The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  In files of letters from the 1940s, I found a particularly telling passage in which my grandfather is talking about an earlier time when an early fortune earned by his writing had evaporated.

  “Oh, well, said Grandpa Vanderhof, you can’t take it with you. But you can take the memory of the Panama jungles, the heather of Inverness-shire, the rocky lakes of Killarney where you can drink cold water that you dip up over the boat-side—you can carry along the picture of the blue-and-violet glass in the Cathedral of St. Germain, and the hot wet rain of the Cuban mountains, and the sound of music on Regent Street, and the flashing water off the coast of Nicaragua. If I had fifty thousand dollars worth of Treasury Bonds right now, I wouldn’t have the rest of it; I’ll take the roads of France, thank you, the whip-crack of Toscanini’s baton, and the pale orchids Irene has worn now and again and the taste of good scotch instead of rank green liquor; and all the rest of it.”

  I have no question now—how could I, after learning all that I’ve learned—that my grandfather lived an extraordinarily rich life, the kind of life I have aspired to. But it’s one thing to face an empty bankbook when you are in your prime, talent and prospects undimmed, and quite another when age and health and a changing world conspire against you.

  I could find no letters from this period in which Mack addressed his dire circumstances. I did find this particularly depressing passage in my uncle’s memoir:

  He blamed his lack of success in this current world to fashion. He believed that since he had had no major commercial success since Andersonville, editors and reviewers might be prejudiced by the sight of his name. . . . In a sad, elaborate scheme, which he revealed to none of us, he submitted—over and over again—the manuscript of what he thought to be a “contemporary” novel to various publishers under a pseudonym. The novel was short and bad, and it was rejected again and again. He went on humming and smiling and walking his hound dog Maury, working endlessly, staving off creditors.

  My mother told me that, as his finances became increasingly desperate, she spent hours going through his bills and his accounts, trying to persuade him of the necessity to cut back. He insisted on continuing on as he always had, eating at expensive restaurants every night, even though, increasingly, “eating at expensive restaurants” consisted primarily of drinking at expensive restaurants.

  “Honestly, Daddy!” she said. “I think you believe in miracles!”

  “Oh, yes!” he said.

  When Tim was going through my grandfather’s desk after he died, he found a folded piece of notepaper under the blotter. On it, Mack had transcribed a quotation: When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools.—Lear, IV:6.

  Beneath that he had written in a shaky script: Jan.–April. No income.

  —

  I have a photograph of my grandfather from this period. My last photograph of him. It is from December 1976, at a wedding reception for my first marriage, a union that lasted, legally at least, nine years to the week from that day—eight years and three months longer than my grandfather would last. He is standing between my two grandmothers, Irene to his left, and my father’s mother, Mildred—we called her “Gackie”—to his right. The navy blazer looks two sizes too big, its collar curving around the empty space where robust shoulders and a strong neck used to be. On the breast is some sewn-on regimental insignia from the Air Force, dominated by an imperious eagle. He has that same pencil-thin line of a mustache he’d worn in photos from 1944. His eyes are drilling into the camera, revealing too much. He has those extra, hooded folds of eyelids, just like his father, beneath which are dramatic bags eloquently describing sleepless nights. His cheeks are sallow and sunken, his mouth thin and pressed, as if in grim determination, or pain. He is holding his chin up high.

  It kills me to remember that this is the party when he told his too long, too unfunny story, and my friend made a much funnier joke at his expense—“Great story! You remember the first half and I’ll remember the second half!”—humiliating him and making me laugh. What would I give to take that back? Name a price, please.

  If only I could have spent a few months at the Library of Congress in the fall of 1976. It wouldn’t have been impossible: The material was there; I was already a professional journalist. I’m sure I could have sold that story to someone. But the idea never occurred to me, and even if someone had suggested it, I would have shrugged it away. My grandfather had always simply been there, an eccentric part of the landscape, and I had long been in the business of believing he was unremarkable, and would continue on believing that until these last eighteen months, when I discovered just how not unremarkable he was.

  In fact, there’s little use pretending here that my grandfather represents a kind of Everyman—how many Everymen have childhoods out of some Dickens tale, write themselves into Hollywood history, and American history, sup with Papa Hemingway, make and lose fortunes. . . .

  Still, I have no problem asserting that the most singularly remarkable thing about him is how much of himself he left behind in the hundreds of thousands of words in his books, and in the documents in those file boxes. Everyman, so revealed, would become remarkable.

  —

  In 1973, when he was sixty-nine—three years before that last photograph of him, and when he still believed in miracles—he speculated in a letter to Burl Ives that somehow he could contrive the perfect death. “I’ll take airplanes, and so will Irene, and we plan to be aboard one—when we’re eighty-something years old, and tired of working—when it hits a mountain while we’re sound asleep. Curt LeMay agreed succinctly, ‘That wouldn’t be bad,’ so I’ll see if it can be arranged.”

  God, when we are still strong, still astride life, waking up every morning pulsing and planning and pushing forward, we feel such control. Arrange the perfect death? Why not?

  Unfortunately, dinners of martinis and vichyssoise—always vichyssoise—starved the body and fed the slow destruction of his heart. What remaining strength he had drained away like a broken wave washing back to sea across the stretch of sand just beyond his door. Now it was the grinding, methodical, relentless process of death, begun years earlier, that gained strength and took control.

  Within weeks of the photograph taken at my wedding reception, Mack’s heart and mind slipped away. On a day of gentle breezes in early April, the doctor examined him, then retreated to the side porch of the house, surrounded by jungle and the sighing of fronds sliding against the screen. This was where Mack had spent countless hours on fine days like this one, writing one word, and then the next, and the next. Out of words now, he remained inside the house, reclining blankly in a big chair, wrapped in a white sheet, groaning. The doctor sat before Tim and Irene and delivered the grim prognosis . . . ten days to two weeks. No more.

  But Mack defied him, held on for months. Or at least his increasingly emaciated body did, wasting into dispiriting shapes ever more like those living dead he’d witnessed at Buchenwald.

  Mack was now beyond worrying, beyond hoping, beyond miracles. But Irene was not that fortunate. The financial situation, so desperate to begin with, threatened to evict her from this home that had been refuge for forty years, a constant in a life of inconstancy. Mack’s endless array of friends had dwindled and disappeared. In May, a letter from a man he’d been closely associated with professionally and personally since 1934 and Long Remember put the situation so well into words:

  Dear Irene,

  I was shocked to hear the news about Mack. I wish I could do something to lighten your burdens, but of course I cannot.

  In the end it was another Sarasota writer of more recent acquaintance who found he could do something, and did it. This was a fellow participant in those gin-soused Friday repasts of local authors they called “Liars’ Lunch,” which Mack had dominated from the start by reputation and inclination. It was also a man Mack had for years belittled in the guise of advising him to abandon the genr
e books he wrote so he could write “a real book.”

  Mack was the literary lion, the Great Man, so John D. MacDonald simply took the needling, over and over, until late one night in 1960, he sat at the typewriter that would produce seventy-eight novels, many of them best-sellers featuring a memorable private detective named Travis McGee, and more than 450 short stories, and wrote:

  Dear Mack,

  It has been your habit (over the years I have known you) to make snide remarks about the work I do which is of importance to me. They have stung. I have been unable to laugh. You speak of “that mystery stuff” with a slurring indifference.

  “That mystery stuff” had made him millions, was still making it when my grandfather’s royalties had dwindled to insignificance, and it afforded John D., as everyone called him, the ability to not only forgive my grandfather but to save him—or Irene, since Mack was beyond salvation—by donating enough cash to keep the deeply mortgaged house on Shell Road out of default. The fact that John’s literary reputation would remain substantial decades after my grandfather’s had all but disappeared would be a fitting reward for his magnanimity.

  Through all of this, I was absent, just seventy-five miles down the road. I had reasons—a new and demanding job, a new baby on the way. I’m sure my mom wanted to spare me seeing my grandfather as a wraith, hollowed of the spirit that had always burned so fiercely. But I needed to not be spared.

  In September, Maury the dog, blind, lame, incontinent, had to be put down. My grandmother, desperately trying to maintain in grief and disbelief, fell while walking along the beach and broke her wrist, and the last strand of her resilience broke with it.

  I’d always thought of it as grief and worry alone that strained her to the limit, but now I can see that it was more than that. She’d loved Mack, but she’d also put up with him. Put up with his multiple and unapologetic meanderings, his compulsion to hog the spotlight and suck up all the oxygen in any room they shared, his insistence on living a narrative that could barely spare a footnote for her. In exchange, she had gotten travel, fascinating conversation, constant adventure, and economic security. And now she’d been betrayed—by Mack and circumstance. After keeping to her bargain for half a century, her payoff had been denied, revoked without appeal.

  She went to the hospital for surgery on her shattered bone and came out with a shattered mind. In the same heartbreaking week, Tim and my mom decided they could no longer handle the physical care of my grandfather and moved his spent shell of a body to the hospital as well. He hadn’t spoken a word for days, I was told. Time was short.

  I drove the two hours north from Fort Myers, fearing what I would encounter. Finding neither Tim nor my mom when I arrived, I asked the hospital receptionist for MacKinlay Kantor’s room. She wrote a number on a slip of paper, handed it to me like a summons I had no choice but to obey, and watched me make that lonely walk down the nearly empty corridor.

  When your number’s up, your number’s up. I remember my grandfather telling me that’s what the airmen flying those deadly bombing raids into Germany always told one another before missions, a fatalism permitting them to ride a hurtling tube of metal into frozen clouds of flak. But that hadn’t turned out to be true in my grandfather’s case. His number had come up, and yet he lingered in some state between life and death, a shrunken man, tethered to tubes, lying curled and insensible as in the womb behind that numbered door.

  I’ve always wondered if he even knew I was there beside him, lightly touching his arm; if he gathered the power for those final words as a reflex or a warning.

  I have pondered those two words that were really one, a thousand times, ten thousand times, in the four decades since. “Horrible! Horrible!” It’s a hell of an epitaph for a life of such spectacular and varied accomplishment, of such passionate use and celebration of the gift of being alive. Forgive me for taking it personally.

  The features of his remarkable life had emerged, phrase by phrase, as if I were excavating that mountain of documents with a teaspoon. Throughout, I could never stop comparing my life to my grandfather’s. For all I had accomplished, he’d accomplished more. For every memorable experience I’d had, he’d had two. For all the sparkling, witty, unforgettable people I’d known, he’d known three. I would never write a book as big and important and successful as Andersonville. He had, but in the end it stood only to remind me, like the “shattered visage” of Ozymandias buried in the endless stretch of desert sands, to look upon his mighty works, and despair.

  All of it had brought him to that ultimate destination; the stark room and those bleak syllables, jagged cliffs against which all hopes and dreams and sparkling memories dashed themselves to bloody bits. So what hope was there for me?

  This is what I’ve been pondering as I’ve worked, sorting through the sometimes eerie similarities and the stark contrasts of our two lives. On my side of the ledger, and I see now that I have my grandfather to thank for this, I have managed to live a rich life without leaving myself and my family in penury. As his financial disaster unfolded in Sarasota in 1977, I was beginning my own career. My grandfather’s nightmare example made me fiscally cautious, debt averse, eager to save and invest. When, thirty years later, the world changed out from under me, as it had from my grandfather, I was able to walk away from a profession that no longer fully valued what I valued, or at least was no longer willing to pay for those values. And though I, too, would face filing tax returns in some of these later years with disturbingly slender bottom lines, I had spent weeks in Spain instead of months, eaten grilled fish on the back porch instead of filet mignon at Delmonico’s, drove a budget rental car along the Pacific coast instead of sailed a luxury cruise ship across the Pacific. As a result I had also accumulated enough of a cushion—retirement accounts, pensions, annuities, extended-care insurance, and all the other tedious and unlovely instruments of responsible money management—that those lean years caused barely a shudder.

  Despite my grandfather’s spectacular paydays, I ended up more financially secure than him when it counted, and felt no poorer for the moderation of my spending—in part because I had also conserved my most important treasure, the love of my wife.

  Mack always insisted—to the point of titling his autobiography I Love You, Irene—that Irene Layne was the great love of his life, and I don’t disbelieve him, despite all I’ve learned. But I also have no doubt he’d squandered that love, as he had his other fortunes, through questing after the extravagant adventures of serial affairs. As his fame leached away, perhaps he understood that the same diminishing force had worked on the sustaining connection with Irene as well. When he was most alone, Irene’s affection was stained with bitterness.

  Was that what was horrible?

  Maybe, in part.

  There’s still that second “horrible,” and that’s the one that had worried me most—the physical destruction and permanent obliteration of the body and all the thoughts and memories it contained; the end of which no amount of anticipation, no manner of good living, no wisdom, no generosity of spirit, no love, not even the kind of immortality attained through fame or genius, could prevent. One day, it might well be me curled and tethered on that cart, croaking out grim tidings of my own.

  What my grandfather said in his hospital room that day has haunted me for years. It’s only been in these past months, reading through his life, that I’ve begun to think about it differently; to consider that, maybe, last words are less important than all the words that came before.

  EIGHTEEN

  That “little book” on the writing table at Finca Vigía on the day in 1951 when my grandfather visited, The Old Man and the Sea, won Ernest Hemingway the Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech, Hemingway said: “Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes . . . but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.”

  Hemingway had
a high degree of that alchemy. His work can be picked at, kicked around, reconsidered, but it is a long way from being forgotten. Even John D. MacDonald, a writer of the genre fiction my grandfather sneered at, produced enough alchemy that, thirty years after his death, Random House decided to republish his entire oeuvre.

  In early 1956 when Mack, still number one on the best-seller list, learned that he had lost out to John O’Hara for the National Book Award, he fired a message off to my mother.

  “Forget about that book award,” he wrote. “I ain’t worrying. Fifty years from now everyone will know Big A, and forgotten John O’Hara.”

  The literary legacy of O’Hara is debatable. But that’s the point. It is debated. Some may diss, or dismiss, him, but he is still a part of the conversation.

  I thought of that when I went searching for contemporary mentions of my grandfather, which are few, beyond the smattering of online reader reviews of a handful of his books. I came across a video of a 2008 Oprah interview with novelist Cormac McCarthy, who has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Oprah asks McCarthy about his trademark refusal to use quotation marks in dialogue.

  McCarthy responds that if you wrote something well enough, quotation marks were unnecessary. The first writer who showed him that, he says, was MacKinlay Kantor in “a very good book” called Andersonville. McCarthy pauses reflectively, then adds, “Now, there’s a writer people don’t know anymore.”

  Don’t tell that to the people in Webster City, Iowa.

  On the first day of my research trip there—I’d been coincidentally and conveniently invited to speak as part of a civic effort to “bring more awareness to MacKinlay Kantor in this area”—Lisa and I took a walk down the main street of the local business district, which looked eerily unchanged from the circa 1910 photo I had found in the Library of Congress files. In the first couple of blocks, we almost literally ran into a huge historical marker, suspended from steel girders thrusting from the sidewalk, featuring multiple images of my grandfather as a boy and a young man. Later, we were driven thirteen miles south of town to a lovely, tree-shaded park in a valley along a bend in the Boone River. Another historical marker informed us that we were on the grounds of what had been a grain mill purchased by Joseph Bone in 1867. The name MacKinlay Kantor once again figured prominently. As I read the small print about the history of the place, I skimmed over the names of the pioneer mill family—Joseph Bone, Evalyn Bone McKinlay, Adam McKinlay, Effie McKinlay—reading along casually until it struck bone.