The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Maybe those ancient photos didn’t do her justice. In any case, she indeed became more comely with increasing age—her face and figure grew rounded but never heavy, the green eyes that showed only gray in the photos sparkled intelligently under perfectly arched eyebrows and hair colored to a polished bronze. My mother told me that her parents’ romance had always come first, even before her and Tim. They traveled the world together, leaving the kids behind with a succession of nannies, boarding schools, and summer camps. (“Don’t worry about the kids, because we’re not going to,” Mack wrote to friends when he and Irene were boarding a ship for a months-long trip to Europe the year Tim turned four.) They attended glamorous parties, exiting the house in a swirl of pipe tobacco, silk, and Chanel. To balance the writer’s lair on the southern end of their house, they built a high-ceilinged studio on the north end where my grandmother worked in oils and watercolors. She eventually got good enough for her paintings to appear in juried art shows and sell occasionally to private collectors. Enthroned in their creative redoubts, they were two oppositely charged poles of a battery that kept the electricity flowing, figuratively, and also literally through the wires of the intercom that crackled from studio to studio.

  I remember more than once cringing as an adolescent when my grandfather very pointedly announced he was retiring for a midafternoon “nap,” then minutes later impatiently began calling—“Reno! Reno!”—from the bedroom. They would have both been pushing seventy then.

  So the casual, jovial reference to a shipboard dalliance—and in a letter to his sister, no less—floored me.

  I had only to read deep into my uncle’s memoir to see this letter was no fluke. When Tim was eighteen, he says, he confessed to his father that he had recently lost his virginity. Mack’s response: celebrate with drinks at the neighborhood bar.

  Tim’s account of their remembered conversation is clearly created, not actual. But even stripped of Tim’s probable embellishments, it is astounding enough.

  Mack begins: “You know, sex is wonderful. It’s a hell of a lot of fun, as you’ve discovered. And . . . most real men need women. And no matter how much we love a particular woman, many of us can’t be satisfied with just one. Man’s a hunting animal.”

  Then Mack leveled his still teenage son with the revelation that, though “I love [your mother] more than any other woman I have ever found” and Irene is “the most desirable woman I have ever known . . . I’ve screwed a lot of other babes as well. Hundreds. . . .

  “To court a pretty babe, to charm her, win her, and have her laughter and her flesh to comfort you during the empty nights . . . is one of the greatest joys in this world.”

  Even if Tim embroidered his father’s actual words, no doubt he captured his attitude. “He once told me,” Tim wrote, “that he’d been faithful to my mother during the first years of their marriage. ‘For four long years,’ he said, ‘I never even looked at another woman. . . . But your mother was so goddamned jealous. After every party we went to Irene would be all over me. “What did you say to this girl? Why were you talking to that one?” . . . Finally I decided that, if she was going to be jealous anyway . . .’”

  In other words, “Look what you made me do!”

  I later found something Mack himself had written, a more elevated view—if even more shocking for its mention of a possibility of divorce—reflecting on the innocence of the early days in his young marriage: “Of the strains which dissolve most early marriages among creative folk we held no awareness, no indication that such exertion would come snapping into our lives. Neither of us had ever looked at another with desire since the moment we met. In ignorance we assumed calmly that we never would. We had not one inkling of those complex passions which baffle the mature of our kind, and which would goad us to the brink of divorce again and again.”

  So: This wasn’t just about men being men, driven to the hunt by their masculine nature. It was about the complex passions of creative people. It was about his needs as an artist. Or so he told himself.

  Ever since the first photos of Mack had appeared in newspaper stories about his literary success, he’d fit the part of the tall, dark, romantic poet—sensitive yet entirely manly. He had thick, abundant hair, like his father, only far less absurdly unruly; a smooth, broad forehead; those hooded, penetrating eyes; a full, firm jaw; and, despite his gimpy leg, a tall, lean, athletic figure. He inhabited an age in which literary novelists became full-fledged celebrities—especially if, like Hemingway, they exuded the masculine energy that suggested a world of adventurous activities not remotely related to the reality of sitting around in an empty room all day pressing keys on a typewriter. That trifecta of looks, image, and success made it certain that no shortage of women would find him attractive. It couldn’t have hurt to have inherited his father’s mesmerizing gift of gab. And having grown up with a mother who worshipped him, Mack no doubt felt that an unlimited ration of female attention was his due.

  There was nothing to be ashamed of! He was forthright, honest, merely expressing his true nature, the true nature of manly men.

  The day I discovered the Costa Rica letter, I told a friend about it, who said, “He was a complete narcissist! You are lucky you didn’t inherit that trait.”

  Hmm.

  As easy as it was for me to scorn the narcissism, the selfish and careless way he handled the people he claimed to love most, I found myself forced to face an uncomfortable truth. I had been that guy, once, many years ago. Although I was not the classic tall, dark, handsome lothario who drew attention in a packed bar as Mack almost certainly did (I am five nine, not six one, for one thing), in close quarters I did have an intensity of focus that conveyed sincerity and depth. It was not an act. I did not put out some glib line. When I turned my focus on a woman it was because I was truly interested in her, in who she was and how she thought, not just romancing her—though, often that, too. And women responded. I could sense the effect it was having, like a tractor beam, drawing them in. Who knows, maybe it was the last diluted magic descended from John Kantor’s ability to mesmerize large crowds.

  I recognized something deeply familiar in Mack’s self-interested enthusiasm for women. You often hear that womanizers act out of antipathy more than desire, and I’m sure that’s often true. But Mack belonged to a class of philanderers motivated by an abundance of appreciation for women. Like him, I loved the thrill of discovery, the peeling of the layers down to the intimate core, both intellectual and physical. And I wanted to believe that this was mutual exploration, nothing selfish about it. I remember trying to persuade a college girlfriend that jealousy, not promiscuity, was the real problem; that feelings of love could never be a bad thing, wherever they might lead, even if that was to other lovers.

  But by the time I found the woman I wanted as my lifelong partner, I had learned, through pain and with great difficulty, that what I really most desired, and needed, was not an unending series of lovers, but one human being in the world I could unquestioningly trust with my most naked self, all barriers relaxed, knowing that she would forever have my back, as I would have hers. And I knew in my gut, sure enough to act on it, that if you were lucky enough to find that person, the one person in whom you could imagine having infinite faith, nothing gained in another relationship could possibly outweigh what would forever be lost.

  Mack remained focused on what he could gain and didn’t worry so much about the cost—especially the cost to Irene, who at times, I discovered, he felt to be crimping his social style by being the type who was “reserved, somewhat distant, and never put themselves forward to get acquainted.”

  On the second page of the letter from Costa Rica he casually describes Irene left at home alone, dealing not only with the kids and the famously insane-making preparations for Christmas, but also laboring to furnish a new house with an insufficient budget (“too hard up at the moment” to afford store-bought curtains, Mack reported, leaving Irene to ma
ke them herself). “No doubt she is up to her ears,” Mack told his sister, apologizing for the fact that her Christmas present might be late. “Irene may be able to handle it single-handed, but don’t count on it; she’s a wonderful gal who has a hard time doing the routine things that other people (some not so wonderful) find very easy to do.”

  A comment that would be infuriatingly dismissive and patronizing in any circumstances becomes almost unbearably so, considering that while Irene labored at domesticity Mack was kicking back in the eternal Costa Rican summer, still simmering from his “fleeting, provocative shipboard thing” with the señora.

  If the Costa Rican was one of the “hundreds” of Mack’s dalliances (Tim says Mack later amended that number to “many”), at least she merited mention in a letter. Unless his claims were outrageously exaggerated, the great majority of Mack’s women went undocumented—casual flings consumed and forgotten. But, I discovered, at least a handful of these relationships had been quite serious.

  One letter caught my attention at first for other reasons. Mack, routinely reciting family news, mentioned “Layne and Bill,” my mother and father. They were “blissfully happy,” he said, and spoke of nothing but their baby son (my brother, Michael) and the near completion of the house they were building in Scarsdale—the house I would spend the first fourteen years of my life in. “All you can hear is Mike and the house, the house and Mike,” he wrote, and then added as an afterthought: “Also talk of another small Shroder they expect to start manufacturing in the spring.”

  That would be me. Undoubtedly the first mention of my (potential) existence ever put to paper.

  The letter was written to someone I’d never heard of, a woman my grandfather addressed as “Ginny-wabbit” (and in another letter, “Ginny Angel”). I wasn’t puzzled for long. After he announced my near existence he wrote:

  Ah, me. Kids are wonderful. How I wish life had let you have your own. Better than that, I would have had it that I, by circumstance, could have guv them to you.

  Right now I wish you were sitting in the chair by the window telling me all sorts of gossip and yarns and making your mulish laughter. Better than that, I wish that Riverside were in the immediate future, and not many months in the past. First chance I ever get to strike a deadly blow at California again, maybe we could take a trip or something or something—IF you could subtract yourself from your regular existence. There is no ignoring the fact that we profit, each to the other and for the other. To you, my eternal respect and joy and admiration and appreciation: spell it L-U-V.

  I assumed that “Riverside” referred to a town in Southern California where they met for a tryst. Less ambiguous was a passage in a letter he wrote to his friend Dick Whiteman. “Ginny was here: we had about eight days together, and despite the failing currency in my private coffer, we flew to Cuba for two or three marvelous days.”

  All the above would have been enough—a long-term, substantial relationship carried on with passion (obviously), expenditure of scarce resources (by implication), and great regret at what could not be (explicitly).

  It didn’t stop there. A paragraph at the bottom of page 2 of the letter to Ginny sheds light on the particularly murky mystery of Irene’s role in Mack’s meanderings, if “sheds light on” can be taken to mean blasting it with a white-hot klieg.

  “Irene is painting calmly and steadily and with all determined passion,” he tells Ginny-wabbit. “Her water colors are really going places. She has sold two—no, maybe three—within the past few weeks. . . . She has a lot to give and tell, and only her own sense of inferiority has restrained her. Certainly it’s a lot smoother, domestically speaking and from my standpoint, to have her heart and soul occupied by painting than by some guy like Hark. She goes out at times when I am away, but there are no longer any conflicts or demands or affirmations between us: just a contemplative and harmonious relationship.”

  A guy like Hark?

  From another letter, I discovered that Hark was the nickname of an Air Force officer whom Mack would fly with in World War II and remain close friends with after the war. When I did some basic research on Hark, something puzzling emerged. He was fifteen years younger than Mack (and fourteen years younger than Irene). Could that be right?

  Apparently it was.

  My uncle said he remembered Hark staying at their apartment in New York when Mack was away. Hark was by then a loan officer at a bank—a career progression Mack would base one of his most memorable characters on, and in turn be immortalized in the history of American film. What Tim remembers from those visits is Hark staying up late talking to Irene. When Tim awoke in the middle of the night, he’d find Hark asleep on the other bed in his room, and in the morning they’d all have breakfast. Except, a few times he woke up in the middle of the night, long past midnight, listening for the sound of conversation. Nothing: a silent house, and the other bed still empty.

  This sent me hustling to the Library of Congress index. Sure enough, Hark merited his own file folder. The letters ranged from 1944 until his very premature death at forty-three in the 1960s.

  The early letters reflect a glib-talking relationship between Hark and Mack in which they come off as old frat brothers. Talking about a trip Mack took to Havana that apparently was less than satisfactory, Hark says, “I warned you about a visit to that fabled city with your family. It is rather better accomplished alone, as are the opportunities for compounding the felonies which in turn make the penicillin or sulfa or Bloody Marys all the sweeter, to say nothing of the memories and the mammaries.”

  Then there are several letters that would have been extremely puzzling if I hadn’t known Tim’s stories of Hark spending extended time with Irene while Mack was away. They were chatty accounts of Hark’s adventures with Irene in Mack’s obvious absence. Just one example:

  “I seem to have collapsed into a state of almost uninterrupted siesta. Irene has borne the overdose of sheer boredom with the most unflagging patience. . . . I can guarantee nothing more constructive for next week, although at the first sign of combat fatigue I am prepared to rush her into town for dinner.”

  If it is not a smoking gun, evidence of 1) an affair, and 2) an open marriage sort of relationship, with the knowledge and consent of the absent husband who possibly handpicked one of his closest friends to be the other man, it is damn close. Another letter comes even closer to revealing an “arrangement” gone bad, while still leaving room to wonder. Does the “blunder” in the following note refer to Mack arriving back home at an inopportune and compromising moment?

  Mack, I deeply regret not having written you sooner, the more so because our last meeting began as a blunder and ended in complete fiasco. For this I can offer only profound regrets, and if at this point you feel inclined to dismiss them, I hope you will do so without a sneer. As you already know, I have deep and abiding affection for you, which I reiterate. I hate to imagine that reciprocally it has gone down the drain, not ‘with a bang, but a whimper.’ . . . Between the lines was the perceptible suggestion of your own tacit (at least) acquiescence in all this.

  Ah, of course: Mack, at least in his own mind, was no ordinary philanderer, but a progressive, “creative type” who was open about his affairs and open-minded about the affairs of his wife—the “tacit (at least) acquiescence” Hark mentioned. That acquiescence bought him something: as he told Ginny-wabbit, an occupied Irene allowed for a much smoother go of it on the home front—and presumably made it easier for Mack to justify his various girlfriends. All good in theory, but in practice, well, it could lead to sneering and conflict. Better after all for Irene to lose herself in her painting rather than in one of Mack’s buddies.

  I unexpectedly discovered the ironic denouement of the Irene-Hark relationship in a 1951 letter my grandfather wrote to Dick Whiteman. I’ll let Mack tell it:

  Remember my old girl friend, the blond who used to be [my agent’s] secretary? At the time that she and I we
re especially friendly, I introduced her to Sid L. and Sid, in turn, introduced her to Hark. Believe it or not, she and Hark are now married. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?

  Mack managed, despite the tangled quadrangle of relationships, to remain friends with Hark, exchanging chatty, intimate letters, until Hark’s death in 1962. I’ll never know how Irene reacted to Hark’s marriage, or if she knew the bride had been a former girlfriend of her husband. All I know is that the entire soap opera situation was a recipe for agony—a reality Mack’s breezy recounting seems to miss completely.

  And as for Ginny-wabbit, that didn’t end as Mack had imagined, either. Another letter to Whiteman, this one from 1953:

  Have you run into Ginny anywhere? The damndest thing happened. When I was there in March ’52 relations were easy-goingly cordial. I didn’t write, as per usual, but last fall I wrote her [the “wish I could have guv you a baby” letter] and had Random House send her my two new books. Stopped in at Random on my way abroad and the guy in charge of shipping gave me a peculiar look, and produced the two books sent to Ginny. On the wrapper it said, “Refused by addressee.” Ain’t that something?

  I had to admit, it really was.

  Then he went on to his other California girlfriend: “As for the dainty Barbara, she up and married Dick Whats-his-name last spring. So I am fresh out of girlfriends when and if I get out your way.”

  As a postscript he added, “Irene has been painting like a whiz; she gets better & better.”

  Good for Irene. And good for Mack.

  Much later I found a further postscript in the California girlfriends saga in a letter from 1956, when he was fifty-two: