The Most Famous Writer Who Ever Lived

by Tom Shroder

  Nicholas Ray, director of Rebel Without a Cause, even cast him in a speaking role in a filmed-in-Florida movie—Wind Across the Everglades.

  “At first I thought I would do it only for kicks,” Mack wrote friends. “But to you I will admit privately that I now entertain the glimmering of ambition along this line.” During the glacially paced filming, he got to hang out with celebrity pals Burl Ives—the future Oscar winner whom Mack had helped get national recognition when he had been a little-known folksinger—Peter Falk, Christopher Plummer, Emmett Kelly, and Gypsy Rose Lee. All great fun, feeding his glimmer of Hollywood ambition, until he saw the movie’s premiere and discovered to his horror that all his lines had been dubbed in by another actor.

  So forget acting. Mack had serious writing to do, Great Writing, and he set to it, this time on his own timetable and employing researchers to help lighten the immense task. He’d written Andersonville in a year and a half; for this new book, he took five years, the entirety of his mid-fifties.

  “Yes dear ones, it is all done,” he wrote to Dick Whiteman and his wife in July of 1961. “The word length approaches five hundred thousand. I suppose that makes it the longest historical novel ever to be published in America.”

  He said it with pride—without a thought for how readers might react to a book that would run just short of a thousand pages. He’d quite intentionally doubled down on the success—and excess—of Andersonville. Son of Andersonville—its real title was Spirit Lake—was intended to do for the conflict between white settlers and Native Americans what Andersonville had done for the clash between North and South. Only more so. Scores of characters, each drawn in minute, historically accurate detail from their points of origin to where their fates collided in a grim little massacre that brought out the beastliness in all. Each individual became a tile in a grand mosaic of the westward expansion, complete with abundant lore and verse and song and customs elaborately described, for both whites and Sioux—who were depicted unromantically, but not without some sympathy and densely realistic detail. A columnist for the Sarasota paper recounted with awe that Mack not only read everything written on the Sioux, he made repeated visits to reservations in South Dakota and lived with tribe members, even learning their native language. In fact, all the characters in Spirit Lake spoke in archaic dialects and vehemently inhabited vanished worlds of the American past.

  Everyone involved with the book was giddy with excitement. If Andersonville had been big, this was bigger, and the bigger the better in all their estimation. The most tangible evidence of this enthusiasm was a first printing of one hundred thousand copies. Even before Mack had finished the book, paperback rights were purchased for a guarantee of $100,000 against future royalties—“an absolutely history-making deal,” Mack crowed, certain that the eventual earnings would be even greater than the guarantee once the book became a perennial best seller. A Book-of-the-Month Club endorsement, which would account for thousands of sales, seemed almost assured. (Mack reported: The book club manager called asking when the final proofs would be ready, saying, “No, we haven’t got any good novel for November, but we think we know where we can find one.”)

  This wasn’t just Mack self-enthusing. Friede told him that Andersonville had “just been a finger exercise” on the typewriter compared to Spirit Lake. World Publishing was committing a $50,000 advertising campaign—absolutely huge in 1961 terms—to launch it. Mack boasted that a war correspondent buddy had called some of the book’s passages “the greatest prose ever written in the English language.”

  As to Spirit Lake surpassing Andersonville in success, they were all deluded; blind to the currents of the new decade, the first trickle of what would soon be a torrent rushing toward the next century, an era of sound bites, BuzzFeed, and instant messaging, and the ubiquitous meme responding to anything extending beyond a few bytes of text: TL; DR. Too Long; Didn’t Read. Throughout the rest of the twentieth century, prodded by the growing ubiquity of light entertainment on television, attention spans would shrink, as would patience for ornamented language and weighty subject matter.

  In the five years of terrible toil it took my grandfather to write Spirit Lake, the world had become a different place. Instead of the critical ecstasy that greeted Andersonville, major reviewers openly mocked the new offering. Time headlined its review “Wordy Way West,” and sneered, “Wordier even than Andersonville . . . Spirit Lake is distended by a cast of more than four dozen major characters cursed with total recall and the folksiest dialect since Mr. Dooley. (‘Well sakes!’ says one. ‘Course, I ain’t had a touch of shakes since two years agone, and I do firmly believe that it was because I et three hard-boiled eggs on Good Friday.’)”

  The New Republic’s premier critic, Stanley Kauffmann, seethed at length about the novel’s verbosity, its “carbonated lyric gush.”

  The verdict, though not unanimous, was damning. There were some raves. The Chicago Tribune called it “a massive and magnificent novel.” The New Orleans Times-Picayune said, “If the Great American Novel can be written, this is it.” But even positive reviews tended to linger on the book’s ponderous length. “Much of the telling is sheer poetry—in the old saga tradition,” concluded Kirkus. “Some of it is legend and myth. There is variety, and pace and a zest for story telling. That sometimes it drags could be forgiven were it not unduly long—at times unnecessarily tedious. But in the main immensely rewarding.”

  And, for Mack and his supporters, immensely disappointing. The Book-of-the-Month Club endorsement failed to materialize—by one vote of the selectors, Mack claimed—dooming Spirit Lake to mediocre performance.

  The hardcover edition sold barely more than half of its optimistic first printing—enough to get it very briefly to number three on the best-seller list but hardly enough to justify the huge ad campaign and the astronomical expectations.

  Unlike Andersonville, which I had at least attempted (and failed, three times) to read through, I’d never even considered cracking open the massive Spirit Lake, which, picking up on the between-the-lines implications of family lore, I’d always assumed was a face-plant of a failure, dense and unreadable.

  Now I’ve gone back to both books. I’d read no further than page 34 in Andersonville before I recognized the passage that had stopped me every time. To put it in cinematic terms, Mack had been doing a close-up on one of his characters—Henry Wirz, the eventual commandant of the prison—while he was on medical leave in Paris, before his assignment to Andersonville. At the end of the scene, he pulled the camera of his mind’s eye back to an ever-wider perspective; first taking in the Parisian environs, than all of Western Europe, then the cresting waves of the Atlantic, then zooming in again on the pinelands of Georgia. A younger me thought it impenetrable. But now I can’t fathom why I reacted that way. It’s a bit purple perhaps, but only a few paragraphs long, after all: “One might then have gone far beyond Henry Wirz, through darkened bricks of the tall old house . . . past the spires of Versailles . . . and spread across the thrashing coasts. . . . Away, away, going in thought or imagination above the long black swells. . . . Above estuaries and over camps the fast wild thought might have gone fleeting, born in a brain which truly had no power to bear it; for this moment became a part of the future where a man can never dwell, and where gods are merely invented, and where the new unseen sun gives off its roaring, and new unseen stars are intact.”

  So yeah, dense and purple. But this time I found I admired it as poetry, understood my grandfather meant to evoke a feeling of sweep and grandeur. And it’s not as if equally windy passages constantly pop up throughout the book: this is a rare flight of fancy. Most of the novel is granular and gritty to a fault.

  I was equally surprised by Spirit Lake. Mack wasn’t wrong. Spirit Lake was, at least, on a par with Andersonville, and of the same quality. I was surprised to discover that even now, if you look up both books on Amazon or one of those reading community websites, they still get
some rave reviews from the handful of contemporary readers who take them on.

  One such review of Andersonville: “This is one of the most remarkable books that you will ever experience. It has a reputation as a ‘tough read,’ but the effort is more than worth it.”

  Of Spirit Lake: “This historical novel is a literary feast. It is a true readers’ read.”

  My own assessment is that there is something close to genius in both novels, an obsessive attempt to paint the most painful, defining moments of America’s past in a gigantic, inclusive mural, a Sistine Chapel version of the historical novel bristling with intimate knowledge of everything from how people talked to how they smelled. Not even half a chapter into Spirit Lake, you learn a folk remedy for fever involving a pound of fresh-butchered beef, a few quarts of human urine, and a black dog—and you just know from the feel of authority with which it is written that this is no figment of my grandfather’s imagination, but a true historical fact.

  The books’ failing, the reason Andersonville especially did not retain its prominence into another century, is that the authenticity of detail serves to make these characters from the past seem alien. They not only look different but think different and feel different. Which is probably true, but it is also true for Tolstoy’s countesses and generals from early nineteenth-century Russia. And yet, reading War and Peace, the overwhelming impact is not how different the characters are from you, but how eerily the same. (See also: William Shakespeare.) It would be unfair to compare any writer to Tolstoy, the Einstein of the human soul, but that’s who Mack compared himself to.

  Even failing Tolstoy’s immortal alchemy, Mack would have helped contemporary readers, and possibly even readers half a century ago, if instead of dozens of characters equally weighted, there were one or a few in whom we could become supremely invested, and whose path through the novel, from beginning to end, kept us turning pages, desperate to know how it all turns out.

  Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nabokov—the great twentieth-century novelists who are still part of the conversation today—all employed that strategy to keep ’em reading, a strategy especially important if you wanted to go on for 951 small-print pages. It might not have hurt to tighten things up, either.

  —

  In the unobstructed view looking backward from the present, justly or unjustly, Spirit Lake was the turning point, the beginning of the decline of my grandfather’s career and reputation.

  My grandfather could be forgiven for not seeing it that way, at least not immediately. Why focus on the negatives, when instead you could focus on Life magazine calling Spirit Lake “a gigantic sweeping symphony,” on the sixty thousand copies sold, or the acquaintances from Sweden who’d heard it was being mentioned for the Nobel. . . .

  Publishers still believed in Mack and waited eagerly for his next pitch. Invitations to appear on television were floating in—he even got paid for strumming his guitar and crooning on a variety show with Burgess Meredith. He could make headlines just by visiting a city. The Air Force brass still loved him, drafting him—very much to his satisfaction—to fly to Europe and write up top secret assessments of new NATO installations. And Hollywood was still stumbling around, threatening to make a huge budget Andersonville epic, which, unlike The Best Years of Our Lives, would be unambiguously about his novel—and named for it. This of course would stand to reinvigorate sales and add to its place in history.

  I pieced together the narrative of his life in the early 1960s as if it were a ten-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. It occurred to me that this was precisely the point in time when I made my first clear memories of my grandfather: the life I glimpsed on our Christmas visits to Sarasota, and their trips to see us in New York—the cocktails, the limos, the fancy restaurants; that penetrating, nasal midwestern voice rising above all background din and asserting itself as the center of everything through recitation or song, personal anecdote, or off-color joke.

  In 1963, Mack flew my father, my brother, and me to Missouri—the hill country where he’d wandered as a young man and set The Voice of Bugle Ann, his most popular novel save Andersonville—to join him and Tim on a float trip down the James and White Rivers. I have indelibly pungent memories of the smell of catfish frying in fat in big black iron skillets, of skipping rocks across the rock-dimpled shallows, of sitting up late playing poker with Mack and the guides, using a canvas cot as a table and smooth river rocks for chips. Late in the proceedings, I felt my brother nudge me beneath the cot, darting his eyes at one of the guides, who instead of buying in when he grew low on chips, was simply and not so stealthily picking rocks off the ground.

  One afternoon, mid-expedition, I was fishing with worms and a bubble float from the bank when I blundered into a school of hungry fish. My pole jerked forward with shocking urgency. There was a pull, a brief struggle, and exultation when the shiny wet creature splashed out of the water into dappled sunlight. As soon as I could unhook the wriggling catch and toss the rebaited hook back in the water, the pole lurched once more. At first I was thrilled, but as I reeled the flapping and gasping creatures in one after the other and the catch bucket began to fill, my rapture turned to nausea at the slaughter I was perpetrating. Stricken, I grabbed the bucket and upended it, sending my victims back into the swirl of the current. I had a brief moment of hope, then my stomach churned as, one by one, the liberated fish turned white-belly up in the black water and drifted away.

  Fifty-two years later, as I was standing in my Northern Virginia living room, it took me a while to spot it. High on a bookshelf, nearly hidden by the much larger volumes beside it, was the diminutive November 1963 issue of Pageant magazine (cover stories: “Must We Die? A Major Report on Medicine’s Startling New Frontier”; and “Sex in the Office—Why It Happens”). The back of the issue features a half-dozen photographs from that trip (“How to get away from it all? A prize-winner’s prize-winning secret”). In retrospect, I think Mack came up with the whole idea of the trip as a way of furthering Tim’s freelance career—for he was the one who took the pictures. It had been at least thirty years since I’d last looked at those photos—my brother skipping rocks and sucking on a grapevine cigar, me diving naked into the current (visible only from the waist up, but I remember the skinny-dipping), my father, twenty-five years younger than I am now, shirtless, balding already, with surprisingly powerful arms and shoulders and a bit too much flesh at the belly. And there we are playing poker, just as I remembered, my grandfather, all business, dealing up the cards, my brother slyly sliding a rock into the pot in the center of the cot. The Pageant story says Mack “told pioneer stories and traded tall tales with the guides.” I remember the fish and the poker.

  I would soon discover a surprising backdrop for that trip. Three months earlier, Mack had returned from a secret project for the Air Force and tried to start on a new novel—one he only described as “modern.” He got nowhere. This wasn’t ordinary writer’s block. On May 8, he wrote to a friend: “Everything I’ve done . . . is wooden, uninspiring, uninviting. . . . I have constantly entertained the feeling that I was stricken speechless, that my tongue was actually torn out by the roots, that I was paralyzed, calloused. . . . I’ve managed to work myself very close to a state of utter mental, spiritual and physical collapse. For the first time since I was in my twenties, I didn’t even wish to go on living. The tension grew to exemplify itself in the fashion of another monster dwelling inside my own body and soul—a creature made perhaps of wire-mesh or wire rings laced closely together, and extending from my fingertips to my gullet and up into the aching recesses of my skull and down across my chest and into every organ and extremity.”

  Five days later, he discovered the identity of that monster. Doctors diagnosed an episode of congestive heart failure. He didn’t use that term in another letter, describing it as a “strained left ventricle,” complicated by high blood pressure. He said he was taking digitalis, and mourned the fact that his doctor ordered him to stop cho
pping wood: “My arms are falling away into nothingness.”

  What he didn’t mention was the most relevant factor, which these days can be found with a simple computer search: chronic heart failure “is characterized by left ventricular dilation, increased left ventricular mass, and reduced left ventricular wall thickness among patients with a long-term history of heavy alcohol consumption.” The italics are emphatically mine.

  It would take him another fourteen years to finish the job, but my grandfather was already well along the road to drinking himself to death.

  —

  Mack’s health slowly returned, at least in the sense that he could work again. But the new decade asserted itself, and his perception of himself began to change. No longer was he a hero of the age, but a victim of it, a holdout against the foolishness of contemporary enthusiasms—television, liberal politics, communism, homosexuals.

  Here’s a typical lead from a news story on a college lecture he gave (and there were many such speeches) in that period: “Pulitzer Prize–winning author MacKinlay Kantor took verbal pot shots at everything from women’s fashions to American foreign policy here Tuesday night . . . leaving little doubt in anyone’s mind that he not only remembers but prefers ‘the good old days.’”

  Exhausted from Spirit Lake, and shaken by its failure to renew the torrent of respect and cash generated by Andersonville, he began sending out bits and pieces of repurposed and repackaged work from the past. And to his horror, he began to accumulate rejections.

  When he pitched a paperback reissue of a 1938 novel about the extinction of passenger pigeons, New American Library replied with a dismissive “We talked about the book this morning and agreed that it would stand very little chance of doing sufficiently well today.”