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Chapter Two
Eugene MacDonald, born in a dingy dwelling in a New Haven alley, had achieved stability and financial security while still in his twenties. He was no longer the handyman's son. After years of working at odd jobs, taking correspondence courses, and inching his way up the social and professional ladder, he was respectable. It was within this cocoon of middle—class respectability that Jack and his sister, Doris, grew up.
During World War 1, Eugene had prospered. Moonlighting as an accountant for an elderly businessman named Stevenson, he discovered that the man had overpaid his taxes by $100,000. The grateful Stevenson made him secretarytreasurer of the Standard Tank Car Company in Sharon, which he had acquired. At thirty, MacDonald was earning the handsome salary of twenty thousand dollars a year plus bonuses.
The MacDonalds moved again. For Jack MacDonald, who was only four years old, the best thing about the new house was a crystal radio set with earphones on which he used to listen to KDKA in Pittsburgh, the first commercial radio station in the United States. Jack's early childhood was the common one of a middle—class kid. He enjoyed the outdoors and sportsexcept for swimming. Three times he had to be hauled unconscious out of a pool or a lake. After the third time, he abandoned aquatic pleasures.
The family spent summers in a house they bought in Orangeville, Ohio, on the Pymatuning River, about twelve miles from Sharon. There Jack collected and mounted butterflies. "I sent away for a butterfly manual, a killing bottle, a proper net, instructions for mounting and identifying." The one he had called "the Zebra" was properly the yellow—barred Helicoman. "The Ghost" was Claudius pernicius, and the little lavender job was called the great purple hairstreak. In a speech to a group of Florida educators years later, MacDonald remembered that he "acquired and with great care cut up the colored plates of rare butterflies and pinned the paper images next to the dead ones. The paper images were never as detailed as the ones which had been alive."
He opened the blades of the old knife and closed them. They had been sharpened and sharpened again until they were narrow slivers of steel perhaps half their original length. I would treasure it. I would keep it as sharp as he had. I would learn how to keep it that sharp. He would teach me.
He said it had been a good old knife. He said he hoped the steel in the new one would be as good, but he doubted it. He looked at it and sighed, and I was ready to reach out from the broad seat in the stern so he could put the knife in my hand.
He flipped it over the side into the muddy river and picked up the oars and rowed the rest of the way back to the cottage dock.
He had no way of knowing. He was not an unkind man. I can still see that knife glint in the summer air and hear the little plop it made as it fell into the Pymatuning River.
I dreamed of it. I dreamed that a big hole had opened up and the river had disappeared, leaving black mud where I walked and walked, looking for the knife .... The knife is still there, forever turning and twinkling in the light of a lost July, falling, falling toward the greenbrown river.
In 1925, Eugene's employer, the Standard Tank Car Company, fell on hard times. The majority of stock was sold, and Eugene was elected a director and officer of the new company, but a year later, he was asked to come back to Savage Arms, where he had worked before. His present company was about to be taken over, and he could be without a job. The family moved once more, to Utica, New York.
As he packed for the move, Jack MacDonald began going though his various collections. There were ship models, balsa—wood gliders, crystal sets, bits of old clocks and watches, and all the stamp—collecting paraphernalia that was part of his current hobby. He came upon his butterfly collection. "The paper insects had curled their wings and faded to grays and pastels," he remembered later. "They had faded just as my trays of moths had faded. The butterflies were still vivid .... The pins had rusted. The wing scales had flaked off them." Jack threw the butterflies away. He was a stamp collector now. The family finished packing, climbed in the car, and drove out of town.
Utica was typical of upstate New York towns. If Ronald Reagan's nostalgia politics of the 1980s had any basis in reality, it was probably in Syracuse, or Rochester, or Utica. These were towns where almost everyone—certainly everyone of consequence—was white, Protestant, and Republican. Anything at all exotic was kept at bayNegroes were in Harlem or Alabama, Italians were in Philadelphia, the Irish were in Boston, Democrats were in Chicago. This was the America of Norman Rockwell, a nation where young men who followed Horatio Alger would feel at home. It was the America that Hollywood used when it began its fabrication of the land Frank Capra would celebrate in his sentimental movies.
Jack attended John F Hughes Public School. He was pressured by his parents into going to Sunday school and got medals for attendance. He was indifferent about summer camp. "I didn't especially like it or dislike it. It made me feel impatient, as though there were other things I would rather be doing, but I couldn't put a name to them," he remembered later. He fought with his sister, Doris, and was punished for tying her to the living—room drapes. "[We] could always trust [our] mother's understanding, but somehow Father just didn't seem to see things [our] way," Doris MacDonald wrote of her father's sternness.
When he was twelve, Jack developed severe headaches accompanied by a high fever. His tongue turned white and there were red splotches on it. He developed a body rash. It was scarlet fever, and in this case it was accompanied by mastoiditis, an inflammation of bones in the head. Today, scarlet fever would be treated with penicillin. But this was 1928, nine years before that antibiotic was discovered and another six or seven before it was used. Jack was put to bed. He stayed there for a year. Today, medical experts believe it was mastoiditis that kept him in bed for so long. Scarlet fever, even in those pre—antibiotic days, seldom lasted more than a few weeks. It was the complications—in this case, mastoiditis—that caused the long recovery.
During the year of convalescence, Jack MacDonald read. He read everythingFlaubert, Hemingway, Faulkner, Galsworthy, Upton Sinclair, B. Traven, Dorothy Sayers, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He read the classics. He read the pulps. And when he was not reading, his mother, Margie, read to him. That year was an immersion into the world of letters that would change his life—a baptism of literature. It was also a year of solitary confinement. "I entertained myself by exercise of imagination," he wrote later. After his recovery, he devoured the books in the Utica library. "I read my way through library shelves, one book after another, going at the rate of a couple a day for years, making myself astigmatic and myopic." He also became more of a loner. "He is a prolific reader and a deep thinker," Eugene wrote in a letter about his son.
Eugene MacDonald had become a gloomy man who lived a life of neverchanging routine. He wore only conservative blue suits and for fifteen years drove a green Packard. He left the office at Savage Arms every day at five in the afternoon and demanded that dinner be ready a half hour later. He always got his way.
Eugene was afflicted with long bouts of depression that often lasted for weeks. During those times, no conversation was permitted at the table. There would only be the sound of the clinking and scraping of knives and forks. Then Eugene would get up and go to his study. He spent most of his time away from the office smoking his pipe in solitude, listening to the political commentary of Lowell Thomas on the radio and reading the dispatches from Europe by Vincent Sheehan of the Chicago Daily News. When he spoke to his children, it was usually in self—help cliches: "A stitch in time saves nine," or "You get out of a thing just what you put into it."
The only respite from this gloomy life was Christmas. "When we were little," Doris wrote in a paper for an English class at Radcliffe, "he dressed as Santa Claus and created great excitement, especially the time when, pretending to be climbing out of the chimney, he touched the draft and got covered with soot. The fact that his children have grown up doesn't lessen his Christmas paradise at all. He does his shopping after office hours, carefully hides all the packages in a back room and spends hours wrapping them. Attached to each gift is a poem, and the jokes of the entire year appear in that poetry. The family sits around the dining room table on Christmas Eve. Each one is requested to read his poem aloud and then celebration is always a howling success—not to mention that father's voice usually leads the chorus."
Doris wrote that her father "appears gruff... a typical hardhearted businessman." She believed a careful appraisal of Eugene would show a twinkle in his eye. Maybe she saw it, but his son never did. Years later, thinking about his father, John D. MacDonald would curse the similarity between the two of them. "He appears most often when I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror at such an angle that the look of my mouth and jaw reminds me of him," he wrote in a 1967 journal. "And it always makes me despise myself instantaneously, then tell myself what else can you expect from genetics, for God's sake, and was he so bad of a man? What kind of a man was he? I am afraid I shall never be able to determine that, but I will be able to accept the fact that I cannot appraise him truly. I cannot root him out of me in certain physical ways, nor in certain habits of mind and emotion, I expect. It seems wasteful to have to keep trying, or wanting to try."
After completing the eighth grade, Jack MacDonald entered Utica Free Academy. Usually, he was a good student—he had trouble with Latin because, according to his sister, "he read Galsworthy instead of Virgil"—and took mostly college preparatory work. In his final year he made a B in Spanish, a C in Latin, a Bin English, and an A in Geometry. He had an 81 average. He also excelled at touch typing; he was one of only two boys in the class. He wanted to be a writer, but he thought he never would. His idea of who could be a writer and who couldn't smacks of the predestination of Calvinism. "I always had the secret wish that I had been born a writer," he said years later. "But it was on the order of wishing I had been born a seal, or an otter. I thought writers were a separate race, so marked at birth and totally aware of their gift from the beginning. I thought they were marked in some way. I worshipped writers but knew I could never be one."
Jack MacDonald graduated from high school in June 1932, one month before his sixteenth birthday. Eugene decided he was too young to go to college. He gave his son a choice —a summer in Europe or a year at preparatory school. Jack chose to travel. In June he left for the continent with Harold Howell, a friend who was a few years older. They traveled through England, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, and Austria. This was in 1932, as the Nazi Party was on the verge of taking over the government. When Eugene asked his son what he remembered most about Europe, the boy told his father, "The sound of marching feet from the cradle to the grave." He did not mention his audience with the Pope. Jack and Harold met two girls when they were in Rome who were scheduled to meet Pope Plus XII, but they couldn't go unless they were escorted by a male. The two boys agreed and went to the Vatican.
Jack kept a notebook during his travels. It's filled with drawings of Dutch windmills, the canals of Venice, and what appear to be either carnival masks or sketches of masked superheroes. Years later MacDonald would remember his world travels with pleasure, but as a teenager, he wasn't impressed, judging from this entry in his notebook:
Have you ever been abroad traveling—It's hellish.
Have you ever been in filthy railroads—It's hellish.
Have you ever been with Mr. Bieler—He walks like a duck, talks like a duck and he looks like a duck.
Have you ever gone abroad traveling—the hell with it.
Have you ever been in trains and buses—the hell with it.
Have you ever been in Germany, England, France gypping the way that they do.
Then to hell with the Germans and to Hell with the Belgians And to hell with the whole damn crowd.
After his summer in Europe, Jack returned for a postgraduate year at Utica Free Academy before going to college. Although he believed writers were born, and he wasn't one of them, he still tried. During that year he wrote three essays for high school publications, and this poem, which was published in The Academic Observer in 1933:
His is a bookshelf musty with age,
And the deeds of men gone by;
Not the roar of motors, screams of wires
Nor the tales of men that fly.
He never skims the murmuring tide
On a cruiser bleak and gray,
For his small life is centered on
Some books, which all repay
His quiet road upon this sphere;
For from these tattered volumes here
He gathers all he's missed,
All that's passed from year to year.
The din of battle, clash of wind
And waves upon the shores
All come to him in glad array,
As o'er his books he pores.
We wonder now, as we look on him,
If his end defeats his means;
For during all those years gone by
He could have fulfilled his dreams.
possible I am seeing a man as cold as I am . . . no, alas, no . . . he has gloves . . . methinks he is a blasted aristocrat . . . I am an atom of the proletariat mass . . . should I envy these people . . . should I want to take their food and homes and women . . . I don't . . . they just got the breaks, or they would be as much of a subject for the pound as I am . . . pound . . . pound of feet . . . pound of coffee . . . pound of sterling . . . pound of fat to keep me warm . . . warm is a fine word . . . it sounds thick and comfortable . . . can it be association or desire . . . that snow is lovely under the street lights . . . each is a star for an ardent lad to find on his lady's coat collar . . . each is a moist and melting star on my collar . . . Dear Santa Claus, bring me a new collar, you old dope.
the feeling of "not knowing where the hell you are or where you're going or why."
Dear Mr. Jackson:
Yours truly,
