The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Already one of the country’s best-known authors, Mack was boosted to a new level of celebrity by Andersonville. I got the biggest kick out of a full-page magazine ad that ran in Life, Newsweek, and The New Yorker at the height of the Andersonville frenzy. In it, five gleeful middle-aged white men in tailored suits are planted in a posh hotel room, smoking, drinking, laughing as if at some particularly wicked, off-color witticism, all turned toward a sixth man standing tall and straight in the middle of the frame wearing a sly grin and a double-breasted navy suit, and gripping a pipe in his fist. It is clear he is the one who has just expressed the aforementioned witticism. The headline says “Lord Calvert American Whiskey for Men of Distinction,” and the caption: “When MacKinlay Kantor, noted author of the current best-selling novel Andersonville, entertains his friends, Lord Calvert helps to make them welcome.”

  I look at Mack in that image—fit and dashing at fifty-two, full head of still-auburn hair, immaculate tailoring, a starburst of good humor emanating from the pleasingly masculine lines of his face, officially a Man of Distinction—and can’t help thinking of Tom Wolfe’s coinage of thirty years later . . . Master of the Universe. Nothing could make it clearer than this piece of advertising art that Mack was most certainly the master of his. When you are a Master of the Universe (or a Man of Distinction), you are elevated in a golden light that seems to flow from some infinite source, naturally focused on you. Imagining that this moment in May 1956 would be the absolute pinnacle of his career, and that the golden glow would slowly dim to a shadow from that moment forward, is too much to ask of anyone in such exalted circumstances.

  Not long after I discovered the Lord Calvert ad, I happened upon a classic 1950 New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway by Lillian Ross. It was an account of a Hemingway visit to Manhattan during which Ross shadowed his every move. At the very end, a phone in Hemingway’s room at the Sherry-Netherland began to ring. “Hemingway picked it up, listened, said a few words, and then turned to us and said that an outfit called Endorsements, Inc., had offered him four thousand dollars to pose as a Man of Distinction. ‘I told them I wouldn’t drink the stuff for four thousand dollars,’ he said.”

  On the heels of that weird irony came immediately another: As I was learning more and more about Mack it made me think about how little I knew about my other grandfather, my father’s father, Millard Shroder. As I began casting around, I found a digital copy of a promotional book, one of only 210 copies printed, titled Accomplishment, containing photos and descriptions of Millard’s many building projects around New York. One of them, the highest profile perhaps, was the 1927 Sherry-Netherland.

  There is no Library of Congress collection concerning the life of Millard Shroder, and almost nothing else online. My father and his sisters are all dead. So I sent a message out to my six cousins on that side of the family, and managed to find only two salient facts about his background. He was an eighth-grade dropout who somehow—nobody knew how—managed to become one of the top builders in New York before he was thirty-five. On the day of the stock market crash in 1929, he returned home to say, “I lost a million dollars today.”

  From an entire lifetime biography, up to the time I knew him as a sweet old man willing to get down on the floor and wrestle with his small grandchildren, that’s pretty much all that remains.

  —

  One late December a few years ago, exhausted by the masochistic ordeal of parking-shopping-paying-wrapping-stressing-and-overindulging that is sadly at the heart of the twenty-first-century Christmas experience, Lisa and I rented a house in the rural hills just outside the small Spanish city of Ronda in Málaga province.

  We’d always dreamed of living for some extended period in France or Spain, and this little peek at that fantasy did not disappoint us. The house had a vine-draped trellised porch on which we ate breakfasts of fruit and creamy yogurt and drank thick, dark coffee while listening to roosters crowing, dogs barking, and somewhere just out of sight a donkey braying. The ancient city—Phoenicians were the second people to inhabit it—consisted of narrow streets rising to a peak, then descending steeply to a spectacular, craggy-sided gorge that split the town down the middle, plummeting 330 meters to a cascading river that meandered through a valley spotted with olive groves and rimmed by mountains. Crisp mornings warmed gradually through the afternoon under relentless sunshine. We felt almost miraculously at home, and sorely tempted when we learned the property was for sale. Tempted . . . but unable to pull it off financially. Imagining that under somewhat more prosperous circumstances we might have bought the place only made it more heartbreaking to leave when the holidays were over.

  In the several years since, I’ve thought of that house frequently, and with longing: the fantasy that got away.

  With all the odd coincidences and parallels I’d encountered researching my grandfather’s life, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when I learned that the cliffside cottage he rented in which to write Andersonville was near Torremolinos in the province of Málaga, a short drive west of Ronda. He even wrote a book, Lobo, about his time in Spain, his first book after “the Big A,” which I had never read. Now I did, and it was like an exclamation point on a growing theme: What I fantasized, my grandfather had lived.

  I know it’s hard to believe, but the idea that I wanted to emulate him never entered my mind. My dreams seemed to arise organically, without reference to anyone else. I didn’t even appreciate the full scale of similarity until I came across his book about living in Spain.

  Actually, it was only secondarily a book about a lifestyle. Primarily, it concerned a dog, Lobo, whom my grandparents encountered at a swank hotel-restaurant complex on the Mediterranean coast. Lobo was a Basque shepherd dog, owned by no one, known by everyone, and a fixture around the restaurant at dinnertime, where he feasted nightly thanks to indulgent staff and customers alike. Apparently, Mack was even more indulgent than most, an attribute Lobo quickly fastened upon. One evening after dinner, Lobo trotted in the open door of my grandparents’ room and hopped up on the couch, not budging until breakfast smells wafted past his nostrils. When my grandparents left the hotel for a house down the road, Lobo waited by the highway exit—for two days, the locals attested—until my grandparents reappeared, at which point Lobo sprinted toward their car and leapt through the open window into Mack’s lap. From that moment, Lobo was Mack’s dog. When they sailed back to the United States, Lobo sailed with them to New York, then motored in the backseat all the way to the house on Siesta Key. An agreeable orphan and mild-mannered beggar all his life, Lobo had suddenly become a family dog of considerable property. It went straight to his head.

  He became, wrote my grandfather, “more avaricious than Hetty Green, more savage than Simon Girty, less charitable than Ebenezer Scrooge.” And more territorial than Genghis Khan. Or as my grandfather recounted it: “‘Good grief!’ he would roar at the top of his lungs, dashing out to the porch, slashing the rugs as he came. ‘Look out there on the beach! There’s an old man walking on my beach. I can’t stand this. He needs to be torn limb from limb! Please open the door and let me out! I want to go down there and assassinate him.’”

  My mom and uncle Tim always used to say that Mack overromanticized Lobo’s viciousness. They called Lobo “a pretty good book about a very bad dog,” and threatened to write a sequel called The Truth About Lobo. In reality, Lobo’s aggressiveness became a huge problem, epitomized when Irene became ill while Mack was away and Lobo almost dismembered the visiting doctor, which was probably the beginning of the end of house calls.

  In my memory, Mack always had a dog. The first I could recall was a black mutt named Bill Dog. Bill was my father, and whether that name was in honor or in mockery of him, we were never quite sure. As I read Lobo, I found myself wondering if I ever had met the Basque shepherd (mourning, as had become my habit, the fact that here was yet another question I could have asked my mom, but never had). I had nearly finished the book
when I arrived at this passage:

  Our two small grandsons came with their parents to spend the Christmas holidays, and we watched Lobo narrowly. I heard him growl just once. He had an ear infection and Mike, the elder, pulled his sore ear. I explained to Mike, and he did not do this again. On the other hand, I came in one day to find the smaller boy in his playpen with Lobo lying just outside the wooden bars. Tommy had fastened his grubby mitts on Lobo’s muzzle, and was kneading flesh and nostrils energetically. Lobo was not uttering a sound, nor was he trying to move away; he was just taking it from the baby. We breathed more easily after that.

  Even if others believed Lobo’s bad habits outweighed all else, Mack would never be persuaded of it. As he labored to complete Andersonville on deadline—the type for the first part of the book being set in the printing presses even before he’d finished the last—he struggled to find the energy required to meet an unforgiving pace. Every day he would flee the house with his typewriter to drive far into the woods to avoid any possible interruptions. But “there came a day when I thought I could work no more. My head ached, my eyes hurt. . . . You can’t finish, evil voices were crying.”

  That was when he began to find Lobo in the car, waiting for him each morning. “He sensed I needed help,” Mack wrote. After that, Lobo remained by his side, steadfastly, until he typed the last word.

  Or so Mack says in the book. Overly sentimental, perhaps, to attribute those motives to a dog. More than likely he just wanted to go for a ride. Yet I found myself choking up when I read it.

  When I was writing the acknowledgments for my previous book, I meant to say in them that I should have given my dog, a yellow Lab/hound mix rescue dog named Sally, a coauthor byline, if only for the fact that her butt time in my office as I wrote the book just about equaled my own. As soon as she realized that I’d headed upstairs to work each morning, I’d hear the scritching of her claws on the wood stairs and then see her pad into the office and plop down on a cushion in the corner, staying there hour after hour until it was time to start bugging me for her walk, a distraction I was both irritated by and grateful for. This continued day after day over the eighteen months I labored, from the time she was thirteen and a half past her fifteenth birthday, even as she aged dramatically, her rear quarters growing progressively weaker, making that climb up the stairs ever more difficult. I tried whenever the weather permitted to work on the back porch so that she could lie out on the deck beside me and avoid the climb. When it got too hot, too cold, or too wet to work outside, I always felt guilty for climbing back up those stairs, because nothing could dissuade her from following me. She stuck it out to the end, far more patient with the damnable immobility of the process than I ever could be.

  It was almost as if she were waiting to die until our work was done. We had to put her down just two weeks after publication.

  Immediately after my grandfather had finished Andersonville, he and Irene visited us in New York as he met with the publishers to smooth out the final small-print details of publication. I didn’t remember this, of course, having just turned one at the time, but I was surprised to learn in the book that they brought Lobo with them—possibly encouraged by the evidence of our playpen rapport in Florida. During the visit, Mack took Lobo to our family vet and discovered that he had heartworm. Lobo was left for what was supposed to be a safe and effective series of shots. After the very first injection, he dropped dead for no reason anyone could discover.

  Mack arranged burial in a nearby pet cemetery—a cemetery whose existence I was aware of growing up without ever knowing that a visit there would reveal a headstone for my grandfather’s dog with the inscription ADIOS, AMIGO.

  We buried Sally in our backyard with her favorite toy in a hole I dug myself, covered with a thick piece of slate from the garden path she loved to run along. I’ve had to write this book solo.

  —

  By spring of 1956, Mack and Irene were both back in fine health and enjoying their Andersonville victory lap of Europe. They’d arrived in Paris, staying in the elegant Prince de Galles Hotel across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. On April 19, a telegram arrived from my mother with two bits of news. “Novel accepted. Hurray! John Kantor died last night.”

  The novel referred to in the telegram was not another of my grandfather’s works, but something my mother had knocked out between changing diapers and making dinners for four, meaning she would soon be a third-generation published author. The “Oh, by the way” news of John Kantor’s death, reduced to five words at the back end of a message about something else, was a stark but fitting end to his career as a lousy father. The next morning Mack sent a return telegram through his publisher. “Inform Layne we had champagne last night for two reasons.”

  My uncle said that Mack told him that his first words after reading my mother’s telegram were “At last we’re rid of him.”

  Almost.

  When he returned to the States, Mack found a rather desperate message from the billing department of the hospital that had treated John in his final illness. It seems upon admission, John had persuaded the hospital intake staff that his son, the famous novelist MacKinlay Kantor, would be paying the bill. (By God! How I love to burn him up.)

  Mack confessed feeling only righteous indignation when he disabused the bill collector (no doubt colorfully) of that hope. But how could he have not felt a pang of loss as well? Not the loss of John, but the loss that had haunted him his whole life—the loss of the last slender filament of a chance that he’d ever have a father capable of love.

  I encountered many surprises in my research, but possibly none less expected than evidence that John Kantor did not go entirely unmourned. To the end of his life, there were still family members who found him impressive and desired his company. I knew this because one of Mack’s first cousins was yet another in the family who became a journalist and a writer. His name was Seth Kantor, son of John’s brother Arvid. Seth had a small role in a large historic event himself. Covering a presidential visit to Dallas on November 22, 1963, Seth rode in a press bus behind the limousine carrying John Kennedy. He heard two of the three fatal shots that rang out from the Texas School Book Depository, and was one of the first reporters to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital—there in time to see the president’s blood pooling on the ground beside the hastily parked and vacated limo. Still unsure what had happened, Seth talked his way inside the hospital. As he was walking down a hall he felt a tug on the back of his coat. In Seth’s testimony before the Warren Commission, he said, “I turned and saw Jack Ruby standing there. He had his hand extended. . . . He said, ‘Isn’t this a terrible thing?’”

  Seth Kantor is probably best known for the book he would eventually write on Ruby—the mysterious nightclub owner who, two days later, would walk into the basement of Dallas police headquarters and fatally shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. But the assassination and the book were both years in the future when Seth wrote a piece for The Dallas Times Herald that began:

  The last time I saw my Uncle John, my father’s brother, he was in his 74th year. He had business in Dallas, and had taken a suite at the Adolphus. He was still a massive man with a mountainous memory. . . . He still wore spats. His voice still came like articulate cannon with a volley that could be heard for hours. . . . He talked to my wife and I at our dinner table for a little more than eight consecutive hours. It was not so much that he talked for such a fantastic span of time . . . it’s that each of us sat transfixed by John Kantor’s words and wished for more.

  Late in this marathon monologue, “Uncle John” began to trace the Kantor family history, all the way back into Europe, telling “what he knew of the family’s outcasts and successes. ‘It is a fact,’ he said, munching a slice of cheese at nearly midnight, ‘that in our family alternate generations are full of achievement and alternate ones are not successful.’” Then he looked at Seth with his intense, hooded eyes and said, “You are in the wrong generation, you k
now.”

  “He was wrong,” Seth wrote. “Three weeks after Uncle John’s death in his 77th year, his son, MacKinlay Kantor, of the ‘wrong generation’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville.”

  Oh, that.

  Mack was still at the Prince de Galles two weeks after he learned that his father had died when he happened to run into an old friend. Mike Cowles had hired Mack as a columnist at The Des Moines Register a quarter century earlier, and had since gone on to found Look magazine. Now, by coincidence, they were staying at the same hotel.

  “We met at the bar for drinks, Irene arriving a bit late. Mike had said, I suppose you’ve already been given the inside dope about your getting the Pulitzer Prize.” Mack’s heart flipped somersaults in his chest. He had no such dope, and with great effort refrained from leaping for joy. “I said without batting an eyebrow: . . . I never count on anything until official announcement is made. . . . And he smiled and said, Well, I guess I ought to know—I’m on the jury—and may I add that it was unanimous.”

  Actually, Mack’s memory of the conversation must have been a little off. Cowles was on the Pulitzer board, which ratified the jury’s recommendation. The jury consisted of Francis Brown, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, and Carlos Baker, a renowned literary critic and Princeton professor who later wrote the best-known biography of Ernest Hemingway. Discovering that Baker was half the Pulitzer jury rang a loud bell. I had earlier found a letter to Baker from Bill Targ, Andersonville’s publisher, describing “a private conversation” the two had had on the day earlier that winter when they learned “Big A” had been passed over for the National Book Award in favor of Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara. According to Targ, he and Baker had vehemently agreed that a far less deserving book had won, and consoled each other with the notion that “justice” would prevail “in the long run.” A few months later, Baker was in a position to administer that justice himself. In their report to the Pulitzer board, he and Brown wrote, “Andersonville, a historical novel in the grand manner, recaptures the tragedy and drama not only of the prison stockade from which it takes its name, but of the Civil War itself. Here is a panorama of the war years and of the divided nation which fought the war. Here, described with moving compassion, are the men and boys who fought and lived or nobly died. Here are those who knew in the Confederate camp at Andersonville man’s inhumanity, and humanity, to man. For sweep of subject matter, for depth of understanding, for skill of narration, this novel would be great in any year and surely in 1955 was unsurpassed.”