The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Idly, as I listened, I examined the front page of the Des Moines paper—the bottom half, which I hadn’t paid much attention to that morning. The thing that gained my curiosity was a box about five inches square at the bottom of the page, and I had to hold my head on one side in order to read it.

  I spoke in a shivering trance, reading the words aloud:

  Purple

  By Sheridan Rhodes

  First Prize Winner in the Register’s Annual Short Story Contest

  I had set out wanting to get some insight into the beginning of my grandfather’s writing career, and I’d expected to piece it together from fragments plucked here and there from correspondence and clippings. Instead, I had this lyrical, second-by-second account by a fine writer:

  We went haywire around there for a while. In memory I can see Mother’s face before me now, gray eyes bulging, mouth laughing, brown hair flying wild. . . .

  Mother didn’t do any more work on Monday’s paper then. [We] took a walk through the melting snow clear down to the Second Street bridge. We stood and watched a pink glow in the western sky and saw cakes of ice drifting silently on the black waters of the Boone beneath us. By that time I couldn’t talk at all, which was and is unusual for me.

  Once, nearly twenty years later, when I was feeling disgruntled and blue and annoyed at the supposed financial failure of a book of mine, a man with a slip of paper in his hand caught up with me in the Pennsylvania Station in New York, and pulled me off a train bound for Florida. The voice of Hollywood had spoken, and I was richer by a small fortune.

  Still, the news he brought didn’t seem as important then or even now as the news which I read off that upside-down paper hanging over the chair in Mother’s office, half-hidden by her shabby old sealskin coat.

  That combination, seeing your words in print beneath your name and getting paid for it, is an explosively addictive combination. I knew the indelible thrill of it, from the moment Mack himself handed me those three $20 bills for my contribution to Hamilton County, a figure curiously similar to his own initial payoff for “Purple.”

  Now I had yet another irony, a synchronistic connection to the story of “Purple” itself, to consider. The more I thought of it, the more astounding it seemed.

  For a short story concocted by a teenager in 1921, “Purple” was remarkably assured writing. It had compression, rhythm, point of view, descriptive prowess. It showed the single most salient characteristic of a natural writer, the one strategy with which I begin every writing class I’ve ever taught—it showed rather than told, demonstrated with detail instead of begging for belief with generalities and summary.

  “Purple”—a story about a farm couple who splurge to buy an art photo of an idyllic countryside scene, never realizing the photo was of their own farm—begins:

  It was a foreign looking motor car to appear in an Iowa lane, but it purred steadily along, as if accustomed to such surroundings. It was piloted by a chauffeur who seemed rather soiled by the heavy dust that hung over the highway they had just left behind them. The auto’s only occupant besides the driver was a lithe, dark man who glanced from side to side as if hunting something. Fields stretched away on every hand—corn with stalks beginning to grow crisp and tough, oats piled in golden stacks as far as the eye could see; the early morning sun glistened on freshly clipped stubble, and a tiny warbler in the grasses at the roadside invited the world to come and share his store of seeds.

  In 2008, eighty-six years after Mack won his first literary prize, a moment he deemed among the most significant in his career, I had a very significant moment in my own career.

  It came about through a story I assigned and edited for The Washington Post Magazine that began with a passage oddly parallel to the opening paragraph of “Purple”:

  He emerged from the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

  The anonymous figure in both first paragraphs was a famous artist appearing out of his usual element—a photographer in rural Iowa in “Purple,” and a musician in a gritty subway station in the Post Magazine article. My friend and colleague Gene Weingarten and I had prevailed upon world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell to play his heart out on a $3 million Stradivarius outside a Washington Metro stop, unannounced. When Bell had performed in a heavily promoted concert in DC just weeks earlier, people had lined up to buy tickets at a couple hundred dollars a pop.

  But when he played anonymously in the Metro during the morning rush, without the official sanction of a concert hall and a famous name to announce his virtuosity, it was a very different story. During the forty-five-minute concert—some of the greatest music ever written, played by one of the world’s foremost musicians on one of the finest instruments ever made—hundreds passed within feet of him without so much as a sideways glance or a hitch in their stride. A scant handful idly tossed him a quarter.

  We called this story “Pearls Before Breakfast,” and it instantly struck a global nerve, going viral on the Internet and passed link by link to millions around the world. Months after publication, it was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing.

  This was a story about how people become so lost in the grind of life that they are unable to see great beauty right under their noses. That exact description applies equally to “Purple.”

  —

  The nature of archival research most often requires sifting through heaps of irrelevant or otherwise unhelpful material, trying to stay alert (and awake) long enough to notice the glint of the proverbial needle, all but imperceptible in the bale of hay. This is what I had prepared myself for in attacking the thousands of folders and tens of thousands of document pages at the Library of Congress. What I hadn’t prepared for was finding almost every paper I touched to bear something of interest and intrigue:

  A baby journal written by Effie, which recorded not only Mack’s hefty birth weight—ten and a half pounds, “fat and round,” she wrote—but the fact that she initially intended to name him John, yet another reminder of this otherwise strong woman’s baffling continued commitment to such an obvious reprobate. A child’s crayon drawing of Civil War soldiers that Mack had done for a school presentation; ironic, considering. A 1911 elementary school report card for my grandfather from Webster City public schools in which “Busy Work” was listed as one of the subjects. (He got an “E”—for “excellent”?) A handwritten spoof of a high school newspaper that Mack and his friends had created (slogan: “Published whenever we get a notion—get me?”), which was astoundingly similar to a spoof paper my friends and I had come up with, The Monthly Moppage, which almost got me suspended from school because the principal thought the MOP in Moppage meant “Make-Out Party.”

  After less than a week I had snapped hundreds of page images with my iPhone camera, and after a month, thousands.

  Many were more than interesting. They propelled the story forward, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that had a key color or shape I’d been searching for to complete a partially constructed portion of the ultimate image. Or a completely unfamiliar shape, announcing an entirely new section of the puzzle. Sometimes both.

  One of those was a 1925 letter from Effie to close friends.

  “You will be surprised,” Effie wrote, “to learn that the Daily News ceased publication January 5th. Mr. Hahne’s financial condition would not allow him to continue the expense of the little paper, so the town is getting along without it. Of course it is needless to say I miss the active work—the pleasure of it—and in another way, I am glad to be released from the strain of producing so much each day, regardless of whether t
here was news or not.”

  Effie was putting on a brave face. In fact, Hahne had lost an election for mayor and no longer needed a newspaper to promote an aborted political career. This development meant, of course, that both Effie and Mack were once again out of work. Mack, who had finished up high school while working at the paper, found odd jobs when he could. But apparently, at the moment Effie wrote the letter, he could not.

  Three weeks after the paper closed, she wrote, “Mack sustained the second operation upon his leg, by which the steel plate, with its six screws, was removed from the bone. He was confined to bed and his room for three weeks. . . .”

  As I read, an image emerged from the obscurity of half a century, of my grandfather, wearing a wicked grin, joyfully rolling up his baggy trouser leg to horrify us grandkids with the sight of the nastiest scar we had ever seen—a jagged maw, crisscrossed by keloid tissue that looked like fat white worms crawling one atop the other, down into the sagging, puckered cavity where thigh flesh should have been. And then I remembered—there was something about a car accident. A bad one that nearly killed him. And despite his injuries, he pulled someone out of the destroyed and burning car, a hero.

  I now remembered my mom emphasizing this last point, surprised that I could have nearly forgotten such a dramatic tale.

  Desperately, I searched through the files of family correspondence for more mentions of the accident. I came across a tantalizing reference in Mack’s annotations to “my mother’s account of my accident,” but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

  Just when I was about to despair, I discovered it, misfiled, in a folder dealing with much later years—and once again my expectations were exceeded. Effie, writing within days of the event, recounted it in moving detail.

  I get up in the morning, eat breakfast and go at once to the hospital. . . . After the paper is out and I get something up for the following day, I eat downtown and go straight to the hospital.

  The left thigh is fractured, the middle third. It was a compound fracture, the splintered ends of the bone having just the covering of skin to keep the bone from penetrating. He also has a rib or two that are fractured. He is skinned from top to bottom, both elbows, his forehead, by his eye, his shoulder, his chest, his hips, his knees and a badly sprained right hand. His glasses were broken all to pieces and one eyeball badly bruised. He is living only by a miracle, and that miracle was an elm tree about eight inches thick and thirty-five feet high.

  Nineteen-year-old Mack had been on a picnic with seven of his friends, five of them in the car he was in, a Chalmers touring car that had just been in the shop.

  “The brakes worked well,” Effie wrote, an observation Mack corrected in his annotations: “The hell they did. I was with Charlie that morning about ten o’clock, before the accident, when he attempted to park downtown in Webster City. He banked almost up over the curb, because the car wouldn’t stop. Nevertheless, we went, knowingly, into a region of steep hills. . . . How half-witted can young people get? The answer is: very half-witted.”

  After the parking mishap, they’d driven more than an hour outside of town to property owned by the family of one of the party. On the way back, they began to ascend one of the steepest hills in that part of Iowa.

  “The hill is one mile long and has a turn near the top of the hill,” Effie wrote. “The grade is toward a forty-five-foot precipice with only a board fence.

  They had been driving about thirty-five mph but slowed to fifteen as they started down the steep incline. Charles (who was driving) says the brakes held-slipped-held-slipped, and Mack, seeing that the car seemed to be gaining momentum, called “throw her in reverse.” Charles then tried the emergency brake, but it would not hold. By the time the car reached the curve it was almost beyond his control; he made the turn all right but in a few rods further down the very steep hill, the left front wheel struck a rock, tore off the tire and rim and that sent the car straight over to the right where it shot thru the fence and over two tree tops, landing right in the top of the third, an elm, which slowly settled under the weight which uprooted it, and the car and the tree went over together. The tree trunk is peeled as with a knife of bark, limbs and leaves. The machine turned over at the bottom as it struck the ground. There were several eyewitnesses. It was seven p.m. When they got there, all were unconscious except Mack and Charles. Charles had presence of mind enough to drag out two girls and turn off the gas and run with dirt to put out the flames which were rising from the car. Mack was trying to climb out thru the shattered top but seeing his twisted leg behind him remarked that “it looked like his—the trousers matched!” And then he fainted. That was when the bones came through the flesh. By that time there were dozens on the scene and they thought Mack was dying. Blood was coming out of his ears, nose and mouth and because of his injured chest they thought his ribs were penetrating his right lung and he thought so too, for he could not get his breath.

  At first they couldn’t find the doctor and were panicking. When he did arrive, he also thought Mack was dying.

  The operator got me at 7:20 p.m. . . . We had just finished dinner when that phone rang. The operator said, “Mack Kantor badly hurt in auto accident near Lehigh. Can’t find a doctor. Bring one at once and come.”

  One never knows how they will feel. I neither felt like crying or screaming and so didn’t do either. I just went.

  Of course we did not know where to go. But as we started down that awful hill and turned the corner, there was the crowd and cars and lights. We stopped and asked where the children were. They said folks had carried them all over into town. Then one woman detached herself from the crowd and said, “All but that boy that was hurt so bad. They took him in an ambulance to Ft. Dodge. His leg was broken, his chest all crushed in and his head hurt. His first name was Mack!”

  But the ambulance hadn’t left yet. As Effie approached, she saw Mack through the open back doors, lying on a stretcher, “laughing and joking with the crowd. I’ll venture there were twenty-five young fellows outside the window giving him oranges or water or wanting to do something for him. They still thought he was dying, and he did look ghastly, but on feeling of his chest, I was sure he was all right. He could talk with short gasps, and kept winking at me. I may have been proud of Mack through his writing, but I have never been so proud of him as I have been through this. He never yelled, or cried, or swore, although he fainted once.”

  I didn’t have to guess how Effie felt; I would find out all too soon—within weeks of reading that account. On a March afternoon bearing the first promise of spring after a brutal winter, my phone rang with a number and area code I’d never seen.

  “This is Martin, Sam’s boss, in Costa Rica,” he said. “Sam’s been in an accident.”

  Sam is my son, twenty-four at the time. While he had been briefing a group of clients about to go on a guided paddleboard tour at a high-end sports adventure shop on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, a freak gust of wind picked up a fifty-pound board lying on the sand and sent it flying end over end into the side of Sam’s face. It knocked him unconscious for at least twenty seconds. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth. I learned later that, just as with Mack, witnesses thought he was dead or dying. His boss had driven him for an hour over rutted dirt roads to the nearest hospital, by which time Sam was conscious but couldn’t remember his address or even his age. The ER doctors flew him to the best hospital in the country, forty-five minutes by medevac helicopter, for reconstruction of his fractured jaw and further tests to determine if he’d suffered traumatic brain injury.

  The surgery would be in the middle of the night, and there was nobody to call us with the result. When I boarded a plane at six the next morning, I had no idea if he’d suffered permanent brain damage or come through the jaw reconstruction without complication.

  Just like Effie, I couldn’t think. I just went.

  Twelve hours later, I walked into his hospital
room. He was sitting up, looking like someone had stuffed a football in his cheek, and, just as with Mack, now sporting a steel plate with multiple screws piecing him together. When he saw me, his smile, even though he had only half a face to smile with, lit the dingy room with the irresistible light of a rising sun. Through all the slow, miserable, liquid-diet days that followed, he never once complained or bemoaned his bad fortune.

  Sam has Mack’s light coloring and his long, strong-jawed handsome face. Maybe he’s got something else from him as well.

  As I thought more of Effie’s account of the car accident, something stuck out like a compound fracture: Mack hadn’t been the hero, as my family’s oral history had always emphasized; his friend Charles had been the one who pulled a girl from the flaming car.

  I went back and found Mack’s annotation. Sure enough, he addressed the discrepancy:

  I seem to come off very well as quite a hero, but I discover now that Mother didn’t yet know that it was I, and not Charles Jones, who pulled Dorothea Western out of the burning car. I didn’t know it myself, because I couldn’t remember. Some of those Lehigh coal miners came to the hospital later and told me, because they had witnessed it from across a nearby creek.

  Okay, so who are we to believe here: a professional journalist (also his mother!), who came on the scene minutes after the accident and talked directly to the victims, or hearsay from a bunch of coal miners who had watched from across a creek and probably couldn’t tell one teenage townie from another? And how could someone with a compound fracture who kept fainting pull an inert body out of a crashed car?

  Also consider that Mack was no more than a few years past masquerading as a returning war vet, desperate for the glory and manhood attributed to those who perform under physical threat.