Today marks the centennial of the birth of MacKinlay Kantor, novelist,
journalist, screenwriter, combat pilot, expert on the Civil War and
police procedurals, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Medal of
Freedom, husband, father, and hero for more than forty years now to a
(still) aspiring writer to whom he was once very kind.
I first heard of MacKinlay Kantor in January 1962. I know this because
I have in my possession the library card I signed the day I borrowed
his short novel
Valedictory
from the library of Bishop McDevitt High School. I was in ninth grade,
and six weeks shy of my fifteenth birthday.
I can see myself in those days. I visited the library nearly every day
during our long homeroom period, sometimes after school. Fiction was
shelved along the inside wall of the library, and at right angles were
the stacks that held biography and the directory of religious
communities that I consulted frequently that year and the next. I had
recently concluded my first virtual visit to Harper Lee's Macon County,
Georgia, and chances are I was running my eyes and my fingers along the
spines of the novels, looking for another world to get lost in, another
father figure as appealing and desirable as Atticus Finch.
And I am fairly certain that it was the title that drew me. I knew that
a valediction was a goodbye. I'd recently read Milton White's
short-short story "To Remember These Things." The narrator's favorite
teacher writes the line from Virgil in his yearbook, as a valedicition,
he says, and as the narrator walks out of the school for the last time,
he thinks about the part of himself that he is leaving behind. Even
then the themes of loss and remembering ran deep in my soul.
Kantor's book is a slim volume, literally, 7 and 9/16 inches by 5 and
1/4 and less than three-quarters of an inch thick. It would be easy to
miss, and judging by the borrower's record card, it was. From the time
it was acquired in 1940 until the day I picked it up in 1962 it had
been signed out only five times, each time to a faculty member, the
last one being Sister Mary Clotilde, who needed to return it by January
21, 1943.
In less than 50,000 words, MacKinlay Kantor gives the reader Tyler
Morley, the school janitor in a small town in Iowa, who is retiring at
the age of seventy-six and going to live with his daughter in Nebraska.
As he watches the Class of 1922 receive their diplomas, he remembers
the encounters he had with them and with other students, and he ponders
the joys and the sorrows his life has held. It's a sentimental tale
written in an old-fashioned style, and I doubt it would find
publication today. But I loved it. I signed it out officially again for
another two-week period in 1962, once as a tenth grader in 1963, and
twice again in the fall at the beginning of my junior year. I have all
this information because some time after that I took it out
unofficially, slipping it into a notebook without signing it out, and
never returned it. Some teenage girls steal clothes and makeup. I stole
books.
By the fall of 1963 I had read a good deal more of MacKinlay Kantor's
work, borrowing most of it (officially, and dutifully returning it)
from the downtown branch of the public library. I read
Andersonville, his novel about the
notorious prisoner-of-war camp in 1860s Georgia, for which he
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959,
Signal
Thirty-two, one of his police novels, and
Diversey, a gritty book about
gangland Chicago in the 1920s that featured an unmarried couple who
slept together, their lovemaking not described in explicit detail but
alluded to enough to be both shocking and exciting to me (and to be
described by a South Carolina senator as "the dirtiest thing I have
ever read").
Like most people of my generation, I can tell you exactly where I was
when I learned that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. I was in
eleventh grade chemistry class, and tucked into my notebook was the
draft of a fan letter I was writing to MacKinlay Kantor. I must have
finished it over the next forty-eight hours, because I remember walking
to the mailbox at Twenty-first Street and Parkside Road in Camp Hill
with it about an hour after I saw Lee Harvey Oswald get murdered on
live television. Mr. Kantor's gracious and personal reply is dated
three weeks later, December 15, 1963.
He begins by saying that he gets lots of letters from readers and
rarely replies to them in detail, but "the freshness and exuberance of
yours put it quite in a class by itself." He encourages my aspirations
as a novelist, saying that my voice is clear and vibrant, and
recommends that I read what he considers his best novel,
Spirit Lake, because I seem
sensitive and understanding and resilient enough to appreciate it. He
includes an autographed copy of
The
Guntoter, a collection of short stories about the denizens of
the Missouri hills.
I still have the Signet paperback edition of
Spirit Lake I bought the next week
for ninety-five cents. It's a big, squashy novel, the kind that's
called a saga, more than 850 pages with a three-page bibliography. It
traces the lives of some white settlers and some native Dakota in
northern Iowa, culminating in what became known as the Spirit Lake
Massacre in the hard winter of 1857. It's got birth and death, joy and
sorrow, love and hate, tenderness and violence. I read it at least
three times. It's falling apart now, and if I wanted to read it again I
would have to acquire a hardbound edition, because the type on my
copy's yellow, tattered pages is too small for me to see comfortably.
But as I look it over, I know that during the sporadic times when I
work on my own saga of the Whitmoyer family of 1880s Berks County, it
is this book that stands as my model.
Kantor continued writing into the 1970s. His last novel,
Valley Forge, was published in
1975. He died at his home in Sarasota, Florida in 1977, remembered as a
versatile writer of both popular and historical fiction who made
important contributions to the American literary landcape.
When asked about his writing process, he once said, "You have to put
words on paper, a lot of them." As I struggle with my own commitment to
developing as a fiction writer, I remember that forty years ago he
thought I could make it. Thank you, Mr. Kantor, for your faith in me,
for your example, for the joy your words have given me. And happy
birthday.