by Tom Shroder
The book was about a cigar-puffing, purple-prose-spouting, Swedish-born Jewish con man with shady connections—a dead ringer for John Kantor. Coward-McCann loved it, and was all set to publish it, until Tim Coward realized the novel was autobiographical. “In the opinion of their attorneys,” Mack wrote, “my father could sue, and collect. . . . Accordingly, they became adamant about refusing to publish.”
No wonder I didn’t know the title. After his father died two decades later, clearing the way for lawsuit-free publication, Mack said he no longer considered the book good enough to publish.
But at the time, having just suffered through the painful process of writing a novel—especially such a personal one and one needed so desperately to pay the bills—I would have thought such a last-minute derailment would have crushed him. Writers have given up hope for far less severe reversals than that.
I see no breast-beating or hand-wringing in the letters from that time. Instead, it appears he simply went back to work on another Chicago novel—one that he would eventually consider “the weakest and most confused” he ever wrote, but still.
It’s impossible to overstate the iron will (and iron ass) it takes to forge ahead with writing under such circumstances. As I write these words, it’s all I can do to force myself to remain sitting upright and continue to press the buttons on the keyboard, rather than slouch forward into a face-plant on the desk, or stagger away to the couch for a little nap. Nothing is flowing, no thoughts seem sharp enough, no words apt, and my gut seethes with despair. I know from experience that despair is always the first stage of writing—or as Ernest Hemingway put it, “The first draft of anything is shit.” But no matter how many times I manage to push through that first stage and emerge with something I might eventually be proud of, it never gets any easier to believe it will happen this time. The revulsion of the moment is so intense I am not exaggerating to say that it feels as if you are trying to force yourself to eat the substance Hemingway so colorfully described. I’m awed by my grandfather’s ability to press on through the disappointments and deprivation.
Unfortunately, he had chosen a bad time to launch a writing career. In October of 1929, just a year after Diversey came out, the stock market crashed, the entire nation’s economy cratered, and book and magazine publishing collapsed like a soufflé in an earthquake. Desperate, Mack wrote a letter to his publicist at Coward-McCann, describing his sorry state and feeling her out on the possibility of asking Tim Coward for another advance. “I sympathize,” she responded. “If you write, you’ve got to eat and you can’t eat unless there is something to pay the grocery bill with. . . . Write to Mr. Coward and tell him that you’re awfully anxious to finish your new book but simply can’t do it unless you have financial security.”
Mack must have done just that. Coward agreed to provide a stipend of $50 a month to provide groceries while Mack wrote. Helpful, but hardly enough for a growing household. Mack arranged a deal with the newspaper in Des Moines to write a daily column for another $50 a month.
Effie, whose heart was acting up again, had to give up her own literary pursuits—she had recently won a short story contest under an assumed name—to come live with Mack and Irene in Des Moines. By now, she had reconciled herself to her son’s marriage and had cordial, if not fond, relations with Irene. The previous year, she had written Mack a letter on his twenty-sixth birthday: “I know that many times in your childhood, you were not happy. . . . I have not realized how very many times you were miserable until you told me yourself, for in my ignorance, or in my great desire to make you happy, I thought you were. . . . So now I am wishing for you more happiness than ever you have had before. You have so much ahead of you, both in the enjoyment of Irene and in the dear possession of your darling baby. To say nothing of your great possession—the genius and talent which are yours.”
The house in Des Moines was not large, and Effie had to share a room with my mother, not yet four. Every night she’d lift little Layne-o out of her crib and bring her into bed with her, and tell her stories about the black cat they had at the time, who—in the stories, at least—attained magical powers after dark and could fly all over, including to the moon. On Thanksgiving Day in 1931, Effie had a major heart attack, then suffered through four painful weeks before lapsing into a coma on Christmas Eve. On the day after Christmas, Effie’s large and oft-broken heart gave out.
I don’t remember ever hearing about Effie’s death from Mack, or even my mom. The whole memory must have been too painful even decades later. So I was especially interested in one of the items discovered in the boxes my sister kept in her closet; a short article Mack wrote about the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death for a magazine appropriately named Fate (“True Stories of the Strange and the Unknown”).
After the undertaker took her body away, Mack and Irene thoroughly cleaned the room, aired the mattress, and washed the sheets. That night, with some trepidation, they told Layne-o she’d be sleeping alone in her room again. They marveled at her innocent glee in returning to the room, absent all morbid fear of death’s shadow. Just a few nights later Irene was getting my mother ready for bed, or trying to, as Layne was jumping all over the bed joyfully. “Oh, I love to go to bed!” she said.
“Do you?” Irene said, amused.
“Yes. I like to come to this room and get into my nightclothes and get into bed. For then the Pink Lady comes.”
Irene, beginning to get a little spooked, tried to appear only casually interested.
“What does the Pink Lady do?”
“Oh, she sits on the bed and she talks to me and tells me stories. I just love the Pink Lady.”
A ghost of a different sort appeared within days of Effie’s death in the form of a telegram from Chicago. Mack opened it with reluctance. The message said, “Now she is a saint.”
It was signed John Kantor.
However it was intended, that meretricious sentiment only inflamed Mack’s wound. Ultimately, he would be the one to have the last word on his mother’s passing, writing in her obituary: “Whatever troubles came to her, she faced with a calm and steadfast faith in the eternal goodness of things, and was a tender giver of inspiration in the joy of living.”
It was, I think, exactly the epitaph I would hope to deserve when I die.
I took another look at that photograph from Christmas Day in 1959 when my grandfather was teaching me how to ride a bicycle. I studied the singular intensity of his gaze once more. Now I felt I finally could read his thoughts as he watched me ride off down his driveway—not only was he certainly remembering his father’s cruel betrayal, the bike promised but never delivered, but also he must have been thinking of his mother, and the Christmas in 1931 that was her last full day of life.
When I collected all the letters I had photocopied at the Library of Congress and arranged them by date, Effie’s death was a clear line of demarcation. It may have simply been the deepening Depression, but it was hard to miss the fact that, after Effie died, all optimism vanished from my grandfather’s letters. Mack quit the Des Moines column—the daily deadline had sapped his creativity and eaten up the time he needed to produce fiction, which he thought could make more money than the column, and was really what he wanted to do, in any case. He packed his four-year-old daughter and his pregnant wife in a mortgaged Chevy and headed east to New York, center of the literary world, once again with only a few dollars in his billfold. They couldn’t afford New York real estate, of course, and rented what he called “a series of ever shabbier apartments” in Westfield, New Jersey, where he tried to type his way out of trouble, without much success.
In the three years following the aborted Half Jew, he wrote two more novels. One was another novel about contemporary Chicago life and the other about a broken-down Civil War vet who takes his granddaughter on the road to look for a runaway mother. Mack describes both as “flops,” and they certainly did little to help the financial si
tuation.
One of Mack’s annotations dealt with this period, the fall of 1932, in gruesome detail:
I was having severe tooth trouble, and naturally could not go to a dentist. I had cavities—some new, some in which the fillings had come out. I kept these stuffed with cotton: tight little wads of it, packed in with a toothpick, so that the guck from decaying teeth would not ooze constantly into my mouth. Later I’d remove the cotton, saturated with decay, and put in fresh. Sometimes during that autumn and winter, the teeth would begin to ache unbearably. I worked out a routine to deal with this situation. I didn’t want Irene to know that I was having any aches in the teeth, because she might have been reduced to tears. So I’d retreat to our toilet in that crazy, scrabbled together apartment in the old house on South Ave. in Westfield. I’d lock the door, sit on the toilet seat, and hang my head away down below my knees. In this position the blood would pour into my head, and apparently swell up tissues until the nerves which transmitted the toothache impulse to the brain would be squeezed off. That’s the only way I can account for it. Perhaps it wasn’t sound medically. Anyway it relieved the ache and I could go back to my work for a while without suffering.
As he was working on new novels, always hoping for the big payoff, he also labored ceaselessly on stories that might pay the household bills. His letters are filled with the ins and outs of his efforts:
The Rotarian just called and told me that they would get a check off to me for the Christmas story in a few days—$150. That’s five cents a word. Our income is certainly creeping up perceptibly, which is fortunate as we must get a high-chair soon and don’t want to have the payments on Irene’s [winter] coat hanging over us for very long! If I keep steadily at work, another month will see us cleared up as to immediate crucial expenditures and debt.
And then there were the long-term debts, not only his, but his mother’s and grandparents’:
I want to take care of as many debts as possible before my royalties come in, so I won’t have to immediately beggar myself paying old debts. I will pay Dr. Wyatt then, also the old small bills. Richardson has a five year note and can wait another year. The notes in the old First National can also wait indefinitely; some day I’ll go in and square up the entire $745. . . . We will take care of the tax debts on the house and Irene and I want to do a number of nice things for you folks. God knows you have waited long enough and invested enough in me.
And God also knew he was trying. But even the acceptance of his third novel, the road-trip story about the ancient Civil War vet and his granddaughter, called The Jaybird, only highlighted how bleak his prospects had become. Just four years earlier, after that grandiose luncheon with Tim Coward, toasting to future fame and riches over cocktails at the Yale Club, Coward sent what must be one of history’s grimmest acceptance letters: “We are publishing The Jaybird. . . . Times are terrible and I don’t want you to anticipate very much. It is the devil to get orders.”
By the winter of 1932, Mack did not even own an overcoat. What he did have was a second child—Thomas MacKinlay, whose middle name represented not only self-tribute on Mack’s part, but an homage to Effie’s maiden name. My uncle insisted that his conception occurred as a conscious act, his father’s way of seeking solace during the paroxysm of grief that followed his mother’s death.
When I came across my uncle’s full name in one of those eighty-year-old letters for the first time, I felt my head jerk back in a literal, physical double take. Thomas MacKinlay . . . I was looking at my own name. I’d known my uncle Tim had been born Thomas, but I’d never known, or somehow forgot, that his middle name was the same as my own. It was odd to contemplate: at the age of sixty, I was discovering that my most personal attribute, the name I signed on formal documents, the identity at the root of memory, was all tied up not only with the beginning of my grandfather’s career, but with the death of the great-grandmother I’d been born twenty-three years too late to meet.
—
The months that followed the move east were an extended flirtation with disaster.
When my mother told me stories of the desperate poverty of her early childhood, I wondered why my grandfather didn’t feel compelled to find a job, any kind of job, rather than keep pounding his head against the wall of publication. While I marveled at his persistence, I thought the less of him for—as I imagined it—allowing his ego to prevent him from doing what was necessary for his family.
A passage from one of Mack’s letters from this period showed me what shallow, uninformed thinking that was: “Of course it’s next to impossible to get a job in New York now, though I’ve been trying hard. Came near a couple of things, but they dribbled out. . . . Existence means nothing if it is saturated with poverty, pain, discouragement. I’ve spent hours walking up and down New York, trying to figure some way out of it. Perhaps it is lucky that my accident & life insurance lapsed last fall. I would have been tempted to ease matters with those. . . . One man can’t pull off a stick-up successfully, or that would have happened long ago. . . . Consequently—well I didn’t do anything about it. Just hung on, tried to write, waited.”
In the cold early months of 1933 he wrote to his sister, “We have just passed through the most crucial and devastating period in our history. Everyone had been sick, Baby Tom had colic, they all had flu.” Irene had to have some unspecified “minor operations.”
“Three magazines owed me money, and I could not collect a cent. From Christmas until Jan. 30th, we only had $65, and that was borrowed. On Jan. 14 we got an eviction notice to be effective Feb. 15. There were plenty of times when it seemed like there was nothing to do but turn on the gas.”
—
For years we have had photos of my grandparents—and my wife’s, as well—looking out from dust-collecting frames on the less prominent walls of our home. You spend an hour hanging them one day, then notice them on the wall for possibly a week. Ultimately, you walk past them, perhaps a dozen times a day, thousands of times over the course of a year, and barely give them a thought.
Possibly because you know so little about them.
That changes, I can attest, when you begin poring over nearly century-old letters filled with these people’s most intimate thoughts concerning the detailed dramas of daily life. It becomes almost impossible not to compare your own experiences with those—previously unknown to you—of the people who made you, both figuratively and literally.
Reading about my grandparents’ early poverty made me consider my own upbringing in a way I had not done before. I did not grow up poor—we were solidly middle- to even upper-middle-class. My father was a builder/developer, working in a firm founded by his father. We grew up in a house with a pool table in the basement and a swimming pool backing up to wooded hills in the famously upscale New York suburb of Scarsdale. I became aware, as I approached my teens, that my father had suffered some business reversals. In fact, that was a large part of the reason we would leave New York for a more modest home in Sarasota, less than a mile from my grandfather’s house. I constantly felt the financial tension in the background, a fog of anxiety, impossible to pin down but permeating everything. We always seemed on the brink of penury, but the trap we lived in never sprang shut.
My state college was inexpensive, and my salary for working at the college newspaper, as pathetically small as it was, paid the better part of my expenses—sub sandwiches and beer, mostly. After college, I expected to be, and was, fully self-supporting. Within a year of graduation, I had married my college girlfriend, and a year after that I became a father at twenty-three. Though I didn’t consider this at the time, I was within six months of the age my grandfather had been when my mother was born. A reporter making just $8,000 a year—minimum salary at the medium-size newspaper on Florida’s Gulf Coast—I had no more business than my grandparents in starting a family with such limited resources. Oddly, accounting for inflation, my income—or lack of it—was almost identical to what my
grandparents had been making jointly in 1927.
Initially, we lived in a $125-a-month apartment in the city’s decayed downtown area. The second-floor, one-bedroom apartment had some down-at-the-heels architectural charm—high ceilings and tall, plentiful windows overlooking coconut palms. But when our downstairs neighbor was raped at knifepoint by a random intruder, we moved to a bare-bones three-room cottage a block from the beach. There was still such a thing as beach-access funk in those days (the cottage is now an unrecognizably upgraded remodel; what was a sandspur- and morning-glory-vine-covered path to the beach is now buried beneath something called the Diamond Head Beach Resort), but even then it was twice the rent of the downtown place. I was always conducting triage on overdue bills, and we couldn’t even think of the occasional movie or dinner out. I picture one night in particular from those years when the ancient, oil-burning heap that was our only transportation seized up and stopped dead six blocks from our place. When I opened the hood, the engine was hot and smoking. I yanked the dipstick: bone-dry. I hiked to the nearest gas station and found a mechanic who guessed from what I told him that the engine gasket had blown. Worst case, the engine was destroyed. Even in the best case, he said, it would cost $600 to get it running again. I remember the figure exactly, because it seemed to me the definition of unobtainable. There was no way I could come up with that kind of money, and yet I had to have a car to work. The world squealed and ground to a halt, leaving my brain to spin pointlessly like tires buried in mud.
Because I could think of nothing else to do, I bought a few quarts of oil—it took all the money I had on me—hiked back to the car, and poured it in. With my heart clutching in my chest, I turned the key in the ignition. The engine hummed to life—I was saved, at least for the moment. But the memory of that vertiginous sense of teetering on the edge of a fiscal cliff, a precipice from which any unanticipated expense could send you tumbling, has never faded.
