The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  But what I didn’t have and couldn’t find in the files at the Library of Congress was anything—save a lone notation in a children’s book—from John Kantor himself.

  Which is why I gasped aloud when I saw the large overstuffed envelope, brown-spotted with age, marked in an antique-looking script: Correspondence from and concerning John Kantor.

  Praying that the contents were in fact as advertised, I pulled out the first of the stacked envelopes inside. It was brittle, the once-white paper now a walnut brown with small tears around the edges and a large crescent moon torn from the side, but the address, “A. D. McKinlay, Webster City Iowa”—no street address necessary—was intact. The A stood for Adam, Effie’s father, John’s father-in-law, my great-great-grandfather. On stationery marked OCCIDENTAL HOTEL, EAGLE GROVE, the letter begins, “My dear father, will you please do me a favor and deposit at once with the First National Bank of Webster City ($15) fifteen dollars for me. . . . I regret much to ask you to do this for me but perhaps some day I will be able to return the favor. It is necessary you deposit the $15 at once. Please do this for my sake.

  “I am yours obedient,” and there it was, the run-together signature with gigantic, showy initial letters and great descending loops on both the J and the K: JMKantor.

  I had only to open the second envelope, also to A. D. McKinlay, postmarked 1903, to discover that the favor from his father-in-law had never been returned.

  For an envelope 112 years old, it was in surprisingly robust condition. Inside were six rag-paper pages that began, “My dear husband . . .”

  The letter was from Evalyn McKinlay, Mack’s grandmother, who was writing with obvious fear and loathing about an onerous “he” who was clearly John Kantor. I knew from another letter in the bin, dated weeks earlier, the circumstances that led Eva to be away from home and her husband in Webster City. Seriously ill with uterine cancer, Eva had been visiting Effie and John in Chicago to see doctors who had only grim prognostications. She had decided that instead of undergoing the risky surgery they proposed, she wanted to go home, possibly to get better opinions from doctors she’d known for years, more probably to die. But apparently, next to her fears about John Kantor, cancer was barely worth mentioning.

  “He telephoned up a few minutes ago that I could not go home tomorrow for he did not get the money!” she wrote. Adam had sent her a bank draft for $44 to pay expenses for the trip home, which John claimed had never arrived.

  He pretended he would get it for me. It’s my opinion that he has had it and spent it. I am so worried. I don’t know whether to say anything to him or not. He asked me last week if I thought you would loan him more money. I said you might, if you will pay him what you already owe him. He didn’t have much to say. How I hope that he has not gotten himself into a scrape. It would nearly kill Effie. . . . She thinks he is just most perfect. . . . She was very indignant when I told her you had asked her to come home. She said she loves her own home. . . . She does not understand John, I know.

  Another antique envelope, this one dated several weeks later, confirms that John was indeed in a scrape. It was a letter from the offices of the Illinois Life Insurance Company, a personal note to Adam McKinlay from one of the company’s officers. It seems John Kantor had written numerous bad checks totaling $315, which sounds trivial until you account for more than a century of inflation: It would be the equivalent today of more than $8,000.

  The letter presents a grim choice for Adam—either make good on his son-in-law’s fraudulent checks or watch the husband of his very pregnant daughter get carted off to jail:

  The defense which Mr. Kantor makes in this matter is that he was hard pressed for money, and as you on previous occasions paid his checks at your end, he thought that you would in these several cases. . . . Mr. Kantor has without question committed a crime, which would place him in the penitentiary for a term of years, and while I regret to cause you any financial burdens at this time, I do feel that it is a case where the future of your daughter and her babies would suffer from the stigma and disgrace that attached to them and to you, her father.

  One of Effie’s babies, Virginia, was then three years old, and the other would be born in less than two months and, initially if only briefly, be given John’s name.

  That baby, who would become MacKinlay Kantor, was born in his grandparents’ home in Webster City, because John, fleeing the consequences of his accumulating misdeeds, had left his wife and daughter no choice but to return home shortly after Eva’s letter. When the baby was born, Eva got up from her presumed deathbed and said she had no intention of lying about when there was so much work to do. She lived, vitally, defying all medical opinion, for another twenty-six years before dying . . . of uterine cancer.

  As I went through these envelopes from those first years of the twentieth century, I discovered that this was hardly the first—or the last time—Adam had faced cleaning up after John’s mess. Another letter dated two years earlier from another insurance company:

  I advanced personally to Mr. Kantor $40 which was the payment of funds misapplied. Mr. Kantor has made repeated promises to return the money to me but has seemingly shown no effort to fulfill his promise.

  Yet another insurance company, yet another letter on Adam McKinlay’s doorstep:

  If you will guarantee the amount of Kantor’s indebtedness, I have faith that he is very sorry for what he has done and I feel sure that he will be a man and pay every cent he owes and never again write checks on banks where he has no money.

  Ah, but he did.

  From the district manager at John Hancock Mutual Life:

  When Mr. Kantor came here, I investigated to some extent and learned of some acts of his that were not right, but he seemed to be in earnest and desired to establish himself here and make a home for his wife and baby. We talked with him very frankly, and also with the pastor of our Christian Church, and we decided to let the past be forgotten, and to support him as long as he lived a proper life. For a time he seemed to be right, but during the last month we discovered things in his way of living as well as in his manner of conducting business that could not be countenanced. . . .

  We are hoping that this may be a lesson to him and that he may profit by this awful experience, and apply his splendid faculties and his wonderful natural ability in better ways.

  All those second, third, and fourth chances, all those Midwestern rubes charmed into thinking John Kantor sincerely wanted to reform and make better use of his splendid faculties, eventually led—through Big Bill’s mobbed-up Chicago, through more and bigger scams, more serious scrapes with the law, and ever more remarkable resurrections—to 1928 and the overdecorated table in the Mount Royal Hotel, surrounded by sycophantic strangers supposedly in honor of Mack’s twenty-fourth birthday, but actually honoring only the sonorous, ponderous man with the center-parted tsunami of hair standing at the focal point of the photographer’s frame, looming above the gloomy youth at the head of the table.

  Mack’s gloom would not last. Within days of the birthday celebration, a letter arrived from the nearly forgotten agent in New York:

  I telegraphed yesterday but notice returned that you were no longer in Webster City but at the address to which I am sending this. I hope so because I am the bearer of good news. DIVERSEY is sold.

  Mack immediately wrote home with the news.

  Naturally I was pretty much bowled over. And Irene, who was making a new pie of green apples, was so overcome that I think she put pepper instead of cinnamon into the pie. . . . It’s only two or three hours since the letter came, and I’m still in a daze. When I consider movie rights, second serial and British rights, my head swims. But I have been able to figure out that it is very unlikely that I will make less than $15,000. . . . Don’t worry about my getting my hopes too high, but I’m just considering. At least everyone in the family won’t have to worry about eating next year.

  Mack would soon be pain
fully reacquainted with the reality of the literary life. But allow him the explosive high of learning his first book had found a publisher. In the universal fantasy of aspiring writers, that long-dreamed of notice—“Diversey is sold!”—is the golden key to the gates of heaven, fame, fortune, possibly even a kind of immortality. When we imagine our book being published—our book!—we are imagining it will be like those books we grew up on, adored by the critics, imitated by the competition, worshipped by the masses. We are most definitely not imagining that it will join those endless Pyrrhic volumes whose indecipherable bindings fruitlessly wallpaper bookstores, libraries, and the dusty reaches of the neighbor’s den; those anonymous, sparsely read, already forgotten legions of books that will never merit so much as a footnote in the history of literature and remain about as significant a year after publication as a back copy of Dentistry Today—only less profitable.

  But in that instant of bracing affirmative response—they don’t call it “acceptance” for nothing—every author-to-be has a Pulitzer Prize–winning best seller, a movie coming soon to a theater near you, and is the owner of a sprawling eccentric beach house with natural finishes, a bold-faced name in the celebrity magazines.

  Mack wasted no time in this post-success world, hopping a fast train to Manhattan, five hundred miles to the south, and in a matter of hours found himself moving along the teeming sidewalks encased in a bubble of special status—picture the Good Witch of the North floating into Munchkinland—the new author on his way to meet with the person he would henceforth refer to as “my publisher.”

  For my grandfather, that person was Tim Coward, a product of Groton and Yale in his mid-thirties who had been a tennis and squash star in college, and who had recently been elevated to president of his own publishing house after a modestly successful career as office manager and salesman for the Yale University Press and Bobbs-Merrill. Mack later said that the firm was funded with the $11 million fortune inherited by Coward’s wealthy wife. At the time, all Mack’s agent knew about the brand-new firm was that it had “unlimited capital.” And with that capital, astonishingly, Coward and his partner, James A. McCann, had chosen to make Diversey their first purchase.

  Tim Coward’s real name was Thomas—an otherwise insignificant fact that would have indelible implications for me. He became one of my grandfather’s closest friends—so much so that Mack named his son Thomas after him, and called my uncle Tim—just like the original. I got the Thomas, as well, but by 1954 the “Tim” had worn off, along with my grandfather’s close relationship with Coward. Thank God for the fickleness of friendship, or I might be Tim, a name I don’t love, meaning no offense to the memory of my uncle.

  Though Coward-McCann would survive in various incarnations into the 1980s, and in later years would publish John le Carré, Edward Albee, Jack Kerouac, Alexander Woollcott, Muriel Spark, Kate Millett, and William Golding, during Tim Coward’s time it was a middling publishing house whose most notable author, aside from my grandfather, was Thornton Wilder. Tim Coward did not make much of a lasting impression in the publishing industry, as such things are measured. The only Thomas Coward recognized by Wikipedia is an unrelated English ornithologist, and even an aggressive Internet search of the publisher’s name comes up blank, save for a mere sentence here or there in a thin smatter of esoteric books. You can learn, for instance, that he had a somewhat sophomoric poem (appropriately) in the 1917 Yale Literary Magazine (I swore I’d be/True to myself. Let others have Life’s praise!) and that he was among a bevy of publishers pursuing Eugene O’Neill when the great playwright’s original publisher went bankrupt in 1933: “After an exchange of correspondence, O’Neill had [Coward] fly down for an overnight visit. An affable, gentlemanly product of Groton, Yale and the squash courts, he charmed both the O’Neills, but his book list, which they received only after they had invited him, was disappointing.”

  That “disappointing” 1933 book list, by the way, would have included my grandfather’s first three novels.

  But in 1928, Coward-McCann had no list at all. I enjoy thinking of my barely twenty-four-year-old grandfather making his way to Coward’s brand-new office, still in that bubble of specialness, on what was then called Fourth Avenue but is now Park Avenue South in midtown Manhattan. It would have been freezing in midwinter, but in my mind, it is a sun-warmed fall day, as it was for me on my first visit to a publisher, floating in that same bubble, the city spinning in its endless variations, a pageant for my personal entertainment, or better yet, a movie set in which I was the principal actor. For a writer, the scenario is the height of romance.

  I found a wonderful letter from this time—wonderful because of when and where it was written: in Coward’s outer office on that first visit in early 1928. Mack had been left alone for a few minutes, and pinched some Coward-McCann stationery to write Effie a note bristling with naive exuberance:

  Dearest Mother,

  Only time for a few lines this afternoon. Am sitting here in the publisher’s office while waiting to have the matter of Canadian royalties thrashed out. . . .

  Thus far I haven’t taken a taxi anywhere but have found my way through this vast roaring maze all alone, and feel very proud of myself.

  Canadian royalties! It sounds rather grand, but in practice, no doubt, amounted to very little. Yet there he was, an author now, hobnobbing in the world capital of publishing. That same day, he’d had his first experience with book editing.

  “Both of the regular publisher’s readers criticized my novel vigorously when it came to the ornate prose . . . one was almost violent on the subject,” he reported. The other reader “enjoyed some of the passages as poetry at least,” but still wanted to cut many of the sections Mack himself referred to as “interlarding.”

  “I can still remember the icy thrill as I read her summing up. . . . ‘I’m not one hundred percent certain. In criticizing these passages . . . I may be just as stubbornly having the nerve to pass judgment upon a work of true genius.’”

  Did someone mention “genius”? That was my grandfather as I had thought of him, firmly focusing on the latter possibility. The nerve of that woman.

  I remember my mother telling me that he once threw such a vicious fit about a copyeditor suggesting an alternate positioning for commas that Coward sent an all-staff memo commanding that under no conditions should Mr. Kantor’s punctuation be questioned. I discovered more than one of those in-house warnings in the files. Here’s one alert sent to copyeditors at The Saturday Evening Post: “He can scream like a banshee if you change a title or delete a phrase or sentence which he particularly values.”

  But to be fair, every writer faces the dilemma of how much to be swayed by the opinions of others—including their editors. How can you be sure that a suggested change isn’t simply a nod to convention, missing, blunting, or entirely undermining the point of something you’ve thought about far more carefully than anyone else?

  I had never read Diversey. I didn’t even own a copy of it until I fished through those boxes at my sister’s house and found a frail red hardcover first edition, signed by Mack to my parents on an apparently random date in 1949. Why would he present the book twenty-one years after publication? I wondered. And then I took another look at the date and something clicked. My mother married my father when she was twenty-one. Doing the math—that would have made it 1949, the year of the inscription. In fact, stretching my memory to near the breaking point, I recovered a hazy recollection that my parents’ anniversary had been June 12—which meant their wedding had been just a few weeks before Mack wrote the inscription in the book.

  So this was a belated wedding present? But why Diversey? Had the bride’s dowry included the complete works, signed by the author?

  It took me a few days of head-scratching before I realized the obvious: Diversey wasn’t just any piece of Mack’s oeuvre—it was the book begun at precisely the moment he discovered Irene’s pregnancy, and sold just days
before my mother was born. In Mack’s mind, Diversey and Layne were practically twins.

  I began reading, not expecting much—both because it was a first novel and because it was dated by a stretch of nine decades. I surprised myself by enjoying it from the opening page. The reviews called it the first realistic portrayal of Chicago gangsters—which, if true, would be quite a thing to be first at. Diversey was not only first, but remarkably prescient. Eight months after publication, in the very neighborhood where the book’s main action takes place, six gangsters and a mechanic were murdered in what became known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  Diversey was ahead of its time in another way: The gangster characters were neither especially smart nor pure evil. They were human-scale—they joked, could be genuinely friendly when they felt like it, and were very much like the multidimensional, somewhat comic gangsters of those modern masters—Elmore Leonard or the Coen brothers. The hero/writer wannabe—obviously a self-portrait of the twenty-something Mack—had some depth and complexity, as did the office girl who became his love interest. Their relationship was sufficiently hard-boiled to avoid an aftertaste of saccharine. Interesting things happened, violent things happened, and I found myself eager to know what would happen next. The writing had a freshness, an originality and muscularity that still worked in another century—lush, but not embarrassingly so. His impressionistic description of a Chicago summer night really was poetic: “The wine of the evening was bitter fever in their mouths. . . . A bright limousine crowded with the giddy young fumed past them, some girl waving. An old-maidish woman with a tiny purple hat limped brazenly among snarling cars.”

  I found it amusing, and revealing of both the author and the times, that the book’s triumphant climax involved the young writer turning his experience with Chicago’s gangsters into a poem and getting it published in the daily paper.