“It was my father’s strange conceit to write me a letter, the writing of which extended over a period of more than thirty years, and which, ultimately, reached ten thousand pages in length, a total of over two and a half million words,” Page Smith writes in his introduction to this book, which should be considered as artifact more than work of literature. The letter’s length was only one of its unique features: “Much of it was devoted to an account of his sexual adventures, related in very explicit detail.”
Smith, a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, received the letter along with a handful of his father’s belongings, in several boxes and trunks delivered to his house in Santa Cruz, California after his father’s death in 1968. Although Smith’s father had mentioned the work to his son, he’d never hinted at its volume or its depth of erotic material. So when Smith first began reading through the stacks of papers, he was quickly put off.
Few children want to know anything about their parents’ sexual lives and the contrast between Smith and his father was particularly stark. Smith married the one and only woman he’d ever fallen in love with and stayed faithful to her until the day he died (she died two days later). Smith’s father had been married three times and, if the letter is an accurate account, had slept with hundreds, perhaps thousands of women. Smith acknowledged his own attitudes towards sex as conventional. His father had been fascinated by all variations of sex and experienced many of them repeatedly.
And so Smith’s first inclination was to leave the boxes in his barn and put the thing out of his mind. As a historian, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of burning the lot. “There was some prospective historical-sociological-psychological significance to it,” he thought. Eventually, an editor at Little, Brown encouraged him to try shaping the material into a publishable format. An unabridged version would have run to 15-20 costly volumes and held appeal for only a handful of research libraries. In the end, the version published by William Morrow in 1976 represented about seven percent of the total.
“My father failed by virtually every standard that the average American regards as important,” Smith writes in his introduction. “He was an absent husband, a nothing father, an inadequate provider, a repeated business failure. In one area only was he an unqualified success — in bed, in sexual exploits.” If W. Ward Smith had any special talent, it seems to have been his appearance. He was a strikingly handsome man. “Women followed him with their eyes. Some looked discreetly, guardedly. Others stared openly.” Once, when Smith was dining with his father and their wives in a San Francisco restaurant, an attractive woman came up to their table, threw her arms around Ward Smith, and kissed him, whispering, “You’re beautiful” in his ear. She was a complete stranger.
He was also attractive to men, in the sense that he seemed to exude confidence, to be the type of man other men wanted to be around and imitate. It made him highly effective as a fund-raiser. Early in his business career, he got involved in various drives to raise funds for charitable causes in Philadelphia, and this brought him into contact with some of the wealthiest men in America, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr.. His reputation followed him to New York, where he became active in the Republican Party and organized fund-raisers in support of Allied war causes. In one drive, he placed a coffin with an effigy of the Kaiser in a rented hall and people paid a dollar each to drive a nail into it.
Coming from a middle-class family in upstate New York, Ward Smith got a leg up in society by marrying Ellen Page, daughter of a wealthy Baltimore businessman. The two were completely unsuitable. She came into the marriage a virgin, a classic example of the sheltered Southern belle. Ward, on the other hand, followed wherever his erection led him. He referred to Ellen as a “Vestal Virgin” and himself as “Prancing Pan.” They had two sons, quickly settled into separate routines, she in suburban New Jersey and he in a Manhattan apartment, free to carry on his affairs unencumbered. She divorced him after ten years.
Despite his appearances, Ward Smith was destined for failure as a businessman. His charm, intelligence, and capacity for hard work were undermined by his unquenchable appetite for sex. He would sleep with his colleagues’ wives and girlfriends, he would bring women into his office after hours for sex, he would step away from party and fund-raising dinners to have a quickie in any convenient corner. After working on Nathan Miller’s successful 1920 campaign for Governor of New York, he was fired when Miller began to distrust Smith’s handling of funds.
It was only the first in a string of rise-and-fall cycles for Ward Smith. According to Page Smith, detailed accounts of his father’s successful and unsuccessful business ventures come second only to descriptions of his couplings. One month he might be hosting dinner for dozens of friends in an expensive Manhattan restaurant, the next playing a trick on a telephone operator to get his nickel back after making a call. He ran an oil company, dealt in Florida real estate, manufactured twine, tried his hand at dairy farming, even made a killing one time buying and selling truckloads of beach sand. In the end, he became almost wholly reliant on the income made by his adoring third wife, a successful fashion designer.
And he had sex whenever and wherever he could. I confess that I skimmed much of this material as it is numbingly relentless at points, but the number and variety of locations involved alone are phenomenal: hotels, subways, parks, restaurants, nightclubs, trains, buses, cars, offices, staircases, closets, phone booths, women’s and men’s rooms, bordellos, ferry boats — there might even have been a church pew or two. The paperback edition of A Letter From My Father advertises the book as “A Classic of Erotic Literature.” In reality, it’s probably more effective than saltpeter in killing any erotic spirit. Reading the book reminded me of the time when I was eight and ate an entire bag of Red Whips: fifty years later, even the smell of Red Whips makes me nauseous.
On top of this, the reader has to confront the fact that Ward Smith was a pretty nasty piece of work when it came to his attitudes towards Jews, blacks, and Fascists. He always made it a point to comment if a woman he slept with was a Jewess, believing he had the power to release a craven eroticism stifled by their husbands. He despised FDR, referring to him as “Franklinstein,” and was an enthusiastic supporter of the isolationist America First movement. Writing in 1943, with a son serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, he describes “Herr Hitler” as “a true German patriot seeking only what he considers best for his people” and Mussolini “likewise a true Italian patriot.” After the war, he applauds the addition of air conditioning to the New York-Baltimore train, but complains that a quarter of the passengers are blacks.
Ward Smith’s account of his life ends in 1947. Or, as his son puts it, “The letter did not end; it stopped.” It’s hard to imagine any reader regretting this. Page Smith’s judgment on his father’s life is that it “seemed to me singularly futile and depressing,” and one can only agree. If there is any value to A Letter From My Father, it is only as a glimpse at the underbelly of American history. “Sex, power, money, and politics — all that is certainly thoroughly American and thoroughly human if not especially admirable,” Smith acknowledges. And for Page Smith himself, editing the letter allowed him to achieve some sense of reconciliation with his father. Which certainly gives the work value at a personal level. But outside the intimate circle of father and son, it can only be considered a curiosity.
The casual bigotry in books like this one is quite common in that era and offers sone understanding for the Holocaust.
I think the historian in Smith overrode his reservations as a son. It was a pretty courageous choice.
Wow. Um, yeah- I can see why his son was uncomfortable reading the material. I’m surprised he made the effort to go through it closely enough to turn it into publishable material.