The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived Read online

  When I arrived at the hospital, I expected to meet my mother and uncle there. I emerged from the parking lot into an empty waiting room. There were no cell phones in those days, so I had to live with the mystery of their absence, naked in my aloneness. I got the room number from the pink lady at the reception desk and took the extra-wide elevator to the floor she’d indicated. I hadn’t seen him for several months, and I tried to steel myself for what I would find as I walked reluctantly down the long, oddly empty corridor past doors opening on scenes from various circles of hell. I slowed as I counted down the numbers to his room. The door was swung nearly shut. I gave it a tentative shove with my hand, and peered inside.

  He lay on his side on a bed by the window, lit by the bone-colored light of an overcast afternoon. His body had shrunken horribly, his skin sallow, his breathing ragged. Tethered to a web of tubes, he looked like one of the inmates of the Andersonville prison he’d written about—tortured, starved, barely alive. I forced myself toward him, to the space between the window and his bed.

  His eyelids, blue-veined, translucent, fluttered like moth wings nearing a flame. I recoiled from the scene, a panicky voice in my head again arguing that I was punishing myself for no reason, as he couldn’t possibly realize my presence, much less recognize me.

  One arm, the arm that had an IV needle stuck in it, was above the white sheets. I put my hand on the bare skin that had once covered a bicep. “Grandpa,” I said. “It’s Tom.” My name caught in my constricting throat. I swallowed hard. “I love you,” I said. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

  He drew two more ragged breaths. I almost jumped when his eyes popped open. He looked straight at me.

  “Grandpa?” I said. “It’s me, Tom.”

  His eyes looked wild, his crusted lips worked as if he were trying to speak.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Do you want me to get you something?”

  His lips kept twisting. I leaned in closer. And then I heard a strangled croak from deep in his throat.

  “Horrible,” he said. “Horrible!”

  After millions and millions of words, these were his last.

  —

  The years piled on like so many shovels full of earth on my grandfather’s grave in his tiny hometown of Webster City, Iowa. He had been cremated, but his ashes weren’t interred with the remains of his mother and grandparents until two years later. As family farms sold out to corporate farmers and local factories closed, the town of eight thousand souls struggled to survive, hanging on to the idea of my grandfather’s fame as a slender claim to its own. The city council erected a plaque in the city park, a historical marker downtown, and a road sign bearing his name at the intersection of a cornfield and an industrial warehouse on the edge of town. Everywhere else, the passing years merely confirmed that his celebrity had been fleeting. All but a tiny handful of his books fell out of print, and even the once mighty Andersonville only sold at a trickle. Most college graduates would never hear his name.

  Though my mother and my uncle kept trying to push the significance of their father’s biography and accomplishments on us, we rolled our eyes and mostly ignored them—glanced at the old newspaper clippings without reading, thought about what we were going to do after dinner rather than listen to yet another story from the distant past. Though his many books lined a shelf in my bookcase, I never so much as cracked open a cover, save for Andersonville, the 350,000-word book which I attempted twice, and both times failed to penetrate beyond page 30.

  For so many people, maybe even most—and it’s certainly true of me and my siblings—even extreme dramas in family history beyond one generation removed become a kind of white noise, tuned out until it’s too late. I can’t remember the exact moment it occurred to me, but at some point a question popped into my head about my grandfather and I realized nobody alive could answer it.

  Even as the details of my grandfather’s life evaporated from the reservoir of human memory, my questions about him grew more numerous and insistent. I couldn’t explain why it had never occurred to me that my desire to become a writer, or the fact that I had, to some extent, succeeded in that rather ludicrous ambition, might have something to do with my heritage, and specifically my grandfather. If anyone ever asked me why I wanted to write, I remembered a moment in an eighth-grade English class poetry section when the teacher chose my poem to read, and my chattering, snoozing classmates actually sat up at their desks, stopped talking, and listened. But suddenly, a half century tardy, I remembered that, around the time I was learning to read, I would corral a tiny portable typewriter—a functional toy (and who gave their five-year-olds typewriters as toys?)—roll in a sheet of crisp white paper, and attempt, letter by letter, to copy the text from The Cat in the Hat, mesmerized by the idea that by assembling words together, one typed letter at a time, one could actually create that magical thing called a book.

  When I did the math in my head, I realized that this unusual childhood literary fetish would have coincided perfectly with the moment of my grandfather’s maximum fame. Could I really believe it was unrelated? Had I been predisposed by nurture or nature, or simply by imitation, to tie my identity to the written word? Could so complex a skill as writing possibly be passed down in Grandpa’s DNA? Could it be mere coincidence that my most fervent dreams of accomplishment were precisely those things my grandfather in fact accomplished?

  I had only too late considered the possibility that I might have been formed or even influenced by the abilities, proclivities, or eccentricities of my near and distant forebears after the firsthand sources of knowledge about them had forever vanished.

  Who arrives at maturity without experiencing that regret? Why, I wondered, do most of us have these dual and conflicting tendencies, resisting our genealogical past as if it were an existential threat, yet ultimately pining to connect with it, even as it vanishes before our eyes?

  Suddenly, questions about the past, your past, and your family’s past begin to flood in, questions that could have been so easily, or at least profitably, answered during the lifetimes of your parents or their parents, but have become literally unanswerable, lost forever behind the impenetrable veil of death.

  Tracing one’s lineage, a persistent psychological impulse through the ages, has also become a cultural mainstay. A 2013 Time magazine story called genealogy the second most popular American hobby after gardening, and the second most visited category of websites after pornography. Popular reality TV shows are filled with genealogical sleuths digging through crumbling registers and handwritten census documents. The portraits they manage to draw with great effort, even when they make lucky finds, are mere outlines providing in the end little more than ancestral stick figures.

  I realized I had an advantage, a big advantage—if not unique, at least exceedingly rare: In the Library of Congress of the United States, which happened to stand less than twenty-five miles from my home, was a room stacked with 158 boxes filled with 50,000 items; countless pages of indexed correspondence, contracts, manuscripts, photographs, journals, tax returns, paraphernalia, and even an unpublished autobiographical novel—all of it by or about my grandfather. This vast cache—collected because a committee at the Library in the 1950s determined that my grandfather represented a “typical American writer”—was supplemented by the forty-some books that he had published, including at least two autobiographies, as well as a memoir about him written by my uncle—almost none of which I had ever read.

  What secrets, what forgotten calamities and unremembered triumphs, what surprising revelations and shocking truths could be pried from those cardboard file folders, all that slowly disintegrating cellulose and black ribbon ink? Was it possible, forty years after his death, that I could get to know my grandfather, not as a teenager might remember a sometimes garrulous old man, but as a contemporary could come to know a living, breathing intimate? More than an intimate—someone whose blood ran in
mine, whose most primal makeup mixed in quarters to make me who I am. In learning about my grandfather’s life, what would I come to discover of my own? What would I gain from studying the minute realities of the history of a man from a now-distant era whose life and mine bore such obvious parallels? What could I learn about writing from my grandfather’s mastery of words, his huge success, and his ultimate failure?

  And what would that tell me about why any of us care about our ancestors? Are we blank sheets of paper, waiting to write our own stories? Or are we merely appendixes to lives already lived and largely forgotten?

  But mostly I wondered if I could discover the meaning of those awful words—that one word, repeated—the final words my grandfather ever said to me, or to anyone. What was it that was so horrible? Was it the futility of accomplishment—the fame, success, and money that had promised so much, but in the end mattered so little? Was it the realization that ultimately his writings would not reach that high and durable orbit of the immortals, but fall ignominiously earthward to serve as footnotes in obscure histories and turn to dust in attic boxes?

  Or was it simply illness and death itself—the inevitable, inescapable pain and ugliness of physical destruction that awaits us all, and, possibly, erases all good?

  The answers I found were not what I expected, and far more than I bargained for. My grandfather turned out to be a deeply flawed man, in ways both anticipated and that I never would have imagined. He was also far more worthy of admiration than I could have known. I discovered a series of astonishing parallels between our lives that defied chance and made me see myself in a new light. I ran smack into stark differences that provoked insights both powerful and uncomfortable. I thought I would merely be pulling at the threads of my grandfather’s life, but soon realized I was clinging to the tail of a tiger as it careened through two centuries of an outrageous American saga.

  TWO

  Just after noon on a beautiful June day in 2014, dry and breezy and not too hot, I boarded a train at the origin of the Orange Line Metro near my Northern Virginia home. I sprawled across two seats in the nearly empty car, wondering how many trips to the Library of Congress it would take to go through 158 boxes filled with the practically uncountable number of documents that comprised the MacKinlay Kantor Papers collection. I had no idea what I would find, or how relevant or revealing any of it would be in my quest to know my grandfather. As the train lurched to the east, my iPhone swooshed: a message from my thirty-something niece, who had no idea where I was or what I was doing.

  “I thought you’d be interested,” she began. “As you know, we’ve been in our house for almost five months, and we are still going through boxes. I just came across a copy of Andersonville. It is an autographed limited first edition with a personal note to my grandma and grandpa [i.e., my parents]. To make it even better, there are articles neatly folded inside the book, including the New York Times book review. Now—if I wasn’t feeling guilty before (for not actually ever reading it!!) I’m really feeling guilty now!”

  Perfect, I thought. Her timing was eerie, and the sentiment on point: the guilt of ignoring a notable family legacy. My guilt was ever greater, of course; one generation closer, I had known my grandfather well into my young adulthood. A great-granddaughter who was born after he died could be forgiven for having failed to read his seminal work. But here I was embarking on an intensive study of his life, and I had done no better.

  In the e-mail, she included a scan of the October 1955 New York Times review. It took up most of the front page of the Sunday Book Review.

  “Onto the warp of history,” wrote Henry Steele Commager, one of the great American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, “Mr. Kantor has woven with the stuff of imagination an immense and terrible pattern, a pattern which finally emerges as a gigantic panorama of the war itself, and of the nation that tore itself to pieces in war. Out of fragmentary and incoherent records, Mr. Kantor has wrought the greatest of our Civil War novels.”

  —

  I’d never seen that sixty-year-old review. I had always understood that Andersonville had been critically acclaimed, but this was no mere good review, it was epic. A surge of conflicting emotions surprised me. I was buoyed at the evidence that my grandfather had been, at least once upon a time, such a big deal. But there was a minor note underlying that, a squeamish bit of discomfort, and it took me a minute to pin it down: As a writer myself (and just like every writer who ever tapped a space bar), I had dreamed of getting a review like that, by a reviewer like that, in a paper exactly like that. After years of downplaying my grandfather’s literary significance, I suddenly found myself comparing it to my own. If he was ultimately insignificant, what was I? Until that moment, I hadn’t fully realized just how personal a search this had already become.

  —

  The James Madison Memorial Building—naming it after the founding father and fourth U.S. president was the cheapskate, afterthought alternative to building a proposed separate memorial to Madison—is the largest library building in the world; 1.5 million square feet of floor space. It’s big, all right. And ugly. The design, a chilly, Bauhaus interpretation of neoclassical architecture, is as derided as the original Library of Congress building, named after Thomas Jefferson, is beloved. The domed, mosaic-tiled, and mural-laden Jefferson building is a century older, all grace and beaux arts exuberance to the Madison’s dour, almost Soviet utilitarianism.

  I would soon discover that the Library of Congress had been a frequent home away from home for my grandfather, who spent weeks and months researching the minutiae of American history with which to fill his novels. Adored by the library’s staff, even before he was designated a “typical American writer” and invited to immortalize his desk debris there, he was given special treatment, a private work space, and fawning assistance. But that would have been in the Jefferson building—the Madison was only completed in 1980, three years after my grandfather died.

  My experience with the Library’s manuscript division, headquartered in the Madison building, was in keeping with the Spartan surroundings. The reception at security and in the reading room itself was as chilly as the architecture. No welcomes, or even a hint of a smile—just an arm’s-length, squint-eyed skepticism that made me feel like an imposition, as if they thought I might leave mustard stains on “their” materials. But I couldn’t argue with the efficiency.

  The Library stored my grandfather’s papers “off-site,” a euphemism for a warehouse in Maryland where they stuck the collections that rarely drew interest from researchers. I ordered the maximum allowed, 40 of the 158 boxes, which were transferred to the Madison’s reading room within forty-eight hours. Here I could view them at one of the wooden tables arranged in neat rows and separated by aisles just wide enough to navigate a rolling cart laden with boxes. After entering the building through metal detectors, then depositing my backpack and coat in the lockers at the reading room entrance, I produced my research credentials at the front desk and took a seat in the third row. I snuck a peek at my neighbors: The woman to my right picked through boxes labeled EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY; the man to my left communed with the documentary leavings of the politician-diplomat W. Averell Harriman.

  I learned at the desk that only four boxes could be brought to the table at a time. Since I had no idea what I was looking for, I ordered boxes numbers one through four, figuring I might as well begin at the beginning.

  The rolling cart arrived within minutes. I lifted box number one from the cart and plopped it on the table. Immediately, a librarian loomed above me, tsk-tsking: You have to leave the boxes on the cart, I was scolded. Remove only a single file at a time, mark its place in the box with an oversize slab of cardboard, then examine the documents inside the file one at a time, being careful not to disturb their order.

  Okay, got it.

  I put the box back on the cart, opened the hinged top, and pulled out the first folder. How many of these fi
les would I need to shuffle through before I found something of interest?

  I flipped it open.

  The top document, covered in plastic, was clipped to a hand-addressed envelope postmarked April 24, 1945. Inscribed in ink on the envelope was handwriting I instantly recognized after not seeing it for nearly forty years.

  It said: MacKinlay Kantor, war correspondent.

  I had remembered all those photos of bombing runs and bomber crews on his office wall—how could I forget?—but somehow it had escaped me that he was not a crew member but a “correspondent.” I had never thought of him as a journalist.

  I carefully removed the letter: a single piece of onionskin paper, typed roughly with a fading ribbon and crudely corrected with a black pen.

  Dear Irene,

  I hope you can read this. The ribbon is very faint, and some of the letters are misplaced on this queer German typewriter (made in Leipzig, not so very far from here). If anyone ever tells you again that the atrocity stories are a lot of hysterical propaganda, just tell them politely to shut their big traps. I am sitting here in some damn German family’s upstairs sitting room, with oil portraits of Grossmutter and Grossvater staring stupidly from the wall: there is the smell of a good dinner being gekuchen—but I can hardly smell it—the smell of death is too persistent in my nostrils . . . the smell of the prison camp some five miles or so away—the sour-sweetish odor of rotten bodies, of pallid dead skin, of burnt bones and flesh—the perfume of burning, typhus-ridden rags and shoes, the latrines oozing with their rich concentrated filth, the old and new pools of vomit covering the ground. There are nineteen thousand prisoners still in the camp—nowhere else for them to go until a transportation path is opened through the battle lines, for many of them are Russians, Czechs, Poles and Jugo-slavs. They are being moderately well fed for the first time in months and years, but their poor wizened stomachs can’t take it—they keep vomiting up the stuff they eat. And the people who come to the camp—a lot of them vomit, too.