The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  This all came back as I looked at the photograph of that man having cocktails on the Siesta Key terrace.

  Had they been closer friends than I realized? I never remembered hearing anyone say that Hemingway had visited them in Sarasota.

  If only I could ask my mother.

  Using my primitive photo-editing skills, I created a document with the face of the man on the terrace on one side and a dark-haired Ernest Hemingway on the other. If these were not the same man, the resemblance seemed uncanny.

  I decided to send the image to a former Washington Post colleague, Paul Hendrickson, who had written a wonderful book with a great title, Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. I explained my dilemma, and he responded: “For sure your grandfather visited Hemingway in Havana—that comes up in various places. I know nothing of EH going to Siesta Key. And if I had to guess, I’d say very close on the photo—but not him. But that is just and purely a guess. Hemingway could look different in different pictures. But I think the hairline is too high here. I could definitely be wrong. And it figures that EH could have stopped off in Siesta Key on his motor trips to Sun Valley—that would be roughly when he would have looked something like the man in this photo.”

  The next day he wrote back: “I have another idea. Try James B. Hill at the JFK library in Boston. He has a genius for faces. He was the primo A/V guy for the library and has committed to memory tens of thousands of images not only of the Kennedys, but of Hemingway.”

  As I was sending Hill the composite of the two images, I looked back at the original and saw something essential I had missed. On the bottom of the photo of the cocktail party was a small date stamp: 1957. This was all Hill needed.

  “The fellow in question does resemble a younger Hemingway,” he wrote. “Similar high forehead, cheeks, and chin—and it was enough to take a second look, but for 1957, think of the famous Yousuf Karsh ‘fisherman sweater’ portrait as representative of how EH looked at that time, with a full white beard and thinning hair combed forward.”

  So the man on the patio—not Hem.

  Just when I was concluding that possibly the Cuba visit was a one-time deal, and maybe my grandparents were in fact mere acquaintances, I came across an article in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune from 1961, in which Mack was asked to reflect on Hemingway’s suicide.

  “Kantor said the last sight he had of the bearded author was as he strolled across the lawn of his Siesta Key home one day three years ago.”

  That would have been 1958, around the time the photo of the man on the patio was snapped. But Hemingway would have had the full white beard in 1958, as Hill noted. So he had been there, all right—certainly he’d had drinks on the patio—but apparently nobody had thought to take his photograph then.

  I eventually found a more poignant reference to one of Hemingway’s visits to Siesta Key in a letter my grandfather wrote barely a week after Hemingway braced his shotgun stock on the floor, put the barrels in his mouth, and pulled both triggers. “Last Sunday,” Mack wrote, “when the news came about Ernest, I really went out and got drunk. I kept thinking of his coming in here two or three years ago.”

  Mack thought Hemingway was disturbingly obsessed with aging. “Don’t ever get to be fifty-eight,” he advised my grandfather, which of course was how old Ernest, five years Mack’s senior, had been at the time.

  Now I knew they were more than mere acquaintances, but I still didn’t have a feel for just how substantial their friendship had been. Sarasota was on the way if you had to drive from Key West to Idaho with almost no interstate highways, as Hemingway did. So stopping there could have been mostly a matter of convenience. And I’d found a bit of hearsay that may have indicated Hemingway had a critical take on my grandfather. John D. MacDonald, a cult-favorite mystery novelist who became something of a protégé of my grandfather’s, once claimed that Hemingway had said mockingly of Mack, “He would be a little bit better writer if he would resign his commission in the Confederate Air Force.”

  So the picture remained stubbornly foggy. I hoped I could clarify it in the Library of Congress files—the catalog entry for my grandfather’s collection said it contained correspondence from Hemingway, but I couldn’t find any. I’d assumed Hemingway, given his prominence, would have had his own folder. But maybe not. I began digging through all the files simply marked H.

  And there it was. A single sheet of semitransparent typing paper stamped FINCA VIGIA in red on top and dated May 16, 1952, a time when my grandfather had put back on his correspondent’s uniform to cover the air war in Korea.

  The letter was typed rather roughly with some accent marks added in black ink, and signed in blue ink at the bottom: Ernie Hemingway.

  I’d seen similar letters offered for sale for thousands of dollars. This was far more interesting than any of those. Instead of mundane items of business, it was a description of a social scene that might have jumped right out of one of Hemingway’s novels. And it demonstrated an interest in, and concern for, my grandfather that went beyond the casual.

  Dear Mac:

  . . . We were talking about the last time we were together with you and your fine family. You brought out some wonderful champagne and we never opened it or drank it. You remember Mary wasn’t here and we were improvising fast on a meal for quite a few people and it was my oversight that the champagne was not opened. But it wasn’t truly all oversight because we drank a couple of dozen bottles of that Rose from the Hospice de Beaume and I remember thinking how that wine seems to have no strength at all when you drink it but actually it is about twice as strong as any other Burgundy. It tastes so light and simple like a health drink that you drink it fast and, when it is cold, like a thirst quencher. I remember thinking that if we served champagne it might be bad for the kids. You and I are supposed to be able to take anything but I can’t stand running even a chance of making kids tight and that Rose from Burgundy is the most deceptive wine I know.

  But I should have written you to thank you properly for the wine you brought out and for the book. Let’s leave it this way: you have a credit of many bottles here and I will trade you even on books when mine comes out with Scribners on September 8th. Since it is shorter than yours I’ll send you two copies.

  Your book confirmed me more than ever in believing you shouldn’t fly more combat missions. I don’t like to have you do it anymore. . . . I don’t think it is necessary and I wish to hell you would not do it. But if that is what you want to do ok and I will sweat you out. But will have to classify you in prayers under crazies and other ranks. That is a high classification. But I’d rather know you were writing, not flying.

  That short book Hemingway had promised to send in duplicate to measure up to my grandfather’s larger book—probably an all-but-forgotten novel called Don’t Touch Me (whose lead female character was based on his girlfriend of the time, Ginny)—was precisely the “small book” my mother had seen by his typewriter on their Cuba visit.

  It was called The Old Man and the Sea and it would win the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and prompt the Nobel Prize the year after that.

  If Hemingway actually sent those two copies he’d promised, they would have undoubtedly been signed first editions, and now insanely valuable. I couldn’t help but wonder where they had gotten to.

  —

  By the time my grandfather visited Hemingway at Finca Vigía in the early 1950s, his money problems should have finally been behind him. He’d had a handful of best-selling books to his name, some extremely lucrative movie and screenwriting deals, and at least some credit for creating the story behind one of the most critically and financially successful American films of all time. He was famous, a frequent bold-faced name in newspaper and magazine celebrity coverage, and one of the first dozen Americans honored with the Medal of Freedom.

  So I had to rub my eyes and check the date twice on a letter Mack had written aboard a ship s
ailing back to New York after he and Irene had spent the better part of a year in Spain: “We’ve made some strides toward getting out of debt, and even have part of my income tax paid for the current year—something I haven’t been able to manage since the halcyon motion picture days.”

  In another letter in the spring of 1955 he wrote, “I haven’t earned an outside dime since October 1953.”

  And yet he’d just spent a year traveling in Europe. He claimed that living there was so cheap “we can’t afford to live anywhere else.” But . . . really? In another place he wrote: “My funds were depleted by the year abroad.”

  My mother had often clucked about his lavish spending and his distrust of any sort of investment. When I thought about it, I could almost understand his motivation. He’d seen firsthand what had happened to stocks in the Depression, of course, but he also had a file full of letters from people who had been cheated out of their investments by his father. Besides, he had always believed the best investment was in himself. His personal history had given him faith that no matter how desperate his situation became, he could write something that would save him.

  I couldn’t help but admire the drive, the courage, that permitted my grandfather to live full bore, walking that tightrope with no net, trusting his talent and his ability to work hard while indulging his thirst for experience. Of course, he wasn’t just exposing himself to the risk, but also Irene, who had consented to live as his dependent, and, in their childhood, my mother and uncle, who’d had no say in the matter. While I might have taken the chance on myself, I never could have put my family in that kind of peril. But Mack just kept on pushing all his chips on the table. Now he was about to hit the jackpot.

  That incomeless year of 1954 would become the most significant of his life—and, in one indelible sense at least, of mine. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the more you learn about an immediate ancestor, the more parallels you will find to your own life, and the more connected you will come to feel. Before I began this book, if I thought at all about any comparison between my grandfather and me, it would have been focused on the ways we were different—he a frothing extrovert, me an inveterate introvert; he a big drinker, me a two-beer-limit guy; he an archconservative, me anything but; and so on.

  But I had come to believe that our connection—beginning but not ending with some of the odd and unanticipated synchronicities in our writing careers—went beyond the inevitable. One of the most trivial of these coincidences, but somehow still compelling to me, was that he had lived for exactly half a century (plus two months) when I began my own countdown of sunrises and sunsets. In his case, fifty was more than just a very round number: It was the year he began the work for which he would forever be best remembered—until there was nobody left to remember him, and no Internet to look up who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1956 (right there on the list, immediately following Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner).

  In many interviews and letters, my grandfather said he’d planned to write a novel about the Andersonville prison camp since the early 1930s, around the time he was researching his escaped Civil War prisoners novel, Arouse and Beware. I have to think that family stories about the Civil War captivity of his great-grandfather’s brother Thomas Bone inevitably figured into his interest in the topic.

  But he also said that his experience at Buchenwald—seeing the horror of what humans could do to defenseless captives in the name of war—was the trigger that, nine years later, compelled him to write Andersonville.

  His desperate need for money also figured into it.

  He had finished two novels during his time in Spain in 1953—one during a stormy passage in the 349-passenger Spanish ship Covadonga. In his annotations he says the ship went through the middle of one hurricane and skirted the fringes of a second, and that he finished the book in the mid-Atlantic, “to the tune of much smashing glass in the little barroom where I worked early each morning, storm or no storm. I had to hold the typewriter on the table with one hand and type with the other. Every now and then a whole shelf of bar glasses or crockery would explode behind me.”

  —

  Jesus. No wonder he ended up publishing forty-five books. I know from experience that completing any book, even under ideal conditions, requires an almost superhuman ability to focus and ignore distractions. Simply sailing the ocean on sedate seas would, for me, be a recipe for literary paralysis. The other passengers parading past, the endless vistas of sky and sea (not to mention the endless buffets), the constant rolling motion of both the ship and the roulette wheel in the onboard casino—all a conspiracy to prevent me from writing more than a paragraph or two. I get distracted by incoming e-mail messages. Hell, I yearn for incoming e-mail messages as an excuse to be distracted, to briefly muffle the pain—not so much of writing, but of the fear that what I am writing is irredeemable crap. I cannot even imagine what it would take to bear down against that pain and do serious work under the circumstances my grandfather described.

  For the moment, though, his astounding focus and drive had gained him nothing. He’d also been working on the notes for an early version of what would later become part two of his autobiography, but neither the two novels nor this had sold.

  His relationship with Tim Coward and Coward-McCann in ruins, he had followed his good friend and Hollywood agent Donald Friede to the World Publishing Company, where Friede had been hired as an editor.

  Friede was an amazing character in his own right. The son of wealthy Russian émigrés, he managed between 1918 and 1920 to be expelled from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It happened that the final expulsion coincided with his father’s death, and the thrice-failed scholar inherited a great fortune. He bought his way into a publishing career in which he had substantial (but not always mutually satisfactory) dealings with Theodore Dreiser, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce. As one profile put it, “He co-founded a publishing firm that went bankrupt, and he left numerous places of employment under difficult circumstances.” He spoke four languages and was married six times, including to the famous and famously beautiful food writer M. F. K. Fisher (a whirlwind romance, after which the newlyweds subleased Mack’s New York apartment). He even had a much-photographed fling with Jean Harlow.

  Mack gives an amusing account of meeting with Friede; his new boss, World vice president William Targ; and another World exec at the Plaza’s Oak Room almost immediately after his ship docked in New York. Friede and Targ proposed that he write a book about the pre–Civil War South, and said they could pay an advance of $7,500—worth about $70,000 in 2015. For someone desperate for money, that must have been a huge temptation—comparing it to my experiences in twenty-first-century publishing—although it seems surprisingly low for a brand-name author. I am not remotely as bankable as my grandfather was at that point, yet the advances for my last four books have all exceeded that number. I did a little historical research and quickly discovered an excellent New York Times article from 2009 that shed some light on that puzzle: “The current culture of blockbuster advances really took shape in the 1970s,” it said, when sales from reprinting hardcover books in high-quality “trade paperback” editions began bringing in serious money; before that, advances were much more meager. The advance for the 1971 blockbuster Day of the Jackal, for example, was only $10,000—even slightly less, in 2015 dollars, than what my grandfather was offered in 1953 for the proposed “southern book.”

  Mack immediately said no.

  Not because he didn’t think the offer was high enough.

  “I wanted a good book contract and an advance most desperately, but still didn’t wish to do the Southern book as outlined by the editors.”

  They asked why.

  Mack said, “Because it would take away from Andersonville, a book I’ve planned to do for a great many years.”

  And then he excused himself to go to the restroom.

  “I made a very leisurely session of
it,” he wrote. “When I got back to the Oak room, the three men still had their heads together, and only broke apart when I approached the table. Donald waited until I sat down to my coffee—or Southern Comfort, most likely, in those days—and said, ‘Well, what’s the matter with doing Andersonville now?’ I exclaimed in pretended amazement, ‘Why, I’m not ready to do it!’ but all the time I knew that I was.”

  This provoked a flurry of persuasion, all three men chiming in with reasons why he should do the book now “while I still had the youth and strength to approach such a demanding task.

  “They were all saying exactly what I had hoped and prayed that they might say, but I played hard-to-get for another half hour, and then we all went back to the office and a contract was promptly drawn up and signed.”

  He eventually got a $15,000 advance—think $140,000 in 2015.

  I found multiple accounts Mack wrote detailing his writing of Andersonville. He began in Sarasota in the final weeks of 1953, and then decided that he and Irene would leave again for Spain in late March 1954 to complete the bulk of the book in Europe.

  I read right over that twice before I saw it.

  Late March 1954.

  I was born on April 9, 1954.

  I try to imagine climbing on a plane and leaving the country on a whim—and, no question, Mack didn’t have to go to Spain to write his book, much less have to go in late March rather than postponing for a few weeks—while one of my daughters was in the final stage of pregnancy with my second grandchild. And then I try to imagine insisting that my wife board that plane as well. Neither of those things would ever happen. And if I tried to force the second thing to happen . . . I don’t even want to think about that.

  Irene was not the distant, unaffectionate type. She was an adoring mother and grandmother. We yearned for her visits. She was hardly through the door before she had an apron on, leading us through the delicious-at-every-stage process of making gingerbread men with chocolate-chip eyes and sugar-candy buttons. She’d tell us stories she’d made up when my mom was little about two bears named Molly and Bruin who sometimes misbehaved and had all kinds of adventures as a result. The stories were engrossing to us, and had been to my mother and uncle to the point where Mack sometimes stalked off in a huff because the kids wanted to hear Molly and Bruin stories rather than listen to Mack read one of his favorites.