XI

Lamentations

The most recent addition to Maxwell Perkins’s list of desperate friends was Ring Lardner. At the beginning of 1931 he was laid up with what appeared to be the effects of excessive overworking, smoking, and drinking. “I guess I am paying for my past,” Ring wrote Max in a short letter that was devoid of the usual wisecracks, “and I’m not averaging more than four short stories a year. None of the recent ones has been anything to boast of and I’m afraid there won’t be enough decent ones to print by fall.” Perkins believed Lardner had followed the “will o‘ the wisp of the theatre” at the expense of his real writing, though he never accused him of that. He did tell him that he wished he would take a year off from the Broadway high life to live quietly and write a novel. “Spring is not so far off now,” Max wrote him, “and that always, I find, brings a man up a good many notches.”

Spring came and went, and Lardner weakened. By fall, Perkins finally perceived that a recurrence of the tuberculosis that had attacked Ring years earlier was sapping his strength. For a while Ring picked up some money writing a “daily wire” for several newspapers, but it was not enough. His royalties had dwindled—Round Up had soared to 100,000 copies, but sales now had dropped—and his overall income had declined alarmingly. His wife, Ellis, summed up their situation for Perkins: “Ring has not been able to do any work for five months and the Lardners are pretty hard up.” As the new financial administrator of the family, she asked Scribners for the $208.93 in royalties that would be due in December. Perkins had the check sent immediately, knowing it would salve the difficulties, not solve them. Apparently the only cure for Ring’s condition was rest. Max knew it was hard to rest when money was such a worry. Discouraged by Ring’s lack of improvement and also by what she had heard of the Fitzgeralds in recent years, Ellis Lardner asked Perkins, “Do you suppose there is anyone left in the world who is well physically, mentally, and financially?”

Six years had passed since The Great Gatsby was published. In the last two years Fitzgerald had hardly put pencil to paper. Certainly the major factor in his lack of progress during that time had been his wife’s illness. By the fall of 1931 they had bought a Stutz car and settled into an oversized house in Montgomery, Alabama, to pick up the pieces of their lives. Scott wrote Perkins that there was, in fact, no talk of Depression in Montgomery; it seemed to have passed the city by, just as the boom did before it. After a while, however, Fitzgerald found the city’s slow pace killing. The thought of each passing day dimming his fame kept him awake nights.

In November Scott packed his bags and left abruptly for Hollywood. He was gone eight weeks, working on a film treatment at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In his absence, Zelda became absorbed in writing her own fiction. Scott came back to his wife and child in Alabama $6,000 ahead and full of material to write about for years to come. “At last,” he wrote Perkins, “for the first time in two years and ½ I am going to spend five consecutive months on my novel.” His new plan called for taking what was good in what he had already written and adding 41,000 words to it. “Don’t tell Ernest or anyone,” he requested of his editor; “—let them think what they want—you’re the only one whose ever consistently felt faith in me anyhow.”

For months Fitzgerald drafted chronological charts, lists, outlines, and character studies for the book—then called The Drunkard’s Holiday— thinking out every detail beforehand so that this time he would not trip up once he started writing. “The novel should do this,” Fitzgerald wrote at the top of his master “General Plan”:

Show a man who is a natural idealist, a spoiled priest going in for various causes to the ideas of the haute Burgoise [sic], and in his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent and turning to drink and dissipation. Background one in which the liesure class is at their truly most brilliant & glamorous such as Murphys.

The hero, named Dick, is a psychiatrist who falls in love with one of his patients, Nicole, most of whose case history was lifted from Zelda’s hospital folders. In time the story would shed the political-economic notions Fitzgerald had in mind and take on spiritual and psychological aspects. The young doctor would expend all his vitality until he would be left emotionally bankrupt, an “homme épuisé”; thus the novel would reflect all the inner torment Fitzgerald felt had been draining him for most of the last decade.

Shortly after Scott’s arrival in Montgomery, where he began marshaling this new version of the book, Zelda’s asthma and her telltale blotches of eczema reappeared. Within days her behavior retrogressed to what it had been in Switzerland. In February, 1932, Scott brought Zelda to the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Her mood improved once he went back to Alabama—to the point where she was able to take a major step. Ever since her ballet career had ended, writing fiction had become an effective therapy for Zelda; she felt a sense of accomplishment every time she finished a story on her own. Max knew this, but he was nevertheless surprised to receive a letter from her in March which announced: “Under separate cover, as I believe is the professional phraseology, I have mailed you my first novel.” It was a full-length work entitled Save Me the Waltz. Zelda had written it in six weeks while at Phipps. “Scott being absorbed in his own has not seen it,” she wrote Perkins, “so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits, but naturally terribly anxious that you should like it.... If the thing is too wild for your purposes, might I ask what you suggest? Presuming, I realize, on your friendship to an unwarranted extent.”

Perkins was perplexed. From the beginning, the manuscript had a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had had difficulty in separating fiction from reality. Highly charged images, often with little connection to one another, crowded the prose. The plot seemed to reflect, often in a distorted fun-house-mirror style of exaggeration, Scott’s early writing about their life together. Save Me the Waltz was the story of Alabama Beggs, a Montgomery judge’s daughter who married a handsome, promising artist she met during the war; through his early triumphs, she found herself unhappy and unfulfilled and started up a ballet career. Zelda had named the artist Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise.

Within the week Zelda wired Perkins: ACTING ON SCOTTS ADVICE WILL YOU RETURN MANUSCRIPT PHIPPS CLINIC JOHNS HOPKINS WITH MANY THANKS REGRETS AND REGARDS. Fitzgerald had at last heard about the manuscript and wanted to read it himself before Max did. Perkins complied, writing: HAD READ ABOUT 60 PAGES WITH GREAT INTEREST VERY LIVE AND MOVING HOPE YOU WILL RETURN IT.

Perkins wrote Hemingway about the novel. “It looked as if there were a great deal that was good in it,” he said, “but it seemed rather as though it somewhat dated back to the days of The Beautiful and Damned. And of course it would not do at all the way it was, with Amory Blaine. It would have been mighty rough on Scott.... I think the novel will be quite a good one when she finishes it.”

Scott interrupted his own novel to confer with Zelda, then wrote Max that the entire middle section of her book would have to be “radically rewritten.” The name of the artist, he said, would of course be changed. But Scott’s objections, in truth, went beyond the qualities of the manuscript itself. He was furious with Zelda. It was not just that she had sent the manuscript to Perkins before showing it to him, as if going behind his back. It was also that he soon realized how much use she had made of incidents from their life together—the rich material he had been too busy to use in the last few years because he had had to write cheaper stories to pay Zelda’s doctor bills.

In trying to placate Scott, Zelda all but threw herself at his feet. In a breast-beating letter she wrote, “Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable.” She knew what she had done: “I was ... afraid we might have touched the same material.” But she explained: “Purposely I didn’t [send my book to you before I mailed it to Max]—knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion.... So, Dear, My Own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you—but time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so bombastic about Max.”

Fitzgerald had left Alabama on March 30 to be near his wife in Baltimore. In May he reported to Max, “Zelda’s novel is now good. Improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it.... I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think.” In the middle of the month, when he mailed the manuscript to Perkins for a second reading, he noted that it had the faults and virtues of any first novel.

It is more the expression of a powerful personality, like Look Homeward, Angel, than the work of a finished artist like Ernest Hemingway. It should interest the many thousands in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell.

At first, when Scott had feared that unrestrained congratulations might encourage the incipient egomania Zelda’s doctors had observed, he had written Perkins:

If she has a success coming she must associate it with work done in a workmanlike manner for its own sake, & part of it done fatigued and uninspired, part of it done when even to remember the original inspiration and impetus is a psychological trick. She is not twenty-one and she is not strong, and she must not try to follow the pattern of my trail which is of course blazed distinctly on her mind.

Now he felt she deserved whatever praise Max cared to give her. She had put all her effort into the book. After first refusing to revise at all, she had reworked it completely, “changing what was a rather flashy and self-justifying ‘true confessions’ that wasn’t worthy of her into an honest piece of work.”

Perkins stashed the manuscript into his scuffed briefcase for the weekend. HAD A GRAND SUNDAY READING YOUR NOVEL THINK IT VERY UNUSUAL AND AT TIMES DEEPLY MOVING PARTICULARLY DANCING PART DELIGHTED TO PUBLISH, he wired on Monday. Later that day he wrote the author of her book, “It is alive from beginning to end.” Max hoped Zelda would consider some timid suggestions, mostly stylistic matters. As in her earlier short stories, she often ran astray chasing down metaphors:

Many of them are brilliant [Perkins wrote her], but I almost think ... that they would be more effective if less numerous. And sometimes they seem to me to be too bold and interesting because then they have the effect of concentrating attention upon them for their own sake instead of for the illumination of the things they are meant to reveal.

Zelda was thrilled. “To catalogue my various excitements and satisfaction that you liked my book would be an old story to you,” she wrote Perkins. “It seems so amazing to me that you are going to actually publish it that I feel I should warn you that it’s probably a very mediocre affair that will soon be as out of date as a Nineteen Four Spalding prospectus for Lawn Tennis. My God, the ink will fade, maybe you’ll discover that it doesn’t make sense. It couldn’t be possible that I was an author.” She agreed to change any “questionable parts,” but Perkins found Save Me the Waltz, strangely enough, virtually beyond editing. The entire manuscript was honeycombed with some of the most flowery language he had ever seen. Her similes flowed naturally if not always sensibly, sometimes dozens of them on a single page. In describing the boatloads of Americans who wandered around France in the late twenties, for example, Zelda wrote:

They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazlenuts at Fountainebleau where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrellas poured over surburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs.

Hardly a character, emotion, or scene was not adorned with her grandiloquence. But that was the very quality that distinguished her writing, just as it enlivened her speech. For the most part, Perkins benignly neglected the problem and chose to let it appear in public as it was, to live or die on its own.

Under her husband’s eye, Zelda revised the galley proofs considerably. The book was shortened, mostly by filing down the accounts of their marital jags. During the next few months proofs were shuttled around so hectically from Perkins to the author to the typesetter, to Perkins, back to the author, and back to the typesetter—that it seemed at last that everyone, exhausted, had just quit, as if to avoid another mailing. Max thought of warning the Fitzgeralds they would have to pay for the excessive corrections, but he knew they wanted the book the way they thought it should be, regardless of cost. Ultimately, countless misspellings, unclear passages, and most of the rococo language found their way into print. Impressed with the bulk of her book once it was bound, Zelda wrote Max, “I only hope it will be as satisfactory to you as it is to me.”

The Fitzgeralds’ marriage worked like a seesaw. In the spring of 1932, while Zelda was high with expectations for her book, Scott was feeling low. He was torn from his past but unattached to any future. “I don’t know exactly what I shall do,” he wrote Perkins de profundis. “Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone.” In his relentless search for a home that might make him feel part of a permanent and grand life, the Fitzgeralds settled into La Paix, a stolidly Victorian house on some Maryland acreage belonging to a family named Turnbull. “We have a soft shady place here that’s like a paintless playhouse abandoned when the family grew up,” Zelda wrote Perkins. Max hoped the peaceful surroundings would compel the Fitzgeralds to live quietly. And, he wrote Hemingway, “if Zelda can only begin to make money, and she might well do it, they ought to get into a good position where Scott can write.”

That year, while Scott was still down, there was a most unusual switching of roles between editor and author, the first and last in their entire correspondence. Fitzgerald had sensed that Perkins was not quite himself, almost lethargic, heavily overburdened. “For God’s sake take your vacation this winter,” Scott urged. “Nobody could quite ruin the house in your absence, or would dare to take any important steps. Give them a chance to see how much they depend on you & when you come back cut off an empty head or two.”

Unknown to almost everyone outside the Perkins house, Max had been greatly worried about the mysterious illness of one of his daughters, Bertha. She had been in a car accident and walked away unharmed physically, but she had then blacked out for the next eighteen hours. Max was absolutely desperate about his daughter’s undiagnosed condition, which induced periodic convulsions. He disclosed the situation to Scott, who time and again volunteered to discuss the case, for he had, he said, become “such a blend of the scientific and the layman’s attitude on such subjects that I could be more help than anyone you could think of.” Zelda was equally solicitous. She had always been drawn toward the sickest patients in the asylums she stayed in.

“I have still got a few purgatories to get through,” Max wrote Zelda that June. “But a month from now I ought to be out of some of the thickest of the woods that I have been in.”

Thomas Wolfe was aware of the change in Perkins too. He believed his editor “would give his life to keep or increase virtue—to save the savable, to grow the growable, to cure the curable, to keep the good. But for the thing unsavable, for life ungrowable, for the ill incurable, he had no care. Things lost in nature hold no interest for him.” If his daughter could not be cured, Wolfe believed, Perkins would not have worried much; but circumstances being what they were, Tom observed Max growing haggard-eyed and thinner, overworking himself at the office to distract himself from grimness at home. Wolfe himself provided Perkins with more than enough to keep his mind on editorial problems.

Wolfe had kept very much to himself for most of the last few months. He had left his apartment on Verandah Place, where he had produced a tremendous volume of work, for another cycle of writing at 111 Columbia Heights, also in Brooklyn. The tools of his trade remained the same wherever he worked: pencils, paper, floor space—and a refrigerator. Max once told a student of Wolfe’s writing how all four elements were basic to his composition:

Mr. Wolfe writes with a pencil, in a very large hand. He once said that he could write the best advertisement imaginable for the Frigidaire people since he found it exactly the right height to write on when standing and with enough space for him to handle his ms. on the top. He writes mostly standing in that way, and frequently strides about the room when unable to find the right way of expressing himself.

After Wolfe’s daily stint, he gathered the papers from the floor and had them typed. Seldom did he let anyone but the typist look at them. Perkins told Hemingway that winter that what little he had seen of Wolfe’s latest work was “as good as it could be.” Unfortunately, Tom had recurring attacks of self-doubt so wracking that he could not write. “He keeps getting all upset, and he is so now,” Max wrote Ernest at the beginning of 1932, “and I am to have an evening with him and try to make him think he is some good again. He is good all right.”

At the end of a whiny session on January 26, 1932, Tom followed Max to Grand Central Station and was still yammering as they boarded the Connecticut-bound train. Wolfe needed further convincing of his abilities, so Max had encouraged him to spend the night at his house. But as the railroad cars lurched out of their berth, Wolfe had one of his sudden changes of heart. He had to go back to Brooklyn, to be alone, to write. He galloped down the aisle toward an exit door and, as the platform pulled away from him, he broad-jumped to the concrete deck. The conductor yanked the emergency brake and Perkins rushed to aid Tom, who lay by the track with blood streaming from his left elbow. Max accompanied him to the Grand Central emergency hospital and waited while the arm was X-rayed and stitched. “I thank God it was my left arm rather than my right,” Tom wrote his sister Mabel, “since my whole chance of living at present depends more or less on my right hand.”

That same month, Perkins had to minister to Wolfe’s needs again, this time as peacemaker. A communique from the German publishers of Look Homeward, Angel came into Perkins’s hands, which showed that Madeleine Boyd had withheld a royalty payment from Wolfe. Tom, rightfully, was furious at this and demanded his agent meet with him and Perkins at Scribners. Before their afternoon conference, Wolfe and his editor lunched, and Tom discussed strategy. He insisted that Max be present during the showdown and that he be “unrelenting.” The meeting did not, however, proceed according to plan. Several years later, Max sent an account of the afternoon to Tom’s friend John Terry:

When we reached this office, Mrs. Boyd was sitting in the little library here, turning over some papers. I went in immediately, but Tom for some reason did not. She immediately began to weep. It was at the very depth of the depression, and she was hard put to it to keep going. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, and unfortunately at the moment when Tom entered, I was patting her on the back, and saying, “Don’t cry, Madeleine, everyone is in trouble today.” I suddenly became aware of Tom’s presence. He was towering above us, and gave me a look of utter scorn. Mrs. Boyd then tried to explain that the failure to pay over the money was due to some confusion in bank accounts which was too complicated for either Tom or myself to understand. (She has since told me that story humorously in retrospect, and I suppose it may well be true.) But anyhow Tom was through with her. And she acknowledged the fault, if not the dishonesty, and when he said, “Don’t you see, Madeleine, that this must be the end,” she agreed to it.

During the meeting Tom upbraided her so bitingly that Max felt compelled to restrain him.

In all their recent times together, Perkins had tried to restore Wolfe’s faith in himself, while Tom’s personal and editorial needs kept Max from his family worries. That season Wolfe wrote Aline Bernstein, who was still reaching out to him, “I’ve got my self-confidence back ... which I had lost completely—and I have never worked so hard in all my life. I have been pretty close to complete ruination, but I may pull out yet.” With three months of concentrated effort, Tom predicted, he could give Scribners a book of 200,000 to 300,000 words which they could publish in the fall. “But if I don’t finish the book this year,” he wrote Aline in an effort to keep her at arm’s distance, “I’m done forever—I’ll never be able to work again.”

In his less sanguine moments, Perkins himself feared that just might happen to Wolfe. Maintaining every expectation of publishing Wolfe’s novel that autumn, he told Wolfe as an incentive that if he had enough gumption to stick with the job and deliver the goods, Perkins would take a sabbatical half-year from his desk to motor cross-country with him in a Ford. Wolfe returned to his Frigidaire with renewed determination, eager to finish his book as much for Perkins as for himself. “He is ... terribly tired and has had a bad year,” Tom wrote Aline; “—his daughter has been having fainting spells with convulsions and no one can find out what’s wrong with her. Max is a grand man, the best I ever knew, and as complete an individual as ever lived.”

In anguish while the finest doctors probed for cures for Bertha’s illness, Perkins wrote Hemingway about his bullfight book. “I wish that manuscript would come ... I expect to get a lot out of it that will act as a counterbalance for things that one sees on all sides.” It would be another month of labor.

Hemingway, by his own admission, had “never gone better than lately.” He returned from Spain in the fall of 1931 with only the “swell last chapter” and a translation of the Spanish government’s Reglamento, the rules governing bullfighting, remaining to be done. That, he said, would conclude “one hell of a fine book.” He and Pauline settled in Kansas City and awaited the arrival of their second child. In mid-November, he announced the birth of his third son, Gregory. Max wired succinct congratulations: ENVIOUS. Hemingway wrote back that he would give out his secret for producing sons if Perkins would divulge his trick for siring daughters.

By the first of February, 1932, Max had received the manuscript of Death in the Afternoon. Ernest had kept his “nose to book grindstone” for a long time and so he was especially anxious to hear Perkins’s reactions. “It’s silly just to write you that it’s a grand book—but it did do me great good just to read it,” Max wrote Hemingway. “I went to bed happy for it in spite of innumerable troubles (not so bad really, I guess). The book piles upon you wonderfully, and becomes to one reading it—who at first thinks bullfighting only a small matter—immensely important.” Three days later, in discussing serialization in Scribner’s, Max noted, “It gives the impression of having grown rather than of having been planned.— And that is the characteristic of a great book.” The editorial questions Perkins foresaw were those of format. He wanted the book to be big enough in size and shape to give the illustrations a real show, but he did not want to put too high a price on it. A second problem dealt with which portions of the manuscript should be excerpted for the magazine. “It’s a mean business, picking articles out of a book like this,” Perkins wrote Hemingway. “But from the commercial standpoint, as we call it, it will help it.”

Hemingway thought they could easily handle these matters at sea. He invited Perkins to the Tortugas, telling him “To hell with signing any goddamned contracts” unless he came. This year Hemingway’s ultimatum did not work. Perkins pleaded insufficient funds and time, but it was mostly a lack of spirit. “I’ve got more problems on my hands now than those of all the rest of my life should add up to,” he explained. His daughter was sent to Boston where he heard “they have bigger and better neurologists.” Her condition remained baffling. It now was taking its toll on Louise. She collapsed trying to keep up with the girl’s illness and was hospitalized herself for several weeks. “Having a hard time escaping an obsession that the Gods are sniping at me personally,” he wrote Ernest. “I have a weakness for obsessions, as you’ve guessed.... But it’s best to get bad luck in bunches if you can stand it.” He wrapped himself in work, hating even to think about missing Key West.

That spring, after Hemingway returned from the Tortugas, Perkins talked him down from 200 illustrations to sixty-four and argued about what had come to be known as “four-letter words.” Ernest agreed to comply with most state statutes by blanking out two of the letters which, Max said, “certainly does make the law what Shakespeare said it was—a fool.” Hemingway was upset that the book would not be the deluxe photograph album he had imagined, but John Dos Passos raised his spirits with his remarks about Death in the Afternoon. It was, he said, the best writing about Spain he had ever read. At Dos Passos’s suggestion, Hemingway cut several pages of philosophizing. Perkins never suggested any deletions of his own; if he had, he might have improved the book further by reducing Hemingway’s literary pretentiousness.

With Death in the Afternoon the words cojones and macho entered the Hemingway glossary and the cult of hypermasculinity had found its spokesman. Indeed, he had become self-obsessed, and the writing lacked its former control. Perkins saw through a lot of Hemingway’s posturing, but he wanted to believe that beneath it pounded the heart of a truly brave man. He admired the manliness of Hemingway’s life and his prose. Zippy Perkins remembered her father’s once explaining, “Hemingway loves to write for those of us who will never come face to face with danger.” Just as Perkins related to Fitzgerald as uncle to a pleasure-seeking but adored nephew, his relationship to Hemingway evoked another familial tie. For Perkins, Hemingway was the daredevil “kid brother,” forever getting into dangerous scrapes, forever being advised and cautioned by his “big brother.” There was a rough-and-ready quality to Hemingway that reminded Perkins of his happy boyhood, and there was an insistent virility that Perkins could not, being a “gentleman,” always express in his own life, but of which he was jealous. Again, as with Fitzgerald, Perkins experienced Hemingway’s style, so different from his own, in a vicarious sense. He identified with Hemingway’s machismo, but could not live it.

While leisurely correcting his galleys, Hemingway took a sunny room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana. Again he urged Perkins to visit him: Max could carry back the proofs and the pictures complete with captions, after the two of them had discussed any problems in the book. Max said he wished he could come down but felt it would be impossible until July. “I am more tied down though now than ever,” he wrote Hemingway, “but also with better prospects for ultimate release.”

The day before Hemingway checked out of the Ambos Mundos, he got bathed in sweat while marlin fishing, then was showered by a sudden cold downpour. By the time he shipped out of Cuba he had a touch of bronchial pneumonia, which he still had not recognized. He steered across the Florida Straits with a temperature of 102 degrees. Once at home, he took to his bed to correct his proofs. The galleys got his blood boiling. It was standard procedure to headline each proof sheet with the author’s last name and the title’s first word. A page would be headed, accordingly, “4 Gal 80 .. 3404 Hemingway’s Death 11½—14 Scotch.” Hemingway asked Perkins if it seemed funny to him to print at the top of every sheet “Hemingway’s Death.” The author did not see any humor in it. He swore that Max should have known that he was superstitious and it was a “hell of a damn dirty business” staring at the caption over and over again.

Perkins had not seen that line of type on the proofs. “If I had I would have known what to do with it,” he assured Hemingway, “because you cannot tell me anything about omens. I can see more than any man on the face of the earth, and once when things were bad and I was alone in the car and a black cat crossed the road I actually shot around the corner. When any of my family are in the car and that happens, I tell them not to be foolish.”

For months Perkins believed his life was cursed. Several authors and colleagues suggested that he had practically sleepwalked through his work that year, preoccupied as he was over his daughter’s health. Perkins had been too glum even to write Elizabeth Lemmon. That June he again explained that there were times when he started letters to her but never finished them.

The way things have been this year I could only write gloomily and I was ashamed to do that—that I couldn’t face a run of bad luck without being gloomy and cowardly about it. So I always gave up before I finished a letter.

Max’s trouble was that Bertha’s illness so depressed him that he could not speak cheerfully of anything that year. “At other times a number of things have always been going wrong but you could always look upon something that was going right,” he wrote Elizabeth. “But lately, everywhere I have looked, ruin threatened.” If his daughter could just recover, Max believed, that would offset every other misfortune. After more than a year of infirmity, she was showing some improvement. “Her illness filled me with cold terror,” he told Elizabeth. “Then Louise was in a dreadful state, not being well anyway. And with business etc. as it was, it was a mighty bad year.”

That summer Arthur H. Scribner died of a heart attack, two years after assuming the presidency of the firm. His nephew Charles succeeded him, and Maxwell Perkins was named editor-in-chief and vice-president of the company. Now there were managerial responsibilities piling on top of his regular editorial concerns—that Hemingway would do something dangerous, that Fitzgerald would not write his book, that Thomas Wolfe would require increasing expenditures of energy and emotion, or that Ring Lardner’s tuberculosis and sleeplessness, caused by worry over his poverty, would worsen. “What of it?” Max asked Elizabeth Lemmon. “What is life but taking a licking?” In another letter he said:

You know that about counting your blessings doesn’t do any good to one from New England. It makes it worse. The New Englander thinks his blessings are the very things that prove he is in for a bad time because justice demands that the score shall be evened up. Some days after my father died my mother said, “I knew something was going to happen,” and when I asked why she said, “Everything was going too well.”—and though I was only seventeen I understood perfectly.“

Max wanted to believe the world would become a better place for his five children, if it could escape a real crash. “But,” he wondered, “can it settle in time for these girls? What can they live by—by nothing that ‘the former people’ did.”

Louise visited Elizabeth at Welbourne for a few days of rest and asked if she would “take care of Max” when he came down later in the summer for what became regular appointments with his otologist at Johns Hopkins. He knew no one in Baltimore and used to wander around Druid Hill Park alone.

Max Perkins suffered from otosclerosis, specifically, the growth of new bone around the footplate of the stapes in the middle ear. Noises often rang in his left ear, sounding like the chirping of birds. Today that tiny bone can be replaced with a synthetic one, but every three months Perkins had to have his Eustachian tube dilated by the insertion of a medicated wire so that the vibrations within his ear were more distinct. In July, 1932, Max showed up for his appointment with Dr. James Bordley. It was too hot for him to consider asking Elizabeth to meet him afterward, but she just appeared on Saturday at the Hotel Belvedere. That afternoon, she drove him out to Gettysburg. “It was the hottest day I’ve ever felt in my life,” Elizabeth recalled forty years later, “but he climbed every monument and looked at every stone wall on the battlefield. I waited for him in the car. When we finally got back to the city our tongues were hanging out. Max was dying for a drink, but it was tough to find one and he said, ‘This is the driest city I’ve ever seen.’ ” Later he wrote her: “They were two of the best days I ever had ... and I shall always be grateful to you for them. I believe a month’s vacation couldn’t have done me more good. You make everything seem right and happy.... Thanks ever so much Elizabeth for being so good to me. I’ll never forget it.”

The next day Perkins telephoned Scott, who motored into Baltimore and drove him out to La Paix. Max found it “really a fine sort of melancholy place,” that made him want to saunter around and look at the trees. But Scott thought they ought to settle down to gin rickeys. They drew up chairs on a small piazza and waited for a breeze to whish through the rich foliage. Zelda drifted outside to join them, looking well—not so pretty as she had been, but calmer than he had ever seen her. Max found more “reality” in her talk. But he worried about them both. Under the white light of the summer sun, Max thought, Scott’s face looked weary and tight, skull-like. Zelda brought out some grotesque sketches she had drawn. After lunch with the Fitzgeralds, Max drove back into town with Zelda, who had to return to the Phipps Clinic, then hopped a plane back to New York.

“Poor old Scott,” Hemingway lamented after Perkins wrote him of the battle-fatigued figures he had seen at La Paix. Ernest still thought the situation was Zelda’s fault. He said Fitzgerald should have swapped her when she was “at her craziest but still salable” some five or six years back, before she was diagnosed as “nutty.” He also did not think Zelda’s becoming a writer was the way to bring either of them back to life. Hemingway warned Perkins that if he ever published a book by any of his wives, “I’ll bloody well shoot you.” Because of Zelda, he said, F. Scott Fitzgerald had become the “great tragedy of talent in our bloody generation.”

“If we could only fix Scott up for a clear six months we might turn that tragedy into something else,” Max wrote Ernest. “And there isn’t a bad chance that Zelda might not turn out to be a writer of popular books. She has some mighty bad tricks of writing, but she is now getting over the worst of them.” In fact, he hoped Zelda might prove to be Scott’s ace in the hole, which he needed desperately. Perkins confided to Hemingway that Scribners had advanced Scott so much money on his novel that it was impossible to see how he could pay off his debt to Scribners even if it were a great success. As it was, they arranged for half of Zelda’s royalties to be applied against Scott’s debt until $5,000 had been paid back.

Max had never been concerned for Fitzgerald so much as after this last visit. “If a man gets tired and has a good alabi—and Scott has in Zeida—he’s likely to accept defeat,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “They’ve all lost faith in him too, even Ernest. I wish it could be fixed so he could show them!”

Save Me the Waltz was published in October, 1932. Its sales never got moving, and only a handful of reviewers praised or even constructively criticized the book. In some respects, Perkins was responsible for the book’s failure on all counts. In his distraction that year, he did not give Zelda a very strong send-off. “It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader,” said the New York Times.

For another year, the Saturday Evening Post was the Fitzgeralds’ prime benefactor. It published three of Scott’s stories that summer; in August he sent them a fourth. The stories contributed little to his literary reputation, but after months of inaction on his serious work, he now had enough money to proceed. “The novel now plotted and planned,” he entered in his Ledger, “never more to be permanently interrupted.”

In a letter to Perkins, Zelda confirmed, “Scott’s novel is nearing completion. He’s been working like a streak and people who have read it say it’s wonderful.” She had no firsthand opinion, because in protecting their material from the other’s poaching, she wrote, “We wait now till each other’s stuff is copyrighted since I try to more or less absorb his technique and the range of our experience might coincide.”

In January, 1933, Scott came to New York for a three-day binge. “I was about to call you up when I completely collapsed and laid in bed for 24 hours groaning,” he wrote Perkins afterward. “Without a doubt the boy is getting too old for such tricks.... I send you this, less to write you aRousseau’s Confession than to let you know why I came to town without calling you, thus violating a custom of many years standing.” Back at La Paix, he vowed to go on the water wagon from the first of February until the first of April. He insisted Perkins keep that from Hemingway “because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic, due to the fact that we almost always meet at parties. I am his alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him, though even Poststories must be done in a state of sobriety.” Max wrote back telling him, tactfully, that Scott had in fact called him.

Because Fitzgerald was devoting more time to his novel than before, his income that year was half what it had been in the first few years of the Depression—less than $16,000. Even after moving out of La Paix into a smaller, less expensive place in town, Scott found himself having to scrimp. He asked Perkins if Zelda had any money due on her book. “She is shy about asking,” Scott wrote Max, “but she could use it to contribute to her winter outfit.”

The royalties would barely clothe her. Save Me the Waltz sold 1,380 copies, which translated into $408.30 in earnings. After subtracting for the cost of excess corrections on the proofs, as was standard, Perkins sent Zelda her check for $120.73, noting, “The result won’t be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask whether you were writing any more because of that fact, but I do think the last part of that book, in particular, was very fine; and if we had not been in the depths of a depression, the result would have been quite different.” The only Scribners books that got any show that year were by authors who had had an earlier success —as with Galsworthy’s One More River or James Truslow Adams’s March of Democracy—or whose authors were celebrities, like Clarence Darrow’s autobiography.

Of the sales figures on Save Me the Waltz, Perkins wrote Fitzgerald, “That is way above the average for a first novel in that bad year, but you are used to such big numbers that it will seem mighty bad to you.” Fitzgerald took the news understandingly, especially after learning that John Dos Passos’s latest book, 1919, had sold only 9,000 copies. Scott did not see how his own book was going to cover his debt to Scribners, as Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy had kept him alive in American letters better than Fitzgerald’s Poststories had done for him. Max wrote Fitzgerald that he did not find Dos Passos’s books enthralling.

His whole theory is that books should be sociological documents, or something approaching that. I know I never have taken one of them up without feeling that I was in for three or four hours of agony only relieved by admiration of his ability. They are fascinating but they do make you suffer like the deuce, and people cannot want to do that.

“If only this world will settle down on some kind of stable basis so that a man can attend to his own affairs,” Max wrote Fitzgerald, “I think that you will soon begin to do steady and consistent work. Let the basis be anything so long as it is a basis—a relatively fixed point from which a man can view things.”

Eight years had passed since The Great Gatsby. And yet, Max wrote Scott, “Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them; but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time.” That summer, Max contrived a plan to get Fitzgerald out of his heavy debt to Scribners by tying in serialization of his novel in the magazine.

In late September, 1933, Fitzgerald promised a complete draft of that work by the end of October. “I will appear in person carrying the manuscript and wearing a spiked helmet,” he wrote Perkins. “Please do not have a band as I do not care for music.” Right on schedule he appeared, and a startled Perkins received the first section of what was to become Tender Is the Night. He immediately pronounced it “wonderfully good and new.” Max timed his next visit to Dr. Bordley so that he could spend the following weekend with Fitzgerald reading the rest of the novel.

Scott kept Perkins for two solid days. Max tried to read the manuscript straight through but found it still unfinished and chaotic. Every time he got involved in a section, he found that Scott was handing him a Tom Collins, as if he were trying to make the writing go down easier. Then Scott would grab a bunch of pages to read aloud to Max. There was more work to be done, but Perkins had heard enough to tell that the book would work. When he got back to his office, he put the terms of their agreement in writing—thatScribner’s

agreed to serialize the new novel in four numbers beginning with the January number which appears about the 20th of December, for ten thousand dollars—six of which will be applied to reduce your indebtedness to us, and four thousand of which will be paid in cash, preferably at the rate of one thousand dollars a month as each installment is delivered.

In his Ledger, Scott marked the happiest event in years: “Max accepts book in 1st draft.”

Ring Lardner was now able to work at least a few hours a day, but insomnia was getting the best of him and his income still was not enough to meet expenses. In August, 1932, Perkins sent him a royalty payment that was not due until December. It was only $222.73, but Ring said it would be a “life saver; or rather a life insurance saver.” That proved worth holding onto, because in a few months he was borrowing against it.

To help Lardner scrape together a few more dollars, Perkins schemed several quick and easy ways for him to get published. Ring had written a new baseball series in the form of letters, a throwback to his You Know Me Al, and a new radio column in The New Yorker. Max suggested binding them into books. That winter Lardner’s doctor ordered him to go to the desert for his health, and Lardner was obliged to borrow money he had not yet earned to pay for such a trip. “Someday I will probably realize that there is a depression,” he wrote Perkins. Max sent advances in $100 increments, noting that Scribners would be willing to pay royalties almost concurrent with sales, even though a large part of their business was now done on a heavy consignment basis.

Lardner went to La Quinta, California, leaving his latest story, “Poodle,” in the hands of some “poor author’s agent” to peddle. It was the first story Lardner ever wrote that was not accepted by one of the first two publications to which it was offered. Within months he was back in East Hampton, critically ill and receiving no visitors. Perkins hated even to inquire.

On September 25, 1933, Ring Lardner died at forty-eight, after seven years of tuberculosis, sleeplessness, fatigue, and alcoholism. Mark Twain’s sentiment in “The Two Testaments”—that “when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free”—seemed tragically apropos.

Perkins wrote to Hemingway, who in his youth had admired Lardner:

Ring was not, strictly speaking, a great writer. He always thought of himself as a newspaperman, anyhow. He had a sort of provincial scorn of literary people. If he had written much more, he would have been a great writer perhaps, but whatever it was that prevented him from writing more was the thing that prevented him from being a great writer. But he was a great man, and one of immense latent talent.

As a final tribute to that talent, Perkins wanted to publish a volume of Ring’s material, a selection from his writing by somebody qualified to choose the most representative examples. He asked Fitzgerald whom he would suggest, barely concealing his hope that Scott himself might undertake the job. Fitzgerald said it was simply impossible for him to accept such an assignment with his own novel so near completion. He nominated Gilbert Seldes, who was both a journalist and a critic.

Within two weeks Seldes was on the project. He was particularly eager to get hold of Lardner’s early material and fugitive newspaper pieces written before he got to New York. After six weeks of digging through Midwestern newspaper morgues, Seldes had the book prepared. He called it First and Last. Seldes’s guiding principle was that “every item should be ‘good Lardner.’ ” While the book did not include the first piece Lardner ever wrote, it did contain the last. There would be nothing more of his for his readers to enjoy, because, as Seldes pointed out, Lardner “had been ill for years and left no manuscripts. For his own fame, he did not need to.”

In February, 1933, Max made a visit to Bertha in Boston and found to his great relief that she was responding to psychiatric treatment. At about the same time the doctors put Louise on a new high-protein diet that miraculously restored her health, ending a year-long worry for Max. Soon he was working again with his old vigor.