The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  It’s difficult for me to believe she wouldn’t have been consumed with regret at having to leave the country when waiting just a few more days would have allowed her to be there for her daughter and new grandson. But I can’t know for sure how she felt; another unanswerable question on the long and growing list for those who are gone.

  In Mack’s view, the trip to Spain was no frivolous endeavor, but essential to accomplishing the herculean task of writing an epic, exhaustively researched, and historically accurate novel. Being abroad was the lubricant that allowed him to navigate the narrow passage between what was possible to accomplish and what was doomed to fail.

  “I followed the same plan of work in Europe,” he wrote, “writing daily wherever we happened to be. In all the hotels where we stopped I had a table in our room or suite—if weather or other circumstances precluded my going out in the car, as in London or Madrid. Normally, however, I worked in the car along roads and in lonely woodlands of Britain, France, and especially Spain, where we spent most of the year. . . . To suggest how these long books get written, you can conjure up a picture of me sitting resolutely in the Hyde Park Hotel before my typewriter all day long. Imagine—in London, one of my very favorite cities! However, I emerged from my cell each night and we went to the theater and had fun, saw friends at dinner. . . .”

  I knew that feeling of resolutely sitting, lead-butted, before the keyboard, letting entire days pass, the world going on without you as you struggled along—all the while worrying that your sacrifice was for nothing. How much harder would it be with the enticing bustle of London or Paris or Madrid just beyond your door?

  As I thought about it, I realized that the ability to force yourself to sit against all fears of failure and urges to flee is what separates those who can successfully complete a substantial work—of fiction or nonfiction—and those who, although possibly more talented, cannot. I began to remember things that I’d all but purged from my mind: for my first book, whose small advance demanded it be written while I continued my full-time newspaper job, I woke up every morning at two hours before dawn and sat grimly at a primitive computer in a closet-size room before a window that remained unyieldingly black against the harsh glare of a desk lamp. My eyeballs felt as if they had been rolled in sand, then reinserted in their sockets; bile bit the back of my throat. But somehow I kept forcing my fingers to move and the words to appear on the screen.

  For another book, I had to complete the research and writing, start to finish, in four months. I worked seven days a week, often twelve hours a day, more as I crashed toward deadline with thousands of words left to write. My eyes would begin to close, my head would nod forward. I’d shake my head, but when that didn’t do the job, I’d slap myself to wake up enough to keep going. If nothing else, I discovered, I did have a talent for endurance.

  Though I would be unlikely to ever intentionally place myself in such extreme temptation as my grandfather did, perhaps I inherited, at least to a diluted degree, his ability to refuse to give up, or even get up, for long hours, day after day, week after week, month after month.

  I also recognized in him my strange affinity for writing alfresco. For my later books, when I’ve been able to work at them full-time, throughout the daylight hours, I prefer to set up my laptop on the back porch. Feeling the breeze, hearing the birds and the fluttering leaves, I don’t feel quite so cheated of the time that passes. I’m not hidden away from the day, but in it. And when my focus begins to break, I can simply stop and gaze at the clouds drifting, expanding, shape-shifting, or listen to far sounds of the wind, muffled car engines, and the nearer chirp of crickets or the tinkling of wind chimes. Sometimes my elderly neighbor, back behind a screen of trees, plays classical music just loud enough so that when the wind dies, the notes trickle in, more like something faintly remembered than an actual sound.

  Mack did me one better: He rented a house on a cliff near Torremolinos in Andalusia, Spain, loaded his car with a folding chair, typewriter, research materials, a woven market basket filled with fresh fruit, vegetables, cheese, bread, and a bottle of wine, then drove out into the countryside on a dirt track until he was sure only the braying of donkeys or the bleating of sheep could disturb him. Often, Irene would come with him and set up her easel and paints just out of eyeshot. The routine takes on flesh in a letter he typed on his folding desk chair on one such day. “I wish you folks could take your work on your laps, the way I can. I think I’ll knock off for a minute, take a little stroll up the hill and see how Irene is making out with her picture.”

  Then he types a long ellipsis to indicate a few minutes have passed and resumes. “She says that the sheep are disconcerting. The whole flock is circulating over this hillside and the orchards adjacent to the hacienda, and are controlled by a lame shepherd who can’t run after them, but who directs them by heaving rocks at them! Quite a literary renegade on the traditional Good Shepherd theme. . . .”

  By the time they sailed back to New York in October, Mack had written 175,000 words. That would be long for most novels. Mack was barely half finished.

  Around my first birthday, in April of 1955, World began to put the book into type to meet its May production deadline.

  “I still had a great deal of work to do,” Mack wrote, “and was at an almost unbearable point of tension. . . . I wrote 27,000 words in the last five days. My publishers were on the phone with me several times each day—listening, checking, advising, holding my spiritual hands and mopping my spiritual brow.”

  He finished the final paragraph on May 25. The last word he dictated to his secretary, sitting on the porch of his Siesta Key house, was Andersonville.

  “It was a little after four o’clock. We yelled for Irene; there was a certain amount of kissing; I think the women shed some tears; then we hastily poured out drinks, and I called Donald.”

  For me, finishing a book has always been a private moment, a rush of exhilaration and relief—it tends to take me by surprise. One second I’m typing along, just as I have been for months, and suddenly—nothing left to type. It takes a minute to sink in, to believe that I’ve really written the final sentence. Then maybe I’ll get up and find Lisa and tell her, “I’m done.” I know she won’t get it at first. Done for the day? Done as in “fed up”?

  “No. With the book. It’s finished.”

  Which she will be glad to hear, if only so she no longer has to listen to me whining all the time about how hard it is. Maybe we’ll go out to dinner to “celebrate.”

  So I read with a mixture of amusement and envy Mack’s description of what happened next.

  “We telephoned friends who had been waiting around with bated breath, and they started appearing at the house within a couple of hours. A lot of the folks had been preparing gifts. . . . I remember that Dick and Patty Martin bought a stockade composed of upright cigars carefully laced together . . . a silver-plate tray for Irene, designating her as a survivor of Andersonville, and a desk-lighter for me, with the circumstance and date engraved.”

  The idea of a circle of friends waiting by their phones—“with bated breath,” no less—for me to finish a book so they can rush over with elaborately themed gifts is beyond ludicrous. Though I have a handful of close friends, some of whom I’ve known for decades, only a few live nearby, none of whom are intimately aware of my writing schedule.

  It is a documented fact that people of the twenty-first century tend to have fewer close friends than people in the latter part of the twentieth—surveys then and now show an average of three close friends has dwindled to an average of two. But that doesn’t begin to cover this disparity. Forget an imagined swarm of admirers celebrating my accomplishments: I barely socialize at all. I regard party invitations with something close to dread.

  Compare that to an excerpt from a 1940s profile of my grandfather:

  It is impossible to convey through the medium of print the vivid and warm personality of Mac
Kinlay Kantor. Upon first meeting, he communicates instantly his robust quality of mind and spirit and his entry into a roomful of people is a challenge to be gay and interesting. . . .

  “If I can’t be with the people I like best all the time, I’ll take those I can get,” says Mack. “I like people and I’ve got to have them around me.”

  It raises at least the possibility that Mack didn’t like to be alone because he wasn’t comfortable in his own skin, which could also help explain his serial affairs, or even his compulsion to prove himself in combat.

  Another possibility: Maybe I am too comfortable in my own skin.

  Rereading my notes I came across something my grandfather wrote in one of his story collections that hit me with a shock of recognition, and some regret: “I wish that all writers might have as good of friends as I have owned and still own. Writing is a desperately lonely business. It is scarcely worth living for in itself. But friends help to keep you going.”

  By any measure, though, the spontaneous outpouring that greeted the completion of Andersonville bears no comparison to my experience, and perhaps can be explained by a simple fact that would be proven out dramatically in the coming months. The book was in fact a huge achievement.

  That’s certainly how Mack saw it.

  As he neared the end of his labor, he wrote this in a “Dear Everyone” letter:

  I thought I had known exhaustion and depletion before, and here, at the age of fifty-one, I find myself struggling with a burden I couldn’t have attempted to shoulder when I was writing Long Remember twenty-two years ago! I suppose old men shouldn’t get ambitious. And sometimes, wracked and sleepless at night, I wish to hell that I hadn’t. Of course the book is so good that frankly it seems to me that I must not have written it. It somehow captivates everyone who reads it. . . . There hasn’t been anything remotely resembling it in the annals of American historical fiction. Everyone has to go back to War and Peace for comparison.

  If he didn’t say so himself.

  But I have to wonder if that extreme faith in himself, bordering on egomania—I believe in you as I believe in a supreme being—wasn’t precisely what gave him the power to push through all the monstrous doubts and fatigue that stop so many in their tracks, regardless of talent.

  In this case, anyway, his absurd level of self-belief turned out to be not simply his own opinion, but the world’s.

  FIFTEEN

  I have written or cowritten five books and have been the editor on three times that many. Over the years, dozens of my friends have published books. Some have big names, but most have been relative unknowns. I would say every single one of them has had dreams—dreams they wouldn’t admit to—that their book would become a number one best seller. I know I have. I also know it will never happen.

  A few years back, Huff Post media blogger BJ Gallagher ran a memo sent to her by a book publisher listing “ten awful truths” about book publishing. From an author’s point of view, they were more like plot points in a slasher flick: More than three million new books are published every year, and every new book is competing with ten million existing books. Even including e-books, total sales of all book formats are declining. A hundred to a thousand books compete for every open spot on a bookstore shelf. The average nonfiction book sells fewer than 250 copies a year, and fewer than 3,000 copies in its lifetime.

  And yet, the fantasy is that your book will be different, defy the odds, catch a wave, strike a chord, and somehow become a cultural phenomenon. In the dream, there might be a short drumroll, a few hints that something big is about to happen. And then—bam!—the book blasts off like a rocket, and there you are, sitting atop the best-seller lists.

  As I began to wade through the voluminous correspondence concerning Andersonville from Mack’s editor, publisher, and publicists at World Publishing, I felt as if I were stepping into my wildest fantasies.

  “So Andersonville is finished, and ready for the ages!” World’s publisher Bill Targ wrote on May 25, 1955. “I feel something historical about this day. . . . No matter what happens, you’ve written the biggest, the most moving novel I’ve read by any American (excepting perhaps Moby Dick).”

  That’s some drumroll. And then, blast off.

  Paperback rights were purchased for $75,000. Book-of-the-Month Club paid $30,000 to make Andersonville its main selection. Reader’s Digest bought the rights to one chapter for $35,000. Then the real money came in: Columbia Pictures paid $250,000 for the movie rights. That was very close in inflation-adjusted value to the $135,000 that Hemingway had gotten sixteen years earlier for the rights to For Whom the Bell Tolls, which at the time was the most ever paid for movie rights to a novel. Altogether, the various rights for Andersonville totaled $390,000—the equivalent of $3.5 million today—before the first book was printed.

  In September, after Mack had labored through all the galleys, all 768 pages of them, he and Irene, soon to have what for them would be unimaginable wealth, went off to Europe, supposedly to recoup, though they both got terribly ill and had to hole up in a hotel. “Run down, weak, giving colds back and forth to each other—oh this has been the sheerest misery. We have not been able to enjoy one single solitary moment of contemplation of all the success won by Big A.”

  Not to worry, they’d have plenty of further opportunity to do so. By midmonth, finally on the mend, he was cheered by this note from Donald Friede: “There now begins a feeling of mounting excitement and anticipation. It’s a wonderful feeling, and it cannot be counterfeited. . . . How we both live for things like this—and how rarely they happen. . . . We have the rare knack of enjoying and milking every last drop of excitement.”

  For once, a singular rarity in publishing, the giddy reading of prepublication tea leaves barely measured up to the reality.

  Look magazine wrote a glowing feature about the book, calling the outrageous-for-1955 quarter-of-a-million-dollar movie rights purchase “not too high a price.”

  By the end of October, Friede’s wife and World’s marketing director, Eleanor Kask Friede (Donald’s sixth and last wife, who would gain eternal publishing fame as the person who saw something in an eighteen-times rejected manuscript about a spiritual seagull named Jonathan Livingston and ended up with one of the best-selling books of all time), wrote to Mack: “I hear that over at the New York Times Book Review office they have a pool, like a baseball pool where everyone gets a number, on which week you, or rather BIG A, will replace Marjorie Fallingstar as #1.”

  Marjorie Fallingstar was wordplay, a derisive reference to Herman Wouk’s novel Marjorie Morningstar, what a twenty-first-century critic would call his “bloated but entertaining” novel about a beautiful young Jewish woman who discovers that a glamorous life is a life of sorrow, and that it was much better to marry a nice Jewish doctor after all. It totally captivated women readers of the day, who made it an instant best seller, until an unrelentingly bleak novel about man’s inhumanity to man miraculously began to overtake it, just in time for the holidays.

  On December 20, Donald Friede wrote to Mack, “And a Merry Christmas to you—oh best-selling author in the United States of America! For that is what you are today—even though the Times still has you at #2. All other papers—and all the bookstores—say that you are the #1 seller. We cannot stop shipping, or billing, long enough to run up daily totals, but you must be mighty close to 110,000 copies sold, if not over. . . .”

  The last redoubt, the New York Times list, fell on the first Sunday of the new year, 1956, when Andersonville began a long reign at number one and remained near the top of the list throughout the year.

  I found an earnings statement for November 1956 that detailed Andersonville’s sales and earnings eighteen months after publication: 175,000 copies of the book sold, from which my grandfather netted $130,000, the equivalent of well over $1 million today. The sales would continue (at a steadily diminishing rate) for years to come—for the original e
dition and for subsequent paperback editions for which it might be impossible to get exact numbers. I do know that one day, sixty years later, I arrived home from my research at the Library of Congress to find in my mailbox a modest check for Andersonville royalties for a paperback edition that still sells about a thousand copies a year. Its sales numbers were indeed exceptional, especially considering the book’s length and weightiness. But to put it in perspective against a book that remains, unlike Andersonville, world famous a half century after publication: Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls sold three times as well, a half-million copies within months of publication. (Andersonville would eventually reach the half-million-sales mark—if I can believe my grandfather’s own accounting in a 1972 letter, in which he claims 500,000 hardcover copies eventually sold and “in the millions” of cheap mass-market paperback books.)

  At any rate, nobody involved with Andersonville was complaining. While the money poured in, so did the accolades. The superlative (“the greatest of our Civil War novels”) on the front of The New York Times Book Review was echoed around the country:

  “The best Civil War novel without any question.”

  —The Chicago Tribune

  “Will give Civil War buffs their greatest hours since Gone with the Wind.”

  —Time

  “No one who reads it will ever forget it.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  Now, even in Europe, American tourists recognized Mack from his newspaper profiles and book-jacket photo and approached him for autographs. So many letters flooded in—fan mail, requests for appearances, people soliciting the newly rich author for investments or charity—that his sister, Virginia, volunteered to reduce the incoming post to the most interesting and important pieces before sending them on to Mack.