The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  We stood and stared at the piles of dead, scores of them, heaps, trucks with the newly dead who could not survive the shock of liberty and salvation. We poked about among great stacks of half-consumed human bones, and saw bodies still half-burnt in the none-too-efficient cremation furnaces (the good Germans ran short of fuel recently: ja, ja, they have shortages over here too). They looked like broken, shriveled black weenies that someone had forgotten and left on the grill too long.

  But worst of all, to me, was the children’s quarters—both in the hospital (smile when you say that, pard) and in the regular children’s quarters. The dear Teutons—think how they enriched the language: they gave us the word kindergarten. A true child’s garden was this. “This section for children from five to fifteen.” Boys, all of them—just boys in this camp—I kept imagining Tim there. It was not too delightful, as you might say, but I imagined it. The marks of the children’s last meal could be seen, if you poked around the wooden tables and filthy old comforters long enough. And good enough for them I daresay: potato peelings, all dried and curly now—gut vegetable for der kinder, ja?—and square biscuits which were part of the dog food for the Dobermans and shepherds of the SS guards. The kids had tried to cook those thick, brown bone-meal crackers. And in the middle of the mess was an eggshell. Whence came that egg? From the Easter Bunny, without a doubt.

  I saw a lot of pulverized cities today—smashed, ruined, pounded to extinction. I wish to God that all of Germany was laid in such ruins.

  I can’t write more now. Good night, baby and children. Bless you all. See you soon, I hope.

  Mack

  I read the letter twice, amazed. Clearly he’d been present at the liberation of a concentration camp—unnamed in the letter—a fact I had never known. Though my Jewish ancestors—on my father’s side, not Mack’s (I didn’t know anything about his father’s Jewish roots, and his mother was anything but Jewish)—were several generations removed from the Europe of the Holocaust, I’d always been haunted by its miasmic shadow, by the sense that what had happened was less the product of an aberration than an indelible stain in the human genome. It seemed odd to me that Mack could have been present at such a historic moment and that I would have never heard of it, either from him directly or from my mom or my uncle Tim. And yet, a simple Google search using the reading room’s Wi-Fi very quickly turned up several references to MacKinlay Kantor being present at “the liberation of Buchenwald.” In fact, some of these references said it was his motivation for writing about the notoriously cruel prisoner-of-war camp at Andersonville—to show that Americans were not immune from inflicting such cruelties themselves.

  “There were two smells,” he said in an interview I found later, “pine smoke and vomit, with a little bit from the dead bodies mixed in. . . . So I thought, for all intents and purposes, I’m standing in Andersonville right now. Then I knew I was going to write it.”

  This origin story conflicted with what I did remember him saying: that he’d researched Andersonville for twenty years—which would have meant long before the war. But there was an abundance of references to his presence at the liberation of Buchenwald. And also a problem: His letter was dated April 24. The first American troops, under the command of Captain Frederic Keffer, arrived at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, at 3:15 p.m. (now the permanent time of the clock at the entrance gate).

  I reread my grandfather’s letter and found that, while there was no reference to “I did this this morning” or “yesterday,” it clearly referred to something that had happened recently enough so that the outrage—the smell of it—still lingered, raw and powerful. Much later I would find this quote attributed to my grandfather, which only compounded the problem: “I probably wouldn’t have written Andersonville if I hadn’t happened to set foot in Buchenwald a day and a half after we captured it.”

  I began to wonder if he later exaggerated his proximity to the moment of liberation. The incongruous date on the letter nagged at me like a loose thread, and I pulled at it. On a hunch, I searched for “liberation of Buchenwald” and the date of the letter, April 24, and I got this on a site called scrapbookpages.com:

  After the liberation of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, the rotting corpses were left unburied until General Dwight D. Eisenhower could arrange for a contingent of American congressmen and a group of newsmen, led by Joseph Pulitzer of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to fly to Germany to view the camp on April 24, 1945.

  By then, the original naked corpses had been left out in the sun and the rain for almost two weeks. The shortage of food and the typhus epidemic in the camp had resulted in so many deaths before the liberation of the camp that the crematorium ovens could not keep up with disposing of the bodies. Since the liberation, the epidemic had not abated and more sick prisoners were dying each day, although some were dying from eating too much of the rich food given to them by the Americans. Their bodies were added to the pile, so that by the time that the Congressmen and the newsmen got there, there were many more corpses.

  There was even a photo of a scrum of journalists gathered around a stack of naked corpses, noses buried in their flip notebooks, eyes obscured by the brims of their ever-present hats. I examined the photo carefully, but between the blurry image and the damn hats, there was no way I could pick out my grandfather. So I went back to searching, this time adding “Kantor” to “Buchenwald” and “April 24.” I got just one hit: a Louisiana State University doctoral thesis on the portrayal of the Civil War in literature. As regards Mack’s visit to Buchenwald, it was the only Web reference that appeared to get it right:

  When MacKinlay Kantor walked through the gates of Buchenwald concentration camp on April 24, 1945, American soldiers had been liberating Nazi death camps and enslavement factories for five months.

  The PhD thesis went on to push one of those silly, overwrought hypotheses common to English departments—that Mack had hidden a propagandistic message in the heart of Andersonville, one aimed not at the Civil War but at the Cold War. By peopling his novel with an evil camp commandant and sadistic guards, but with noble, sympathetic civilians surrounding the prison camp, helpless to stop the horror, he was actually trying to sell the American public on the idea that German scientists who stood by and did nothing to stop the Holocaust they were contributing to were not evil themselves. He was making this case, the thesis argued, in support of the U.S. military’s project of rehabilitating German scientists to help in America’s rush for postwar military superiority.

  I skimmed all that nonsense. (One thing I know from ample personal experience with my grandfather is that such critical overthinking would have driven him to apoplexy. I can see him now, scrunching his nose as if smelling something rotten and raising his voice to a falsetto in a mocking, sneering imitation of whatever errant theory he’d gotten scent of.) But I kept combing through the thesis, looking for any details of use in my own quest. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. I would have been happy with any tidbit I happened to bump into. Instead, I slammed into a boulder. It was an aside concerning Mack’s association with General Curtis LeMay, noting what some LeMay biographers had said about the 1968 third-party vice presidential candidate’s single most notorious comment: that the North Vietnamese had better stop their aggression, or we’d “bomb them back into the Stone Age.”

  This riveted my attention. In the spring of 1972, as a freshman at the University of Florida, I was still facing the possibility of being drafted. I remember lying on my narrow dorm bed in the dark, staring at the ceiling, horrified by the thought that in a matter of months I could be carrying a rifle into some Vietcong-riddled jungle in the middle of what I believed to be an unjustified intervention in a foreign civil war. I identified strongly with the antiwar movement, moved by the destruction of lives, both American and Vietnamese. I remember the feeling, like all the air being sucked out of my lungs, when on March 30, 1972, instead of ending the war, Richard Nixon vastly extended it, announcin
g a massive bombing campaign against North Vietnam. As I walked around campus on a bright, beautiful North Florida spring day, everyone I encountered seemed as anguished and enraged as I was. A common idea infused the students who’d come out to protest: that our country, which had saved the world from Nazism, had morphed from hero to villain and was conducting atrocities in our name. I’m sure I must have repeated the “bomb them back into the Stone Age” quote that day to represent the epitome of the brutal, and brutally wrongheaded, mind-set of the Neanderthals forcing this war down our throats.

  Before evening I would be caught in a stampede as riot-clad police charged a peaceful gathering of outraged students. Later, I choked on tear gas sprayed from an armored car at students manning impromptu barricades at the main campus intersection. Time and again, police charged and the students ran like a panicked school of fish. At one point I saw a crowd of students breaking and running in my direction. As I ran with them, my heart thumping, I felt more than saw a heavy object fly past my head, followed by a sickening thud. I glanced over my shoulder, my legs still churning. A uniformed cop dropped to the ground. I wanted to make everything go in reverse, but I just kept running.

  That helpless feeling of the ground shifting beneath my feet came back strongly as I read this sentence: “LeMay’s most recent biographer denies LeMay wrote the infamous and oft-quoted bluster at the end of [his autobiography] that advised the North Vietnamese to ‘draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.’”

  In fact, the biographer, Thomas Coffey, wrote that LeMay maintained that his actual position had always been to use all force necessary to win, but no more, saving lives on both sides. The “Stone Age” quote, the general claimed, was “overwriting” inserted into his autobiography by his ghostwriter.

  The ghostwriter wasn’t named, but of course I knew it was a real ghost, my ghost: MacKinlay Kantor.

  All these years later I had met the enemy, and he was my grandfather.

  First box. First file. First document.

  —

  I assumed, of course, that such a significant find with my first cast into this paper ocean had to be a fluke—just like getting my niece’s e-mail about finding the copy of Andersonville at the exact moment I was embarking on my first research trip. In fact, I discovered that the stunning Buchenwald letter probably shouldn’t even have been in the first box, much less the first file. As I continued to flip through the documents, I realized all the rest concerned Mack’s childhood and adolescence. What I knew about this period in his life was fragmentary and episodic. He had grown up with his mother, Effie McKinlay Kantor, whom he had adored, and his older sister, Virginia, in the idyllic early twentieth-century middle-American village of Webster City, Iowa, which I’d never visited but always pictured as Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show. I knew his father had abandoned them. I knew he and his sister grew up poor, and that Mack worked odd jobs from very young, keeping the pennies he’d earned to buy candy—an addiction that ultimately rotted his teeth (a story he told while gleefully flipping out his upper plate to drive home the moral). And I knew that he had been an avid collector of butterflies—because he’d shown me how to net them, euthanize them in jars tainted with ether, and arrange them on collection boards.

  Otherwise, his early life was pretty much a mystery to me.

  One of the first things I came across was a postcard with a photograph of Webster City’s main street, circa 1910. It was no rustic paradise, but an unlovely looking slice of early twentieth-century small-town America; a couple of blocks of unadorned two- and three-story buildings that, to my eye, bordered on bleak, but that Mack apparently saw as the epicenter of a mythic American boyhood.

  Mack’s commentary on the picture of downtown Webster City made it clear that he had studied this photo minutely, reading it as if a sacred relic. He said this: “An excellent picture of the corner of Des Moines Street and Second Street as it appeared during my boyhood. I delivered Freeman-Tribunes to almost every building on this street, and for years. . . . I assume we are looking south, about five o’clock on a summer Sunday morning [because] A) the shadows thrown from the east to west are very long, B) the trees at the end of the street and the vines on the hotel porch are in full life, C) only two vehicles in sight, only two or three people sitting on the hotel porch, and . . . no pedestrians. That is not a man who is standing in the deep center of the photograph behind the telephone post, that is Emil Beck’s life size tailor sign.”

  I resolved to make a trip to Webster City at some point to see that intersection for myself and wondered how transformed it had already become by the time he had written those comments in the late 1950s. Something about the way he parsed that humble little downtown streetscape, the almost theological intensity of his analysis, ignited a powerful flash of nostalgia for my own distant past—exactly as far gone from me now as that image was for Mack when he wrote the annotation. The peculiar innocence of the 1950s suburbia of my childhood flooded into my mind’s eye: the packs of roving kids playing kick the can or hide-and-seek until dark; the spinning stools at the drugstore lunch counter; the no-adults-involved, after-hours pickup ball games in the schoolyard; the big, powerful gas-guzzling cars driven without apology or guilt; the belief, never true, that we were living inside one unified and undifferentiated American culture, which anyone could define in an uncomplicated way. All of that was not just past, but nearly vanished, a world that very soon would recede beyond memory.

  I stared at Mack’s Webster City a long time, trying to imagine the ways in which every street corner, every storefront, would have brought forth a rich web of personal history for him. But even more revealing than the photograph itself was the discovery of these annotations. As Mack gathered and packaged his papers for shipping to the Library, he had taken the time to write several hundred pages of notes, commenting on the items enclosed. Among the first of these I ran across was this: In 1957, as he was boxing up and cataloging huge piles of old manuscripts and personal correspondence detailing his sometimes painful struggles to get a book started or finished, he wrote, “I find myself appalled at the demands of the writing business. Nonetheless, I wish I were working on a book at the moment rather than doing this.”

  I came up against the ingrained skepticism with which I regarded my grandfather. What instantly came to mind was: Well, why weren’t you working on a book then?

  His comment struck me as disingenuous. My grandfather was not big on humility. We knew, even as kids, that he gloried in the idea that his every letter would be enshrined at the Library of Congress. I suddenly remembered that when one of us kids got a letter from Grandpa—a letter we knew he had kept a carbon copy of, as he did with every letter he wrote by that time—we would only half-jokingly say that it was clear he was writing it more to the Library of Congress than to us.

  But as I thought about it, I realized I was being unfairly harsh. I knew all about the powerful desire to do something, anything, other than work on the book you desperately wanted to write, but even more desperately wanted to avoid writing. When I created a writing/editing website, this is how I chose to introduce myself on the home page: “I’m sure there are writers who don’t find writing to be a bone-crushing, nausea-inducing festival of self-loathing. I just don’t happen to be one of them. Faced with a blank screen, I am invariably seized with the overwhelming desire to clean out my garage, give myself a root canal—do anything other than write.”

  Who was I to criticize a man who managed to publish more than forty books in his life—ten times my total.

  His output should have been ample evidence that, when he said he’d rather be writing a book, he probably meant it. And who could resist the flattery of being asked to comb through all your files, everything on and in your desk and closets, to (in theory at least) immortalize even the most minute records of your existence? As a time waster, that beats the hell out of cleaning your
garage. Actually, it includes cleaning your garage, and sending the whole shebang off to Capitol Hill.

  Mack must have spent weeks or even months on those annotations. One of them that immediately caught my eye was clipped to a two-page printed menu, grandly titled:

  Dinner Given by

  MR. JOHN KANTOR

  in Honor of the Arrival of His First Grandson

  The date on the menu was 1925, twenty-one years after John had abandoned his pregnant wife, Effie, and his three-year-old daughter, Virginia, offering only sporadic and insufficient support in the following decades. Mack was twenty-one when his sister, Virginia, then twenty-five, had her first child—the grandson for whom John was allegedly throwing the lavish banquet aboard the RMS Berengaria, a Titanic clone.

  The menu listed six courses, in French, each said to be prepared “à la” a family member—including Hors D’oeuvre Parisienne Oeufs Caviar à la Uncle Mack.

  Although he hadn’t been invited to the dinner—none of the family members it was supposed to be honoring had—the taste of it was still bitter on “Uncle Mack’s” tongue nearly thirty-five years later.

  “My father kindly sent copies of this little menu to all of us in the Middle West, evidence attesting to his affection for his dear daughter and darling first grandchild,” he wrote with dripping sarcasm in his annotation. “At that time dear daughter could probably have done with a new winter coat, and dear great grandparents could have done with having their coal bin filled for the winter. . . . Anyone who examines my life and cannot understand why I hated my father with the hate of hell just hasn’t really examined my life, or isn’t quite bright.”

  I could imagine how galling this was—this “let them eat cake” shipboard dinner thrown for John’s cronies when the new mother and grandson were barely scraping by in Iowa. It was almost comic-book-villain galling.