The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Anyone who has watched the TV series Mad Men can easily picture the drinking culture Mack enthusiastically participated in as a rising writer with an overactive social life.

  No doubt, there had been embarrassing scenes and alcohol-fueled regrets aplenty during those years. But it took a persistent case of flu on the heels of the exhausting finish of Andersonville to make Mack think of taking that “last desperate step”—not even of stopping drinking, but just cutting back.

  By then, according to my uncle’s memoir, Irene was already seriously concerned, as were their closest friends. If anyone said anything about it, Mack bellowed, “How the hell do you expect me to come down from that labor, this excitement, overnight?”

  Being on the wagon, such as it was, clearly didn’t much outlast the sniffles. Back in the States, now a certified literary lion and for the first time in his life having the economic liberty not to immediately harness himself to another weighty writing project, he sloshed his way around the country.

  My uncle described post-Andersonville visits to New York that resonate deep in my memory: “Sometimes during their stay in the city, they’d go up to Scarsdale, to visit Layne and Bill Shroder and their children. Mother would be anxious and warm and eager, a youthful, sweet-scented . . . grandmother. Dad would usually drink too much, and always he would want to perform and preside—singing songs, reading to Layne and Bill the latest chapters of the manuscript he was working on, reading to the kids excerpts from children’s books he had written. . . . And always, back in New York, there would be ritual . . . drinks in their suite at the Algonquin, then cabs summoned, and then the grand procession to a table, with greetings from the manager or owner and a scurrying of waiters, and drinks and dinner and laughter, at this favorite restaurant or that. And at the end of the evening, he would insist on picking up the check for everyone, and tip quite grandly. . . . He moved through some of those days in a bright alcoholic fog. Sober as a stern, demanding judge in the mornings; foolishly benign, foolishly angry, late at nights.”

  I remember how, after his third or fourth cocktail, his face would seem to tilt sideways, his jaw shifting beneath slightly unfocused eyes as he brayed out a joke or a song; how he looked around for approbation, but more easily found something to irritate or enrage him.

  When I showed my sister the above section as I was writing it, she reminded me of something I’d forgotten, a story my mother told us: At one big alcohol-fueled night out with her father at a dinner theater performance, deep into the post-meal drinking, the emcee of the event announced to the crowd that the famous author MacKinlay Kantor was in attendance. A spotlight waggled its way around the tables searching, settling finally on Mack, passed out facedown on his dinner plate.

  The drinking had gone well beyond even the most liberal definition of moderation. I found a 1957 letter from Mack himself that paints the picture quite clearly:

  Made a nice acquaintance on the airplane . . . quite a drinker. We both were to have a little time in Dallas, so we killed a bottle of champagne in the bar, and then my flight got delayed . . . so we went back to the bar, more champagne. Our flight was called—engine trouble. Back to the bar. More Champagne. I think this went on two or three more times, but I can’t remember very well. . . . It took me two days to recover, but now I am drinking almost nothing, and feel grand.

  The key word in that last sentence: almost.

  I can only imagine what Awful Incident made Mack grasp that his drinking had gone well beyond supplying the occasional amusing anecdote and was something that needed to be addressed. Was it a hideous public explosion? A bad fall? A near miss on the highway? All three in one night?

  I’ll never know. But within months of the party in the Dallas airport bar, he wrote again to Dick Whiteman:

  I had a great deal of trouble with liquor ever since I saw you. When abroad usually I don’t drink too much, although there have been notable exceptions. Back in the US, with the pressure mounting on me from every angle, I found my only relaxation at the end of a day in about a thousand Gibsons, which of course necessitated further treatment next morning. So it went; I was on the wagon three different times, during one period of which I joined AA and was bored stiff with the people and their utterances, if not their practice. Finally I decided to seek divine guidance from the former head of the Yale Plan Clinic. He studied the thing from every angle—physical, chemical and psychological—and came up with the not too unexpected verdict that I could not drink like an ordinary human being, at least not at this moment in my life. The funny thing is that I find no difficulty ever in quitting. It’s just that I would prefer to drink and have liquor in my life. In the past I have gone a month on two different occasions, and nearly three months on another without trouble during the duration of dryness, but with the firmly-arrived-at intention of practicing moderation when I returned to drinking again. No soap—couldn’t be done. Thus I went dry on the 17th of Sept and will be dry until the 17th of March. My own hunch is that it will be like that from now on, punctuated with an occasional happy fling.

  The problem, as Mack would put it exactly halfway through his time On the Wagon in a letter to Hark:

  I’m having trouble re-establishing connections with my novel. I am far away from it just at present—intellectually I am eager to return to the fray; emotionally, I still recoil. This is a tough business in a creative existence—trying to adjust to a creative life without alcohol when it has determined one’s pattern of conduct for so long a time. However, I am willing to spend six months in trying.

  It happened that, during this brief dry spell, Hemingway showed up with his longtime companion and confidant Toby Bruce, whom my grandfather described as their “mutual friend.”

  I told Ernest I was on the wagon for six months and couldn’t join them in a drink. Ernest looked at me sadly and said, “Mack, I have a crushed kidney, and you can’t drink with a crushed kidney.” So I asked Toby what he’d have. He said, if the two biggest drunks in North America weren’t drinking then he wasn’t either.

  I found nothing directly calling his experiment with not drinking a failure, but I didn’t need to. Instead there was this, from early 1958, exactly two months before his dry period was supposed to end: “We talk about going to Mexico in the Spring; I am hoping to be working on my novel again. I certainly don’t feel like it now, or feel like much of anything else. This life of sobriety is not for me, but I must maintain it as scheduled until the 17th of March; then the hell with all such attempts.”

  In April he wrote a long letter to the Yale alcoholism expert arguing the necessity of drink to his creative process. “The point I wish to make,” he wrote, “is that dreams of complication and clarity almost never occurred to me during the times when I was on the wagon. I am prone to regard these as evidences of a creative force and ambition.”

  I think that was the end of his attempts to stop drinking for a number of years. For me, the most moving part of my uncle’s memoir had to do with an incident in the summer of 1962. Tim, then a freelance photographer, was in New York when he got a long-distance call from Mack: “I’m out here in Webster City. . . . I’ve been drinking my way across the country—the booze had started to build up before I left Sarasota—and I’ve been drinking here, and last night they had a party for me. At six o’clock this morning I woke up and found that I was staring at the goddamn trees. I’d passed out on the lawn and so, I decided it was time to climb back on the wagon. The trouble is I’ve got the shakes, bad. I’m due in NY in a few days . . . but I don’t dare drive the car. I wondered if you could possibly fly out to Des Moines. . . . I can get the car that far.”

  When Tim met Mack at the airport, he handed him the car keys, hands shaking. “I damn near didn’t get here, even though I only went at thirty miles an hour all the way,” he said.

  Tim started out cross-country, his father, diminished, beside him. When they stopped for dinner, Tim hesitated before ordering a dr
ink. Mack said, “Go ahead, you earned it. The booze is my problem, not yours.”

  That’s where the story ends in Tim’s telling, but I winced. I knew what Tim, in the writing of his book, either didn’t know or wouldn’t admit. Mack’s alcohol problem was most definitely his problem, too. Despite tremendous talent—he was a brilliant photographer and a fine writer himself—after a hitch in the Air Force, which no doubt pleased his dad more than himself, he modeled a career based on his father’s—in independent pursuit of artistic success in one medium or another. Though Mack was fiercely proud of Tim and believed in his talent, even he urged him to take a more practical course. “If he would just take some part time jobs, say, and work three days a week at something remunerative, which he could easily find to do—even if he had to go into a factory—then the problem would be solved,” Mack wrote to a friend. “But he stubbornly refuses.”

  Tim had some success with photography, but never enough to live comfortably or support a family. He eventually gave up that pursuit to become a writer, which wasn’t as loopy an idea as it may sound, considering his true talent. He published My Father’s Voice to some good reviews. This was a high point for him, a moment of hope: Now that he was a published writer himself, things would change. “I have a novel to do,” he wrote in the book’s final chapter, “and I hope books after that. . . . I am eager for the future.”

  When the book didn’t sell, he blamed the publisher, as writers so often do, for failure to adequately publicize it or bring out a paperback edition. He had interest from publishers in another book, but that stalled when his health began to degenerate, mostly due to a lifetime of heavy drinking and smoking. He ended up flat broke, and too often drunk, living in an ancient Florida apartment house that had been charming in the era when Mack built the house on Siesta Key, but was now disintegrating around him.

  “He never had the money for bills—although always, mysteriously, for alcohol and cigarettes,” my cousin, his daughter, Lydia remembered when I showed her Mack’s letter. “In response to my often begging him to get a job, even if it was working as a cashier or bagging groceries, he always told me that the very reason he couldn’t have a ‘normal job’ was the fact that from a young age, Gramp had told him that a regular job was simply not acceptable: only greatness counted. Given this letter, apparently that was not the case, and Gramp and I had very similar attitudes towards Daddy’s situation.”

  I knew that my mother was constantly tormented by the worry that Tim might end up on the street if she didn’t lend him money, and that she might be enabling him if she did.

  In the end, he discovered he had lung cancer only because he fell down—no doubt when drinking—and busted out some teeth. A checkup at a charity dental clinic revealed he had worse problems than a broken smile. I loved him dearly, which only made it more painful to see his decline and the relentless vise grip that drinking had on him.

  Which brings me to . . . me.

  Both my mother and my father drank all their adult lives. Based on what is now known about how alcohol impacts physiological health, they undoubtedly drank too much. They may have been partially psychologically dependent, with negative emotional consequences. I’m not talking falling-down, getting-the-shakes, tragedy-level consequences. It was more things said and done that couldn’t be unsaid and undone. By some definitions, any negative consequences of frequent alcohol use qualify as alcoholism.

  According to Robert Morse, MD, the former director of Addictive Disorders Services at the Mayo Clinic (and a million other sources), “the single most reliable indicator for risk of future alcohol or drug dependence is family history. Research has shown conclusively that family history of alcoholism or drug addiction is in part genetic.”

  The relationship between individual genes and alcoholism is intensely complex and far from completely understood. Research with mice, though, has demonstrated one fascinating genetic link. Deficiency in a specific gene has been shown to increase anxiety behavior of mice in a maze, and those mice with increased anxiety go for alcohol over water when given a choice, while mice with sufficient quantities of that gene prefer water. In fact, when the gene-deficient mice drink alcohol, their anxious behavior diminishes—so drinking is an apparent attempt at self-medication.

  Even if there is a human equivalent gene or combination of genes that could create a higher risk of alcoholism, not all offspring of parents with those genes would be at risk. Inheritance is always a roll of two dice, and it’s the combination that ultimately matters.

  Ironically, my own genetic predisposition—or lack of it—would colorfully express itself one night when I was fifteen . . . on my grandfather’s beach. Mack had said a friend and I could camp overnight. He came by at dusk, as he almost always did when I camped there, and chatted for a bit. I can’t remember a word of what was said, but I would now pay a small fortune for a tape, or better yet a video, of that conversation. Most likely it would have been a monologue by my grandfather. When he’d said his piece, he shuffled back up the lawn toward the house, fragrant clouds of smoke from his pipe lingering behind as he disappeared into the growing darkness. We set to digging a pit in the sand for our campfire, using as a scoop one of the baked-bean cans we’d already emptied into the frying pan. We’d scooped only a few canfuls of sand before we hit something metallic. With a small thrill of discovery, I reached down and pulled. It was an even greater find than I could have imagined: a completely full six-pack of beer still lashed together by its plastic harness.

  In order to appreciate our glee, I have to reiterate that we were fifteen and had a long night of sitting on the beach with absolutely nothing to do. Without so much as phony IDs to our name, it was as if the booze fairy had waved her magic wand over our campsite and, presto chango, the brewskis rose from the earth, right into our eager hands.

  I brushed off the sand on one of the cans, popped the tab, and took a big swig . . . then gagged and spit. God knows how long that six-pack had been buried, but based on the degree of flatness and staleness of the liquid it contained, I would have guessed Late Jurassic.

  I grabbed the can out of my friend’s hand as he began to tilt it toward his mouth. “Don’t do it!” I shouted. “It’s completely foul.”

  We settled for shaking the cans and spraying them on each other. Even that was disappointing due to the lack of fizz.

  I thought nothing more of the incident until many years later when my friend, whom I hadn’t seen for some time, was telling me about his terrible descent into, and struggle to recover from, alcoholism.

  “In fact,” he said, “I first glimpsed that I might have a problem with alcohol because of you.”

  I told him I had no idea what he meant.

  “It was that night we were camping at Mack’s beach and we found the six-pack.”

  What about it? I said.

  “Well, you took one sip and spit it out, and then started pouring all the cans out on the ground, and the whole time I was thinking, ‘Wait a second! It’s still alcohol!’ The taste of it, which is what mattered to you, was completely irrelevant to me. The only thing I cared about was the buzz.”

  I did have a handful of incidents of binge drinking in college, and just out of it, but only enough to learn in a way hard to forget that what heavy consumption of alcohol made me was not creative but, first, stupid, and second, sick as a dog.

  Most likely I had my genes to thank for that ultimate aversion to drunkenness—certainly not Mack’s, but, who knows, maybe . . . John Kantor’s.

  —

  Mack ultimately got off the wagon—he didn’t fall, he leapt off—and continued to drink, as he would for the rest of his life. Once again, five o’clock cocktails and refills throughout the evening fueled his self-confidence and ambition. On top of the literary world and barely into his fifties, he began thinking big, bigger than ever. Given that he was always puffing on his pipe—new pipes and pipe tobacco were pret
ty much what us grandkids gave him every single birthday and possibly every Christmas for good measure—it would have been clever to call them pipe dreams, if he hadn’t already succeeded so grandly. Certainly his editor took them seriously, possibly even prompted them. Soon after the news of the Pulitzer, Donald Friede wrote Mack a “What now?” letter.

  It is the damndest challenge any writer ever faced. You’ve got to follow War and Peace with Moby Dick. And you can do it. Here’s why. For the first time in your life—this was not the case while you were writing Big A—you have security for years to come. You don’t have to worry about anything financial—not even what you’ll have to do when you finish Son of Andersonville and are waiting for it to ring the cash register. . . . You can write as well as you can as slowly as you must. . . . You have hit your full writing stride at your young age. . . . Everest, hell. Stratosphere! And it’s yours for the reaching.

  Not only his editor but the world at large kept telling him he was a Great Man and had no limits. Paul Reynolds, his agent for foreign rights, whispered seductively in his ear, “If Andersonville can get a wide enough foreign distribution you might get a Nobel Prize. I know you think I’m crazy but there is that real possibility.”

  Mack didn’t think it crazy. He was beginning to believe he deserved it. Why not? Nothing seemed denied to him.

  Drake University, where Effie McKinlay met John Kantor, granted him an honorary doctorate. To celebrate a powerful new set of beacon lights beaming from the ninetieth floor beneath the world-famous spire of the Empire State Building, Mack was commissioned to write a poem to be cast in bronze and installed on the observation deck. His effort, a tepid echo of the inspiring Emma Lazarus poem for the Statue of Liberty (Bring me your tired, your poor . . .), was soon forgotten (Whence rise you, Lights? From this tower built upon Manhattan’s native rock. Its roots are deep below forgotten musket balls, the moldered wooden shoe, the flint, the bone). Still, his writing was now literally on top of the world.