story under the required pseudonym, Sheridan Rhodes, after the street address of the apartment his father had rented for them in Chicago.

  In Author’s Choice, he describes what happened next:

  For a while I dashed eagerly to our post office box each morning, expecting to find a check for the $50 First Prize.

  Months went by, but still no fifty dollars—no blue ribbon, no anything. Maybe my manuscripts had gone astray; I wrote to the Des Moines Register to make sure that they hadn’t. No reply. Maybe the Register had decided to call off the contest. Maybe— After Christmas, I began actually to forget about that contest for days and weeks at a time.

  On February 25th, 1922, we stopped at the post office as usual, got our morning Register and a few letters out of the box and went to the office. We worked hard through most of that day and lunched at the Greeks’. After the paper had gone to press about four o’clock, I enjoyed my weekly leisure and wandered our populous main street through the slush and trample of a winter Saturday. Just before dusk . . . I drifted back into the office. Mother was at her typewriter doing three things at once, as she could do so well: writing up a Farm Bureau meeting; laughing over her shoulder with Miss Ella Stickney, the bookkeeper; and talking politics with Charley Hoffman, the boss printer. That morning’s Register was hanging across a chair by her desk.