The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

Mack appreciated their new arrangement from a more practical vantage point: “At a conservative estimate I spent more than 180 hours during the more than five months from the time I met Irene until we announced our marriage in riding back and forth from her home on the street car. More than a week of twenty-four-hour days! At that rate, I actually lost three weeks of sleep. . . . So you can imagine the beneficial change our new circumstance has made. . . .”

  In October, he wrote Effie a letter for her forty-seventh birthday, “still trying to sell Mother on the idea that my marriage was all for the good, and that she was still very important in my life,” he noted in his annotations.

  His plea began “Since Irene and I were married, I’ve begun to realize how many things you taught me which have made my married life happier by far than it ever could otherwise have been. I mean your efforts—so many times grievously unrewarded!—to instill a bit of patience, foresight and steadiness in the breast of a kicking mule.

  “Just because I cannot write long letters often, is no reason for you to believe that I no longer love you as I did. . . . I think of you always.”

  The reason he had so little time was that, when he wasn’t working, he was pounding away on the typewriter on a seemingly endless series of stories, all of which got him nowhere. Mack noted that, between 1923 and 1926, he’d submitted hundreds of manuscripts for publication with next to nothing to show for it. “Most of these were misguided, inept and unsuccessful for I had little to offer as yet, except a scorching ambition.”

  It was the inevitable chain of disappointment that tests any writer’s will. In one letter he lamented: “The damndest luck! I submitted a story to the DeMolay Councillor and yesterday got the manuscript back with a letter saying they had planned to buy it but that the Councillor was going to be suspended this month. Isn’t that hell?”

  Still, both he and Irene had slightly improved their employment situations. Mack had quit American Flyer to work in the claims department of Mandel Bros. department store, writing letters to people whose merchandise had been lost or broken in shipping. He’d gotten a raise to $30 a week with the additional benefit that Mandel’s was in the Loop, just across the street from Irene’s new place of employment—she’d traded her hated chore of window-shade painting for a job advising customers in the art framing department of Carson’s department store on State Street.

  They luxuriated in the ability to meet for lunch during the workday, and on weekends socialized with fellow Graeme Players or Dick Little’s crowd. Mostly they enjoyed each other’s company. One weekend they went to Lincoln Park Zoo and Mack howled at the wolves until they started howling back and the keepers chased them off.

  But Mack suffered in his work: “I was finding affirmation of a hideous truth. Most people didn’t like the jobs which life compelled them to hold. . . . Far cry from the small town newspaper effort of an earlier epoch. Mother and I worked day and night and . . . truly loved every minute of it.”

  Trying to spin their situation positively, Mack wrote home, “We are well and fine and have no children or prospects! We are awaiting all breaks of luck. . . .”

  And soon a lucky break would come, in the form of an unassuming “While you were out” message left on Mack’s desk in the claims department at Mandel Bros., waiting for him when he returned from lunch one day.

  I came across that note, sitting by itself, in one of the Library of Congress files. Written in pen, in a feminine cursive hand, it said, Kantor / Call Mr. Farquhar / R 540 Great Northern Hotel.

  I recognized the note immediately, because Mack had mentioned it in his autobiography sequel:

  “The key landed in the dungeon cell with a clang, sooner than had seemed possible. On my desk appeared a note concerning the publisher of the Cedar Rapids Republican.”

  The notepaper was in remarkable condition, and the ink appeared as dark and unsmudged as the day it was written.

  I was impressed that this humble slip of paper had survived the chaos of all the life that followed it, and ended up here in the Madison building. It had been just one year shy of ninety years since some secretary or switchboard operator had neatly inscribed that cryptic, but oh so portentous message.

  I understood why he had kept it. I had such messages in my life, deceptively mundane but life-changing messages that had reared up on this or that desk or sideboard, radiating alarm or promise, instantaneously altering the look of whatever place it lay—the very light surrounding it—with a rush of blood to the brain. Some of the portents were not good ones: for instance, the torn scrap of notebook paper left on my desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer by a colleague in the middle of the day, greeting me as I returned from an interview, which said, “Call your brother.” It wasn’t that I didn’t frequently talk to my brother on the phone, I did, but in this pre-cell-phone era he had never, not once, called me at work.

  The expression “My heart is in my throat” stops being a cliché in moments like that. As I dialed, I knew I didn’t want to know. I found out anyway: My father, a heavy smoker for forty years, had coughed up a significant amount of blood. Within fifteen months, he was gone, and in my mind, it always began with that slip of a note lurking malignantly on my desk.

  But mostly I thought of the good messages, and one especially, exactly parallel to what Mack found waiting for him at Mandel’s that day ninety years ago, a note that said, “Call Joe Workman, Fort Myers News-Press,” which led me to that claustrophobic suburban bureau with the hard-drinking bureau chief and the nasty society lady, which led to other such messages, and other jobs, and a career in newspapers that stretched through thirty-three years to one final, unexpected note waiting on my desk, announcing that I was eligible for, and encouraged to take, a buyout from The Washington Post.

  —

  James S. Farquhar published a medium-size city paper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa—1926 population, 55,000—130 miles from Webster City. The father of Dick Whiteman, the one Webster City friend Mack would remain close to his entire life, was a prominent businessman with many contacts—including Farquhar. The elder Whiteman had put in a good word for Mack with the publisher, who looked up some of Mack’s work for The Webster City Daily News and the Tribune, and now he was sitting across the dinner table from him at a Chicago hotel.

  Farquhar talked about the job. He liked what he had seen of Mack’s work, as the stories he’d done on old pioneers and ancient Civil War vets and quaint local customs were exactly the kind of thing the publisher was looking for. It all seemed to Mack too good to be real. And then Farquhar asked him how much money he would need. He heard himself, as from a great distance, say, “Could you manage $50 a week?” The figure—more than what Mack and Irene now made jointly—seemed preposterous, and when Farquhar countered with $40, Mack was almost relieved. It was a 33 percent increase in pay for Mack, and it would go as far in Cedar Rapids as the full $50 would have taken him in Chicago.

  In Cedar Rapids, he and Irene could live on his salary alone. Later that night when he gave Irene the news, the two of them held hands and danced in circles in their crummy little apartment, imagining a much richer life in Cedar Rapids.

  That Sunday, they continued their celebration with a dinner at Irene’s folks’ house. Mack lost himself in the fragrant casserole dish filled with fresh lima beans baked overnight with onion, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar, and a dash of mustard, and didn’t even notice when Irene was summoned from the table. He did notice when she didn’t come back. He found her out on the porch, staring into the night, gripping a folded sheet of paper until it warped and twisted in her hands. When he looked at her questioningly, she extended it to him.

  Mack opened the folded sheet to the letterhead of an advertising art agency. This was the company Irene had applied to before she and Mack had met, the job she coveted but thought she had no chance of getting. The letter explained that the agency had no openings when she’d applied, but they had noted the quality
of her portfolio and filed it. Now they wanted to offer her a position as a staff artist.

  Mack wrote that he felt like tentacles had wrapped around his chest, squeezing so he could barely breathe. Forcing out the words, he said he guessed maybe he could stand the claims department a little longer, until he could start selling his short stories, anyway, and that with the salary Irene could get as an advertising artist, plus what he made pursuing broken lamps and scratched furniture, they could get a decent apartment. . . .

  Irene stopped him. “I will write to them and tell them I can’t possibly consider it,” she said.

  The tentacles released their grip.

  “You won’t be angry, jealous, resentful?” he asked.

  Of course not, she said. “I’ll just take pride in the fact that these people did want me after all.”

  “Those years of struggle to attend classes at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute had borne only this small and suddenly sweetly bitter fruit,” Mack wrote. “That night I would awaken to find her crying.”

  —

  Any regrets about the impact on Irene of their move to Cedar Rapids quickly dissipated in Mack’s mind. At twenty-three, he had obtained his dream.

  “I was subsisting by the typewriter itself—by activity of fingers, memory, and whatever perceptivity I had acquired . . . and, above all, whatever skills one might burnish in the management of words. . . . Here was a typewriter on its scant desk in the newsroom, and my name and title on a card fastened against glass up above . . . Special Assignment Reporter.”

  I knew just how he felt. My first professional reporting job, exactly a half century later, was for a paper of precisely the same relative size and stature (allowing for a near doubling of the U.S. population) as The Cedar Rapids Republican. In those days, even a midsize paper loomed large in its own domain. I’ll never forget the swell of power, the frisson that came with picking up the phone and appending the name of your newspaper to your own. You sensed the people on the other end of the line growing instantly alert—whether through alarm, curiosity, or delight. Being a reporter throughout most of the twentieth century had sex appeal, dash, significance. People made movies about reporters, wrote books about them—we were players.

  It’s become a more complicated calculus in recent years—given the decline of newspapers and the rise of chaotic and ubiquitous communication on the Web, where amateur bloggers, “citizen journalists,” and Twitter feeds have diluted and confused the cachet of being a working reporter. Reading Mack’s description made me realize that my career in newspapers—beginning in 1976 and stretching into the first decade of the twenty-first century—had been as similar to his experience at The Cedar Rapids Republican as it was alien to that of a twenty-something hired by The Washington Post today as a “mobile innovations optimizer” or “viral meme checker,” or whatever incomprehensible job title they come up with to mask the stark fact that professional news organizations are groping blindly toward a problematic future.

  And though, in the 1970s, I would not have seen Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as a destination for someone with literary or media ambitions, in the 1920s, the American Midwest emerged as a cultural hot spot. Writers and newspapermen like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis all drew heavily on their Midwestern backgrounds for inspiration. All those fertile plains and that pioneer can-do spirit fed a uniquely American aesthetic and reflected the dynamism of a continental power rising to world preeminence. This somehow translated into surging creativity in the letters and arts.

  So it was somewhat more than a freakish coincidence that, when Mack and Irene rented a room in a former mansion, the two large south-facing windows overlooked a rooftop apartment in the renovated barn of a funeral home that was the home and studio of Grant Wood—not yet, but soon to become, one of the most iconic American artists of the twentieth century. Wood would live in that apartment—in which he had famously adapted a glass coffin lid for use as a front door—for many years. But when Mack and Irene became over-the-back-fence neighbors in 1926, Wood was still early in residence there, and in his career. Soon he would become a pillar of the growing “regionalist” movement in art, or as he put it, “an American way of looking at things, and a utilization of the materials of our own American scene.”

  Whether Mack articulated it or not, his profound affection for his Webster City upbringing and the broad-shouldered grime of Chicago, his reverence for the rugged pioneers of the generations preceding him and pride in the growth of American power—and even the fact that his education had been rustic, at best, innocent of the European focus of an elite university—made Wood, thirteen years his senior, a natural role model and inspiration.

  “His standards were exacting, determined,” Mack wrote of him. “Requisitely he painted with sublimity in the face of popular opinion, popular belief and acceptance. . . . I had been of the same inclination from the start of my writing days at sixteen, but sometimes feared that I was mistaken in this course.”

  His association with Wood confirmed for him that, as he put it, “my way was right and another man’s way—the wrong way.”

  That certainty is astounding considering that, when Mack arrived in Cedar Rapids in 1926, he’d yet to publish anything of significance, beyond a short story and a few poems. Yet here he was, assuming common ground with Grant Wood! The fact that Wood had just established a community theater, much like the Graeme Players, the previous year—even staging the group’s first production in his loft studio—made his mind-meld with the young couple next door complete.

  They quickly became close friends.

  I had no idea. None. Like everyone else, I’d seen American Gothic—the gaunt, elderly rubes rigidly facing the viewer, propped up by a pitchfork—in various incarnations and representations, about ten million times. As an editor, like a million editors before me, I’d commissioned parodies of Wood’s most famous painting at least twice—and probably more, I am not proud to admit.

  And yet I remember not a single mention, from my grandfather, grandmother, mother, or anyone else about this close association with the man on every list of America’s greatest painters.

  Like other intriguing pieces of my grandfather’s life, the full picture didn’t emerge in a single passage in a book, Google hit, or yellowing piece of typing paper. It was, rather, like an archaeological dig, the shovel chunking on a tusk, or thighbone, followed by the careful scraping away of the surrounding sediment to reveal other fragments in particular relationship, each changing the initial idea of the find until an overall pattern emerged. And the pattern of his friendship with Grant Wood would alter surprisingly as I dug deeper.

  When I first searched for joint mentions of my grandfather and the painter, I came up with something that indicated quite other than reverence in Mack’s attitude toward Wood. In R. Tripp Evans’s 2010 biography, Grant Wood: A Life, a book that critics said “blew the cover off Grant Wood’s homosexuality,” my grandfather was granted a surprising role in the artist’s evolution.

  Evans cited a gossip item that Mack had published about Wood. Speaking of him as a “confirmed bachelor,” the gossip piece continued: “Pink of face and plump of figure, he was most nearly in character one night when he appeared at a costume party dressed as an angel—wings, pink flannel nightie, pink toes, and even a halo, supported by a stick thrusting up his back.”

  As one reviewer of the book pointed out: “Not only did Kantor link Wood’s costume to common stereotypes of the ‘fairy,’ but after comparing Wood to Snow White, who lay imprisoned in a glass coffin awaiting her prince’s kiss, Kantor wrote: ‘The front door of his apartment is made of glass, but it’s a coffin lid. OOOOOOoooooh!’ Kantor then exhorted the ‘boys’ among his readers to ‘look [Wood] over.’ The meaning of all this is quite evident, unless one doesn’t want to see.”

  Not only did Evans suggest that Mack, Wood’s supposed
friend, was outing him as a homosexual against his will, but that this had the effect of forcing Wood to abandon his frequent use of a beret in favor of the decidedly unfeminine overalls he took to wearing to bolster a “farmer-painter” pose, and—more significantly—to turn away from his earlier painting style of impressionism, fearing it might appear effeminate, in favor of the stern Gothic realism that led directly to American Gothic, which, when it was exhibited in 1930, made him an instant international celebrity.

  I had to laugh at my grandfather’s apparent Forrest Gump–like ability to pop up in the background of these historical tableaus. First “bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age,” and now shaming Grant Wood into American Gothic?

  I found nothing to indicate that Mack had ever been accused of outing Wood during his lifetime—which by any calculus would have been a dishonorable move, even if it did push Wood to create his masterwork (which I doubt). Instead, I found this passage Mack wrote about Wood in the 1970s:

  “People . . . whispered he was a homosexual. He was nothing of the kind. He was simply asexual—withdrawn by inclination, habit and choice. . . .”

  As I dug deeper into ever-higher-numbered boxes at the Library of Congress, more pieces of the puzzle emerged. It certainly became clear that Grant Wood bore Mack no ill will. On the contrary, through the years he sent hand-lettered Christmas cards with breathtaking original lithographs he’d made of rural scenes accompanied by affectionate personal notes. (I found myself greedily wishing that my grandfather had passed these particular documents along to me, rather than to the Library.) In 1935, after one of my grandfather’s novels—about foxhunting with hounds in Missouri—was reviewed harshly in The New York Times, Wood wrote a long, passionate letter of defense to the book section editor.

  Because the novel afforded me a great deal of delight and because a parallel case might be found in the criticism of painting, I could not resist writing with regard to it. Mr. Kantor has dared an extremely difficult form of art and in addition has chosen a phase of American life, which, while perfectly authentic, is almost unknown and thus extremely complicating the problem of a novelist. Yet he has emerged with a novel which is a work of art.