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 edition 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.

Already one of the country’s best-known authors, Mack was boosted to a new level of celebrity by Andersonville. I got the biggest kick out of a full-page magazine ad that ran in Life, Newsweek, and The New Yorker at the height of the Andersonville frenzy. In it, five gleeful middle-aged white men in tailored suits are planted in a posh hotel room, smoking, drinking, laughing as if at some particularly wicked, off-color witticism, all turned toward a sixth man standing tall and straight in the middle of the frame wearing a sly grin and a double-breasted navy suit, and gripping a pipe in his fist. It is clear he is the one who has just expressed the aforementioned witticism. The headline says “Lord Calvert American Whiskey for Men of Distinction,” and the caption: “When MacKinlay Kantor, noted author of the current best-selling novel Andersonville, entertains his friends, Lord Calvert helps to make them welcome.”

I look at Mack in that image—fit and dashing at fifty-two, full head of still-auburn hair, immaculate tailoring, a starburst of good humor emanating from the pleasingly masculine lines of his face, officially a Man of Distinction—and can’t help thinking of Tom Wolfe’s coinage of thirty years later . . . Master of the Universe. Nothing could make it clearer than this piece of advertising art that Mack was most certainly the master of his. When you are a Master of the Universe (or a Man of Distinction), you are elevated in a golden light that seems to flow from some infinite source, naturally focused on you. Imagining that this moment in May 1956 would be the absolute pinnacle of his career, and that the golden glow would slowly dim to a shadow from that moment forward, is too much to ask of anyone in such exalted circumstances.

Not long after I discovered the Lord Calvert ad, I happened upon a classic 1950 New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway by Lillian Ross. It was an account of a Hemingway visit to Manhattan during which Ross shadowed his every move. At the very end, a phone in Hemingway’s room at the Sherry-Netherland began to ring. “Hemingway picked it up, listened, said a few words, and then turned to us and said that an outfit called Endorsements, Inc., had offered him four thousand dollars to pose as a Man of Distinction. ‘I told them I wouldn’t drink the stuff for four thousand dollars,’ he said.”

On the heels of that weird irony came immediately another: As I was learning more and more about Mack it made me think about how little I knew about my other grandfather, my father’s father, Millard Shroder. As I began casting around, I found a digital copy of a promotional book, one of only 210 copies printed, titled Accomplishment, containing photos and descriptions of Millard’s many building projects around New York. One of them, the highest profile perhaps, was the 1927 Sherry-Netherland.

There is no Library of Congress collection concerning the life of Millard Shroder, and almost nothing else online. My father and his sisters are all dead. So I sent a message out to my six cousins on that side of the family, and managed to find only two salient facts about his background. He was an eighth-grade dropout who somehow—nobody knew how—managed to become one of the top builders in New York before he was thirty-five. On the day of the stock market crash in 1929, he returned home to say, “I lost a million dollars today.”

From an entire lifetime biography, up to the time I knew him as a sweet old man willing to get down on the floor and wrestle with his small grandchildren, that’s pretty much all that remains.

—

One late December a few years ago, exhausted by the masochistic ordeal of parking-shopping-paying-wrapping-stressing-and-overindulging that is sadly at the heart of the twenty-first-century Christmas experience, Lisa and I rented a house in the rural hills just outside the small Spanish city of Ronda in Málaga province.

We’d always dreamed of living for some extended period in France or Spain, and this little peek at that fantasy did not disappoint us. The house had a vine-draped trellised porch on which we ate breakfasts of fruit and creamy yogurt and drank thick, dark coffee while listening to roosters crowing, dogs barking, and somewhere just out of sight a donkey braying. The ancient city—Phoenicians were the second people to inhabit it—consisted of narrow streets rising to a peak, then descending steeply to a spectacular, craggy-sided gorge that split the town down the middle, plummeting 330 meters to a cascading river that meandered through a valley spotted with olive groves and rimmed by mountains. Crisp mornings warmed gradually through the afternoon under relentless sunshine. We felt almost miraculously at home, and sorely tempted when we learned the property was for sale. Tempted . . . but unable to pull it off financially. Imagining that under somewhat more prosperous circumstances we might have bought the place only made it more heartbreaking to leave when the holidays were over.

In the several years since, I’ve thought of that house frequently, and with longing: the fantasy that got away.

With all the odd coincidences and parallels I’d encountered researching my grandfather’s life, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when I learned that the cliffside cottage he rented in which to write Andersonville was near Torremolinos in the province of Málaga, a short drive west of Ronda. He even wrote a book, Lobo, about his time in Spain, his first book after “the Big A,” which I had never read. Now I did, and it was like an exclamation point on a growing theme: What I fantasized, my grandfather had lived.

I know it’s hard to believe, but the idea that I wanted to emulate him never entered my mind. My dreams seemed to arise organically, without reference to anyone else. I didn’t even appreciate the full scale of similarity until I came across his book about living in Spain.

Actually, it was only secondarily a book about a lifestyle. Primarily, it concerned a dog, Lobo, whom my grandparents encountered at a swank hotel-restaurant complex on the Mediterranean coast. Lobo was a Basque shepherd dog, owned by no one, known by everyone, and a fixture around the restaurant at dinnertime, where he feasted nightly thanks to indulgent staff and customers alike. Apparently, Mack was even more indulgent than most, an attribute Lobo quickly fastened upon. One evening after dinner, Lobo trotted in the open door of my grandparents’ room and hopped up on the couch, not budging until breakfast smells wafted past his nostrils. When my grandparents left the hotel for a house down the road, Lobo waited by the highway exit—for two days, the locals attested—until my grandparents reappeared, at which point Lobo sprinted toward their car and leapt through the open window into Mack’s lap. From that moment, Lobo was Mack’s dog. When they sailed back to the United States, Lobo sailed with them to New York, then motored in the backseat all the way to the house on Siesta Key. An agreeable orphan and mild-mannered beggar all his life, Lobo had suddenly become a family dog of considerable property. It went straight to his head.

He became, wrote my grandfather, “more avaricious than Hetty Green, more savage than Simon Girty, less charitable than Ebenezer Scrooge.” And more territorial than Genghis Khan. Or as my grandfather recounted it: “‘Good grief!’ he would roar at the top of his lungs, dashing out to the porch, slashing the rugs as he came. ‘Look out there on the beach! There’s an old man walking on my beach. I can’t stand this. He needs to be torn limb from limb! Please open the door and let me out! I want to go down there and assassinate him.’”

My mom and uncle Tim always used to say that Mack overromanticized Lobo’s viciousness. They called Lobo “a pretty good book about a very bad dog,” and threatened to write a sequel called The Truth About Lobo. In reality, Lobo’s aggressiveness became a huge problem, epitomized when Irene became ill while Mack was away and Lobo almost dismembered the visiting doctor, which was probably the beginning of the end of house calls.

In my memory, Mack always had a dog. The first I could recall was a black mutt named Bill Dog. Bill was my father, and whether that name was in honor or in mockery of him, we were never quite sure. As I read Lobo, I found myself wondering if I ever had met the Basque shepherd (mourning, as had become my habit, the fact that here was yet another question I could have asked my mom, but never had). I had nearly finished the book when I arrived at this passage:

Our two small grandsons came with their parents to spend the Christmas holidays, and we watched Lobo narrowly. I heard him growl just once. He had an ear infection and Mike, the elder, pulled his sore ear. I explained to Mike, and he did not do this again. On the other hand, I came in one day to find the smaller boy in his playpen with Lobo lying just outside the wooden bars. Tommy had fastened his grubby mitts on Lobo’s muzzle, and was kneading flesh and nostrils energetically. Lobo was not uttering a sound, nor was he trying to move away; he was just taking it from the baby. We breathed more easily after that.

Even if others believed Lobo’s bad habits outweighed all else, Mack would never be persuaded of it. As he labored to complete Andersonville on deadline—the type for the first part of the book being set in the printing presses even before he’d finished the last—he struggled to find the energy required to meet an unforgiving pace. Every day he would flee the house with his typewriter to drive far into the woods to avoid any possible interruptions. But “there came a day when I thought I could work no more. My head ached, my eyes hurt. . . . You can’t finish, evil voices were crying.”

That was when he began to find Lobo in the car, waiting for him each morning. “He sensed I needed help,” Mack wrote. After that, Lobo remained by his side, steadfastly, until he typed the last word.

Or so Mack says in the book. Overly sentimental, perhaps, to attribute those motives to a dog. More than likely he just wanted to go for a ride. Yet I found myself choking up when I read it.

When I was writing the acknowledgments for my previous book, I meant to say in them that I should have given my dog, a yellow Lab/hound mix rescue dog named Sally, a coauthor byline, if only for the fact that her butt time in my office as I wrote the book just about equaled my own. As soon as she realized that I’d headed upstairs to work each morning, I’d hear the scritching of her claws on the wood stairs and then see her pad into the office and plop down on a cushion in the corner, staying there hour after hour until it was time to start bugging me for her walk, a distraction I was both irritated by and grateful for. This continued day after day over the eighteen months I labored, from the time she was thirteen and a half past her fifteenth birthday, even as she aged dramatically, her rear quarters growing progressively weaker, making that climb up the stairs ever more difficult. I tried whenever the weather permitted to work on the back porch so that she could lie out on the deck beside me and avoid the climb. When it got too hot, too cold, or too wet to work outside, I always felt guilty for climbing back up those stairs, because nothing could dissuade her from following me. She stuck it out to the end, far more patient with the damnable immobility of the process than I ever could be.

It was almost as if she were waiting to die until our work was done. We had to put her down just two weeks after publication.

Immediately after my grandfather had finished Andersonville, he and Irene visited us in New York as he met with the publishers to smooth out the final small-print details of publication. I didn’t remember this, of course, having just turned one at the time, but I was surprised to learn in the book that they brought Lobo with them—possibly encouraged by the evidence of our playpen rapport in Florida. During the visit, Mack took Lobo to our family vet and discovered that he had heartworm. Lobo was left for what was supposed to be a safe and effective series of shots. After the very first injection, he dropped dead for no reason anyone could discover.

Mack arranged burial in a nearby pet cemetery—a cemetery whose existence I was aware of growing up without ever knowing that a visit there would reveal a headstone for my grandfather’s dog with the inscription ADIOS, AMIGO.

We buried Sally in our backyard with her favorite toy in a hole I dug myself, covered with a thick piece of slate from the garden path she loved to run along. I’ve had to write this book solo.

—

By spring of 1956, Mack and Irene were both back in fine health and enjoying their Andersonville victory lap of Europe. They’d arrived in Paris, staying in the elegant Prince de Galles Hotel across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. On April 19, a telegram arrived from my mother with two bits of news. “Novel accepted. Hurray! John Kantor died last night.”

The novel referred to in the telegram was not another of my grandfather’s works, but something my mother had knocked out between changing diapers and making dinners for four, meaning she would soon be a third-generation published author. The “Oh, by the way” news of John Kantor’s death, reduced to five words at the back end of a message about something else, was a stark but fitting end to his career as a lousy father. The next morning Mack sent a return telegram through his publisher. “Inform Layne we had champagne last night for two reasons.”

My uncle said that Mack told him that his first words after reading my mother’s telegram were “At last we’re rid of him.”

Almost.

When he returned to the States, Mack found a rather desperate message from the billing department of the hospital that had treated John in his final illness. It seems upon admission, John had persuaded the hospital intake staff that his son, the famous novelist MacKinlay Kantor, would be paying the bill. (By God! How I love to burn him up.)

Mack confessed feeling only righteous indignation when he disabused the bill collector (no doubt colorfully) of that hope. But how could he have not felt a pang of loss as well? Not the loss of John, but the loss that had haunted him his whole life—the loss of the last slender filament of a chance that he’d ever have a father capable of love.

I encountered many surprises in my research, but possibly none less expected than evidence that John Kantor did not go entirely unmourned. To the end of his life, there were still family members who found him impressive and desired his company. I knew this because one of Mack’s first cousins was yet another in the family who became a journalist and a writer. His name was Seth Kantor, son of John’s brother Arvid. Seth had a small role in a large historic event himself. Covering a presidential visit to Dallas on November 22, 1963, Seth rode in a press bus behind the limousine carrying John Kennedy. He heard two of the three fatal shots that rang out from the Texas School Book Depository, and was one of the first reporters to get to Parkland Memorial Hospital—there in time to see the president’s blood pooling on the ground beside the hastily parked and vacated limo. Still unsure what had happened, Seth talked his way inside the hospital. As he was walking down a hall he felt a tug on the back of his coat. In Seth’s testimony before the Warren Commission, he said, “I turned and saw Jack Ruby standing there. He had his hand extended. . . . He said, ‘Isn’t this a terrible thing?’”

Seth Kantor is probably best known for the book he would eventually write on Ruby—the mysterious nightclub owner who, two days later, would walk into the basement of Dallas police headquarters and fatally shoot Lee Harvey Oswald. But the assassination and the book were both years in the future when Seth wrote a piece for The Dallas Times Herald that began:

The last time I saw my Uncle John, my father’s brother, he was in his 74th year. He had business in Dallas, and had taken a suite at the Adolphus. He was still a massive man with a mountainous memory. . . . He still wore spats. His voice still came like articulate cannon with a volley that could be heard for hours. . . . He talked to my wife and I at our dinner table for a little more than eight consecutive hours. It was not so much that he talked for such a fantastic span of time . . . it’s that each of us sat transfixed by John Kantor’s words and wished for more.

Late in this marathon monologue, “Uncle John” began to trace the Kantor family history, all the way back into Europe, telling “what he knew of the family’s outcasts and successes. ‘It is a fact,’ he said, munching a slice of cheese at nearly midnight, ‘that in our family alternate generations are full of achievement and alternate ones are not successful.’” Then he looked at Seth with his intense, hooded eyes and said, “You are in the wrong generation, you know.”

“He was wrong,” Seth wrote. “Three weeks after Uncle John’s death in his 77th year, his son, MacKinlay Kantor, of the ‘wrong generation’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville.”

Oh, that.

Mack was still at the Prince de Galles two weeks after he learned that his father had died when he happened to run into an old friend. Mike Cowles had hired Mack as a columnist at The Des Moines Register a quarter century earlier, and had since gone on to found Look magazine. Now, by coincidence, they were staying at the same hotel.

“We met at the bar for drinks, Irene arriving a bit late. Mike had said, I suppose you’ve already been given the inside dope about your getting the Pulitzer Prize.” Mack’s heart flipped somersaults in his chest. He had no such dope, and with great effort refrained from leaping for joy. “I said without batting an eyebrow: . . . I never count on anything until official announcement is made. . . . And he smiled and said, Well, I guess I ought to know—I’m on the jury—and may I add that it was unanimous.”

Actually, Mack’s memory of the conversation must have been a little off. Cowles was on the Pulitzer board, which ratified the jury’s recommendation. The jury consisted of Francis Brown, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, and Carlos Baker, a renowned literary critic and Princeton professor who later wrote the best-known biography of Ernest Hemingway. Discovering that Baker was half the Pulitzer jury rang a loud bell. I had earlier found a letter to Baker from Bill Targ, Andersonville’s publisher, describing “a private conversation” the two had had on the day earlier that winter when they learned “Big A” had been passed over for the National Book Award in favor of Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara. According to Targ, he and Baker had vehemently agreed that a far less deserving book had won, and consoled each other with the notion that “justice” would prevail “in the long run.” A few months later, Baker was in a position to administer that justice himself. In their report to the Pulitzer board, he and Brown wrote, “Andersonville, a historical novel in the grand manner, recaptures the tragedy and drama not only of the prison stockade from which it takes its name, but of the Civil War itself. Here is a panorama of the war years and of the divided nation which fought the war. Here, described with moving compassion, are the men and boys who fought and lived or nobly died. Here are those who knew in the Confederate camp at Andersonville man’s inhumanity, and humanity, to man. For sweep of subject matter, for depth of understanding, for skill of narration, this novel would be great in any year and surely in 1955 was unsurpassed.”

They concluded, “In the better than average fiction year, then, these three—Andersonville, Ten North Frederick and Band of Angels [by Robert Penn Warren]—stood forth, but in our view, as we have stated, the chief of these was, and is, Andersonville. We urge it again for the Pulitzer Award.”

As I read my grandfather’s letter, I could picture Mack, Irene, Cowles, and his wife sitting in the bar, Cowles quoting the jury report from memory and Mack floating along on a high unrelated to the no doubt top-shelf whiskey in their glasses. I felt astonishing good fortune to be holding in my hands the actual account, written on the day after it happened, of what had always been a mythic event in my family. As an adolescent, I remember staring, fascinated, at the surprisingly small piece of parchment, about half the size of a sheet of typing paper, hanging in my grandfather’s study in a distressed gold frame. It surprised me that something so insignificant-looking could have had such an impact. I have said often here that I grew up discounting my grandfather’s importance as a literary figure, understanding first and foremost that his vision of himself as such had been disproved even before his death. But there was one thing that had always impressed me, and would always impress anyone who heard of it, and it was there, inside that frame—a document appearing to be nothing more than a bit of bureaucratic inconsequence, a preprinted form with spaces for a name and a title, which were typed in as if an afterthought.

Just looking at it now, I recall the comforting musk of mildew and moldering books and cedar that had always surrounded it in the eternal twilight of my grandfather’s study. And I can look at it anytime I want: it hangs on the first floor of my home, not far from another similar, though somewhat larger and more professionally constructed looking version of the document, an “honorary” Pulitzer presented to me by my staff when I left The Washington Post. It was a kind gesture, intended to recognize my role in the Pulitzers awarded to articles that I had edited. I gushed my thanks, of course, and never told anyone that in fact I found the document humiliating, a consolation that failed to console. My name was not on any of those Pulitzers, the real ones, a reminder that there were things I had wished to achieve that I never had.

I could well imagine what it would have been like—those moments of pure satisfaction that occur after recognition on a grand scale, ratification for all the world to see that your best efforts were, in fact, good enough.

And now I didn’t have to imagine, because Mack’s letter allowed me to come along for the ride:

We had our drinks. . . . Irene and I wandered out to a cab, rode clear down to St. Germain Blvd. at the Odeon, sat, had coffee, walked, had wine, walked slowly, ate mild dinner in a small cheap café but GOOD, walked all the way up to the Seine under stars on the first warm night of the year in Paris, walked through the Tuilleries gardens, walked home, sat in a bar, I had TWO yellow Chartreuses, Irene had TWO tomato juices, came up to bed, read magazines idly, went to sleep before one a.m. . . . Is that a way to celebrate a unanimous Pulitzer Prize?

Yes, most definitely, it is.

—

In fiction, climaxes so often consist of a nexus point, where dramatic resolutions to crucial but seemingly unrelated plot points occur simultaneously. This contrivance would not feel as satisfying as it does if the phenomenon did not occur so often in real life. How odd, I thought, that within two weeks in the early spring of 1956 my grandfather would receive news of both the final resolution to his lifelong bedevilment by his sociopathic father and the pinnacle achievement of his career.

Throw in, as icing on an already rich cake, the evidence that his talent and passion for writing had been successfully transmitted to his progeny—the sale, simultaneous to all the above, of my mother’s novel—and it all seems a little too contrived.

And that was my first thought. The odds of a random housewife successfully selling a first novel are astronomical; but perhaps considerably less so if her father happened to be the current best-selling author in the country.

I had grown up with my mother’s novel, The Four of Them, always visible on the bookshelf in our living room. It was a fact. My mother had written a novel. But it was something, like her eye color, that existed without consequence. I didn’t remember her writing it, and she never talked about it, or published anything further.

I never even removed it from the bookshelf until I was in eighth grade, when I read The Four of Them and wrote a book report on it for school. I pretended not to be shocked or embarrassed that my mother could have written a novel that revolved around sex—the unmet needs, physical and emotional, that drove a sensitive, alienated young woman enduring suburban wifehood to have an extramarital affair and the bleak consequences ensuing. This was just at the point in time when I began to fantasize about being a writer myself. I wish/don’t wish that I still had a copy of the book report. I’m sure it would be excruciating to read. I can only remember that I had smugly and obnoxiously given it a mixed review—as if my fourteen-year-old self knew better.

Reading the novel now for the first time since then, I still give a mixed review, though with somewhat more nuance and superior credentials. The prose is occasionally overcooked and the plot, certainly by today’s standards and quite possibly even by 1956 standards, is a little trite. But the writing itself has signs of real talent—a feel for language, a knack for imagery, and the ability to make trenchant observations that ring true. The handful of reviews the book got after publication were—you guessed it—mixed. “In an exuberant first novel, Layne Shroder reveals herself as a talented writer, but one whose gifts and enthusiasms occasionally lead her away from her story rather than into it” was the first sentence of one review, whose almost every sentence contained a bit of praise followed by a “but.”

—

Of course, I am not a casual reader, but someone searching the pages for insight into my mother, who never revealed herself this intimately in a lifetime of conversation.

I had been poleaxed to learn for the first time, as I was sitting in the manuscript room reading a letter my grandfather wrote to an old friend, that my parents came within a breath of divorce when I was seven years old. (“This is the real thing this time. Layne told me that she plans to go to Mexico for a divorce in the fall.”)

Their marriage would survive that moment without any of us ever realizing how close the end had come. Divorce did come, but a decade later when I was a sophomore in college, after which I discovered that adultery had been an issue for one, or possibly both, of them. So in this clearly autobiographically influenced fiction, I expected to find some insight into the forces that ultimately unraveled my parents’ relationship. In the book, the main character, called Sarie, decides in the end that her difficulty feeling passion for her husband—a passion briefly ignited by another man with bitter aftershocks—is ultimately less important than her feeling of deep affection for him, and that perhaps by focusing on that feeling one moment at a time, she can manufacture a lasting love. “She managed, for the moment at least, to make it true,” my mother writes in the novel’s penultimate sentence, “and futures are composed of present moments.”

So there was that.

I was also looking for a sense of a writing style that resonated with my own. I had seen that echo in my grandfather’s writing, and even in my great-grandmother’s, and by now I expected to find it here. What I didn’t expect was this passage, in which Sarie is reflecting on natural beauty: “She immersed herself in it, until she felt she might burst with the pressure, the hurtfulness it caused.”

An interesting idea not all that commonly expressed—that beauty, deeply felt, can cause pain. I certainly hadn’t been thinking of my mother when I wrote of a moment of personal epiphany in the conclusion to my most recent book: “I felt the pain in the joy, the unbearable beauty of the world. . . .”

I suppose that it should not be surprising that a son could absorb even unspoken attitudes—but I never would have associated that sentiment with my relentlessly optimistic and not particularly outdoorsy mother. And then there were the inevitable similarities of her heroine’s life to her own, and the possible insights it provided; like the passage in which Sarie remembers crashing her bike as a girl and confronting her father as she stumbled home. “She remembered anger in her father’s face. . . . ‘Jesus Christ, Sarie, haven’t you any sense? . . . Do I have to take your bicycle away from you? God damn it, Edith, do something!’ he appealed to her mother. ‘Why do I have to be presented with all these problems when I’m working?’ He’d stormed back to his typewriter. . . .”

That squares with the disappointingly little I know—because I never asked—about how my mother regarded her upbringing. As best as I could reconstruct from stray statements across a lifetime, she had no doubt her father loved her. When he was away, which was often, he would write amusing and affectionate letters to her, and no doubt he could be the same when they were together. But he could also be prickly, distant, and unavailable. As Tim put it in his memoir, Mack “wanted to be the best father in the world,” but “what model did he have?”

There were times when having us grandkids around irritated him into shouts of “Jesus Christ” and “Goddamnit!” just as in The Four of Them.

But as I’ve said, he could also be sweet and charming and generous to us, and it had been the same with my mom when she was little. What surprised me in the letters Mack wrote to friends was how highly he spoke of my mother’s talent as a writer—and how fiercely he wanted her to make use of it. I found a three-page letter he wrote praising her talent and counseling her at length in the practical matters of advancing her career, even suggesting topics for a second novel. Between the lines, you could sense how much he dreaded the idea she might not write one. In one letter I discovered that he had even underwritten the cost of a full-time maid in our house so my mother would have time to write. When he thought my parents were about to divorce, he unloaded on my father in a surprisingly progressive screed about my dad’s very typical 1950s attitude about separation of domestic duties and my mother’s career aspirations:

“He never did learn to give her the slightest cooperation in the actual running of the house . . . and flew into a rage if he thought she was taking any time out for her own writing, when she should have been waiting on him.”

Shortly after Mack got his Pulitzer, when he was delivering family news to his old chum Dick Whiteman, he crowed about my mother’s unassisted sale of her book in the same breath he announced the birth of a new granddaughter: “Layne-o has presented the world with a girl for a change: one Susan Irene, who is a calm and meditative baby. She is also going to present the world with a new novel, to be published by Houghton Mifflin next year. They never guessed who Layne Shroder was, which of course filled her with delight; she did the whole thing on her own. I’m reading the book now; it really is fine.”

Parental pride, of course, is to be expected. But somehow it surprised me, given what I believed about his self-obsession, and I was moved to see this clearly heartfelt praise.

And then he had this to say about the theme: “The subject bores me though. I told her that I couldn’t get interested in a gang of young people just discovering for the first time that there is such a thing as marital infidelity, and Layne says haughtily that a few million people may disagree with me; which I hope is true. Marital infidelity is just as sure to be persistent in the world as the sun, moon and stars. In every case except your own of course!”

I had managed to stifle the impulse to snort thus far, but then he came up with the capper.

“Come to think of it,” he wrote, “I believe I only made one pass at your dear wife in all my existence, and when she said No, I retired gracefully.”

Something tells me he wasn’t joking.

My mother wasn’t wrong about a few million people being interested in adultery in the mid-1950s. Sexuality in suburbia, adultery in particular, powered Peyton Place to near the top of the best-seller lists, alongside Andersonville, for much of 1956 and 1957, the year my mother’s book was published. Even so, like the immense majority of first novels, The Four of Them sold sparsely—more likely in the hundreds of copies rather than the thousands. I had long known that she’d begun a second novel, and then abandoned it with, as far as I knew, no regrets. I’d wondered about that. With all the promise and encouraging critical reception of her first novel, why didn’t she keep going?

I stopped wondering when I started writing books myself.

There come just too many soul-crushing moments when all you’ve written seems gibberish and all possible paths forward look to end against an unclimbable wall, or over the edge of a cliff. I never would have completed anything if I hadn’t already been paid an advance I would have had to pay back.

I was amused when I came across this quote from my grandfather, basically saying the same thing: “Most good writers, and most bad ones too, are poor people. Their earlier stories get written because they need food and shelter. Their later stories are written because they want . . . Cadillacs or want to go hunting moose.”

He also wrote, “When you’ve been a writer as long as I have . . . nothing inspires you except a check.”

Of course, Mack had managed to keep writing, completely checkless, contract or no contract. On my bookshelves, I found something I didn’t even realize I had: a ledger book he had kept from the 1930s in which he scribbled notations in tiny script—the title of a submission on the left, and the fate of the submission on the right. Page after page have but one word, repeated again and again, in the right column: Rejected.

But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop. For him it was write or starve.

In the years after my mother’s first novel, Mack’s letters always had the same two comments about her writing; he believed she was truly talented, and he feared the comfortable, distracted life of a suburban mother threatened her deserved future as a writer.

I thought his analysis was as good as any explanation of her abandonment of writing: absent the threat of starvation and legal obligation to whip her along, she simply got stuck and couldn’t find sufficient motivation to unstick herself.

It wasn’t until I began looking through the documents I’d collected in a file marked LAYNE-O that I realized something startling: of all the letters she wrote exulting about signing a book contract, only some were from 1956. Another, I noted, was dated 1957. This was for the second novel, signed shortly after publication of her first. She’d had a contract after all, which must have made it exponentially more painful to quit in the middle—especially for a woman who wrote in her alumni magazine, “After my first son was born I told myself and the world that I was so busy and contented that I would probably never write again, but I soon began to feel restless. . . . It seemed it was impossible to discard my ambition without discarding a part of myself. Writing is for me almost like a drug. I doubt I will be able to stop for more than a short time.”

After her divorce from my dad, my mother went to law school—the oldest person in her class by about twenty years. She passed the bar in her mid-forties, and practiced for thirty years as a public defender in juvenile court—a job she considered a calling and approached with indefatigable passion, despite the fact that it was one of the most taxing, depressing, and thankless tasks imaginable. At the end of her long life, when she was heroically refusing to yield her spirit to rapidly advancing lung cancer, I reopened the topic of her writing career.

“Even if you couldn’t finish the book you started,” I said, “didn’t you ever have the urge to write some other book?”

“You know,” she said, “night after night when I got you all to bed, I would sit there and struggle to write, because I had always thought I was meant to do it. But eventually I realized: I hate writing.”