The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  They concluded, “In the better than average fiction year, then, these three—Andersonville, Ten North Frederick and Band of Angels [by Robert Penn Warren]—stood forth, but in our view, as we have stated, the chief of these was, and is, Andersonville. We urge it again for the Pulitzer Award.”

  As I read my grandfather’s letter, I could picture Mack, Irene, Cowles, and his wife sitting in the bar, Cowles quoting the jury report from memory and Mack floating along on a high unrelated to the no doubt top-shelf whiskey in their glasses. I felt astonishing good fortune to be holding in my hands the actual account, written on the day after it happened, of what had always been a mythic event in my family. As an adolescent, I remember staring, fascinated, at the surprisingly small piece of parchment, about half the size of a sheet of typing paper, hanging in my grandfather’s study in a distressed gold frame. It surprised me that something so insignificant-looking could have had such an impact. I have said often here that I grew up discounting my grandfather’s importance as a literary figure, understanding first and foremost that his vision of himself as such had been disproved even before his death. But there was one thing that had always impressed me, and would always impress anyone who heard of it, and it was there, inside that frame—a document appearing to be nothing more than a bit of bureaucratic inconsequence, a preprinted form with spaces for a name and a title, which were typed in as if an afterthought.

  Just looking at it now, I recall the comforting musk of mildew and moldering books and cedar that had always surrounded it in the eternal twilight of my grandfather’s study. And I can look at it anytime I want: it hangs on the first floor of my home, not far from another similar, though somewhat larger and more professionally constructed looking version of the document, an “honorary” Pulitzer presented to me by my staff when I left The Washington Post. It was a kind gesture, intended to recognize my role in the Pulitzers awarded to articles that I had edited. I gushed my thanks, of course, and never told anyone that in fact I found the document humiliating, a consolation that failed to console. My name was not on any of those Pulitzers, the real ones, a reminder that there were things I had wished to achieve that I never had.

  I could well imagine what it would have been like—those moments of pure satisfaction that occur after recognition on a grand scale, ratification for all the world to see that your best efforts were, in fact, good enough.

  And now I didn’t have to imagine, because Mack’s letter allowed me to come along for the ride:

  We had our drinks. . . . Irene and I wandered out to a cab, rode clear down to St. Germain Blvd. at the Odeon, sat, had coffee, walked, had wine, walked slowly, ate mild dinner in a small cheap café but GOOD, walked all the way up to the Seine under stars on the first warm night of the year in Paris, walked through the Tuilleries gardens, walked home, sat in a bar, I had TWO yellow Chartreuses, Irene had TWO tomato juices, came up to bed, read magazines idly, went to sleep before one a.m. . . . Is that a way to celebrate a unanimous Pulitzer Prize?

  Yes, most definitely, it is.

  —

  In fiction, climaxes so often consist of a nexus point, where dramatic resolutions to crucial but seemingly unrelated plot points occur simultaneously. This contrivance would not feel as satisfying as it does if the phenomenon did not occur so often in real life. How odd, I thought, that within two weeks in the early spring of 1956 my grandfather would receive news of both the final resolution to his lifelong bedevilment by his sociopathic father and the pinnacle achievement of his career.

  Throw in, as icing on an already rich cake, the evidence that his talent and passion for writing had been successfully transmitted to his progeny—the sale, simultaneous to all the above, of my mother’s novel—and it all seems a little too contrived.

  And that was my first thought. The odds of a random housewife successfully selling a first novel are astronomical; but perhaps considerably less so if her father happened to be the current best-selling author in the country.

  I had grown up with my mother’s novel, The Four of Them, always visible on the bookshelf in our living room. It was a fact. My mother had written a novel. But it was something, like her eye color, that existed without consequence. I didn’t remember her writing it, and she never talked about it, or published anything further.

  I never even removed it from the bookshelf until I was in eighth grade, when I read The Four of Them and wrote a book report on it for school. I pretended not to be shocked or embarrassed that my mother could have written a novel that revolved around sex—the unmet needs, physical and emotional, that drove a sensitive, alienated young woman enduring suburban wifehood to have an extramarital affair and the bleak consequences ensuing. This was just at the point in time when I began to fantasize about being a writer myself. I wish/don’t wish that I still had a copy of the book report. I’m sure it would be excruciating to read. I can only remember that I had smugly and obnoxiously given it a mixed review—as if my fourteen-year-old self knew better.

  Reading the novel now for the first time since then, I still give a mixed review, though with somewhat more nuance and superior credentials. The prose is occasionally overcooked and the plot, certainly by today’s standards and quite possibly even by 1956 standards, is a little trite. But the writing itself has signs of real talent—a feel for language, a knack for imagery, and the ability to make trenchant observations that ring true. The handful of reviews the book got after publication were—you guessed it—mixed. “In an exuberant first novel, Layne Shroder reveals herself as a talented writer, but one whose gifts and enthusiasms occasionally lead her away from her story rather than into it” was the first sentence of one review, whose almost every sentence contained a bit of praise followed by a “but.”

  —

  Of course, I am not a casual reader, but someone searching the pages for insight into my mother, who never revealed herself this intimately in a lifetime of conversation.

  I had been poleaxed to learn for the first time, as I was sitting in the manuscript room reading a letter my grandfather wrote to an old friend, that my parents came within a breath of divorce when I was seven years old. (“This is the real thing this time. Layne told me that she plans to go to Mexico for a divorce in the fall.”)

  Their marriage would survive that moment without any of us ever realizing how close the end had come. Divorce did come, but a decade later when I was a sophomore in college, after which I discovered that adultery had been an issue for one, or possibly both, of them. So in this clearly autobiographically influenced fiction, I expected to find some insight into the forces that ultimately unraveled my parents’ relationship. In the book, the main character, called Sarie, decides in the end that her difficulty feeling passion for her husband—a passion briefly ignited by another man with bitter aftershocks—is ultimately less important than her feeling of deep affection for him, and that perhaps by focusing on that feeling one moment at a time, she can manufacture a lasting love. “She managed, for the moment at least, to make it true,” my mother writes in the novel’s penultimate sentence, “and futures are composed of present moments.”

  So there was that.

  I was also looking for a sense of a writing style that resonated with my own. I had seen that echo in my grandfather’s writing, and even in my great-grandmother’s, and by now I expected to find it here. What I didn’t expect was this passage, in which Sarie is reflecting on natural beauty: “She immersed herself in it, until she felt she might burst with the pressure, the hurtfulness it caused.”

  An interesting idea not all that commonly expressed—that beauty, deeply felt, can cause pain. I certainly hadn’t been thinking of my mother when I wrote of a moment of personal epiphany in the conclusion to my most recent book: “I felt the pain in the joy, the unbearable beauty of the world. . . .”

  I suppose that it should not be surprising that a son could absorb even unspoken attitudes—but I never would have associ
ated that sentiment with my relentlessly optimistic and not particularly outdoorsy mother. And then there were the inevitable similarities of her heroine’s life to her own, and the possible insights it provided; like the passage in which Sarie remembers crashing her bike as a girl and confronting her father as she stumbled home. “She remembered anger in her father’s face. . . . ‘Jesus Christ, Sarie, haven’t you any sense? . . . Do I have to take your bicycle away from you? God damn it, Edith, do something!’ he appealed to her mother. ‘Why do I have to be presented with all these problems when I’m working?’ He’d stormed back to his typewriter. . . .”

  That squares with the disappointingly little I know—because I never asked—about how my mother regarded her upbringing. As best as I could reconstruct from stray statements across a lifetime, she had no doubt her father loved her. When he was away, which was often, he would write amusing and affectionate letters to her, and no doubt he could be the same when they were together. But he could also be prickly, distant, and unavailable. As Tim put it in his memoir, Mack “wanted to be the best father in the world,” but “what model did he have?”

  There were times when having us grandkids around irritated him into shouts of “Jesus Christ” and “Goddamnit!” just as in The Four of Them.

  But as I’ve said, he could also be sweet and charming and generous to us, and it had been the same with my mom when she was little. What surprised me in the letters Mack wrote to friends was how highly he spoke of my mother’s talent as a writer—and how fiercely he wanted her to make use of it. I found a three-page letter he wrote praising her talent and counseling her at length in the practical matters of advancing her career, even suggesting topics for a second novel. Between the lines, you could sense how much he dreaded the idea she might not write one. In one letter I discovered that he had even underwritten the cost of a full-time maid in our house so my mother would have time to write. When he thought my parents were about to divorce, he unloaded on my father in a surprisingly progressive screed about my dad’s very typical 1950s attitude about separation of domestic duties and my mother’s career aspirations:

  “He never did learn to give her the slightest cooperation in the actual running of the house . . . and flew into a rage if he thought she was taking any time out for her own writing, when she should have been waiting on him.”

  Shortly after Mack got his Pulitzer, when he was delivering family news to his old chum Dick Whiteman, he crowed about my mother’s unassisted sale of her book in the same breath he announced the birth of a new granddaughter: “Layne-o has presented the world with a girl for a change: one Susan Irene, who is a calm and meditative baby. She is also going to present the world with a new novel, to be published by Houghton Mifflin next year. They never guessed who Layne Shroder was, which of course filled her with delight; she did the whole thing on her own. I’m reading the book now; it really is fine.”

  Parental pride, of course, is to be expected. But somehow it surprised me, given what I believed about his self-obsession, and I was moved to see this clearly heartfelt praise.

  And then he had this to say about the theme: “The subject bores me though. I told her that I couldn’t get interested in a gang of young people just discovering for the first time that there is such a thing as marital infidelity, and Layne says haughtily that a few million people may disagree with me; which I hope is true. Marital infidelity is just as sure to be persistent in the world as the sun, moon and stars. In every case except your own of course!”

  I had managed to stifle the impulse to snort thus far, but then he came up with the capper.

  “Come to think of it,” he wrote, “I believe I only made one pass at your dear wife in all my existence, and when she said No, I retired gracefully.”

  Something tells me he wasn’t joking.

  My mother wasn’t wrong about a few million people being interested in adultery in the mid-1950s. Sexuality in suburbia, adultery in particular, powered Peyton Place to near the top of the best-seller lists, alongside Andersonville, for much of 1956 and 1957, the year my mother’s book was published. Even so, like the immense majority of first novels, The Four of Them sold sparsely—more likely in the hundreds of copies rather than the thousands. I had long known that she’d begun a second novel, and then abandoned it with, as far as I knew, no regrets. I’d wondered about that. With all the promise and encouraging critical reception of her first novel, why didn’t she keep going?

  I stopped wondering when I started writing books myself.

  There come just too many soul-crushing moments when all you’ve written seems gibberish and all possible paths forward look to end against an unclimbable wall, or over the edge of a cliff. I never would have completed anything if I hadn’t already been paid an advance I would have had to pay back.

  I was amused when I came across this quote from my grandfather, basically saying the same thing: “Most good writers, and most bad ones too, are poor people. Their earlier stories get written because they need food and shelter. Their later stories are written because they want . . . Cadillacs or want to go hunting moose.”

  He also wrote, “When you’ve been a writer as long as I have . . . nothing inspires you except a check.”

  Of course, Mack had managed to keep writing, completely checkless, contract or no contract. On my bookshelves, I found something I didn’t even realize I had: a ledger book he had kept from the 1930s in which he scribbled notations in tiny script—the title of a submission on the left, and the fate of the submission on the right. Page after page have but one word, repeated again and again, in the right column: Rejected.

  But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. For him it was write or starve.

  In the years after my mother’s first novel, Mack’s letters always had the same two comments about her writing; he believed she was truly talented, and he feared the comfortable, distracted life of a suburban mother threatened her deserved future as a writer.

  I thought his analysis was as good as any explanation of her abandonment of writing: absent the threat of starvation and legal obligation to whip her along, she simply got stuck and couldn’t find sufficient motivation to unstick herself.

  It wasn’t until I began looking through the documents I’d collected in a file marked LAYNE-O that I realized something startling: of all the letters she wrote exulting about signing a book contract, only some were from 1956. Another, I noted, was dated 1957. This was for the second novel, signed shortly after publication of her first. She’d had a contract after all, which must have made it exponentially more painful to quit in the middle—especially for a woman who wrote in her alumni magazine, “After my first son was born I told myself and the world that I was so busy and contented that I would probably never write again, but I soon began to feel restless. . . . It seemed it was impossible to discard my ambition without discarding a part of myself. Writing is for me almost like a drug. I doubt I will be able to stop for more than a short time.”

  After her divorce from my dad, my mother went to law school—the oldest person in her class by about twenty years. She passed the bar in her mid-forties, and practiced for thirty years as a public defender in juvenile court—a job she considered a calling and approached with indefatigable passion, despite the fact that it was one of the most taxing, depressing, and thankless tasks imaginable. At the end of her long life, when she was heroically refusing to yield her spirit to rapidly advancing lung cancer, I reopened the topic of her writing career.

  “Even if you couldn’t finish the book you started,” I said, “didn’t you ever have the urge to write some other book?”

  “You know,” she said, “night after night when I got you all to bed, I would sit there and struggle to write, because I had always thought I was meant to do it. But eventually I realized: I hate writing.”

  SIXTEEN

  The first sign of even an inkling of self-awareness by my grandfather that he had a drinki
ng problem came in a letter from Europe in those first weeks after finishing Andersonville, when he and Irene were both sick as dogs: “I’m still coughing, still sneezing, still nose-blowing. I’ve taken the last desperate step, and am now On the Wagon—for how long I don’t know but certainly until I’m better. Perhaps that’s not literally true, but I mean no cocktails. . . . In Spain it would be almost impossible to go completely On.”

  So he was aware, but unaware.

  Both Mack and Irene came from nondrinking families, and they’d learned to drink together as a release and a modest rebellion, staking out territory they saw as the proper ground of creative types. It may have helped, in Mack’s case, that John Kantor made a very ponderous point of disdaining all drink. Whatever John didn’t like, Mack would love.

  In his autobiography, Mack said he’d always felt alcohol was benign, even helpful, as a contrast to drugs of any kind, which he abhorred. “I had visions of becoming a groveling monster under the influence of drugs,” he wrote. “Liquor was something else. It was fun, it could be indulged in at the end of a hard day’s work if one had the price.”