FOUR

I became a journalist not out of love but desperation.

I was nineteen years old. What I wanted to be was a fiction writer, a novelist. It would never have occurred to me to add the words “like my grandfather” to that thought. It would not be accurate to say I believed my literary ambition had no connection with my grandfather. That would indicate I thought about a possible connection to him, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, and rejected it. In fact, I never considered the possibility at all. As far as my ruminations about motivation were concerned, he might as well have been a plumber.

If I had been forced to specify an aspirational role model, I would have said Harry Crews.

Harry Crews died in 2012 at the age of seventy-six, dissipated by a lifetime of hard living, too many drugs, oceans of alcohol, and an uncounted number of fists to the face. I couldn’t recognize the hairless, bloated, toneless seventy-something man in the New York Times obituary picture, the man described as a “little-known” but larger-than-life novelist with an enthusiastic cult following, a writer of “dark fiction” filled with southern grotesques and wild violence. The Harry Crews I remembered was fixed in a thin slice of space-time, a stretch of six months or so in Gainesville, Florida, forty years ago. He was in his short-lived “speed freak phase.” He’d given up drinking—very temporarily, as it turned out—but he was definitely on something that turned up the wattage. He’d become a serious runner possessing almost zero body fat and a Mr. Clean gleam, both on his shaved skull and in his eye. He had recently published a novel about a man who eats an entire car, piece by piece. Just because.

In the fall of 1972, I managed to get into one of his University of Florida creative writing seminars as an undergraduate, a sophomore no less. I don’t remember if I had to produce a writing sample, though I must have. I can’t imagine what it would have been, aside from a few embarrassing fragments of adolescent attempts at poetry. For someone who longed to write fiction, I can’t recall that I had actually written any. But whatever thin wisps of prose I possessed, I offered up.

Crews was a writing god in 1972 Gainesville. “Little-known” he may have been in terms of a New York Times obit, but then and there he was the most famous man in town, a swashbuckling Hemingwayesque figure who made flesh the cliché of living legend—at least to an eighteen-year-old with dreams of literary fame and fortune. I do remember being summoned to a one-on-one interview in which Crews studied me the way a hawk must study a chipmunk. He accepted maybe a dozen students into his seminar that semester, a three-hour marathon one night a week that was less of a class than a performance. I have no idea why I was among the chosen ones, but I have been forever grateful for that fluke of luck.

Crews spoke in great roiling torrents, extolling us like a tent revivalist doing his unlevel best to save a particularly sorry bunch of sinners. His gospel was the nakedness of truth, the necessity for a writer to peel away all egotistical posturing, to abandon caution and conceit, and care only for revealing his inner world in all its sick and twisted glory. That we were all sick, twisted, and glorious was the basic tenet of his faith.

He made it quite clear he had no use for convention in life or literature, and appeared to us as the embodiment of Bob Dylan’s creed “To live outside the law, you must be honest.”

There were periods in his pedagogic career when he was not the most attentive teacher. He’d show up late and half-baked to stumble and mumble around. Or, fully baked, not show up at all. Twenty years on, when I was editor of The Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, I assigned a talented young woman to go up to Gainesville and profile him. He showed up for the interview wobbling drunk and propositioned her within the first ten minutes. Before she could even react to the lewd suggestion, he peed his pants and vomited expansively on the upholstery of her car. So: not always the model of professorial rectitude. But in the brief moment of time in which I sat at an old-fashioned wooden writing desk in an antiquated second-floor classroom, the syrupy scent of jasmine drifting in the open windows, he was an exemplar. Sometimes he’d begin by reading us something he’d been working on—it would eventually become a novel called A Feast of Snakes—raw passages ripped from his typewriter only hours earlier. This was thrilling, terrifying, and disconcertingly intimate. He read with such fierce energy and conviction, we were all swept up and carried away in the flood of prose, each and every one of us forever embedded with the desire to write as if we were dancing around a ring, trying to deliver a knockout punch.

That was the downside of his charisma. We weren’t so much students as disciples, and to this day his manic rhythms throb in some recess of my brain whenever I sit at a keyboard.

Here’s the upside: One night he walked into class with a twenty-page manuscript in his hands and announced that he was going to read a student piece. He set to it with the same drama and passion he’d delivered for his own work. His reading was so riveting, it wasn’t until several sentences in that I realized that it was my story he was reading, the story I’d suffered and strained over, finishing only shortly before dawn on the day it was due, having grown to detest each and every word.

I think now it wasn’t all that bad. I’m certain it wasn’t all that good, either. But as Crews read it, pacing manically before us, flailing his free arm and belting out my words as if they were fists of fury, I could see my classmates leaning forward in their seats, rapt. And for the first time, I truly believed I could become a writer.

I went off to Europe the following summer, just turned nineteen, for a year abroad. I brought a blue spiral notebook in my scant luggage, imagining that I would fill it with prose sketches and short stories inspired by my ensuing adventures, which indeed turned out to be abundant. But the great bulk of pages in that notebook remained stubbornly blank. I tried sometimes, even managing to scratch out a few (pretentious) sentences or (derivative) paragraphs with a groaning effort completely unjustified by the result.

Over the Christmas holiday, two friends and I paid $75 each to nearly freeze to death in the back of an unheated, unlicensed truck from Amsterdam to Barcelona (we hid behind mattresses at the Spanish frontier while the driver bribed the border guards). From there, we hopped on a ferry to the island of Ibiza—still semirural in 1972 and not yet fully transformed into an Iberian Miami Beach. Landing at the docks of the one large town, we purchased a plastic tarp, a loaf of black bread, garbanzo beans, and wine sacks filled with cheap red wine, then set out to make the three-day walk from one end of the island to the other. We arrived at the opposite coast on Christmas Eve, improbably discovering the ruins of what had once been a substantial beach house set on high ground above a small cove surrounded by mounds of wave-thrashed volcanic rock. On the walls of what had once been a living room someone had writ large in red paint, Dommage petit oiseau, tu va mourir. I had enough French to translate: “Too bad, little bird, you are going to die.” The Charles Manson–ish vibe, just three years after the satanic drifter and his disciples had butchered the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, was disturbing enough on its own, and made rather worse when we lifted a bucket from an abandoned water well in the courtyard to discover it contained the moldering corpse of a cat.

Nonetheless, we spent Nochebuena, the Good Night of Christmas Eve, in this decidedly no bueno shelter, dragging seaweed up from the beach to soften the concrete floor beneath our plastic tarp. All night, the tarp rustled alarmingly every time one of us tossed or turned, which was continuously. In the morning, nauseated from lack of sleep, we discovered an additional cause for our nocturnal misery—the seaweed beneath the tarp had been infested with stinging sand fleas, which had left painful red welts liberally distributed across our unwashed bodies.

Merry Christmas to us all.

Understandably, we’d each grown grumpy and more than a little weary of constant companionship. We walked into a small town not far from the house and found some blissfully dark, powerful coffee. Fortified, I left my friends sitting on a wrought-iron bench in a date-palm-lined square and followed the small road out of town, where it almost instantly became a dirt path winding steeply uphill past terraced gardens and tiny mud-walled homes, the fragrant scents of people’s breakfast wafting from sun-baked brick ovens.

As I climbed, the terraced fields gave way to woods and a few clearings with larger, more prosperous homes. At the extreme limit of habitation, as I made a hairpin turn on the steep switchback path, I heard a child’s voice crying, improbably in English, “It stands!” I pivoted and saw three children of stair-step heights standing back to admire a small Christmas tree they had erected in a clearing. I had a powerful sensation that I was not looking across a few feet of space, but through years of time, back into my own childhood. I stood, hidden by the tall pines of the forest, staring as the children romped excitedly about the tree, laughing and placing decorations. I remembered with astonishing clarity a Christmas morning at my grandfather’s house fourteen years earlier. My brother, three years my senior, woke me in the dark and led me into the living room, where the tree rose, bristling with colored glass balls and tinsel that shone dimly in the light of a tropical moon. But even that dazzlement could not wrest my attention from the object rearing up before the tree, a red ribbon perched like a cherry atop the handlebars: a pristine red and white Schwinn bike, with an old-fashioned bulb horn and training wheels. I felt lifted on a billowy cloud of joy, no less awestruck than I might have been at nineteen if I awoke to find a ribbon-bedecked Ferrari roadster parked outside my front door.

I did not know then—would not know for years yet—about the cruelty of my great-grandfather and the promised bicycle that never materialized. There is a photograph taken later that morning—I couldn’t go back to sleep, no surprise—when my grandfather took pity on me while my parents slept interminably. He brought me out to the crushed-shell driveway to take my first tentative spin on my new bike. In my uncle Tim’s photo, my apple-cheeked face is alight, gleaming with the prospect of a life filled with ecstatic surprise. My grandfather stands well back, pipe clenched in his jaw, fists propped proprietarily on his hips. He gazes at me intently. A touch of pride is unmistakable, but there is something else, something deeper and unreadable.

Knowing what I know now, I’m sure he had to be thinking of it, how could he not be? The bicycle he never got must have once gleamed as brightly in his little-boy imagination as mine did in reality. Perhaps no small portion of the pride, the satisfaction so visible on his face, arose from knowing that he could make possible for me what had not been so for him.

That day in Ibiza I wasn’t thinking of my grandfather’s past but my own. That sudden, unexpected transport to my childhood had a powerful effect on me. Like Proust, rung like a gong by the redolent taste of a tea-dunked cake, “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.”

Suddenly everything connected, became meaningful. I had an overwhelming need to convey this sensation, to make of my own past, so puny yet so vivid, a story worthy of the emotion bursting inside of me. I kept climbing, wheels spinning round and round in my head.

The path petered out and I found myself scrambling up or around a series of large boulders, clinging to roots and slender trunks to make my way higher.

The day was cool, and cooler still, as I gained altitude, but now I had begun to sweat with steady exertion, which shut down the whirring in my head. I can’t say how long I had been thrashing forward, my heart pounding and breath sawing in and out, when I broke from the trees and realized that I was looking downhill. I spun around. Through the trees in the far distance, a shocking blue. I’d been climbing so long, so deep in my own head, I had forgotten I was on an island. The entire southwest coast of Ibiza stretched before me, sheer rock cliffs plunging like daggers into the seething sea, white-foam breakers icing at their base, so distant they seemed frozen, unchanging.

I found a flat-topped boulder and sat, feeling a million miles away from the house of horrors below, just as far from my friends waiting in the town, and even farther from the life I had led to this point. I thought: Not one person in the world knows I am sitting here on this hilltop gazing out over the waves that bore Greeks and Romans on their way to world conquest. I took out the blue notebook from my rucksack and opened it, reading the few pathetic entries that seemed nothing more than empty posturing, and mourning all the empty pages beyond. I picked up a pen to try to scratch onto the page what I was feeling, but every word I chose seemed labored. I felt that grinding void I often felt when trying to write, a combination of nausea and terror. I shut the notebook as if I were twisting away from physical pain.

Then a voice sounded in my head; I heard more than thought the words “You want to be a writer, but you don’t write.”

The image of Harry Crews proclaiming my story like a sermon popped into my mind. Not a great story, but it had at least been a finished one, something I’d conceived and brought to fruition. Why had I been able to do that and no more?

Another word materialized: deadlines.

I knew where I could find deadlines, and plenty of them. The college newspaper. I cringed. I had always imagined journalists to be as they were portrayed in old movies, crude buffoons who ran roughshod over subtlety and sneered at sensitivity. The thought of becoming one myself made me slightly ill. But I knew then, with no doubt in my mind, that when I returned to Gainesville that summer, I would join the paper.

—

Early on in my forays through the documents in the file folders at the Library of Congress, still in the single-digit box numbers labeled FAMILY AND BIOGRAPHICAL FILE, I came across a letter from Mack that surprised me. It was dated 1922, when he was just eighteen, under the letterhead WEBSTER CITY DAILY NEWS, addressed to his mother and sister.

“Apparently this is the first time I was left in sole charge of the Daily News,” he wrote in his annotations.

I had been vaguely aware that, early in his career, Mack had contributed short pieces to a Chicago Tribune column called “A Line O’ Type or Two,” but I never realized he had started out as a newspaper reporter. Another surprise: Atop the very stationery on which Mack wrote the letter, the “Daily News literary editor” was listed as E. M. Kantor.

Effie.

As I began to look around for context on these surprising facts, I stumbled on yet another vein of gold, a book fully digitized on the Internet that my grandfather wrote in 1944 after he’d already had several best-selling novels—enough success anyway so that a publisher thought there would be a market for Author’s Choice, a collection of forty lesser-known pieces of short fiction he’d written for magazines. But once again the gold in this mine, for me, was not so much the pieces themselves but the explanations he’d appended to each story, or as he put it in the subtitle: With copious Notes, Explanations, Digressions, and Elucidations; the Author telling frankly why he selected these Stories, why they were written, how much Money he received for them, and of his thrilling Adventures with wild Editors in their native Haunts.

A “digression” following the reprint of the first story he ever published explained his tenure at The Webster City Daily News like this:

On June 20th, 1921, my mother [then forty-two] took up the editorship of The Webster City Daily News and I was at her side from the start.

Mr. Fred Hahne, who owned and published The Daily News, had asked my mother to be his editor a couple of months before, and she had told me previously that she would consider the proposition only if I promised to go back with her to Webster City, our native town, and help her with the paper. She didn’t like some of the people I was running around with in Des Moines, and wanted to lure me into what she considered the comparative sobriety of a county seat town before I got into any more trouble than I had already gotten into, which was plenty.

I found a richer view of that moment in the pages of Mack’s unpublished autobiography.

He resisted at first. “I felt that I was a man, there was no reason for me to be tied to my mother’s apron strings.”

But Effie insisted. “I won’t leave you in Des Moines.”

Mack protested that he knew nothing about covering news. Then he recounted a long speech from Effie, which he clearly couldn’t have remembered word for word, but it was a sentiment that he later repeated dozens of times as his own view of the matter: “You want to write fiction—that’s the thing you want to do in life. It seems to me that in order to be any kind of writer at all, you’re going to have to write lots of words. Words, words, more words! Social notes, news notes, things that happen in local courts; people, people all over the place, doing trivial things, doing big things. People trying to live . . .”

They were back in Webster City within the week, Effie ensconced at the editor’s desk squarely in front of a wide storefront window.

Which left me wondering. I had learned early in my research about Effie’s somewhat desperate stints emptying bedpans and manning cash registers. How had she suddenly become the editor of a daily newspaper?

I found the answer in But Look the Morn. Effie’s lively mind could not be fully occupied with her menial tasks or exhausted by the life of a single mother. She was a passionate amateur local historian. Mack remembered the “days she spent driving along country roads, searching out some decrepit millwright who had a story to tell.”

Possibly her interest was fired by her own lineage, of which I had known very little. Her mother, born Evalyn Bone, was the daughter of Joseph Bone, an Iowa pioneer, veteran of the 7th Iowa Cavalry and the Indian Wars and owner of one of the first grain mills in Hamilton County. Adam McKinlay, Mack’s grandfather, came to Webster City as a teenager, apprenticed in various mills, eventually managing Joseph Bone’s mill until, at twenty-six, he married the boss’s sixteen-year-old daughter and became a part owner.

When a local printer decided to publish a two-volume History of Hamilton County, Iowa, Effie, who literally had the county’s history in her blood, was tapped to provide an eleven-page chapter about the key development necessary for a town to arise: Hamilton County mills.

“Her eyes were alive with the zeal of research,” Mack wrote of his mother’s scramble to make good on the assignment. “We lived only for the day when the volume would actually be printed and we could hold a copy in our hands.” Then, one night, Effie arrived home bearing the thick volumes.

“With tender fingers I touched the page which bore Mother’s name, and regarded her with a wonder not as yet mingled with any hope or desire for emulation.”

I found a passage from Effie’s first published work on the early mills, expecting something tedious, archaic, clearly the work of an amateur. In fact, it had style, literary fire, sensuality, and astonishing deftness for an unpracticed writer—even by contemporary standards. Effie wrote: “Often a warm night in early March broke up the ice and the swelling, menacing roar aroused the family. Great cakes of ice weighing many tons, carried by the swollen flood, piled up in the bend of the river, wedged against the bridge piers, against the mill foundation, hurling themselves upon the corner of the mill which stood upstream, leaving nothing but destruction in their wake. . . . Fire could be combated with water, but water and ice knew no defeat; they carried everything before them.”

The words piled up and hurled themselves at the reader, just as the ice was hurled by the flood. Water and ice knew no defeat. . . . Poetry, pure and simple.

No doubt, though only a small handful of volumes were published, after her hardship and the scandal her marriage had caused, Effie must have been profoundly gratified to find she’d managed to improve her status in her own eyes and that of her neighbors. Effie McKinlay Kantor was a lot of things, but she was now also that remarkable creature: a published author.

After the history was distributed in 1913, the managing editor of one of three local papers—even a town of nine thousand had three newspapers in 1913—asked Effie, then thirty-five, to try her hand at being a reporter, a position that, as Mack wrote, “had a dignity that approached eminence” as well as paying more than her previous menial jobs.

Effie attacked her reporting with energy and passion, bringing the sensibilities of a small-town crusader to the paper’s pages. She campaigned for parks and other civic improvements while earning several promotions with accompanying pay increases, just as her father’s career and finances were sputtering to extinction. Joseph Bone had sold the mill and invested in properties in Washington State. Adam McKinlay had become unable to perform the necessary tasks of millwork due to asthma contracted over years of breathing in flour dust and was forced into a succession of lesser jobs. When the western investments didn’t work out for Joseph Bone, Adam found himself depleting his own meager savings to provide his father-in-law with loans that were never repaid. Finally, he could find no job at all, and the family struggled to survive on Effie’s salary and proceeds from the sale of the undeveloped portion of their small homestead property.

So for a few years Effie had status, and earned enough to keep her family afloat. Then, in 1917, The Freeman-Tribune failed. It was following this disaster that Effie wrote her desperate appeal to John Kantor and John put her and his children up in a Chicago apartment until he got caught up in the real estate expert scandal.

When John’s rent checks disappeared, the family moved back in with Effie’s parents in the ever-shrinking house in Webster City. Her father’s prospects remained moribund, and it seemed that every job Effie could have aspired to had already been claimed by a returning World War I veteran. Just when total financial collapse seemed inevitable, Effie discovered she had friends in Webster City, friends who had been impressed by her energy and zeal as a newspaper reporter and who had attained political power in the Iowa capital of Des Moines, just an hour or so drive away. Those friends called in favors until they found Effie a clerical spot that paid enough, barely, to move Mack and Virginia to the capital city and still send money home to her parents.

I could find no mention of this time in Des Moines in any of my grandfather’s published autobiographies, and it was mentioned only in passing in the files of correspondence. Then, months into my commuting to Capitol South and the Madison building, all the way into box 139 of the Kantor Papers, I found it: a carbon of the original typed manuscript of what my grandfather had intended to be the sequel to But Look the Morn but never published. As I read through the pages, I quickly realized that the time in Des Moines, just two years, was more than a brief digression in my grandfather’s life: It was seminal.

—

Moving seventy miles away from Webster City had a fringe benefit for Mack: obtaining a safe remove from a town where his last name had been featured frequently on the front page of the local newspapers in connection with the ongoing scandal in distant Chicago. Free from the constraints of his hometown, where his life history was not only known but discussed and clucked over, Mack must have felt free to reinvent himself—and not just free, but driven.

Mack found himself at the high school hangout, the drugstore lunch counter, mingling uncomfortably with his new high school classmates but drawn to another group only a few years older, “who bore the unmistakable stamp of those who had gone far and seen much, no matter how young they were.”

These were youthful veterans of the war “over there” in Europe, now belatedly resuming their high school careers.

“I felt that I too had gone far and seen much,” Mack wrote. “I imagined that I was more at ease among these ex-soldiers than with boys my own age. It was not without design that I wore a khaki shirt and overseas cap when first I sipped soda water in that drug store.”

Just looking the part wasn’t enough. Mack began to casually drop references to “my regiment” in conversation, and refer to battles that of course he had only read about. Soon the subtle hints turned into bald lies about the action he had seen, always based on accounts of battles he had read about in fervid secret sessions in the public library and presented in what he imagined to be self-deprecatory fashion. “Oh, I didn’t have it so bad. Sure there was a lot of lead flying, but the boys up in the hedge rows had it far worse!” He showed off a scar on his calf he casually said was torn by a German bayonet when in fact it had been impressed by a German shepherd. He even bought service ribbons in a secondhand store and pinned them to his flannel shirt. At first he felt the thrill of his purloined identity. “The girls of 1919 were more impressed by a veteran of school age than by a football hero.”

But soon, of course, the lie grew legs and careened around town, forcing him awake to the horrible shame of what he had done and to live with the constant threat of exposure. He lay sleepless at night, searching for a way out, fantasizing about calling a school-wide assembly and confessing all.

The true veterans didn’t take long to detect contradictions and false notes in his increasingly elaborate tales, and word spread. His former friends snubbed him, or had places to be when he came around. “The worst thing about it was that I despised myself even more than other people could despise me,” he wrote. He was left to struggle with the terrible possibility that maybe he was his father’s son after all, compelled to lie for personal gain or glory by some blood poison stowed away in John Kantor’s seed. The stain of his shame sank into the fabric of existence. “It is impossible to exaggerate the remembered drabness and bleakness and chill and ugliness which lay over my life at this time. . . .”

But I knew. I knew exactly how it felt. It may seem ridiculous to compare—he was fifteen, and I was only six, but the nature of my lie, the motivations behind it, the yearning for recognition I was too young to attain and didn’t deserve, were freakishly similar right down to the lust for the badge of a service uniform. The depth of the shame, too, cut across age differences—even as an adult I have hesitated to speak, or even think, about this episode. But when I came across those unpublished pages, sitting at the wood desk in the Library of Congress manuscript reading room, cringe-inducing memory flooded in:

At some point in first grade, I became profoundly impressed by, and envious of, the slightly older kids who got to walk around school wearing those buckle-on white belts slanting across the shoulder like a beauty contestant’s sash. These were members of the safety patrol and the belts were the badge of honor that marked them as the Chosen Ones. I lusted after those white belts, made of shiny plastic, smooth and cool to the touch.

Safety patrollers were selected by an election, certifying the admiration of their classmates, which may have been the real distinction I yearned for. Their role—standing prominently in front of the school at the first and last of the day, encouraging their fellow students to walk, not run, to and from cars and buses—seemed to me a dazzling spotlight, drawing me like a moth to flame.

First-graders were too young to be designated as patrollers, and elections wouldn’t even be held until the second grade began.

But my mother didn’t know that.

I think I must have daydreamed about it for days, if not weeks, until one afternoon I blurted, “Guess what happened in school today? I was elected to the safety patrol!”

I don’t know what kind of response I expected. I don’t think I even cared. I just wanted to hear myself say it, to create an alternate universe in which I was the popular kid, the one whom his classmates respected and the adults deemed worthy of Special Responsibilities.

I still remember the shock when my mother raced right past—“How wonderful, dear”—and bustled about, excitedly planning early breakfasts to accommodate my new pre-school duties. I was taken aback by her enthusiasm, and a thousand calculations whirred in my brain. Well, okay, I hadn’t considered that my mother would actually do anything other than praise me. It was disconcerting that she seemed so action-oriented, but I was pretty sure I could still deal with this. When she asked me where my patrol belt was, my mind whirred some more and I said, “Only second-graders get those. We’re going to make ones out of paper and leave them at school.”

I would think that would have tipped her off, but she kept coming, like a monster in a nightmare. Now she was calling my father at work. Now she was dialing up the other mothers in our carpool to let them know I’d need to be picked up ten minutes early. I knew then I was doomed.

Here came the shame, the self-loathing, the soul-searing, world-crushing knowledge that I had gone too far and there was no way back.

Oddly, I don’t remember my mother confronting me when my absurdly clumsy lie collapsed of its own ridiculous weight. I recall no lecture about honesty. What I remember is every day thereafter walking into school like a condemned man awaiting execution. And each day that no ax fell became a hellish eternity, making me yearn for the flash of the blade and the blow that would put a final end to the misery, along with all else.

Finally, what seemed like weeks later but was in reality probably a couple of days at most, after suffering through another endless stretch of watching the clock until the bell rang my release, I was shuffling guiltily toward the door when my teacher said, “Tom, can you stay for a minute?”

The blow I had feared, and hoped for. I froze, light-headed, weak-kneed.

She walked to where I stood and cocked her head. “Tom, did you tell your mother you were elected to the safety patrol?”

I flushed, my heart thumped thirty-second notes in my chest, my entire body throbbed with alarm. Something sprouted in my six-year-old brain and bloomed from my lungs. “There must be some kind of misunderstanding!” I shouted, and sprinted from the room. Fortunately, none of my classmates ever discovered the nature of that “misunderstanding.”

For Mack, a teenager exposed for all to see, the consequences of his lie were simply unbearable. He quit school and found a job testing gravel, sand, and cement for the Iowa State Highway Commission. Dropping out was easy enough to explain by saying his family needed the additional income. It was also true.

The commission was charged with the transformation of hundreds of miles of muck roads into modern highways, for which a bottomless source of pavement would be required. Mack’s job involved digging samples from gravel pits, then running rote tests in labs leased from the university. At night he hung around the neighborhood pool halls, mingling with drinkers, gamblers, and in some cases, thieves.

One day, a pool hall buddy showed up at Mack’s lab while he was alone, running tests. He was in the neighborhood, the buddy said. Mack was glad for the company, but slightly uncomfortable with the companion, whom he knew to possess a set of tools with which he boosted headlights from parked cars to sell to shady garages. The two chatted for a while, pleasantly enough, until his buddy noticed a stack of factory automobile tires piled in the corner, and a transom window above the door that swung open and had no lock to secure it.

Now he boxed Mack in a corner, speaking under his breath, proposing they meet back there that night. Mack could help him up to the transom. He’d do the rest—wriggle through the slot, drop to the floor, and unlock the door. Then he’d need Mack only to help roll the tires down an alley to his car.

Mack mumbled something noncommittal. But when his “friend” left and his boss returned, Mack pointed out the lack of a lock on the transom, and urged him to have one installed immediately.

Then, when Mack was alone again, a chain of thoughts began grinding in his head.

“I suddenly saw the pool halls for what they were—dull, spiritless abodes of the idle and the disappointed and the incompetent. . . . If someone wanted tires, why not go to work and earn money to buy them?” Then he thought of his father, always trying to find ways to grab money that he hadn’t earned.

“God, I said to myself, I want to work. I want to work hard. But at what? I didn’t want to be a laboratory assistant all my life.”

He tried to think about what he was passionate about. Butterflies, the woods . . . Perhaps he could be a naturalist. But as soon as the thought occurred, he dismissed it. “I realized that what I loved about moths and butterflies was the romance of their pursuit and capture, the unbelievable color and delicacy of the creatures themselves. . . . Mine was merely a poetic fascination, a grand worship of Nature. I was not cut out to be a scientist.”

Still, those moments he spent in the woods had moved him. He could still see them so vividly, even in the industrial confines of a cement lab. The more beautiful they had been, it seemed, the more fragile and fleeting. How could he hold on to them? How could he make the world see what he saw?

And then he knew. “I thought: If you imagined it clearly enough you could make it come true for yourself. And if you wrote it down, you could make it come true for everybody. You could write the good and bad things, reconstruct all existence.”

He had always been a reader, enamored of tales of adventure and daring. Now “I saw for the first time what books were really for. They were a means of cementing the past, which otherwise would have perished, a way of holding beauty and legend, unfading, shared and dreaded and loved far down the centuries.”

Mack raced home that evening, his transformation shining from within. He was no longer disappointed, aimless, bitter about what life had dealt him. He had a goal, a great ambition.

“I lay across the bed and began to write. My mother came in and asked what in the world I was doing. I told her, ‘I’m going to be a writer,’ and she came over and kissed me on the back of my head, and I went on writing.”

Perhaps of all single mothers in dire need of practical moneymaking support within a thousand miles of Des Moines, Iowa, only one, Effie M. Kantor, would have uncomplicatedly, unambivalently rejoiced at such a declaration.

Her need for practical solutions would soon increase dramatically. A farm belt depression hit hard at Iowa’s state budget. First, Mack lost his job in the lab, followed quickly by Effie, who lost her clerical job in a steep reduction of state office staff. Only Virginia, who was going to college, managed to hold on to her part-time job. They put off the landlord and lived on bread and beans and made thin soup by boiling bones donated by a sympathetic butcher. Effie made a pittance in change by playing piano for dance classes and church socials.

And then, within months, the miracle occurred. Hahne—a job printer specializing in livestock catalogs who thought printing his own newspaper might launch his political career—offered Effie the editorship. Despite her current destitution, and what must have seemed like an astronomical salary offer of $40 a week (the equivalent of $535 a week in 2015), she didn’t agree right away. She told Hahne she had one condition: that Mack could come on as an unpaid apprentice.

Despite his reservations, Mack soon felt at home in Hahne’s small newspaper office in a red-brick storefront on the edge of Webster City’s small downtown.

“The two of us put out the paper, a four-page tabloid,” Mack wrote in his unpublished account.

We didn’t carry any wire stuff. Everything was local news and had to be written by one or the other of us. Sometimes we had a lucky windfall in the form of a report from the State Park Commission, or copious verbatim extracts from church bulletins which the local clergy wanted us to print. Generally speaking, we wrote every column that went into the paper, with my mother doing the lion’s share.

It was hard work but it was fun. I doubt if ever a mother and her son enjoyed a professional association more heartily than did we two, in those years of the early 1920s.

Each week I had perforce to write thousands of words: obituaries, sports, civic happenings, social activities, everything that went on around the town which my mother thought I might be capable of covering. On the whole I think that Mr. Hahne was pretty long-suffering, and so was Webster City. Of course some folks thought it highly indelicate—practically obscene in fact—for a seventeen-year-old youth to come baying after their news. Occasionally I editorialized, too, but neither the townfolks nor Mr. Hahne knew that. They thought it was Mother. She took considerable blame for mistakes which I made, but was serenely confident that her firm shoulders could carry the load.

When I was sixteen, Mack published a series of essays and stories about small-town America for a book called Hamilton County—there are ten counties in America by that name, some distinctly rural, some containing large cities, but all essentially middle-American, and that was the point. The text was accompanied by photographs taken by my uncle Tim, who at that point had become a professional photographer with some national magazine credits. Some of the photographs featured teenagers, and Mack wanted to imagine authentic-sounding dialogue to go with them—but didn’t believe he was in touch enough with my generation to produce it. So he asked me to write some up. I did—three separate pieces of dialogue suggested by the photos. I am afraid to read them now, but as I handed him the few typed pages, I felt that, after a somewhat disconcerting struggle with the empty page, I had actually come through and produced something that more or less worked. I remember watching his face as he read, holding the pages with his right hand and his pipe with his left. I could see his eyes switching right, then left, as they moved down the page. His focus on the words seemed complete, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Then he looked at me and smiled. He said nothing, but he transferred the pipe to his mouth, reached his free hand into his back pocket, and pulled out his well-worn billfold. Now he needed two hands. He put the pages down, reached into the wallet, and handed me three crisp $20 bills. This was long before the era of ATMs on every corner, and crisp bills were a novelty. The feel of the cash in my hands, conveyed for words I had somehow conjured from nothing, then put on paper, had a “Jack and the Beanstalk” magic to it. The bills weren’t the seeds, but the words were. From something that had seemed so tiny and inconsequential had grown something miraculous.

Months later, I received a copy of the book in the mail. I remember opening it to the title page where it said that “three generations” had been involved in the making of the book, and there was my name.

There is an odd, hard-to-explain, and impossible-to-duplicate thrill that comes from seeing your own name in a print byline. However slender a slice of prose it is attached to, however likely it will be seen only by the tiniest fragment of the larger world, it is still your name, preserved to some degree, creating some infinitesimal but real possibility of the immortality shared by the likes of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway.

At least, it is license to dream.

For me, those dreams never included working for a newspaper.

A few months after Hamilton County came out, in the fall of my junior year of high school, Mack played his celebrity-writer card to persuade the local newspaper to offer me a job as a weekend copyboy. I was willing, reluctantly, until I discovered the hours included Saturday nights. Giving up date night was not a sacrifice I was prepared to make, so I turned it down. Mack, of course, was embarrassed and disapproving. I cringed at his back-of-the-throat grumbling. I felt guilty for letting him down. But all of that was nothing beside the prospect of losing my Saturday evenings with that cute blonde.

Only as I read the letter from the teenage Mack on Webster City Daily News letterhead did I grasp the true significance of my grandfather’s gesture. In arranging that newspaper job, he wasn’t just doing a favor for his grandson, he was seeing himself in me; was, in his own way, trying to share one of his fondest, most formative memories—by finagling me a job in a newsroom, just as his beloved mother had done for him.

I felt guilty all over again, decades after the fact, for turning down that Saturday night job, and was rather amazed that he hadn’t been even more upset than he was—the incident was almost immediately forgotten.

It wasn’t long before I came across something else he wrote—an explanation for his tolerance of my venality, and a reprieve for my guilt. In one of his annotations for the Library of Congress, he wrote about a high school job he had clerking in a downtown shop where he was supposed to work until ten every Saturday night: “Never once did I work all of a Saturday evening.” When his boss saw how antsy he grew as date night neared, “he would kindly let me go. I would jabber a word of thanks and get out of the store as fast as possible without knocking down any old ladies.”

That letter he had written from The Webster City Daily News in 1922 was a joy to read. He was all of eighteen when he wrote it, working at a local paper in a rural state in a time that is long gone. Yet the attitude of the amused observer, already cynical and aloof like a jaded pro journalist laughing at the multiple ironies of his situation, is so familiar to me. He mentions, sardonically, that Fred Hahne, the paper’s publisher, who is listed at the top of the letterhead, above Effie, had placed both of his stories—stories that Mack clearly felt may not have completely deserved it—on the front page. “Of course! Why not?” he snarked.

I had faced just such humiliations and frustrations as a beginning reporter, not much older than Mack was when he wrote the letter. I worked for a bureau chief who had been making a reverse career commute—from The Washington Post to The Miami Herald to progressively less impressive papers until he wound up chain-smoking foul-smelling low-tar cigarettes and sucking his dentures loudly in the tiny strip-mall office of the Cape Coral bureau of the Fort Myers News-Press. Every day he’d wander next door to the bar sometime before noon, and I would be left alone to generate the required three news stories and three briefs a day on such earthshaking events as city sewer and swale commission meetings. Once the boss decamped, my only company was a middle-aged southern lady who handled the society news. Underneath a patina of syrupy sweetness, she had the disposition of a barracuda and the ethics of a hyena. To survive the triviality, I developed the same sort of appreciation for the absurd I saw in Mack’s letter, in which he tells his mother, “No great difficulty came up, except when I called that bird—John Young—who [here he handwrote an m to make it whom—a distinction that troubles me still] you told me to call about someone having their tomatoes stolen. I said—‘We were told you could give us some information about some tomatoes which were stolen.’ I guess he thought I was insinuating that he had stolen them. He got pretty mad. But I couldn’t get anything out of him.”

Around the borders of the stationery, he had sketched ink drawings illustrating various points in his letter; a man with a burglar mask carrying a bag overflowing with tomatoes, for instance. The style of the primitive but somewhat charming little sketches leapt out at me like some hand reaching from the void. This was the selfsame style of cartoon drawing with which, some forty years later, my grandfather would decorate the hand-inked birthday cards or kiln-fired painted ceramic cups and bowls he distributed to us grandchildren on our birthdays, some of which I have preserved in dusty frames or kept propped on shelves in the back of a closet. As I thought of these corny, sweet gifts, wondering if I could find any of them, an image popped into my head: a cartoon figure he drew of me on my fourteenth birthday. In the identical style of that ninety-three-year-old letter, he portrayed me seated at a desk wearing long hair and blue jeans, a pen in my hand and a roll of parchment before me. The caption he wrote was: O God, we fear he will be a writer.