The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  But I also found a bitterly angry 1974 letter from Wood’s sister, Nan Wood Graham, the very woman who posed for the indelible character in American Gothic (and, judging from that face in the painting, not the individual you want pissed at you). The letter, ironically, was not referring to the 1920s gossip item, but to what Mack thought of as his defense of Wood as being asexual, not homosexual—which had just been published in his memoir.

  “I am very hurt and bewildered at what you have done to a fine man’s memory,” she wrote. “Grant considered you a friend and confided in you but you certainly haven’t turned out to be such. Even his very worst enemies did not suggest that he was neuter.”

  She went on at length, suggesting that Mack “jumped to conclusions” because her brother had “high morals” and refused to consort with “immoral women” as well as possessing a “great fear of syphilis.” That he was a “perfectly normal, decent man.

  “The night you claim you sat up all night drinking, no doubt you did plenty of talking too. But Grant was too much of a gentleman to betray your confiding in him, let alone bray it to the world. . . .”

  In conclusion she wrote, “It is a shame he ever met such a cheap person as you . . . his pretend friend.”

  Evans’s biography closed the case for many by insisting that Wood was in fact obviously and conspicuously gay. But New York Times art critic Deborah Solomon was not convinced:

  A man who stifles his desires to the point of near extinction cannot accurately be called gay, and by the end of the book the reader has no idea whether Wood was ever intimate with a man. Affairs are hinted at, but the author is unable to document them; Wood himself claimed to be innocent of carnal satisfactions. One of his friends is quoted in the book recalling a night when Wood seems to have confessed to being chastely asexual, which is not implausible.

  Knowing what I now know, it is clear that friend was my grandfather. And maybe he was right.

  But that was not the most intriguing thing I discovered about their relationship. In early January 1941, Wood’s friend and PR person wrote Mack to say,

  You are about to lose a dear friend. Grant Wood has been ill for several months with what we first thought was a gall bladder ailment. Recently an operation was performed. The doctors found cancer of the liver. Of course, there is no hope. . . .

  I know that Grant would like a letter from you. Just a casual note, mentioning perhaps that you read of his operation in the paper and hope that he is feeling better. He speaks of you frequently: wonders how your work is coming and how you and your family are. I’m sorry to write you this stunning news. But I knew you would want to know.

  Mack responded—how could he not?—though no copy of the letter is in the file. But two weeks later, on January 23, Grant wrote what must have been one of the last letters of his life.

  Your note was waiting for me when I got back to Iowa City. . . . I intended to get in touch with you (when we were both in New York) but I came down with a bad case of the flu. . . . I’m back home taking it easy for a while. Florida sounds fine and I’d love to see you and Irene. But I’m afraid that’s out of the question just now. . . .

  Along with the letter he sent another stunning woodblock: three horses standing in the snow behind a barbed-wire fence, staring—eyelessly—at the viewer beneath a threatening sky. The fact that the horses number three could not be a coincidence. The image is stunningly apocalyptic. The creatures are so black only the outline of their bulk is visible, except for the wisps of manes and tails blowing in a cold wind—a stunning, frightening void. Even so, there is something about their pose, the slant of neck and head perhaps, that suggests expectancy, as if they are waiting for something, possibly warmth, or comfort.

  Though the letter is dated January, the piece is titled February.

  Eighteen days later, on February 13, Mack got a telegram: “Grant Wood died peacefully Thursday night.”

  —

  It’s interesting to speculate what would have happened to Mack if, like me, his first newspaper job had led to a slightly better job or a slightly bigger newspaper, which led to a mediocre larger city newspaper, which led to an excellent big-city newspaper, which led to one of the great newspapers in the world.

  But it didn’t.

  In early 1927, not yet a year after Mack took the job, the Republican was bought out, and the entire staff canned.

  “After publishing for 56 years, it was sold overnight to the Cedar Rapids Gazette, our hated rival,” he explained in his Library of Congress annotations. “Ninety-odd men were out of work with less than two hours official notice, without one cent of severance pay. Farquhar announced his intention of starting a paper in California on his own. . . . He said that of all the people on the Repub, he wanted to keep me with him.”

  But Farquhar’s prospects were far from certain. He hadn’t owned the Republican and didn’t profit from its sale. The new paper was still pure speculation. He said he couldn’t afford to pay Mack and Irene’s travel expenses to the Pacific, in any case, and they simply didn’t have the money to go on their own. Mack had the idea that he would work some odd jobs, sell some stories if he were lucky, and save up a small grubstake, permitting him and Irene to hitch their way west. He even got as far as soliciting recommendation letters from various worthies to ward off local authorities who might otherwise arrest the couple as vagrants.

  He would never get around to using those letters, but he kept them, and thirty years later sent them along to the Library of Congress, where, eventually, I would get a kick out of reading them.

  From the editor of College Humor magazine: “Very quick to follow our suggested ideas. . . . Enjoyed popularity in Chicago for quite some time.”

  From the Iowa Railroad commissioner, who apparently wanted authorities to know they had the right vagrant: “Height 6’1”, eyes grey-green, weight 130–135 pounds; left leg badly scarred.”

  From his Cedar Rapids publisher, J. S. Farquhar: “I commend the splendid genius of MacKinlay Kantor. . . . The time will come when his name will be known all over America.”

  But the plucky plans of this tall, painfully skinny young man to migrate masked the depression he must have been feeling. After a promise of liberation from a life of jobs he couldn’t stand, a brief sampling of the excitement and fulfillment of daily publication—excitement and fulfillment that paid a living wage—it was a cruel blow to have it all collapse in the time it took for his boss to say, “Mack, come in and close the door. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  For the time being, he and Irene went to ground, back to the family home on tree-lined Willson Avenue in Webster City, where he had grown up. If Mack didn’t hear the whispers directly—about how the big-shot town poet who’d won that contest and read his work over the radio had been forced back to town with his tail between his legs—he heard them distinctly in his inflamed, humiliated imagination. Decades later he would still resent it.

  Effie was home to greet them, but she’d been staying thirty miles up the road in the slightly larger town of Boone, where she had been invited to start up a small community magazine charmingly named Community. There would be no salary, but the pressman would provide paper, printing, postage, and supplies for a split of any revenue. Effie would write every word, sell the advertising—even write the advertisements herself. The first issue had a distribution of six thousand—just about half the town’s entire population. After they split the proceeds and paid incidental expenses, there might just be a little left over to pay the taxes on the Willson Avenue home and buy bread and winter coal for her sickly and unemployed parents. But Effie, who had refused to buckle under the doctor’s dire prognosis the previous year, seemed as energetic as a healthy woman half her age.

  “In this moment she was ardent in adventure,” Mack wrote. “No one ever sparkled more flashingly than she in such condition. The valvular heart trouble which had plagued her . . . ?
A bagatelle!—she never thought of it. She aspired to be the recording angel of her adopted Boone.”

  There are several issues of the all-Effie Boone monthly Community magazine in those Library of Congress boxes. The issues are fairly thick, glossy, professional-looking. In a place of honor in each is an “editorial” about the month of publication, Effie’s confident, straightforward signature at the bottom. Her prose has something, I thought as I read it. It is clear-eyed, faintly poetic:

  “The yellow leaf, the fading flower, the gentle rain falling on the carpet of dead leaves . . . for a short time, in October, everything is warmly, vividly alive . . . then, a few frosts. . . .”

  Reading those “month” essays provoked a faint memory. Could it be? I briefly rooted around online, and there it was: a 1986 special issue of The Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine, containing a year’s worth of calendar pages, each month’s page paired with an essay about that month. Sure enough, I had written one of those essays, about the almost unbearable South Florida August:

  “The heat is like an injury you keep reinjuring. You begin to worry that all that pain has got to add up to something bad. It bakes your paint job and cracks your vinyl dash. It melts the asphalt and lingers spitefully at night. . . .”

  More hard-boiled than poetic, I guess. But still.

  I had not set out to recapitulate the life and career of Effie Kantor. At the start, I didn’t even know she had had a career. Now, once more, I’d stumbled onto this odd parallel.

  —

  Back in 1927, as Effie commuted from Webster City to Boone and back, Mack began to prepare for his trip out west by doing odd jobs, but making so little at them that they seemed pointless. Irene began to urge him to use his time instead to write the novel they’d been talking about since Chicago.

  There had been two moments during their courtship and early marriage when, had it not been for Irene, Mack might have been sucked into the same fog of Chicago corruption and cronyism in which his father had dwelled. While at Mandel’s in the claims department, he found a way to pick up an extra $20 whenever the city went to the polls by being a poll watcher for one of the political organizations. On one such assignment, Mack watched as his precinct captain stole the opposition’s voter list, then covered for him when cops came asking about it. As a reward, the precinct captain offered to make Mack a precinct captain himself, on the condition that he and Irene were willing to move to another precinct.

  All Mack would have to do, the boss said, was keep in touch with the voters in that precinct they knew they could count on and make sure that on election day they all got to the polling place and voted the right way. For that, he would get $200 a month—enough so that he could do nothing but write when he wasn’t doing his political work. Mack was elated until Irene nixed the idea. In Chicago in 1926, it wasn’t unheard of for a precinct captain to be summarily dismissed via tommy gun. It was in the course of the coming election, after all, that those sixty-two bombs blew near polling places, killing two politicians and an unknown number of more or less innocent bystanders.

  Another sweet opportunity presented itself when an acquaintance from the Line O’ Type gang showed him a stash of bootleg wine and suggested he could act as neighborhood distributor, making a cut of every sale. Again, Irene exercised her veto: Wasn’t their neighborhood already the territory of a big-time gangster, who might not look kindly on amateurs elbowing into the picture?

  She was unconvinced by Mack’s contention that the wine sales would be too small-time to upset anyone.

  “You won’t let me do anything!” Mack exploded in frustration.

  “Oh, write a book about it,” Irene said.

  Now that he had time on his hands and a desperate need to jump-start his writing career, she repeated her exhortation. This time Mack took her seriously.

  As he began to think about a novel involving Chicago gangsters, he remembered a time in February 1926, just before he met Irene, when he found himself in a poker game with waiters, bartenders, and several shady characters on the edge of organized crime. By dinner, his pockets were stuffed with large bills. He knew he wouldn’t be allowed to simply walk away from the ongoing game so far ahead. So he returned after dinner. Sure enough, he lost all his winnings, and then some, going into debt by hundreds of dollars he didn’t possess. Under terrible pressure, he managed to walk away from the table by handing over a gold cigarette case his father had given him “with ornate ceremony in the presence of business associates.” Aside from its melt value, that case meant nothing to Mack, and he was not unhappy to part with it, but there was still a large debt to pay, and he was unemployed. The gangster types made their impatience, and the consequences of delay, pretty clear. Mack wrote to the only person he believed might help him out, a Webster City banker whose bank was in bad shape, but nonetheless sent $50. His creditors grabbed that, too, but still weren’t satisfied. Mack took to carrying around a .38 revolver until the worst of his creditors had been chased out of town by cops or competing gangs.

  As he sat down to write, that near-miss experience was money in the bank.

  His novel would be about a young reporter, leaving his job in a small town very much like Webster City, hoping to break into newspapers in Chicago. Not only does he fail to find a job on any of the papers, he fails to find any job at all—until a gangster, hiding out from hit men in the would-be reporter’s dingy apartment house, offers to pay the young man to run errands so he can stay safely off the streets. As part of the reward for his service, the mobster pulls strings to get him a patronage job in city government. In other words, Mack was imagining what might have happened if Irene hadn’t stopped his slide into the ethical, legal morass of Chicago’s corruption.

  Mack didn’t waste his precious time as I did in 1980 on my Florida back porch. He knew he was onto something. He pounded the typewriter furiously in his two-fingered hunt-and-peck style, and after a couple of days had amassed twelve thousand words, enough to build a small stack of paper in the basket to the side of the table he’d set up as a writing desk.

  “The manuscript!” he wrote. “I was dying to hold it in my hands—dying to read aloud, to feel that renewal of strength which powers a writer, and engages the machinery of his intellect and emotions, of his whole body, in each heartbeat as he reads.”

  Effie had come down from Boone for the weekend, and Virginia and her new husband, Jim Sours, a small-town minister, were there, too, providing a ready audience. So, as Mack’s heart pulsed, he read, and when he was done his audience cooed adoringly, insisting he couldn’t possibly give up working on so promising a project. Effie said, “I’ve been making notes as I sat here. I couldn’t help beginning while you were still reading, because it was so much in my mind. Children, I have been reworking my own budget. I have found a way whereby I can send you four dollars each week.”

  Virginia and Jim offered to contribute the $5 and $10 tips Jim received each time he presided over a wedding.

  I thought of all those times I’d been summoned to stand around on the hard black slate floor of my grandparents’ living room while Mack chanted his latest work aloud, my eyes rolling back in my head from boredom. Clearly, I owed my brief discomfort at Mack’s command performance to that seminal moment in 1927 when his family rallied around to support and validate him.

  How I wish that I had actually listened.

  Even taken together, the financial tokens from his family were barely enough money to sustain two souls. Considering his alternatives—paying his own way out to California and an iffy newspaper startup, or to Kansas where some old man wanted to pay Mack a pittance to ghostwrite his memoir (no matter how hard up he got, he’d never be a ghostwriter, he vowed)—Mack’s choice was clear, and universally endorsed by this enthusiastic family focus group.

  He accepted the money and went back to work, hunting and pecking on the typewriter so furiously his index fingers became bruised, then bro
ken, splitting along the nail, oozing blood and pus into bandages for the duration as he typed.

  When he finished the book—which he called Diversey, after the street where the semifictional boardinghouse resided—he hitched a ride in the caboose of a stock train carrying hogs to Chicago and, still smelling slightly of livestock, presented the four-hundred-page manuscript to his sometime editor at College Humor who had been buying scraps of verse from Mack for a few dollars apiece. Somehow Mack got the not very realistic idea that the magazine could run his novel as a serial. The editor was not quite as supportive as Mack’s immediate family. He was fond of Mack, but not above having a little fun at his expense. He balanced the paper-stuffed envelope on his palm, then tossed it in the air and caught it. “It seems about the right weight!” he cried. “But I’m still not sure you can write a novel.”

  When the editor stopped laughing, he promised to read the manuscript and let Mack know his decision, but Mack already knew. So it wasn’t a surprise, but still a crushing blow, when the envelope returned to Webster City and the book remained unpurchased. Rattled now, Mack sent the pages off to an agent in New York whom he’d had some dealings with, all ultimately unsuccessful, in the past.

  Today, a writer seeking publication of a semiautobiographical first novel would have about the same chance of success as someone buying a lottery ticket at a convenience store. I doubt the odds were much better in 1927.

  Weeks passed. He heard nothing back. To make matters worse, Mack was once again dealing with a painful flare-up of his osteomyelitis.

  As I pieced all the above together from various sources, I realized that this had been the background for a revealing letter from Effie dated August of 1927.

  My dearest son,