by Tom Shroder
He was still only twenty-nine years old.
That summer he wrote to Dick Whiteman, his best friend from his Webster City childhood, who had gone into advertising and was living in Southern California:
A week or two ago I delivered Books I and II to Tim Coward. He was somewhat bowled over by them. He dug into his pocket for a little money which has kept us out of the breadline at present while I try to go ahead with Book III. . . . I know it’s about 400 times better than anything I’ve done before . . . a dead ringer for Hollywood, what with the Confeds and the Yankees and the hottest love affair that ever breathed itself this side of Hades.
Where did that kind of confidence come from? Might it have helped having a mother who called him a writing genius on his twenty-sixth birthday and could say, “I believe in you as I believe in a supreme being”?
Apparently he hadn’t always been that way. I discovered a 1930 essay written by Effie herself on her son the novelist for a Boone, Iowa, newspaper. “MacKinlay Kantor is seldom pleased with his own writing,” she wrote. “I have seen him more often sad, depressed over his inability to express what he feels, than happy or elated at accomplishment.”
Now, that sounded like me.
I don’t recall ever having the certainty, as my grandfather did in 1933, that I was in the process of hitting something out of the park. Reading my grandfather’s words of exuberant self-belief forced me to wonder about my own lack of it. Maybe I’m just being realistic.
And as amazing as it seems, so was he.
The completed novel, about 120,000 words, was published in April of 1934, and the gates of heaven opened, pouring out the reviews of an author’s dreams.
Jonathan Daniels, writing in The Saturday Review of Literature: “It is an understatement to say that Mr. Kantor has written a historical novel. For in Long Remember, far from being background, history is the actor and the men and women of the story are swept irresistibly before it.”
Another reviewer declared it an instant classic: “Long Remember can stand shoulder to shoulder with The Red Badge of Courage as a romantic-realistic presentation of one of the great dramatic moments in our history.”
Some years later, Edith Walton would write in The New York Times Book Review: “The solidity and brilliance of Long Remember gives it a lasting quality lacking in Gone with the Wind. . . . It made one feel like a shuddering eye witness; it flamed with life and imaginative insight.”
For contemporary readers, some dated language will stand out. (In a spasm of lustful inner dialogue, our hero appraises the love interest’s hotness thus: “Oh, you woman!”) The final resolution of the book is vague and a little disappointing. But the vitality of the characters and situations remains undiminished.
Following the pattern of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, which had been a huge best seller five years earlier, in Long Remember, readers experienced the horrors of war in unrelenting close-up, through the eyes of an iconoclastic but realistic and ruggedly appealing antihero with a semi-nihilistic worldview. Visceral depictions of battlefield action intertwine with a doomed romance only the more passionate for being set against such a grim background.
If anything, Long Remember was even easier for readers to relate to than Hemingway’s World War I novel, as the protagonists were not soldiers fighting in Italy, but civilians going about their lives in an American small town until the crest of war broke on top of them.
And readers did relate, by the droves, wallets in hand.
Long Remember remained high on national best-seller lists for months, Paramount eventually bought the screen rights, and Cecil B. DeMille, impressed with the book, invited Mack to come to Los Angeles to work on the screenplay for a biblical drama, which, though never produced, paid him the 2015 equivalent of $6,000 a week. In the first eight months after publication in 1934, Mack’s total revenue went from $30.20 over a similar period two years earlier to $12,622, the equivalent of $226,000 today.
Almost overnight, he transformed from an obscure writer barely able to make the rent to someone whom newspapers referred to as a “celebrated young novelist” with more money flooding in all at once than he’d made in the previous thirteen years combined. Magazines that had paid him $100 for a story were now forking over $1,000.
“Although I never lost hope, there were times I thought fate had forgotten me,” he told a reporter at the time. “But it’s all over now.”
It sure seemed that way. His next book, a short (128-page) novel called The Voice of Bugle Ann, about a feud over the killing of a beloved foxhound in the Missouri hills, was rushed out less than a year later. It became an instant sensation when it was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, bringing tears to the eyes of dog lovers everywhere. And dog lovers were everywhere. Bugle Ann sold better even than Long Remember and again sold to Hollywood, where it was almost instantly made into a movie starring Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O’Sullivan.
That same year, still living in New Jersey, but suddenly flush with money, Mack inevitably decided to spend some of it. I’d never known exactly how my grandparents had decided to build a home on a Siesta Key beach until I came across a 1950s interview with Mack in a Sarasota newspaper.
“The children were both sick all the time. . . . They had colds, always out of school. ‘Take the children down to Florida,’ I told Irene. They had never been south of Des Moines.”
Irene made the long road trip alone with the kids—which must have rivaled the hell of living through the Depression—an eight-year-old and a three-year-old, on those pre-interstate highways. In Punta Gorda, one of them—Mack didn’t say which one, and of course it was too late to ask my mother—stepped off a steep ledge in the surf and nearly drowned. So, back on the road. Driving through Sarasota, Irene crossed a rickety wooden bridge onto Siesta Key, a narrow barrier island between a sparkling blue bay and six and a half miles of sugar-white sand beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. In that whole slice of subtropical heaven lived just 250 souls. She stayed the night in a motel on the next key to the north.
I found Irene’s account in yet another newspaper feature. “I often think of that first night,” she told the interviewer. “I looked out of the hotel window at the pure white sand, which looked exactly like fresh-fallen snow.”
She was hooked, and I knew exactly how she felt.
—
One night in late 1967, my parents informed us that we were moving to Sarasota. It was after dinner in our Scarsdale dining room, dishes still on the table, when my father cleared his throat and made the announcement. You would think I would remember the reasons he gave, but I don’t. I remember the shock—my entire life, almost fourteen years, in one house, one school district, one set of friends, and now it would all just end? I don’t even remember that it helped knowing Sarasota from all those winter vacation trips to our grandparents’ house on the beach. I loved those trips. I loved the palm trees, the fishing trips, the sun, and the warmth. I loved my grandparents. But Sarasota was not home.
We didn’t move right away. My parents and my sister waited a few months until school was out and went south, while my brother and I headed north to a two-month-long summer camp in New England. When we returned on the camp bus to New York, family friends picked us up and drove us to JFK International. We flew on our own—my first flight without my parents—to the then tiny Sarasota regional airport. I remember standing on the curb just outside the terminal, watching the palm fronds undulate in an ocean of wind, waiting in a kind of suspended animation for someone to pick us up and a new life to begin.
The house my parents bought was on a man-made canal on Siesta Key in one of the subdivisions that had pumped up the Key’s population from 250 to 5,000 in the thirty years since my grandparents had built their house—the kind of development my grandfather loved to rail against and wrote a raunchy, rambling protest song about that he was only too happy to perform. I felt lonely and isolated at firs
t, but as the fall months rolled into winter and the steamy heat gave way to the most delicious soft breezes, I began to see the advantages. One November afternoon, friendless and nearly literally bored to tears, I took off on my bicycle, tires crunching along the crushed-shell road that led from our house toward the beach. I stopped beside an orange tree, noticing that the fruit had seemingly puffed up overnight to the size of baseballs and had turned from dark green to bright orange without so much as an intermediary phase. They were hanging there like living Christmas ornaments, free for the plucking. I think the moment I bit into that sweet pale flesh, the burst of flavor exploding in my mouth, I began to see life in Florida differently.
Not long after, I was sitting at a beachside restaurant with my father for a late dinner on a night with a hint of chill in the air—Sarasota did have some cold snaps in the winter, but they were about as threatening as vanilla ice cream. I looked up from the table, and my attention was captured by a penetrating glow, radiating through the large windows that circled the dining room. A full moon had risen above a stand of Australian pines, whose trunks made feathery shadows on gleaming, pure-white sand, which looked exactly like a field of freshly fallen, completely undisturbed snow.
Memory is an odd beast. That was an otherwise ordinary night, undistinguished and unremarkable in any other way. But as I read my grandmother’s description of her first night in Sarasota, the image of that driftlike sand came back so powerfully I could feel the chill, smell the mingled scent of pine and sea salt, and see the glow that I suddenly realized had always been with me, not merely as a visual memory but as a marker of transcendence, a moment of feeling complete and unshakable peace in the present moment.
So I understood why, in 1936 with their newfound wealth, they quickly snapped up an acre of jungle with fifty yards of beachfront, bought additional acreage of jungle to either side as a buffer, then commissioned Ralph Twitchell, the architect who had supervised the construction of John Ringling’s opulent mansion on Sarasota Bay, to design the sprawling, eccentric, and—for the time—radically modern beach house of their fantasies.
I also understand, given Mack’s rising wealth and visibility, why the letters began to arrive.
CORNING, NEW YORK, 1935
My dear Mr. Kantor:
I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your story The Voice of Bugle Ann. I have been interested in your success since your father made me one of his victims to the amount of six thousand dollars. I have in my possession your book Long Remember he inscribed as follows: “I hope you will enjoy reading this book of my son’s as much as I enjoy giving it to you, John Kantor.”
At the time I thought that inscription described in a few words the type of man I believed your father to be—kindly, generous, and extremely proud of his son’s success. It was his fondness for books and garden and his pride in you that inspired my confidence and it has been the most cruel thing that anyone has ever done to me—to find that a man who appeared to be a friend of our whole family had deliberately robbed me of nearly everything I owned in the way of securities. The title of your book, Long Remember, has turned out to be so sadly significant.
Since then I have read every story you have written. I want you to know that there is a woman in Corning who will read each new publication with interest but with a little stab of pain as well.
KENMORE, NEW YORK, 1936
Dear Mr. Kantor,
Your father called on us in 1934 and because we thought a man who could be so sincerely proud of his son was trustworthy, we gave him one thousand dollars from our savings for investment in oil wells (leaving only a balance of $42.17 which unfortunately is still the balance as I have been to the hospital, we lost our only son, and have been unable to add to our account). We have received no return of any kind, although your father did keep in touch with us, even writing through an attorney after he was arrested. However, I still have faith (not my husband, he hasn’t even read a line of yours because of his prejudice) that your father will return, not an increase, but just the amount we entrusted to him.
Where is your father now? Can you give us any hope to cling to?
CHICAGO, 1936
Dear Mr. Kantor:
I am writing to inquire whether you can tell me the whereabouts of your father, Mr. John Kantor. About five years ago, at a time when he seemed to be in real distress financially, I made him a personal loan of $600, accepting his note for the money. This was at a time when he was trying to promote a campaign to bring back beer. Shortly afterward, the campaign fell through and I lost track of him; but reports coming to me in the meantime were not reassuring.
Now I find myself in really urgent need of the money. On the off chance that you will be good enough to tell me where he can be located and whether in your judgment I have any chance to collect, I am writing you this very frank letter. I like your father and have a genuine admiration for his ability. I believe he would want to reimburse me if he knew my situation. . . .
NEW JERSEY, 1937
Dear Mr. Kantor,
One Friday afternoon a tall imposing looking stranger entered our delicatessen. While I was getting his order ready, his eye wandered around the store and hit on a bag of Kantor’s coffee.
“Is this good coffee?” he asked.
“It has to be,” I said. “It bears our name.”
“Have you ever heard of MacKinlay Kantor?” he queried.
“The great American writer? Why yes, I’ve read a few of his works.”
“Well I am MacKinlay Kantor’s father. . . .”
The next morning the telephone rang. A lady’s voice said, “Hello, this is Mr. Kantor’s sister-in-law. . . .” When she hung up, I tallied up her order—something over $10 which is a good size order for a small store, especially in these times when every dollar counts. When I delivered the goods they told me that Mr. Kantor wasn’t in, but would come to the store early in the week to pay the bill.
A week passed and no Mr. Kantor. A few more days, and I began to get fidgety, so dad suggested I go up to the house. I found the place deserted, with a note on the porch reading “no more papers.”
Weeks have passed. I hate to think that the name of a great American writer should be besmirched by his own father, who contracts debts using his son’s good name as a key to the heart of trusting citizens, and fails to redeem his honor. . . . If there is any way that you can see to the payment of this obligation, it will be greatly appreciated.
As awful as this barrage of letters must have been—and there were many more, equally heartbreaking—they weren’t entirely unexpected. Nor was it surprising to see the baffling range of crimes, from defrauding a trusting couple of their life savings to cheating a deli owner of a lousy $10 worth of cold cuts, nor was the unflagging energy of his malfeasance.
As soon as Diversey came out, letters of the type once directed at Adam McKinlay—stories of bad checks and bad faith—had come to Mack. He hadn’t seen his father since their encounter that February morning in 1928 on the day my mother was born, but in December of 1933, when he was in New York to put the final edits into Long Remember at Coward-McCann, he was in the lobby of the Commodore Hotel when a man about his own impressive height touched his shoulder. Mack must have felt quite a jolt when he turned to find his father’s bejowled intensity aimed in his direction.
“He wanted me to have dinner, etc.,” he wrote to his sister.
He had his wife with him. I wouldn’t come for dinner, but dropped in during the evening and chatted with them. They were living in Hartford, Conn. The wife was a pretty redhead about twenty-eight years old [John was fifty-four then], and seemed to have the knack of handling him. He seemed older, somewhat subdued, but just as full of lies and fine speeches as ever. I wouldn’t invite him out to visit the children. Later however, I did go with Irene and have dinner with them at the Biltmore. We were both very much amused, but didn’t care to pursue the acquaintanceship.
/> Some time later while we were down south he read in a New York paper that we were gone and promptly drove out to see the children. Mrs. Keyes was quite bewildered to have a self-announced grandfather come marching in. He stayed an hour or two, made a long distance call, and Mrs. Keyes found him spying over my mail when she came into the room. He asked where my clippings were kept, but she wouldn’t allow him to penetrate my workroom, so he left.
That was all we heard of him until April, when he called up full of congratulations and fulsome phrases about Long Remember. Needless to say, I didn’t send him a copy.
About six weeks ago, I received a letter from a psychologist of Columbia U. It seemed that my father had cheated the prof out of some $22,000 and he was trying to get it back, wondered if I had any influence with my father etc. . . . I learned to my astonishment that he had been using my name as a lever, talking about the money I would make from Long Remember, and finally he begged the prof not to prosecute as it would REACT UNFAVORABLY ON MY BOOK. I immediately wired the old devil to get the hell away from me and never mention my name again in any of his nefarious enterprises. I also communicated with the prof and volunteered any aid I could give in order to bring about a speedy prosecution, but he’s likely fled the country by this time. I wish they had got him and stuck him in the pen where he has belonged these many years, but apparently he was born to die with his boots on, cheating somebody merrily up to the last gasp.
I couldn’t find any mention of John’s dealings with the Columbia professor in searches of newspapers, but I did find a brief article in The Webster City Freeman from less than a year later that answered both Mack’s conjectures about whether his father had fled the country and the sad query of the man who had purchased some oil wells from John wondering if there was any hope he would ever get his investment back. The answer to both questions was negative. The news account reads:
