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Exhausted after working on his book for two solid months, Thomas Wolfe left England to ring out 1930 in Paris. He refreshed himself by gorging on food and drink, but he had not crossed the Channel to socialize. For a few days he remained alone, trying to catch up on sleep and correspondence. In an unsent draft of a letter to Perkins (a briefer version of which he mailed later) he considered the turn his writing was taking. He pondered the fact that “no one has ever written a book about America,” and he came up with the intention to write one that might contain all the things every American felt but never said. “It may be grandiose and pompous for me to think I can [write it],” Wolfe said, “but for God’s sake let me try.”
For over a year Wolfe had been carrying in his head Perkins’s idea for a book. He did not want Max to think he was giving up anything that he wanted to do, but as Wolfe explained, “I had this vast amount of material, and what you said began to give shape to it.” At the same time Wolfe recalled the myth of Antaeus, the gigantic wrestler whose strength was invincible so long as he touched the earth. In a long letter which he wrote through the night back in London and did mail to Perkins, Wolfe announced that his book had a new title which was both “good and beautiful”—The October Fair or Time and the River: A Vision.
Wolfe sent Perkins a record of the book’s growth, showing how the editor’s passing comment in Central Park had snowballed in the author’s mind to encompass not only the valley of Asheville but also the heights of Olympus. “Thank God, I have begun to create in the way I want to,” he wrote Perkins, “it is more autobiographic than anything I ever thought of ... but it is also completely fictitious.” Wolfe said, “The idea that hangs over the book from first to last is that every man is searching for his father.”
Already the book was immensely long, as it was bound to be, because Wolfe’s mind never failed to visualize the cosmic implications of everyday occurrences. “My conviction is that a native has the whole consciousness of his people and nation in him: that he knows everything about it, every sight sound and memory of the people,” he declared to Perkins. “I know now past any denial, that that is what being an American or being anything means:
It is not a government, or the Revolutionary War, or the Monroe Doctrine, it is the ten million seconds and moments of your life—the shapes you see, the sounds you hear, the food you eat, the colour and texture of the earth you live in—I tell you this is what it is, and this is what homesickness is, and by God I’m the world’s champion authority on the subject at present.
Wolfe crammed one of his letters that December with names that told the story of America in themselves—American states, American Indian tribes, American railways, American millionaires, American hoboes, American rivers. Tom felt that he had told Perkins too much and yet too little. But Max should not worry: “It’s not anarchy, it’s a perfectly unified but enormous plan,” he said. “I want to come home when I know I have this thing by the well-known balls.” Until then, he asked Perkins to write him if he thought all this was a good idea, without saying anything about it to anyone else. “If I’ve talked foolishness,” he wrote, “I’d rather keep it between us.”
In wishing Perkins a joyful Christmas, Wolfe said, “My own is not as happy as last year’s, but by God, I believe I thrive on adversity, I am not going to be beaten because I won’t be beaten—Now is the time to see what is in me.” Even though Wolfe’s letters did not sound happy, Perkins was delighted to receive them. There was much that he did not understand, but, he told Tom, “Every time you write about the book, I get as excited as I did when I began ‘The Angel.’ I wish to thunder you would come back with the ms.”
By early January, 1931, Wolfe was “simply living with the book.” He was determined to work on it abroad until he could write no more, which he figured would be in another six weeks; then he would return to America. “When I get back I want to see you and go to that speak-easy again,” he wrote Max, “—but I’m not going to see anyone else: I mean this; otherwise, I’m done for—no parties, no going out, no literary people —nothing but obscurity and work. I shall never be a damned literary-party monkey again. I’m a poor dumb simple bloke—but I will not fail you!” In his flat at Number 15 Ebury Street, Wolfe thought often of Perkins. When he was feeling loneliest, he recalled when he and Max used to go to “Louis and Armand‘s” and have a few drinks of the strong gin they served, then ravenously tear into their thick steaks. Later they would tramp all over New York or ride the ferry to Staten Island. “To me,” Tom wrote Max, “that is joy; you are a little older and more restrained but I think you had a good time, too.”
Tom now had an increasing need to involve Maxwell Perkins in his life as well as his work. The two men could no longer be separated, nor did they wish to be. More and more Wolfe was becoming the son Perkins never had.
For months Wolfe had been haunted by hallucinations, until he verged on physical and mental illness. “I hear strange sounds and noises from my youth, and from America. I hear the million strange and secret sands of time,” he wrote Perkins. At last Tom recognized that he needed help, and he asked Max for it. First, he wanted him to find him a quiet place near Manhattan where he could live and work in almost complete isolation for at least three months. During that period he wanted to talk to Perkins whenever Max had the time for it. Finally, Wolfe asked Perkins’s help in easing one of the great agonies of his life.
I am not asking you to cure me of my sickness, because you can’t do that. I must do it myself, but I am very earnestly asking you to help me to do certain things that will make my cure easier and less painful.
For the first time, Tom described his torment over Aline Bernstein to Perkins, in almost clinical detail:
When I was 24 years old I met a woman who was almost forty and I fell in love with her. I cannot tell you here the long and complicated story of my relations with this woman—they extended over a period of five years ... at first I was a young fellow who had got an elegant and fashionable woman for a mistress; and I was pleased about it; then without knowing how, when, or why, I was desperately in love with the woman, then the thought of her began to possess and dominate every moment of my life. I wanted to own, possess, and devour her; I became instantly jealous; I began to get horribly sick inside, and then all physical love and desire ended completely—but I still loved the woman. I could not endure her loving anyone else or having physical relations with anyone else, and my madness and jealousy ate at me like a poison—like all horrible sterility and barrenness.
Wolfe said he had not wanted to make this trip to Europe but had yielded to what friends wanted for her. He wrote her from the boat that took him from her, but he had not communicated with her since. During the first five months of their separation she had sent a string of messages. Snatches of them read:
DEAREST LOVE
HELP ME TOM
WHY HAVE YOU DESERTED YOUR FRIEND PAIN I BEAR TOO GREAT IMPOSSIBLE TO CONTINUE LIFE COMPLETELY PARTED FROM YOU
HEART HEAVY NO WORD FROM YOU LOVE ALINE
Her letters tormented Wolfe, for she sometimes signed them in her blood. Then Wolfe received another cable which read: LIFE IMPOSSIBLE NO WORD FROM YOU ARE YOU WILLING TO ACCEPT CONSEQUENCES DESPERATE. For a few days he thought he would go mad, but he neither wrote nor cabled. “Each day I would go for mail in the most horrible state of nerves, wondering if I should see some cable which carried the dreaded news,” he wrote Perkins. “I longed for NO news, and I hoped for some news—but nothing came, and that was almost worse than ever.” He imagined that she had killed herself and that her embittered, grief-stricken loved ones were saying nothing to him. He combed the obituaries in the American newspapers until one day he found her name—not among the death notices but on the theatrical page. He read an account of a great artistic success Aline Bernstein had scored. Later, Wolfe met a man who asked if he knew her and said that he had seen her looking radiant at a party in New York only a short time earlier.
In the final weeks of 1930 her pleas began again. There had been two months of silence during her theatrical triumph, but once her success had worn off, her pain was reborn, and again Wolfe was the cause. She wrote in despondency, “Hold out your hand to me in my hour of need. Impossible to face New Year. I stood by you in bad years, why have you destroyed me? I love you and am faithful until death, pain I bear too great to endure.” Eight or ten times she signaled in distress. Wolfe cabled back, asking if it was fair to send such messages when he was alone in a foreign land trying to write.
“You may wonder why I come to you with this,” Wolfe wrote Perkins; “my answer is that if I cannot come to you with it, there is no one in the world I can come to.” He tried to destroy the pain by detailing it: the pain in the pit of his stomach from the moment he awoke, the feelings of nausea and horror that he carried all day long, until he vomited from physical sickness at night. For the past three months Tom had remained in the same place and had written over 100,000 words of his book. “I am a brave man, and I like myself for what I did here,” he wrote Perkins from London, “and I hope you like me too, for I honor and respect you, and believe you can help me to save myself.” But Tom wanted to save more than that: His “utter and absolute belief in love and human excellence” was also at stake. “No matter what breach of faith, truth, or honesty this woman may be guilty of,” Wolfe said, “I want to come out of this thing with a feeling of love and belief in her ... [because] there is the most enormous beauty and loveliness in her yet.”
“I must not die. But I need help—such help as a man may hope to receive from a friend,” he wrote Perkins. “I turn to you because I feel health and sanity and fortitude in you.... [If] you understand my trouble,” he wrote, “say simply that you do, and that you will try to help me.” Max had once remarked that Wolfe’s letters from Europe sounded “unhappy.” Wolfe hoped he had at last made the reason plain.
“I’ll do anything you ask of me,” Perkins replied, “and any reluctance will come only from lack of confidence to do good. But I should be glad that you did feel you wanted to ask me.” Perkins already looked forward to Wolfe’s return and hoped he would be in New York in the summer because, he admitted, “I’m generally horribly lonely. There are people enough, but none I care really to see. I’ll count on some of your company, anyway....
“I had gathered that things were bad in some such way, but not that they were so bad as they are,” Perkins continued, addressing himself to the heart of Wolfe’s problem. “Heaven knows how it would go with me in such a situation, but may you get strength somewhere to stick it out.... I wish I’d been through the like of it. Then I could preach.” He was certain that Tom had taken the best course in going away.
As for me, I can only feel angry with her [he wrote of Aline Bernstein]. She may be really fine, but there is an egotism in women beyond any known in men, and they infuriate me. But I know I am prejudiced against them. Did any one of them ever admit she was in the wrong about anything ? I know you’ve been in hell. I’m no good at suffering myself and so it’s hard to encourage others to it. But I’m dead sure you’ve done right and you must stand it for the sake of everything if you can.
The only consolation Perkins could offer Wolfe was in listening to his grief; his only succor was bromidic advice about sticking to his work. Beyond that he could do little more than write, “My great hope is someday to see you walk in with a ms. two or three feet thick.” At the end of February, 1931, Wolfe cabled Perkins: SAILING EUROPA THURSDAY NEED NO HELP NOW CAN HELP MYSELF MUST WORK SIX MONTHS ALONE BEST WISHES.
Aline Bernstein had been flirting with suicide. After reading in the newspaper of Wolfe’s return on the S. S. Europa, she swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to the hospital. “Apparently to love you as I do is an insanity,” she wrote Tom; “—I am having a great fight in myself. The way I love you will never stop, but I know now that you will no longer have me nor hold me near.” Temporarily withdrawing but not surrendering, Aline said she had one favor to ask. She wanted to see Wolfe’s new book before it was published. Mrs. Bernstein understood his method and realized that he was about to write of the years when she entered his life. She wanted at least a voice in what went into print. If Wolfe was reluctant to comply, she suggested allowing his Mr. Perkins to mediate.
Wolfe was busy settling into 40 Verandah Place in Brooklyn and preparing his material to show Perkins. I MUST COME THROUGH NOW OR EVERYTHING IS LOST, he wired Aline; HELP ME BY BEING HEALTHY AND HAPPY AND MY DEAR FRIEND. LOVE.
Perkins saw Wolfe only a few times upon his return, and then they talked more about his personal life than about his writing. Wolfe was desperate. Mrs. Bernstein was doing everything in her power to persuade Tom to come back to her. “We live in a crazy world, here it is a sin, in the eyes of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, that I love you,” she wrote him. “But money grabbing is not such a sin.” After visiting Tom’s apartment one day, she threw a $100 bill over the Brooklyn Bridge, thinking, “If they cannot understand how I love you, here is something to appease the Gods your people worship.” Max, never having had any trouble of the sort Wolfe was in, did not think he was doing him much good, but he listened patiently. Only with Elizabeth Lemmon did he even suggest the matter, obliquely at that. “I cannot bear to hear any more troubles,” he wrote her. “Everyone seems to be in trouble. Nothing and no one seems any longer to be sane and healthy.”
Within weeks of Wolfe’s voyage home, Scott Fitzgerald’s father died. Scott too, like Wolfe, had been in trouble all year, trying to find time to complete his novel, which he was calling “the encyclopedia,” and to pay off his “national debt” of $10,000 to Scribners. When word of the death came he was in Gstaad trying to recover from a “shaky” time of big-money writing for the Post. Now he rushed back, heading for Baltimore. Perkins saw him in New York for fifteen minutes and got terribly depressed. “He is very greatly changed,” Max reported to Hemingway. “He looks older, but it is more that he has lost, at least temporarily, all of the elan that was so characteristic. But he may be all the better for it because you feel at bottom he is a very real person now.” Zelda was still in “mighty bad shape.”
Two weeks later Perkins and Fitzgerald lunched together, just before Scott sailed back to Europe. He had seen his and Zelda’s families, and Max guessed that anticipating those two visits had pained Scott greatly. But this time Perkins found him very much his old self and enjoyed being with him. “And,” he wrote John Peale Bishop, “it made me think he had the resilience to stand almost anything and would come through well in the end.”
“The Jazz Age is over,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins in May, 1931, from Lausanne. “If Mark Sullivan [whose fifth volume of social history for Scribners, called Our Times, had brought him by now from the turn of the century to the end of the World War] is going on you might tell him I claim credit for naming it & that it extended from the suppression of the riots on May Day, 1919, to the crash of the stock market in 1929—almost exactly one decade.”
Perkins knew that Fitzgerald had coined that phrase and found Scott’s remarks worthy of more consideration than a passing reference in a collection of history books. He believed Scott should write at least an article about it, some kind of fresh reminiscence or even an elegy that would remind the public of his influence and, at the same time, fix a point in his mind from which he could begin a new phase of his career. Perkins passed his idea on to Fritz Dashiell at the magazine, who then wrote Fitzgerald, “There is no one more qualified to sound its knell.” Scott could not commit himself to the assignment, but he could not put it out of his mind.
Not until the end of August did he write to Max again. By then, Zelda had taken a turn for the better. After more than a year of psychotherapy in a sanitarium outside Geneva, and of periodic separations from Scott, her sporadic attacks of eczema and asthma, occasional irrationality and hysteria, were subdued. Her case was viewed as a “reaction to her feelings of inferiority primarily toward her husband.” For several weeks, Scott and Zelda were at peace with each other and talked eagerly of going home. She was well enough to leave her Swiss doctor, and Scott wrote Max that she was even writing “some amazing stuff.” Max received the article he had suggested—“Echoes of the Jazz Age”—four weeks before the Aquitania docked.
Fitzgerald’s essay aroused much discussion, not only because of the happy memories it evoked but also because of the author’s candor. That period seemed rosy and romantic to those who were young then, Fitzgerald said, “because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.”
For some months Perkins had been less than satisfied with Erskine Caldwell’s writing, feeling at times that his compact, evocative little stories carbon-copied some of Hemingway’s. But he had not quite written the author off.
Following Perkins’s first acceptance of his stories, Caldwell continued to write short pieces. Each was sent to Scribner’s Magazine via Perkins. The magazine editors did not think his writing was compatible with their readership, and none of the pieces was accepted until it reached the little magazines. After several months without a Scribner’s acceptance, Caldwell filled three suitcases with his unpublished poetry, stories, and sketches, went to a small cabin, and reread them all. The next morning he burned every page, along with his collection of rejection slips, many of which came from Perkins.
A few weeks after the bonfire Caldwell received a different kind of letter from Max Perkins. The editor had a new idea for getting Caldwell’s stories across to the public. He suggested that Caldwell group enough of his strongest stories to fill a book of 300 pages—half with New England settings, the rest with Southern locales—which might be brought out after the first of the year. Once the stories were typed, Caldwell went to New York, feeling bold enough to face Perkins. He took the same rackety elevator up to the fifth floor, but this time he did not retreat. He entered Perkins’s office and handed him the stories that would make up the book, American Earth. Caldwell recalled:
Wearing a hat with a turned-up brim, which appeared to be at least a half a size too small for him, he sat down at his desk and slowly turned the pages of the manuscript for a quarter of an hour. No word was spoken while he sat there. At the end of that time, he got up smiling a little and moved stiffly around his office in new bright tan shoes, occasionally looking out his window at the traffic below, while he told of several incidents he recalled about life in Vermont when he was a youth.
After nearly an hour of reminiscing, sometimes seriously and often humorously, Perkins mentioned for the first time the manuscript Caldwell had brought in. All he said was that he would publish it.
American Earth came out in late April, 1931. The notices were mixed; most New York reviewers still approached Caldwell’s baldly told stories as though they smelled a bad odor. The book sold fewer than 1,000 copies. In a third attempt to get Caldwell’s career off the ground, at a time when publishers could ill afford taking such chances, Perkins asked Caldwell how he felt about writing a novel. Unbeknown to Max, the author had already finished a draft of one about Georgia backwoods people, Tobacco Road. By the summer he had revised and submitted it to Perkins.
Scribners published Tobacco Road in February, 1932, and it barely met Caldwell’s minuscule advance against royalties. The reviews were as unenthusiastic as they had been on his first published volume, but the author dug right into another novel. Autumn Hillwas about a family living on a back-road farm in Maine. A month after Caldwell submitted it, Perkins wrote him “that we have decided against Autumn Hill, personally disappointing as it is to do.” Perkins was not shedding crocodile tears, as his letter went on to show:
I believed in it, I wish to say, and still more in you; and I saw that it was given every kind of consideration. It was read by six people,—including those who necessarily consider more the business side of such questions, who in normal times would not have read it. The sales of American Earthand Tobacco Road were against it. The fact is that this depression compels a scrutiny of manuscript from the practical point of view such as never before required, and it is very hard when confronted by the figures to resist the practical arguments. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.
Perkins felt that he had no right to make suggestions about material he was rejecting, but it was a practice of his that had become habitual. In a postscript he mentioned—with some ambivalence—one or two points in the plot that he wished Caldwell would amend before submitting it to another publisher—all because “I want to see you succeed, as you ought to do.”
Caldwell’s literary agent was Maxim Lieber. Together they went to see Perkins in his office and had a long, friendly talk. Perkins said he hoped Caldwell would not want to find another publisher but would offer Scribners his next book, even though the option clause of their contract was now voided. The author was free to publish wherever he could, but he was willing to agree to show Perkins his next book. Before he had a chance to give his word on it, Lieber got Caldwell to leave the office with him. He liked the new novel, Lieber said; Caldwell liked it, and Max Perkins liked it. That could only mean that it was sure to find a publisher. If Scribners would not take it, they would find some house that would. Caldwell agreed.
“After knowing Max Perkins as long as I had,” Caldwell remembered, “it was disturbing to think that such a decision would mean I would no longer be in a position to call upon him for help and advice.” The next day, as he was walking up Fifth Avenue to the agent’s office, he halted at the corner of Forty-eighth Street and looked up at the fifth-floor windows. “After a while my eyes became blurred,” he recalled, “and when I finally walked away, I was thinking of how I could tell Max Lieber that I had changed my mind and did not wish him to find another publisher.” Upon Caldwell’s arrival at the agent’s office, Lieber told him that there were only a few minutes before their appointment with Harold Guinzburg and Marshall Best at the Viking Press. Caldwell wanted to stay and explain to Lieber his most recent change of heart, but Lieber was excitedly discussing the new prospects. Within the hour Guinzburg and Best were pointing out the advantages of a Viking agreement—this over a sumptuous lunch, which they had encouraged Caldwell to order without regard to cost. He could not help silently comparing this luxurious reception with the one and only time Maxwell Perkins had bought him a meal. It was at a lunch counter. Max had ordered for each of them— a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a glass of orange juice. The only comment Caldwell recalled Perkins’s making at the time was to the effect that “in Vermont the lean and hungry countenance of man was held in fearsome respect.”
Caldwell never figured out if it was the memory of the measly peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that turned the trick, but he was persuaded to submit his next three books to the Viking Press. They rejected Autumn Hill as Scribners had, but Caldwell began writing another novel set in the South—God’s Little Acre. According to the newly signed contract, Viking had first chance to read it. By the time it was published, an adaptation of Tobacco Road had been written for the stage, and it began a record-breaking run of more than seven years on Broadway. Caldwell’s career was to go on and on, but Scribners never published him again.
So long as he could keep his authors’ minds on writing, Max Perkins believed, they could all continue their careers and get through the Depression. In a letter to Hemingway, Perkins proposed his own brand of rugged individualism: “Maybe the present discouraging state will end by improving things for those who come through.”
Out in Montana, Hemingway was getting in some good writing on his bullfighting book—until November, 1930. On the evening of November 1 he was driving John Dos Passos back to Billings after ten days of hunting when the lights of an oncoming car sent Hemingway swerving into a ditch. Dos Passos climbed out of the overturned wreck unscathed. Hemingway’s right upper arm was broken in such a way that it had to be slung very close to his body, bandaged tightly to keep it from jostling. Hemingway facetiously suggested to Perkins that Scribners insure him against future accidents and disease, as there would be big money in it. It might even pay better than publishing his books. Since signing with Perkins he had had anthrax, a cut right eyeball, congestion of the kidney, cut index finger, gashed forehead, torn cheek, a branch speared through his leg, and now this broken arm. On the other hand, he noted that he had never once been constipated during that same period.
Ernest made up for his latest inactivity by directing Perkins to several prize authors he might sign up. Ford Madox Ford, a former collaborator of Joseph Conrad, had met Hemingway years before in Paris, when the former edited the transatlantic review. He was dissatisfied with his present publisher and wished Hemingway would suggest to Max Perkins that he wanted to change. “I don’t of course ask you to guarantee my selling powers or the like,” Ford told Hemingway, a generation younger than himself, “but you might just mention it.” Ford, for all his talent and influence, had not had a commercial success in twenty-five books. In forwarding his letter to Perkins, Hemingway enclosed an analysis of Ford’s work, a cycle in which “megalomania” and success “pee-ed away” would inevitably follow his periodic good works. Hemingway estimated that Ford was due for another fine book and thought a good publisher “would hold him steady.”
Perkins did not know what to do about Ford Madox Ford. He had liked the fat bear of a man since a casual meeting years earlier, and he especially liked his war novel, No More Parades. “But,” Max wrote Ernest, “in the first place I dare say he is a man with an eye to a big advance, and it is always difficult too, to take on an older writer who has been all about and has become exacting and who having changed so often will probably change again.” For Perkins, the great interest in publishing was still “to take on an author at the start or reasonably near it, and then to publish not this book and that, but the whole author.” One could then afford to lose on certain books because of the gains on others.
Despite his misgivings, Perkins invited Ford in and learned of his newest plan, a three-volume History of Our Own Time, from 1880 to the present. Perkins thought they might be able to consummate a deal to their mutual advantage, but Ford constantly neglected the history for other projects. Scribners ended instead with only one chapter of his reminiscences, Return to Yesterday, which the magazine published.
With far more enthusiasm, Hemingway sent Perkins a second suggestion later in the year. The poet Archibald MacLeish, whom he had also met in Paris, was unhappy with his present publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Usually Hemingway’s recommendations were out of charity toward the author, but his endorsement of MacLeish was based on great respect for him as a writer. He wrote that MacLeish was the best man Perkins could get as a poet at that time, for he had “come on steadily” while the others had stood still or retrogressed. Perkins had been “damn good” to Hemingway, and recommending MacLeish was the biggest favor he could do in return. Ernest said it would be a tragedy if Max did not sign him. After some correspondence with Perkins, and hearing a good deal more about him from both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, MacLeish said that he would let Scribners have the first refusal rights to his next book, but that it might not be done for a year or two. “I like his poetry immensely,” Max wrote Ernest.
Several months later Perkins read MacLeish’s long-awaited work, Coraquirtador. It was a lengthy narrative poem based on Cortez’s expedition to Mexico and emphasized the love of men for adventure. Perkins thought it was magnificent. But he doubted that Scribners could captureConquistador because Houghton Mifflin was taking up the gauntlet. Scribners would offer satisfactory terms, but MacLeish found it difficult to accept them on account of his relationship with Robert Linscott, his old editor. Perkins chose not to push his interest in the book or even embarrass the poet about it. Because of MacLeish’s commitment to his editor he forbade Hemingway from intervening on Scribners’ behalf. “I am mighty sorry to see that poem go,” Perkins lamented to Hemingway, “for it is one of the kind of things that make publishing seem really worth being in.” (Years later Perkins took the same honorable position with Robert Frost, who had been published by Holt. Max and Jack Wheelock lunched-two or three times with the New Hampshire poet. When terms of a contract were about to be drawn up, Wheelock remembered, “Frost withdrew for fear of treating Holt shabbily. And Max felt that he could not force the issue.”) Hemingway got the news about MacLeish in Piggott, Arkansas, from the poet himself, who felt bad about acting as he had. Ernest realized how little luck he had had in getting writers for Perkins, but with what he had written on his bullfight book, Death in the Afternoon, he vaunted that there was really “no need to get any more Hemingsteins.” Ernest returned to Florida for the winter and waited for the bones in his writing arm to knit.
The 1930 congressional elections went right in every respect from Perkins’s point of view—especially in regard to Prohibition. It was finally becoming a “wet” legislature, and Max hoped it would get around to repealing the Volstead Act. Among the affiliations he listed in his latest Harvard alumni report was the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, with himself as Director. But business, he wrote Ernest, “seems to get worse and worse all the time.” Max observed that “ever so many people have become so desperate that they think, or at least say, that the capitalist system is dissolving. But old Stalin thinks we shall get over it this time—and maybe one or two times more. And I hope by that time my daughters will all have married mechanics and engineers.”
After a lapse of more than a year, Max received a letter from Elizabeth Lemmon. Theirs was a relationship unaffected by time. Elizabeth had been too involved with her social life in Baltimore—she had many suitors —to write; Max had his work. But they still thought about each other often. “I had written you several times,” Max wrote her now, explaining, “Last July I carried a letter all addressed and stamped, in my pocket for a week; but then I tore it up.”
The next day he mailed her a newsy letter, mostly about his family. Max said he was not at all upset when his eldest daughter, Bertha, an excellent student at Smith College, flunked her first midyear exam, because he understood the circumstances. She had had two days to study for it but had not put in one minute; she had taken up Look Homeward, Angel instead and had been able to do nothing else until she finished it. According to her, everyone at Smith was reading it, which Max thought was remarkable, because “it’s far more a man’s book.”
In early March Max’s brother-in-law Archibald Cox, to whom he was close, died, leaving seven children. The oldest, Archibald, Jr., was at Harvard considering a legal career; for a later generation he would come to symbolize certain Yankee virtues—artless decency, natural moral clarity, canniness that does not exploit advantage—that Max symbolized for those who knew him.
Max went south later in March, for what had become his annual Gulf Stream excursion. He found Ernest in good shape, except for his arm. Hemingway navigated the boat left-handed through the prow-slapping waters. With some elaborate rigging, he was able to fish, a sure sign to Max that he would be just as good as new. Perkins cruised with Hemingway and The Mob long enough to see the galley cleaned out of Ernest’s supply of Bermuda onions; but he thumbed a ride back to Key West on a passing sloop, leaving for New York before they got storm-bound again.
Back in port Hemingway was soon at work again, with both arms free and a renewed determination to outwrite everyone else in the world. In fact, vying against “living merchants” had become too easy. He wrote Perkins that he preferred to outdo the dead masters. They were really the only ones who provided much competition, though he admitted that William Faulkner was “damned good when good but often unnecessary.” Perkins agreed. For years Faulkner had been writing short stories and trying them onScribner’s with what he called “unflagging optimism” and little success. “I am quite sure that I have no feeling for short stories; that I shall never be able to write them,” he admitted to the magazine staff. Faulkner seemed “crazy” to Perkins, who had just read his sensational novel Sanctuary and deemed it a “horrible book by a writer of great talent.” Because none of Faulkner’s books had commanded any kind of sale, Perkins thought this would be a good time to annex him to his list, but he did not act. John Hall Wheelock suggested that “Max didn’t follow through on Faulkner just then because he was afraid of arousing Hemingway’s jealousy.” Hemingway had recently expressed his confidence that Thomas Wolfe would write plenty of “swell books” for Perkins, and he still believed in Fitzgerald’s bedrock talent. But, Wheelock said, “in Hemingway’s mind, there was no more room in Max’s life for another power so threatening as William Faulkner. Hemingway’s was a mighty ego, and Max knew it.”
In May, Ernest went to Spain, where the newly organized Spanish Republic replaced the Carlist monarchy. Hemingway remained aloof from the political scene, working on the final chapters of his bullfight book.
That same month Douglas Southall Freeman invited the Perkinses to Richmond. This visit promised to be more social than Max’s last trip there because Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee was steadily advancing. He followed a strategy that Perkins had mapped especially for him, though it was sound advice for anyone writing in that category:
You are not writing a study of Robert E. Lee, or a personal interpretation of him, but the first complete and perhaps the definitive, biography: a great feature of it is that it contains all the information pertinent, and that a great deal of this is new. This fact which is indisputable, must govern the character of the book.—It prevents you from any such freedom of imaginative interpretation, for instance, as Strachey allows himself. And it governs you in the matter of selecting, for you must put in everything, and not simply select what is valuable from some purely artistic or literary standpoint.
Perkins often pinpointed worthwhile themes for Freeman to develop, aspects of Lee’s life which, retold, would keep the work from being strictly archival. To make the book more than a lifeless commemorative monument, Perkins reminded Freeman,
any personal incidents or anecdotes which showed him in action, or which showed him in contrast to others, and tended to explain how he came to be so admirable and controlled, would come as a relief to the prevailing tone of the narrative.
Two more years of the most methodical writing followed, and on January 19, 1933, Freeman wired Perkins, I AM VAIN ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL REJOICE WITH ME WHEN I TELL YOU I YESTERDAY COMPLETED THE TEXT OF THE LEE. ONLY LITERARY REVISION REMAINS. After twenty years on the project, Freeman’s four-volume biography was published. It had the extraordinary distinction of being praised by the critics, winning the Pulitzer Prize for biography, and becoming a best seller. The book had taken almost two years of editing, and in December, 1934, Freeman expressed his gratitude to Perkins: “This book would never have been finished but for the encouragement I received at your hands. Many a time, when composition was lagging, a word from you prodded me on.”
Freeman was already considering subjects to which he might devote the next ten years of his life. Perkins thought he could do a brilliant biography of Washington.
It is that in his case too, you would be writing largely a military life, and whatever else may be said about the Lee, the accounts of the campaigns, and battles, are I believe, excelled by no other writer on military matters. I thought this when I first read the ms., and now we know that authorities think it. The clarity and intensity with which these campaigns are described makes most fascinating reading, and most enlightening. Of course in Washington’s case, the military strategy would be much less complicated, but I do not think that the Revolutionary campaigns are even as well understood as the Civil War ones, and I think you would handle them magnificently, and that all your study of war for the Lee and previous to that, would be of great advantage to you.
Upon making his recommendation, Perkins turned Freeman over to Wallace Meyer, who had played a major role in editing the Lee. Freeman went on to write Lee’s Lieutenants before getting to his seven-volume life of Washington, the final installment of which he did not live to complete.
Geographically, at this time, nothing more than the East River separated Max from Tom Wolfe, but they communicated mainly through the mail and saw each other only when Wolfe’s work schedule permitted. In August, 1931, Perkins thought they should get together, at least to discuss the possible publication date of Wolfe’s novel. Perkins wrote to him in Brooklyn, “You ought to make every conceivable effort to have your manuscript completely finished by the end of September. I meant to speak of this when we were last together. I hope you will come in soon and tell me what you think you can do.”
“I know you are not joking and that you mean this September, and not September four, five, or fifteen years from now,” Wolfe replied. “Well, there is no remote or possible chance that I will have a completed manuscript of anything that resembles a book this September, and whether I have anything that I would be willing to show anyone next September, or any succeeding one for the next 150 years, is at present a matter of the extremest and most painful doubt to me.”
Tom said he regretted destroying Perkins’s belief in him almost as much as he feared failing himself. But Wolfe said he did not “care one good Goddamn of a drunken sailor’s curse whether I have disappointed the world of bilge-and-hogwash writers or any of the other literary rubbish of sniffers, whiffers, and puny, poisonous apes.” The only thing Wolfe cared about now was whether he had enough faith and power left that would justify his going on. He wrote to Perkins that “no one can take anything from me now that I value, they can have their cheap, nauseous, seven-day notoriety back to give to other fools, but I am perfectly content to return to the obscurity in which I passed almost thirty years of my life without any great difficulty.” He had no desire to cling to his “stinking remnant of a rotten fish” of a manuscript; but, he wrote Perkins, if anyone wanted to know when he would have a new book out, he would answer without apology, “When I have finished writing one and found someone who wants to publish it.”
Wolfe’s most fluent channel of expression was the written word. (In fact, he stammered when he was excited.) And so, at great length, he wrote Perkins exactly what was on his mind more intimately than he could by talking to him in person. Wolfe wanted to tell Perkins finally that he was in doubt about his book but not despair. “I felt if my life and strength kept up, if my vitality moved in every page, if I followed it through to the end,” he wrote Perkins, “it would be a wonderful book—
but I doubted then that life was long enough, it seemed to me it would take ten books, that it would be the longest ever written. Then, instead of paucity, I had abundance—such abundance that my hand was palsied, my brain weary—and in addition, as I go on, I want to write about everything and say all that can be said about each particular. The vast freightage of my years of hunger, my prodigies of reading, my infinite store of memories, my hundreds of books of notes, return to drown me—sometimes I feel as if I shall compass and devour them, again be devoured by them. I had an immense book, and I wanted to say it all at once: it can’t be done.
Wolfe was putting his story down like a mosaic, tile by tile. He hoped each piece would be a complete story while it made up the whole plan. The newest section had become a big book in itself and was for the first time straight in his head to the minutest detail. He wrote Perkins, “It is a part of my whole scheme of books as a small river flows into a big one.”
In getting them all published, Wolfe said he understood that he was not bound to Scribners by any sort of contract. None was offered him, nor had he taken money that was not his own. The only bond Wolfe was conscious of was one of friendship and loyalty to Max Perkins’s house. He wanted to remain both Perkins’s friend and author, but he believed those were honors he had to earn. He still felt so beholden to Perkins for his contribution to Look Homeward, Angel that he did not want to accept anything more from him until he had reimbursed him for that much. And so he said the best way to leave things between them was with the “coast clear”—without debits or entanglements. “If I ever write anything else that I think worth printing, or that your house might be interested in,” he wrote Perkins, “I will bring it to you, and you can read it, accept it or reject it with the same freedom as with the first book. I ask no more from anyone.”
Wolfe saw what happened to so many writers in what they were already calling “the twenties.” He wanted to have nothing to do with those “nasty, ginny, drunken, jealous, fake-Bohemian little lives.” He saw how the literary establishment kicked these men out, after tainting and corrupting them, and brought in another set which they called “the younger writers,” among whose names Tom had seen his own included. Wolfe would not be billed like some prizefighter, he said. “The only standard I will compete against now is in me: if I can’t reach it, I’ll quit.”
I’m out of the game—and it is a game, a racket [Wolfe wrote Perkins]. What I do now must be for myself. I don’t care who “gets ahead” of me—that game isn’t worth a good goddamn: I only care if I have disappointed you, but it’s very much my own funeral, too.
When Tom Wolfe was a boy, he said, he used to call someone he looked up to a “high-class gentleman.” “That’s the way I feel about you,” he wrote Perkins. “I don’t think I am one—not the way you are, by birth, by gentleness, by natural and delicate kindness. But if I have understood some of the things you have said to me, I believe you think the most living and beautiful thing on this earth is art, and that the finest and most valuable life is that of the artist. I think so, too: I don’t know whether I have it in me to live that life, but if I have, then I think I would have something that would be worth your friendship.”