It’s a faded reddish brown hardcover, on a coffee table in a New London condo, a stringy gold marker randomly lining the fold halfway through the book.
To Gordon McKinnon, though, it’s a whole lot more.
It’s called Look Homeward, Angel, written by Thomas Wolfe, and it touched McKinnon while he served in Europe during World War II. Searching for clarity and vision and, perhaps someone to identify with, McKinnon, then 19, cherished the book in the spring of 1945, much like teens did with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye when it was published six years later.
It persuaded him to write for a living, not go into engineering.
“I liked the descriptions the author gave to his characters,” the 90-year-old McKinnon, forever known as Mac, told me Wednesday at his home. “As a young person, you knew what the author was saying.”
Like thousands of soldiers in Europe and the Pacific, Mac benefited from Armed Services Edition books, an effort by librarians and the War Department to send 120 million small, lightweight paperbacks to those fighting the Nazis and the Japanese.
A New York City author named Molly Guptill Manning captured this era in When Books Went to War, and she’ll share her thoughts April 21 at Red River Theatres.
Wolfe’s book made it into the hands of a Claremont kid who, energized following the attack on Pearl Harbor, had glamorized war into a noble, patriotic journey, dismissing the danger that lay ahead.
“At 18, you’re full of vinegar and another word,” Mac said with a hint of embarrassment over the word he omitted. “I sort of looked forward to going into service.”
Unlike so many others, Mac’s naive view never strayed far, like it had for those who had seen death or been wounded.
Mac was part of a reserve artillery unit and a scout team, and he also served on guard duty. He never tasted the full force of the horror going on at the time.
He spent time in France and Germany, before his final stretch overseas, in Liege, Belgium. He showed me a black-and-white photo of his barracks, a five-story building that resembled an old mill factory, with a huge courtyard and empty feeling.
In a well-lit day room, Mac says he found the paperback version of Wolfe’s book, published in 1929, nine years before the author’s death at 38. At the time, Wolfe was a cult hero whose free-flowing style would later influence writers such as Jack Kerouac during the Beat Generation of the 1950s.
The story, a fictional account of Wolfe’s life growing up in North Carolina, focuses on Eugene Gant, a troubled young man searching for his niche in life, and who has a strained, distant relationship with his alcoholic father.
“I liked how lyrical he was about this young person in the South,” Mac told me. “I liked the narrative about this young man and his problems.”
I wondered if the protagonist had something in common with Mac, something he could latch on to, embrace, share with the author, call his own.
He said he did: His own father, Hugh, who ran a dry cleaning business, spent the last 25 years of his life at the state hospital, now the Public Utilities Commission Building, near Concord High School.
It was called a nervous breakdown at the time, but Mac said it might have been dementia. Whatever it was, this part of our interview was difficult.
Mac sat in his favorite chair, his hands clasped around the top of his cane. His wife of 66 years, Betty, whom Mac met while he was a newspaper reporter in Vermont, sat on the couch, a demure, gentle figure with her arms folded across her chest.
Betty worried that her husband was revealing too much, that this slice of his life should be kept private. Mac, though, sensed the importance of his complex relationship with his father, how it ran parallel with Eugene Gant and his experience with his father.
I asked Mac if he was close to his dad. “Not really,” Mac said. “He was a first-generation Scot. He had a European sense, and his responsibility was to provide for his family. He was a good man. I didn’t see much of him.”
Beyond that, Wolfe’s words convinced Mac that he was no engineer, his initial career choice. “His passages were so lyrical about how a young man viewed the world around him,” Mac said. “It was so beautiful. I thought if I only could do this.”
And so he did, in a related form. First, he saw cities like Cologne, Germany, leveled from Allied bombing. Then he got back to the states and in 1946 bought every Wolfe novel, four long ones, to present to his high school sweetheart, who, it turned out, left him.
He met Barbara soon after and married her six months later. “Oh, yeah,” Mac said, when asked if the departure of his old girlfriend was the best thing that ever happened to him.
He and Betty laughed.
Through it all, Wolfe’s words stuck with him. “I didn’t recognize I had much talent for writing,” Mac said. “But I read about Eugene Gant and that he had problems like most kids. The right prose at the right time, it can be influential.”
Mac became a newspaper writer and editor in Maine, Vermont and upstate New York, before working for the National Fire Protection Association in Boston.
He and Betty settled in New London 16 years ago. Mac lent out two of Wolfe’s novels and never saw them again.
But on Wednesday, Look Homeward, Angel looked right at home, on a coffee table, with its faded cover and gold marker.
“I didn’t lend that one out,” Mac said. “I would never lend that one out.”
(Ray Duckler can be reached at 369-3304 or rduckler@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @rayduckler.)