The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  All this was trivial, of course, compared to what my grandfather faced. But I couldn’t help thinking of it when I got to a letter describing his last-minute reprieve from eviction, if only because of this ironic detail: The week they were to be evicted, Mack got news that Redbook had bought one of his stories for the amount of—wait for it!—$600.

  Deep in one of the Library of Congress files, I discovered yet another irony. I happened on a 1964 mail-order request to FAO Schwarz for the purchase of one pool table, seven feet long by three and a half feet wide, to be billed to MacKinlay Kantor and delivered, before Christmas Day, to my childhood address.

  Finding that particular mail-order document in the Library of Congress conveyed a peculiar kind of recognition shock. It was a little like watching the president taking the oath of office on TV only to realize that he was wearing your favorite T-shirt from the summer camp you attended when you were twelve. I had spent (wasted?) countless hours of my early adolescence banging colored balls around that pool table’s felt surface. Still, I had no memory of it having been a gift from my grandfather. I wondered: Why on earth would he have included that in the papers he sent to Capitol Hill?

  My first thought was once again uncharitable—that it was a crude boast, an ostentatious flaunting of his generosity. But once again, as I learned more, as I read more deeply into Mack’s financial struggles in the early years of his marriage, I became more sympathetic. That pool table, to him, was not merely a boast, but a symbol of what he had achieved: the ability to provide a kind of childhood environment that would have seemed a fantastic dream to him then. I would not have to mingle with the wastrel crowd at some sleazy pool hall, as he had. I could learn to shoot in the comfort and security of my own home!

  The pool table had been one of those undeclared markers of ascendant middle class that defined our home life, a symbol. I would soon discover that Mack had played a more substantial role in my family’s financial well-being than I had ever imagined. That sense of economic uncertainty I’d lived with may have been more accurate than I knew.

  Later, I discovered a letter that Mack wrote to a friend in which he discusses having signed over all royalties from one of his books to my mother. “I’m hoping it sells well,” he wrote, “mostly because I want it to generate enough so they can pay back the substantial sums they’ve borrowed from me.”

  That trap that always seem poised to snap but never did? In part, I have my grandfather to thank for that.

  He certainly couldn’t rely on his father’s generosity to escape financial calamity. He had only his own talent, and fortunately, in 1933, that turned out to be just enough. The $600 sale to Redbook enabled him not only to avoid eviction and pay the most pressing bills, but also to move to a summer rental in an art colony called Free Acres in the mountains about thirty-five miles west of New York City. “A kind of hunting lodge in the woods,” as Mack described it. For a while, things were looking up again. He had impressed the editors of some of the crime-fiction pulp magazines and was able to sell a series of short stories that Mack himself considered to be hackery. One of the magazines included a small profile to acquaint its readers with this frequent contributor, and it provided me with a wonderful glimpse of my grandfather at the age of twenty-nine, as others saw him: “Mr. Kantor is an extraordinary young man, and probably the one writer we know who really looks like a writer. Tall, loose-jointed, horn-rimmed glasses, long brown hair, he emerges periodically from New Jersey with a brief case under his arm and a pipe in his mouth.”

  The manuscripts in that briefcase had dug him out of a hole, but by the fall of 1933, he was feeling strapped again.

  In a letter home he wrote, “In April we got a small shot in the arm from the sale of a full-length detective tale . . . a thousand dollars, less commission. But by the time we had paid up the Westfield bills, traded in the car on a less rusty hack, it was all gone. Our furniture is still in storage in Des Moines, and God knows when we will get it here. I haven’t sold anything worthwhile since April and the pinch is getting us down. We had knocked off one or two Des Moines bills, but the rest are still howling mournfully. The worst is that old man Kantor had to go and seduce himself with a new novel, and with that on my hands, I haven’t been able to think of anything else.”

  Actually, he’d been thinking of it for quite a while, at least since he’d visited Tim Coward in 1930 for a literary blowout that morphed into something more important. “Coward-McCann threw a drunken orgy for us,” Mack reported in a letter to an old friend, “and I think Burton B. wanted to make Irene, but a swell chance he would have had. . . . Well, I didn’t sell a single story while I was in town, and that made me pretty blue. We came back by way of Gettysburg, Harper’s Ferry and the Blue Ridge Mountains. I got quite an emotional wallop out of Gettysburg, and material for an article which helped pay the expenses of the trip. . . . Quite an emotional wallop . . .”

  Later, in a newspaper interview, he said of that experience, “I saw the headlights of my car washing over the rows of grave stones along the Chambersburg Pike. I didn’t sleep much that night and at dawn I was up and tramping over the battlefield.”

  He began writing on January 1, 1933—thanks to a New Year’s resolution “to begin work that very day, and to write at least something on it every day despite poverty, creditors, toothache, my new son’s colic, and all hell and high water.”

  ELEVEN

  As history turned out, Mack began his new novel at the precise nadir of the Great Depression—for the nation, and for the young Kantor family personally, only six weeks away from the looming eviction.

  He later claimed that he’d been wanting to write about the pivotal battle of the Civil War “since boyhood,” inspired, he said, by his great-grandfather and his great-grandfather’s brothers, all of whom fought during the Civil War.

  This stopped me. I’d been fascinated by the Civil War since childhood—an interest I never attributed to my grandfather. When I was about eight, and my brother ten, we both got Union uniforms for Christmas—blue cap, jacket, pants—and toy muskets. We waited until the first thaw. Then, for some reason I find difficult to reconstruct, we decided to stay awake until our parents were asleep, put on our uniforms, drop the muskets out our bedroom window, and climb out after them.

  Maybe we imagined that in the shrouding darkness, absent any adult presence, our fantasy world could flare to life. For hours in the strange void before dawn, we crept around the suddenly unfamiliar landscape of our neighborhood, pretending to be tramping through a battlefield. We crouched behind boulders, crept along fences, moved tree by tree through the woods, almost believing that every shadow, every creaking branch, signaled the advance of Johnny Reb.

  I can’t say exactly why the Civil War moved me more than World War II, in which my father participated (he was a Navy seaman in the Japanese invasion fleet that was spared combat by the atomic demolition of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and which occupied the fantasies of most boys in the early 1960s. Maybe it was the idea that the battles had occurred on my native soil, contested among soldiers, on both sides, who sounded like me. That doesn’t really seem an adequate explanation, but I was hooked on Civil War history enough so that I am quite sure if anyone had told me I’d had direct ancestors who’d fought in the Civil War, I would have remembered. That I didn’t remember anything of the kind left me surprised, then skeptical, when I saw my grandfather’s claim in that 1930s newspaper interview. Maybe he’d just been feeding the reporter a line for better publicity.

  What I did recall—one of the few stories of any sort about previous generations that I knew—was something my mother told me about my great-great-great-grandfather, Effie’s grandfather, Joseph Bone. The topic came up one day when my mother was rolling out some dough with a rolling pin that she said had been handcrafted from wood from an apple tree by Joseph Bone’s father and handed down through the generations. The story was that Joseph Bone had been wounded or became
ill fighting Indians on the Great Plains. An Army surgeon, who thought he might die, sent a telegram to Joseph’s wife, Rachel Bryan Bone, saying he would send an escort of soldiers to collect her in Iowa and bring her to her ailing husband in western Nebraska.

  The message couldn’t have arrived at a worse time. Rachel, fevered and in agony from an abscessed tooth, was driven to desperate measures.

  Now comes the part of the story that guaranteed I would always remember it: Rachel put down the telegram, heated a steel knitting needle in a lamp, and jammed it into her swollen gum to lance the abscess and kill the nerve. She then traveled the 350 miles to the Nebraska Territory with her cavalry escort to retrieve her husband and bring him home.

  I’d often wondered if this wasn’t a melodramatic family myth—possibly embellished by my grandfather, the professional inventor of stories—rather than reliable oral history.

  Besides, this was a tale of the Indian Wars, not the Civil War. When I began wondering if my grandfather had also exaggerated his Civil War antecedents, I did some searches and hit on something surprising. The name Joseph Bone popped up prominently in the history of an infamous massacre of settlers by Indian warriors. According to a half-dozen histories, on the morning of August 8, 1864, Lieutenant Joseph Bone of the 7th Iowa Cavalry was traveling with a small platoon on a ranch near Plum Creek in central Nebraska, when “he spied . . . a crescent-shaped formation of about one hundred Indians thunder down the bluffs to the south upon a wagon train.” The wagons, about a mile and a half from where Lieutenant Bone watched, formed a circle as the drivers tried to take defensive positions. Armed only with pistols, they barely slowed the far superior Indian force. All Bone could do was race for the telegraph office at the Plum Creek station and tap out this message to his superiors at Fort Kearney: “Send company of men here as quick as God can send them.”

  God was otherwise occupied. The reinforcements didn’t arrive until ten that night. By then the thirteen men on the eleven-wagon train were all dead—scalped, shot through with arrows, and partially burned. One woman and a boy had been taken captive (the boy would eventually die of typhus; the woman, rescued after a year of captivity, would write an account of her ordeal). By the time the soldiers arrived, all they could do was dig graves.

  This left unsettled the question of how much truth was in my family’s story of Rachel Bone and the white-hot knitting needle. I found some intriguing, if not definitive, clues in a book called Massacre Along the Medicine Road: A Social History of the Indian War of 1864 in Nebraska Territory. Joseph Bone is introduced as a “red-haired, fiddling lieutenant.” I don’t know anything about the red hair—the one picture I have of Joseph Bone is as an old man with a John Brown–style pointy white beard and white hair. There’s no conspicuous red hair on my mother’s side of the family, except, as a younger man, I had mysteriously abundant red highlights in my beard. And fiddling? I found another record indicating that before he was promoted to lieutenant and transferred to the cavalry, Joseph enlisted in the infantry as a drummer. Maybe he was musical in general.

  But the key assertion was this: When his company had left for a new posting in Kansas, Joseph was “left behind because of a chronic disability which caused him to be unfit for rigorous duty. Now he was on his way home and out of the Army.”

  With him, multiple accounts agree, was an escort of ten men. None of those accounts mention an attendant wife. Why, after all, would a soldier’s wife be summoned all the way to Nebraska to pick him up if he had an escort of ten soldiers to see him home?

  And yet I eventually found, in an envelope stuffed in the back of my own closet, a particularly vivid account written by Mack’s sister, Virginia, who heard the story from Effie, who heard it from her mother, Evalyn Bone McKinlay, who heard it from Rachel Bone herself.

  Virginia confirmed the story about the knitting needle and the abscess, and confirmed that the homeward-bound group, “consisting of two sick officers, their wives and a small escort of soldiers,” witnessed the massacre from behind some rocks at the crest of a hill. When the Indians had galloped off with their captives, Rachel and the rest of the party descended to look, fruitlessly, for survivors. And then there was a gruesome endnote. “Great-grandmother Bone attempted to secure an arrow that had been shot into one man’s chest. He had gripped it so hard in a futile attempt to remove it that, in death, his hands could not be released. Great-grandmother Bone broke it off and brought the feathered handle home as a reminder of their danger. . . .”

  My triple-great-grandmother was one tough broad. If the story is true.

  The historical record’s confirmation of some of the details of the family oral history (Joseph Bone’s involvement in an Indian raid, his disability and trek homeward with an escort) and the vividness of the handed-down tale (white-hot knitting needles plunged into swollen flesh and arrows yanked from the chest of a corpse are, after all, hard to forget) make me think that it probably is.

  As it turned out, my grandfather would prove reliable in his assertion that the men of his great-grandfather’s generation had served in the Civil War. Joseph Bone wasn’t just a fighter in the Indian Wars, I belatedly realized. The date of the attack he witnessed in the summer of 1864 was deep into the four-year war between the States. Many soldiers from the upper Midwest were fighting Confederates to the south, but some had to stay home to protect settlers. So Joseph had indeed been a Union soldier—even if he fought Indians instead of rebels.

  I quickly found confirmation that at least one of Joseph’s brothers had also enlisted. Samuel Bone, a year older, enlisted in the infantry in the same place on the same day as Joseph. Unlike Joseph, who got promoted and transferred to the cavalry, Samuel remained a corporal in the infantry, moving south with his regiment, eventually participating in the siege of Vicksburg and the capture of Mobile. In the family genealogy I’d found, there was mention of only one other brother, Moses, and all I could find on him was a long how-to article he contributed to a 1905 book on mink trapping. (Another published author in the family! Sample handy trapping tip: “If you wish a good scent to draw mink, collect the scent bags of muskrat and preserve them in alcohol.”)

  Only as I was writing this did I come across a Civil War record for a Thomas Bone. Because there had been no Thomas in the genealogy, I wondered if he was unrelated. But his birthplace was the same as Joseph’s and Samuel’s, and his parents had the same names. Joseph was not listed as a brother, but Samuel and Moses were. And then there was another surprise, a fourth brother I hadn’t yet seen: Addison Bone. Clearly, these were my triple-great-uncles, and I would soon discover that all fought in the Civil War. The least fortunate was Addison, who was with the 28th Iowa Infantry for just seven months before being injured in the Siege of Vicksburg, then dying of his wounds on a hospital ship in the Mississippi River. Thomas Bone’s war record was perhaps even more dramatic: He, too, fought at Vicksburg, was wounded severely, had his arm amputated, but returned to service and was promoted despite the lack of limb. Within another few months he was severely wounded a second time, in some unspecified but horrible to imagine way, and finally discharged in February of 1865, three months before the war ended.

  All that is leaving out what may be the most significant detail: On July 14, 1863, during the Siege of Jackson, Mississippi, Thomas Bone was taken prisoner by Confederate forces.

  To me, all this is just history, but to my grandfather it would have been living memory. His grandmother, Evalyn—three years old when her injured father returned from Nebraska and the Indian Wars, and four when her uncle Thomas came home from the Civil War and recent captivity with one empty sleeve—would surely have remembered such dramatic events. She would have no doubt told my grandfather all this, and almost certainly it retained a strong hold on his imagination, considering what was to come.

  I know for sure that Evalyn had kept the buttons from Joseph Bone’s Union uniform, because my mother showed me those buttons. She
gave one to me to hold. I can still feel it, the coolness, the density of weight. I remember circling the flesh of my thumb around the engraved surface, wondering where those buttons had been, what they had seen.

  I felt a thrill of recognition when, in But Look the Morn, I came across this passage:

  The Civil War lived in Grandma’s button-bag. . . . On rainy Sunday afternoons I used to take the Civil War out of the button-bag and play with it on the floor. There were the large brass buttons which had fastened [Great-grandpa] Bone’s blouse down the front, and the smaller ones which had adorned his sleeves. There was a shoulder-strap, too, with its single bars of stiff gold braid; and upstairs we had a picture of him which would have terrified me if I had not known that, in spite of his angry eyes, he was an old soldier. And all old soldiers were kind to little boys.

  Mack knew that because he didn’t just play Civil War as I had, though he did that to excess. He taught himself to play a fife, and actually joined a fife and drum group consisting of himself and a constantly shrinking contingent of Civil War veterans, who played on commemorative occasions in town, when they weren’t attending one another’s funerals.

  “I can remember parading through cemeteries on the Fourth of July, the old men of the town and me, a skinny kid in his teens with a fife. Sometimes the Civil War seemed closer than the time I was living in.”

  —

  Even as his financial situation continued to be desperate, my grandfather sensed as he worked deeper into Long Remember that this was the beginning of a new phase in his life.

  “Have about 23,000 words done . . . ,” he wrote in a letter to his sister. “Two years ago I wouldn’t have been in any way capable of doing what I’m doing now. . . . Sometimes I wonder if it’s my peak—if I can ever feel anything so tremendously again.”