Uncanny Realist: John T. McIntyre and Steps Going Down (1936)

Abstract

One of America's most talked about literary figures in 1936 was a sixty-five-year old Irish American named John T. Mclntyre, who had just published the novel Steps Going Down, an idiosyncrastic amalgam of H. P. Lovecraft-style super naturalism, Thomist theology, mysticism, and realism in the tradition of James M. Cain. Steps Going Down crowned John T. Mclntyre's career and earned the obscure novelist and playwright his first national acclaim. He was celebrated in Time, the Nation, and the New Yorker; newspapers across the eastern seaboard reprinted dramatic publicity portraits; prize money and royalties made him financially secure for the only time in his life. His success, however, was ephemeral, and the brilliance of his brief celebrity made his subsequent fall into poverty and anonymity all the more poignant. Indeed, Steps Going Down might well have served as the title of its author's biography; as mesmerizing as the novel is, John T. Mclntyre's life probably makes a better story. He was born in 1871 to Patrick and Sara Walker Mclntyre of Philadelphia. Lie grew up in the city's Northern Liberties district and attended St. Michael's School, and then the Harrison Grammar School. Years later, he would recall that his mother had withdrawn him from the parochial school because of the cruelty of the Christian Brothers who taught there. This is certainly plausible, although the only one of Mclntyre's novels to use autobiographical materials, the unpublished and undated Some Days in the World, portrays the Christian Brothers affec tionately. It seems equally plausible that some misfortune had put parochial school tuition beyond the family's reach. Mclntyre appears to have lost his father, either by death or desertion, at a very early age. In any case, his exertions in pub lic school were no more successful than those with the Christian Brothers. It is