The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Occasionally I get a letter from Barbara. She’s so erratic. I think she is still in love with me, despite her marriage, and that is very stupid. As for the other one—Ginny—I am told that she is very happy, although I don’t know her married name.

  Mack’s letters made it clear, or at least possible, that he believed his adventures had not ultimately damaged his marriage—Irene remained the “most desirable woman I’ve ever known,” the one he would always come home to.

  It frustrated me, as details of Mack’s long history of adultery revealed themselves, that though I was getting an astonishingly intimate glimpse inside my grandfather’s mind, I could never get even the slightest sense of how Irene saw things. I assumed it all had been horribly destructive to her, but was I in fact being narrow-minded?

  And then I visited Webster City.

  Lisa and I stayed in an old mansion, restored as a bed-and-breakfast, just a block away from what had once been the home of Adam and Evalyn McKinlay, where Effie Kantor raised her two children. Glorious in my grandfather’s memory, this was the place where he heard his father’s voice for the first confusing time through the receiver of a telephone, where he wrote his first short story and completed his first novel. To us, it appeared to be little more than a shack, paint shedding from the once whitewashed siding, weeds encroaching where a lilac-covered arbor had stood a century ago, sheltering Mack as he wrote in fine weather. We’d been told that until recently the house had been inhabited by a hoarder, stuffed floor to ceiling with junk. Now it stood empty—except for the junk, which still filled the rooms where Effie once played the piano and Mack sifted wonderingly through the bag containing buttons from his great-grandfather’s Civil War uniform. I circled the house, hoping for some sense of magic, but all I got was an overwhelming blast of melancholy.

  Webster City, population nine thousand, is no bigger than it was in 1904. What had been a prosperous farming and business community when my grandfather was a boy gradually hollowed out, losing almost all of its industry. Oddly, the declining downtown still contains an absolute gem of a public library, donated by Kendall Young, a wealthy nineteenth-century cattleman, and completed the year after my grandfather was born, with no expense spared. The large, two-story beaux arts building has gold marble columns imported from Africa, mosaic terrazzo floors, and stained glass coloring both large windows and an impressive dome. My grandfather, never an avid student, always said this was where he got his education. And now the library has a room set aside to contain a collection of his books, and letters that the Library of Congress is missing.

  Some of them had been donated to the library by Dick Whiteman after Mack died. Perhaps nobody screened the letters before handing them over, or maybe whoever did decided that, given that everyone involved was dead, there was no reason to hold back.

  I was glad for that lack of discretion. Because, finally, here was the smoking gun, the clear evidence of the impact on Irene of Mack’s philandering, and it wasn’t pretty.

  Addressed to “Friends in the Know,” Mack described a tour of France during which Irene won a bet for “a unit,” as they called it, giving her the right to set the day’s itinerary, compelling her husband to range far afield to a small town with a four-star restaurant she’d seen in a guidebook. Mack grudgingly obliged, but ended up enjoying the meal.

  Come morning, Irene was morbid and kinda sullen, so I says Whatsa matter? . . . She said: Well, I dreamed about—Ugh, how could you?

  How could I what?

  You were writing to That Creature again!

  Which Creature? (Since there have been a galaxy of Creatures in my life, I can be pardoned for being obtuse. But she always has a most fearful intonation when she says those two words.)

  The one out in Los Angeles. Nasty little thing . . .

  Oh, Barbara?

  No, no, no . . . That nasty Ginny. Ugh . . . dreamed you were corresponding again, then you were meeting her and then . . . What a horrible woman!

  By no means. I was very much in love with her, once. How could I not be? You were in love with Hark; I was shopping around, met Ginny. . . . We had perfectly marvelous times together, until she got so disturbed . . . so jealous of You, and my devotion to my family; she saw I would never get a divorce in order to marry her. . . .

  Ugh. What a ghastly dream I had! Well, I can tell you this: If I ever hear of your seeing That Creature again, I’ll . . .

  Mack assured her all was in the past, and went out to pay the hotel bill.

  So, there in the hitherto-unheard of town of Vienne, France, on the morning of 2 June, 1959, I closed the door, walked about eleven steps, saw a woman with dark glasses, heard her scream my name—And there I stood, face to face with . . . Ginny.

  It was an odd feeling, holding that letter in my hands, knowing it would forever change the way I remembered my grandparents, and feeling a retrospective pity for my grandmother, both for a life of almost total dependency, and the pain of maintaining this illusion of a storied, everlasting romance.

  I thought about something that had hovered in the back of my mind, a slight uneasiness I had felt when I noticed that in almost every “Dear Everyone” letter my grandfather wrote, he’d go on at great length about his doings, catch up about the kids, then the grandkids, and then finally close with a paragraph about Irene. It was always about her painting . . . “having fun this week with water colors” . . . “doing some of the best work of her life” . . . “sold two paintings last month” . . .

  Now I realized why it bothered me: It seemed too pat, a little patronizing, part of the elaborate maintenance of the myth of equal partnership, both creative and sexual. It was a myth that suited Mack’s purposes. My uncle wrote that his father “thought it was wonderful that she was exercising what he privately, only privately, considered to be her modest gift, and so he praised each painting she made. ‘Irene! That’s magnificent!’ And she would pause, eyes straining at the canvas; the brush held, uncertain, in her hand.”

  I put the “Creature” letter back in its folder and returned it to its rightful place in the MacKinlay Kantor collection of the Kendall Young Library. I exited into the main library and turned to leave. I walked about eleven steps when something caught my eye. There on the wall was an oil painting, a scene of a nun in a white habit walking down an unpaved street in a Spanish village. The colors are muted, somehow dyspeptic, and the houses to either side tilt inward. It’s all a little dizzy and claustrophobic. The nun’s eyes seem empty, holes in her soul.

  I recognized the style, and glanced at the artist’s signature in the lower right corner: Irene Layne Kantor, 1954.

  —

  Believe it or not, I’ve so far omitted what could be the most significant of my grandfather’s affairs, mostly because it takes some telling.

  The night eighteen-year-old Tim Kantor sat in a bar “celebrating” his first sexual experience, when he got over the shock of his father’s revelation, he remembered a time in his early childhood when Mack announced, “Now I’m going to take you to see one of the loveliest women in New York.”

  This lovely woman was Peggy Pulitzer, born Margaret Leech, the newly widowed second wife of Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of The New York World newspaper and heir to the great publishing fortune of Joseph Pulitzer. “Lovely” was no exaggeration. She had lustrous brown hair; a flawless peaches-and-cream complexion; large, luminous, wide-set eyes; and a perfectly proportioned nose and mouth—beauty saturated with a grave intelligence. She was ten years Mack’s senior, and an accomplished writer in her own right: three well-received novels and a best-selling biography of New York anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, cowritten with legendary journalist Heywood Broun, to her credit. She was accomplished and clever enough that she became a recognized member of the famous Algonquin Round Table, which, if nothing else, indicated she could hold her own among the sharpest, wittiest conversationalists in America.

  Tim
’s childhood visit with Mack to her home—which Tim chose to remember as a perfect echo of the time John Kantor took little Mack to see Sophie Tucker, “the most lovely woman in Chicago”—can be dated by Tim’s age in the anecdote: six. That would make it 1939, the same year Mack had met the hot Costa Rican babe aboard the ship to Central America, and the same year he’d taken his solo apartment in New York—allegedly because he couldn’t write in Sarasota.

  Based on the dates of letters Mack had kept in a file marked, ambiguously, PULITZER, Mack and Peggy had been having an affair since 1936, when Peggy was researching her first solo book of nonfiction, an ambitious reconstruction of the Civil War in Washington, DC. To do so required daunting amounts of research at the Library of Congress, something at which Mack was already an expert. He had begun his prodigious sessions at the Library years earlier while researching Long Remember, and continued them for another Civil War novel that followed called Arouse and Beware, the tale of two escapees from a Confederate prison. As one reviewer said of the book, “There is, as with Long Remember, a note of authenticity in the manner and matter of telling.”

  No wonder. When Mack decided one of his characters would swim across the James River in early March under cover of darkness, he drove to Virginia and, in the middle of the night, found the location that matched his story, stripped off his clothes, and plunged in, banging against rocks and shuddering in the cold: “I thought to myself, you could get killed this way.”

  He had also consumed the kind of maggot-ridden food prisoners at Andersonville would have eaten. These stunts aside, most of the authenticity in his historical novels owed itself to the countless hours he’d spent in his private study carrel at the Library of Congress.

  When Mack wasn’t in DC researching, he was gadding about New York in literary venues, and sure to have rubbed up against his Algonquin peers if not been invited to sit at the table himself on occasion. It’s easy to imagine that, if so, he would have paid especial interest to members of the female persuasion. That speculation isn’t much of a stretch considering Mack’s description of his lunches with his publisher Tim Coward at that other famous venue for publishing types, the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel.

  He was an inveterate gossip; so was I, and how we loved to sit at the corner table and chew over everything which had happened in the past week or month—which had befallen us or had befallen others whom we knew. Wearying of this gentle sport, we would then privately, and with due meditation, appraise the ladies sitting nearby, then each would come up with his selection A) for marriage B) for a solitary week-end upon some tropical island C) a one night stand, pure and simple. . . . All the time the poor innocent women would be laughing and chattering or drinking and dining utterly unaware of this profanation. . . . We were children at these times, sophomores if you will, but we were reasonably healthy and reasonably happy and we both had good imaginations.

  He clearly didn’t always stop at imagining things. Between Mack’s good looks and rising talent, and the happy fact that he had lots to teach about research and the Civil War, Peggy, a sophisticate if there ever was one, must have either overlooked the mile-wide sophomoric streak in him or found it somehow endearing, presenting the intriguing challenge of polishing the rough edges off this boyish man with so much potential.

  In any case, the letters make it clear that she accepted that charge with relish, and pleasure.

  “Not the least of the things that have happened in the last year is, for me, the ability to excite your mind a little sometimes,” she wrote to him. “I don’t mean dragging you to Othello, or putting on a disk of Beethoven, though they have a relation to what I mean. But I like to strike an occasional spark from those dim recesses. . . . It’s not completely different from the excitement of sex, just the same sort of emotion permitted to invade the entire personality.”

  Mack had never been to college, never even read some of the classics of literature. It was Peggy who urged him to read Tolstoy, the Russian master whose ability to write about characters in vast historic panoramas as if he had access to X-rays of their souls wowed Mack. In a letter from that same year to Virginia, Mack reported, “Have read Of Human Bondage and The Way of All Flesh this summer. Am now boring stubbornly and willingly under the vast weight of humanity in War and Peace.”

  So, progress! In one letter, Peggy wrote: “Sweetheart, you’ve got the makings of a great person, and I like the way you’re doing.”

  What would it take to mold those “makings” into the man Peggy imagined?

  Well, they had plenty of opportunity to practice the polishing, with both of them making trips to DC to labor at research in the Jefferson building.

  (That research, carried on periodically over the course of two decades and several books, would result in both authors winning Peggy’s father-in-law’s little literary prize. In 1942, Peggy would become the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for history for Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865, and eighteen years later would become the only woman ever to win that prize twice. Given her married name, it’s necessary to add that, sixty years after that first award, prominent book critic Jonathan Yardley wrote, “No one who has read Reveille in Washington can believe that the prize was won on anything except merit.”)

  In those early days, when all such accolades were yet undreamed of, Mack and Peggy spent their time dreaming of each other. After one joint research trip in 1938, soon after a novelette by Mack called Writing in the Sky had been published in The Saturday Evening Post, Peggy wrote, elliptically but evocatively:

  “The yellow church on the corner brings back a luminous grey morning, with all the branches wet and black and the girls hurrying their way to work. The writing on the sky says Mack. It’s a miracle.”

  For all I knew, Peggy was referring to somewhere in New York, but living in Washington, I instantly thought of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square, near the White House, which every president since James Madison has attended at least once, for no other reason than that it is the most strikingly yellow church on a corner I know. This thought was nothing more than passing fancy, of course, until I came across a note in Mack’s short story collection mentioning that when he was conducting research at the Library of Congress in 1937 he stayed at the Hay-Adams hotel, which is . . . directly across the street from St. John’s.

  I found it easy to imagine the two of them, steeped in pheromones, inhabiting that snow-globe world unique to completely entwined lovers, cosseted in the lovely Italian Renaissance confines of the Hay-Adams, with its vaults and arches and dentil moldings and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the yellow church on the corner.

  It took me a surprisingly long time to realize just why it was so easy for me to imagine, and so vivid in the imagining. In some nearly forgotten time decades ago—a moment that might as well have been another life—I met a woman under similar circumstances: illicit rendezvous, cozy historic hotel, research trip to Washington. Okay, identical circumstances: She was also a writer, introduced to me when we had both been awarded the same prize for our work. Such an odd, chill-inducing parallel served well enough to remind me how little standing I had to judge my grandfather harshly.

  In my grandfather’s case, it’s clear that Peggy, older and wiser, never imagined that their “miracle” would ever include them leaving their spouses for each other, even after she was widowed in June 1939. She saw his marriage—which no doubt in frankness, Mack would have characterized as a happy one—and their age difference as net positives:

  It is even an advantage that our birthdays are so disparate, for the high unsuitability of our ages frees us, without the restless intrusion of hope, to preserve the quality of our love. Does that sound like a lot of words? I mean that it is normal for two people who love each other deeply to look forward to that fulfillment which must be the end of romance. Well, we have our romance, and are permitted to keep it longer than more fortunate lovers do.

 
It didn’t turn out to be all that long. In 1939, she wrote him one last letter as his lover—there would be other letters through the remaining decades of his life, but they would be polite, distantly fond. Obviously, she had grown weary of her pupil lagging behind.

  You are at a Parting of the Ways, and, though startlingly undeveloped, won’t be able to keep on growing up—even you!—much after thirty-five. So unless you take a brace and look about you and associate with people of more background and broadmindedness and procure a modicum of education and get curious and take some cognizance of the great culture of Western Europe, on which everything we have and are is based and which until now you have tossed aside like an old brochure on the wall-paintings of Southern Tibetan lamaseries, as something too esoteric and unrelated to your experience, as well as too complex and formidable, as well as something you don’t feel quite up to bothering with, like typhoid fever shots—I say, taking a long breath, unless you do all these things and set about them hard this very afternoon, you are presently going to turn into one of those elderly Pucks, those superannuated Peter Pans, these elfin, quaint, dear old special Characters, who grow old without ever having grown up.

  It was a snooty and insulting (also literate and amusing) takedown. Certainly, it was memorable—how many breakup letters have you gotten from a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer? But perhaps the most amazing thing about that letter is that Mack kept it—this brilliant lecture on his immaturity—ripped from the rest of the letter, folded and tucked into an envelope marked PEGGY in that no longer so ambiguous PULITZER file.

  THIRTEEN

  As most of America languished in the Depression through the mid-1930s, my grandfather prospered. Though the books that followed Long Remember and The Voice of Bugle Ann would not become top sellers, between continuing book royalties and advances, movie-option deals, and ever-increasing rates for short stories, he managed to make $35,000 in 1937, which incredibly is the equivalent of about $600,000 today. In 1938, he made $27,000 ($460,000 equivalent).