The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  “The gang wars! There was a steel which could take the edge he gave it, quivering like a stiletto under a staring sun. . . . They’d read it. Vast, troubled mobs in street cars, or libraries he might never know. . . . A sewing-machine salesman in Mattoon, Illinois. A thin-legged girl riding the El. . . . Bridal couples, retired farmers, violinists, domestic science teachers.” The list of all those who would be wowed by his poem goes on and on. Was 1928 the last moment in American history a young man might dream of conquering the world through poetry?

  In classical terms, a gang hit, followed by publication of the poem, was the peak of the rising action in the book’s plot. The denouement that followed was more subtle, more intriguing. Our hero had spurned his girl for being too working-class, and then came to regret it. The girl had gone off to lick her wounds, and better herself—even learning to speak with a higher-class accent. It ends on a night when he is alone in his room, longing for her, while, unknown to him, she is walking toward the corner of the street where he lives, Diversey Street, of course. The final words, refusing to tie things into a neat bow, are: “She felt childishly nervous. . . . Her eyes watching the bright toes of her shoes beat evenly against the cement, and never knowing until she got there whether she’d turn in, or keep on going north.”

  I looked for the ornate prose that had triggered alarm in the publisher’s office but it didn’t leap out at me. Possibly that’s because the most egregious examples had been excised in that long ago editorial meeting: Mack said he struck a bargain with Coward—he would keep five of the red-lined sections and let go of the rest. My best guess is that this description of the big-city newsroom may have been one of the five purple passages he kept: “A sleepy monster, shaking ink off its mane, yawning and stretching. Whining a little. . . . A bent ‘boy’ with sateen sleeve protectors hobbling back and forth from the brass maw of a shining tube. . . . Beneath that floor, the roar and rumble of breathing steel mammoths. Hairy men, sopped with pitch, running along steel shelves. Broad cylinders spewing out, faster and rumble, fasternrumble, fassenrum, fassenrum, rum, rum, rum, mmmmmmmmm—”

  At that first meeting, Coward took Mack to the Yale Club for lunch. Ironically, I had been taken, under similar circumstances when my first book sold, to the Princeton Club. Less than a third of a mile separates the two. Back then especially, New York publishing was all very Ivy League. I knew exactly what Mack meant when he wrote to Irene: “Somebody pinch me. Irene, truly this is how it feels to be sitting, ready for lunch with your publisher in New York City. I thought it would happen. We both dreamed it would happen. . . . But—But—this is how it feels. . . .”

  It is, as a friend always reminds me, that magic moment, post-acceptance and prepublication, when all is yet possible.

  Judging from Mack’s reaction to that lunch, the conversation over the white-linen tablecloth was upbeat, even triumphal. This was the book that would launch not only Mack’s writing career but the Coward-McCann company itself. Over multiple martinis, or perhaps rye whiskey—whatever 1920 literary types drank to excess at the Yale Club—Tim told Mack that Coward-McCann would push sales of Diversey to twenty thousand copies “if he had to go out and sell it himself.” Every cent of Diversey’s profits would be invested in advertising; “we’ll get it all back on your next book, and the one after that.”

  “There’s no doubt I’m hooked up with a wonderful bunch,” Mack wrote, “and that in a few years from now we will all be on easy street, if such a place there is.”

  —

  Easy Street had to go first through Montreal. On February 9, Irene went into early labor. Mack, back from his hiatus in New York, installed her in the hospital his father had paid for, and things proceeded slowly enough that the doctor assured him he had time to go meet his father for a meal. Mack had issued John an invitation, his treat, feeling “overcome with a sense of obligation,” despite the false job offer. But lunch went badly after his father asked him what he intended to name the baby if it was a boy, an obviously sore subject considering Mack himself had briefly been named John. Mack said Kenny, after Irene’s beloved dead brother.

  “Did I understand you correctly?” John huffed.

  “That’s right.”

  John “sat in embittered silence . . . then glared at me with contempt as he got up slowly. ‘There will be another John Kantor in this world if I have to make one myself,’ he declared, and stomped out.”

  After my mother was born—a native Canadian, a fact we had always chuckled over with no understanding of the circumstances—Mack made sure Irene was resting comfortably and the baby blanketed warmly in the nursery, then walked to the hotel to inform his father, in conference as usual, of the blessed event. Mack stuck his head in the door and kept the news to a single sentence. He went to the American consulate to reassure himself that Carol Layne would still be able to choose to be a citizen of the United States—she could go either way when she turned twenty-one, it turned out. Realizing he hadn’t eaten anything since the night before, he stopped at a cafeteria for a plate of hot food, then returned to the hospital.

  Before he even entered the room he could hear Irene weeping.

  Mack felt himself plunge into that black pit that is always waiting for us. He imagined a small casket, a tiny hole in the ground . . . until Irene managed to gasp, “He was here!”

  “God almighty, who was here?”

  Irene gulped and stammered through her tears until she got the story out. She had been asleep. When she awoke, John Kantor loomed high above her, chewing an unlit cigar. He plucked the cigar out and glared at her. “So you have a baby girl,” he said coldly. “I know that, I was informed. Your husband is brokenhearted.”

  Mack wrote, “My father had given me many vile moments, but this was the first time I ever actually thought of killing him.”

  He half limped, half jogged back to the hotel, his fury driving him forward over the complaint of his bum leg. He interrupted his father in the midst of another meeting, and voice seething, asked to talk to him privately. His father refused to dismiss his associates—“Whatever you have to say you can say in front of these gentlemen.”

  Mack wrote: “In the middle of what might be called my discourse, he turned to the other men and said, ‘I could wish that my son had my own voice, which has been compared to that of the great actor Boris Thomashefsky. But instead he talks more shrilly, like his grandfather McKinlay.’”

  Mack’s words burst from him in barely controlled fury. “My grandfather McKinlay is a poor old man, weak and crippled. All he has left to him is his reputation for unclarified honesty. I have in my possession some letters which he received in 1901, 1902, and 1903. There are receipts as well, for monies which he paid out in bail, or in making good on bad checks signed by another man.”

  As Mack spoke, John Kantor sat there making faces, then broke into crude mimicry of his son’s speech in a whiny, nasal tone.

  Mack turned to leave. “At a cry from my father I looked back to see him bursting into glee, his face demoniacal as he beat his fist on the desk. ‘By God!’ he cried, ‘how I love to burn him up.’

  “This was my last scene with him then, nearly the last that I ever had.”

  The new family fled Montreal with a wailing baby and a total of $30, not counting the $10 Canadian bill in Irene’s purse. A cabbie dropped them off at Irene’s childhood home in Chicago, collected an exorbitant fare, then took off with Irene’s purse—Canadian bill and all—still in the backseat. They would have to start their career as parents with $20 to their names.

  Mack hustled downtown and managed to sell ideas for some short crime fiction to True Detective magazine at a cent a word. He then solicited an assignment for a slightly more lucrative sketch for College Humor for which the editor had specifically requested “purple language.” Mack had never thought of himself as a “hack writer,” but now he would have to find a way to fit that into his self-image—at
least until Diversey came out and produced that $15,000 he was expecting.

  All my life I’ve heard the story of my mother’s infancy, of the dirt-poor apartment in which her poor mother struggled to keep a semblance of peace so that Mack could tap out the stories that might keep them in baby food, while diapers hung on a line above his head and dripped on him as he worked. In its awful purity, this tale always seemed like a fable to me. I heard it as one might hear “In my day, I walked three miles to school uphill in the snow.”

  But now I knew the specific reality of the moment; that this was their first apartment as parents in an iffy north Chicago neighborhood with hookers and street kids loitering on the sidewalks, a third-floor walk-up with a hole-in-the-wall kitchenette, a crib improvised from three chairs tied together and one cramped bathroom, the tiny sink the only venue for washing the diapers, which they tried to dry on the fire escape until they discovered that the unsavory pair of gangster’s molls who lived above them liked to drink out there and didn’t bother going inside to pee. Having nowhere else to string that infamous laundry line, Irene placed it above the small dining table—which also happened to be the lone surface that could accommodate a typewriter.

  One day Mack came home—if you can call the dump they inhabited home—from making the rounds of editors downtown to find a silver-haired man cooing over baby Layne as Irene made tea. This was Joseph Kantor, my great-great-grandfather, the grandfather Mack barely knew. When the subject of John came up, my grandfather remembers his grandfather saying, “So you hate your father . . . that is too bad, but nobody should blame you. Jan (he pronounced it Yan in a still thick Swedish accent) was always so.”

  Joseph, a slim, modest, courtly man descended from multiple generations of rabbis, blamed John’s propensity for selfishness and self-aggrandizement on a pampering, overindulgent mother, and an inclination since childhood to build himself up in the eyes of others by lying. He said that when John was barely ten he disappeared one day and was finally found down at the docks, surrounded by a crowd of rough laborers listening to the little boy tell outrageous lies.

  Mack walked the old man back to his tiny apartment. Joseph dug through some papers and pulled out official-looking documents written in Swedish and pointed to his name, Joseph Kantor, which was all Mack could make out. “You cannot read it,” Joseph admitted, but he wanted him to know that the papers said that Joseph Kantor was empowered to sell clothing and other merchandise to the Swedish royal household.

  A lot of good that did him in Chicago.

  “Again he donned his threadbare blue topcoat—brushed until the seams stood out—and walked me to the corner,” Mack wrote. “I spoke once more about my father, but Grandpa Kantor was musing in abstraction. . . .

  “‘Who? Yan?’ he spat. ‘Bah!’”

  Two months later, Joseph Kantor was dead.

  “He suffered no pain at all,” Mack wrote in a letter to his mother. “I for one have not shed a tear. The vision of a lonely old man, living in a single room and bereft of his companions of earlier years, with sons in whom he could put little or no trust, is much more painful than the thought of that same man serenely asleep.”

  I assume that, despite the state of their relations at this point, Mack wrote some consoling words to his own father, because John wrote back in a rare mood of humility, thanking him and Virginia for their “words to comfort and cheer some weary, tired, worn-out soul.”

  He went on to deliver a mini-sermon (ever the phony preacher) on the commandment to honor thy mother and father, concluding on a shockingly uncharacteristic note: “I try to be good and to so live that in my life I will reflect honor and credit upon my parents. I have not succeeded and perhaps I will not succeed, but I hope that you, my children, will benefit from my shortcomings, learn from my frailties and so strengthen yourselves so that where I’ve failed, you will succeed.”

  Future letters would not be so self-denigrating.

  —

  It must have been after four a.m. that morning in my sister’s guest room that I came across a thick envelope addressed to my grandfather, care of the Layne family in Chicago. The multipage letter inside it, typed on posh, personalized Mount Royal Hotel stationery, was dated March 28, 1928.

  No doubt, Mack would have tried to brace himself before opening the bulging envelope, but even so, he couldn’t have anticipated what he would find on those three single-spaced pages.

  “This is written to my son,” John Kantor begins. “So there will be no misunderstanding I am sending a copy of this to his Mother and his sister. . . .

  By the time this reaches its destination, Mack will be gone from Montreal, and in leaving he has committed the most refined cruelty that has ever been done to a human being. If he had planned for twenty-four years to do what has been done, it could not have been done any better and yet I do not blame him at all. For Mack is a paradox. In some things he is extremely brave, in other things a dismal coward; at times a spine as stiff and rigid as Cleopatra’s needle and then again, as weak and limber as a thread; in a few things unselfish, in most things the most selfish person I have ever met . . . a real ingrate . . . a conglomeration of ideas without any substance. . . .

  For almost twenty-four years, through no fault of his own, he caused a void in my mind and soul which only he could fill. He came to fill it, he did fill it completely and then unfilled it, dug out the tree he had planted, roots and all, creating an emptier, more dismal, more hideous emptiness than ever before. Weak, volatile, melancholy hypochondriac. . . .

  This gush of self-pity goes on for many more paragraphs. All largesse lavished upon Mack and Irene during their stay in Canada is itemized: the luxury hotels, the dinners, the apartment, the hospital stays . . . “at a cost of thousands and thousands of dollars, all trampled underfoot because his wife cried and said she was lonesome. My God!”

  John even suggests that Mack owes the sale of Diversey to him: “Mack, conduct a little investigation now and find out just how you got that contract,” he says between parentheses.

  Finally, he compliments himself for his restraint. “I feel I could write a lamentation greater than Jeremiah’s but have studiously avoided anything that would smack of asking for sympathy.”

  Despite these grievous wrongs, he says to Mack, “I would be glad to hear from you often. Under no circumstances do I wish to hear from Irene, directly or indirectly.”

  He signed it, “Lovingly and sincerely, Daddy.”

  My grandfather did not include an account of receiving this remarkable document in his autobiographical writings about this period. Perhaps he just tossed it in some box where he kept all those other letters, the ones from 1901, 1902, and 1903, and tried to forget about it. In time, other letters from other unhappy acquaintances of John Kantor would add to that cache.

  Those letters would reside together, in various containers, over the course of three generations. For decades, they had been as good as lost among the fading context of lives ended, and well on the way to being forgotten. Given my grandfather’s penchant for broadcasting his feelings about John Kantor—“I hated my father with the hate of hell!”—I couldn’t explain why he’d never sent these envelopes to the Library of Congress curators—who surely would have recognized their importance—with the rest. But as my plane lifted off from Atlanta, barely ahead of a tropical storm that would shut down the airport, I had those same envelopes tucked securely in my carry-on (“I have in my possession . . .”). I wondered what John Kantor would have thought if he could have had a vision, as he stuffed those tightly packed pages in the envelope, of the circuitous journey they would make, in whose hands they would end up, and for what purpose they would be used.

  TEN

  Diversey was published to notice in newspapers around the country. Mack estimated the total at more than 150 papers—an astonishing amount of attention by contemporary standards, when even a single review in the mainstream medi
a is difficult to come by. And many of those reviews, if not most, were very positive. The Philadelphia Public Ledger called it “The first novel of a promising young author and the first publication of a promising young firm. An auspicious debut for both.”

  The Washington News said, “This novel marks the appearance in the literary world of two forces that promise to be important.”

  The Buffalo Times added, “Superbly vital and virile and shot through with galvanic shafts of poetry.”

  But, as is still true today, critical praise is no guarantee of big book sales. And clearly there were no big sales in this case. The $15,000 in royalties, foreign rights, and movie deals that Mack had imagined in those heady moments after Coward-McCann purchased the book—which would have amounted to about $210,000 today—never materialized. I could not find out, and it may well be impossible to discover, exactly how many copies of Diversey sold. Whatever the number, it wasn’t enough. His difficult living circumstances persisted, as did his drive to produce, and his optimism. In a 1929 letter he wrote:

  It is difficult to work in such small quarters as we have here, with Layne-o kicking up a hell of a racket half the time—laughing and cheering—so I have to spend a lot of unproductive hours in front of the typewriter. But I beg to report that I have completed nearly 8,000 words or about one-tenth of the total of the new book. It is going to be different in many ways from DIVERSEY—much more subdued in tone, but none the less realistic. . . . It is called HALF JEW. We think it’s a bear of a title—one that will mean much more from a sales angle than the more mysterious DIVERSEY.

  Half Jew! A bear of a title, indeed. This was a book I’d never heard of, and a quick Internet search came up blank. And then I found it in the Library of Congress index—not just a reference to it, but the actual mess of a manuscript. (“A young woman in Des Moines agreed to type it for me,” Mack explained in an annotation. “She wasn’t a very good typist. And also charged too much.”)