PART THREE
XIV
When he returned from Key West in early February, 1935, Maxwell Perkins urged Charles Scribner and Fritz Dashiell of Scribner’s to serialize Hemingway’s new book, now called Green Hills of Africa. It was a narrative expedition into contemporary literature almost as much as into the Serengeti plains. As with Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway, writing in the first person, was the guide. At conveniently located water holes in the safari, he paused to discuss writers and writing; for example, at one point he mused about Thomas Wolfe:
Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if they sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t.
Perkins wired Hemingway of Scribner’s enthusiasm for his book but said they would need to study the manuscript further before confirming the $5,000 proposal Max had mentioned while they were fishing in the Gulf Stream. It was a question of quantity of material, not quality. A week later Perkins wired: WRITING ABOUT PRICE. WISH TO PAY $4500. WILL BEGIN MAY NUMBER. PUBLISH BOOK OCTOBER....
In his letter Perkins added little to his telegram except his chagrin about the price. He knew Hemingway could get at least twice that much from any of the bigger magazines. “It is not a question of what Green Hills is worth intrinsically at all,” Perkins explained, “but of what we can rightly pay for it and still run the magazine on as nearly sound an economic basis as the present situation allows, which is not a sound one.”
By the time Hemingway received the offer he was “touchy as hell.” He was more anxious about the reception of Green Hills of Africa than of any of his previous works, for in it he vented his aggressions not only against other writers but also against the critics who had tried to put him down in the last few years. Hemingway was laying his career on the line; and he hotheadedly interpreted Perkins’s hard feelings about the money as an invitation to refuse the offer, thereby releasing Scribner’s from purchasing it. So far as Hemingway knew, he told Max, the magazine had never run on a sound economic basis; but then, neither had Hemingway. He maintained that he had never cost a publisher anywhere any money, except Horace Liveright ... by leaving him. Perkins avoided a flap by getting Scribner’s to pay Hemingway the $5,000.
That spring Ernest cruised for the first time to the island of Bimini, a fisherman’s paradise 175 miles northeast of Key West. Perkins withheld his editorial comments on Green Hills of Africa for the galleys, hoping the few months in Bimini might calm Hemingway.
At about this time Fitzgerald went off to a hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, for four weeks of rest. After writing for fifteen years, he was less secure than the day he started. He was flat broke and was beginning to realize he was no better a caretaker of his physical resources than of his fiscal ones. “I do not think he is especially sick,” Perkins wrote Hemingway, “but just exhausted from work and alcohol.” Home again in Baltimore, Fitzgerald wrote Max that he had “been on the absolute wagon for a month, not even beer or wine, and feel fine.”
The news pleased Perkins, but he believed that Fitzgerald would soon suffer symptoms of withdrawal—a letdown and then a struggle. He knew Fitzgerald would need the support of all the friends that he could get, but Scott was hard put to find them just then. That year, almost simultaneously, three of his friendships with Perkins’s writers deteriorated.
Months earlier Fitzgerald had openly admitted a kind of literary inferiority to Hemingway. He had written him that his respect for Ernest’s artistic life was absolutely unqualified, “that save for a few of the dead and dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much.” But their personal relationship had become distant, less because of Fitzgerald’s envy than of Hemingway’s arrogance. When Perkins suggested that Ernest find the time and some reason to write Fitzgerald, to brace him for “the crisis he will have to meet after a bit” from giving up liquor, Hemingway said he could not think of a way to write him without hurting Scott’s feelings.
Several months later, however, Hemingway asked Perkins to tell Scott that, strangely, Tender Is the Night kept improving every time he picked it up. Fitzgerald was cheered by Hemingway’s kind words. The book had fallen flat, but the author still believed in it profoundly. “Things happen all the time which make me think that it is not destined to die quite as easily as the boys-in-a-hurry prophesied,” he wrote Max. His friendship with Hemingway, on the other hand, had been one of the “high spots of life,” but, Scott wrote Perkins, “I still believe that such things have a mortality, perhaps in reaction to their very excessive life, and that we will never again see very much of each other.”
Fitzgerald also wanted to avoid Thomas Wolfe for a while, after reading the advance copy of Of Time and the River which Perkins had sent him. He admired Wolfe’s lavish dedication, and wrote Max, “I am sure that nothing Tom has said in his dedication could exaggerate the debt that he owes you—and that stands for all of us who have been privileged to be your authors.” Fitzgerald thought the book went downhill from there, but he asked Max on no account to tell Tom this, “for responding as he does to criticism, I know it would make us life-long enemies and we might do untold needless damage to each other.”
Of Time and the River helped Fitzgerald realize “that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor.” A short story could be written on a bottle, Fitzgerald saw, “but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows as Ernest did in A Farewell to Arms. If a mind is slowed up ever so little it lives in the individual part of a book rather than in a book as a whole; memory is dulled.” Still on the wagon and full of sober regrets, Fitzgerald told Perkins, “I would give anything if I hadn’t had to write Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference.”
The old friendship between Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson had also lapsed. They had gone in opposite directions. Antagonism had mounted because of their respective reputations as scholar and wastrel, and it came to a head in an argument over that very issue. “Bunny [Wilson’s nickname] was the one who quarrelled, not Scott,” Perkins wrote Hemingway years later, “and Bunny behaved, I almost thought, childish.” More than ever, Perkins thought Wilson was a “remarkable chap and a man of natural integrity,” who had done some magnificent writing in his last book for Scribners, American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932). But during the next few years, Wilson’s animosity toward Fitzgerald spilled over into his relationship with Perkins. Several times he came to Max for money against the earnings of future books. Once he requested the modest sum of $75; another time he asked Scribners to help him get a bank loan. “You wouldn’t do anything for me on either occasion at a time when you were handing out money to Scott Fitzgerald like a drunken sailor—which he was spending like a drunken sailor,” Wilson wrote Perkins years later. “Naturally you expected him to write you a novel which would make you a great deal more money than my books seemed likely to do. But, even so, the discrepancy seemed to me somewhat excessive.” Wilson did not attribute this to malice. “You’re the only person I ever see around there, and I’ve always felt I was on very good terms with you,” Wilson wrote Perkins. He ascribed it to the “general apathy and moribundity into which Scribners seems to have sunk. You people haven’t shown any signs of life since old man Scribner died—except when you have a paroxysm over some writer —usually very unreliable like Scott or Tom Wolfe—upon whom you squander money and attention like a besotted French king with a new favorite.” Years later Wilson admitted: “I ... was never one of his favorites,” thus explaining why he left Scribners for another house in the mid-thirties. At that point he struck up a profound intellectual affair with Marxism, which threw into bolder relief for him Fitzgerald’s social and historical shallowness. It would be years before Fitzgerald and the man he called his “intellectual conscience” would sit down and talk as friends again.
On several occasions, Scott had seen Elizabeth Lemmon at small parties in Baltimore. (Max envied him that. He had not been with Elizabeth for months. “I know it is my destiny to see you very seldom,” he wrote her, “and I can endure it well enough even if the interval is to be years, when I know it in advance.”) Max felt Elizabeth, in those brief meetings, had done Fitzgerald a lot of good. “Scott is under forty,” he told her, “and if he’s finished with alcohol he might do greater things than he had ever thought of. I know you had not consciously or directly influenced Scott but you were a revelation to him and did unconsciously.” If Fitzgerald could stop drinking for good, Perkins believed, it would be largely because of Elizabeth Lemmon.
On the wagon longer than he had been in ages, Scott found his life “uninspiring,” whereas, he believed, these should be his most productive years. “I’ve simply got to arrange something for the summer that will bring me to life again,” he wrote Perkins, “but what it should be is by no means apparent.”
For lack of a better suggestion, Max urged Scott to continue work on a novel he had begun which was set in medieval Europe—a long way from West Egg. Fitzgerald replied that the 90,000-word book would be called Philippe, Count of Darkness. His hero was a Frankish tough guy in armor—“It shall be the story of Ernest,” Fitzgerald put down in a notebook. Then he outlined parts of it that he could sell separately to magazines. He said Perkins could have it all by the late spring of 1936. “I wish I had these great masses of mss. stored away like Wolfe and Hemingway,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, “but this goose is beginning to be pretty thoroughly plucked, I am afraid.”
In May, 1935, Fitzgerald visited Perkins in New York. A bright period in Zelda’s health had proved to be just a flash, and Scott’s mood the evening they were together reflected it. He was scrappy, putting Max on the spot about books Scribners was publishing. He expressed his greatest dissatisfaction over Tom Wolfe. Scott had recently read Wolfe’s story “His Father’s House” in the latest issue of Modern Monthly, published by V. F. Calverton. It embodied all Wolfe’s faults and virtues and made Fitzgerald wish Tom were the sort of person with whom one could discuss his writing.
How he can put side by side such a mess as “With chitterling tricker fast-fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birderies came” and such fine phrases as “tongue-trilling chirrs, plumbellied smoothness, sweet lucidity” I don’t know. He who has such infinite power of suggestion and delicacy has absolutely no right to glut people on whole meals of caviar.
Fitzgerald’s unusual surliness with Perkins was provoked mostly by his own poor health. Just days before, the phantom illness he had so often blamed for his ills had materialized in a spot on his lung. The air in Wolfe country was reputedly therapeutic for tubercular conditions, and so Scott took a room at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville. The move to North Carolina, he said, was an attempt to commute a “death sentence” his doctor had handed down if Scott were to revert to his old ways of living. Fitzgerald’s return address for the next few months was “Gant’s Tomb, Asheville.”
“I was a good deal dismayed & probably jealous so forget all I said that night,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins after he had returned to Baltimore. “You know I’ve always thought there was plenty room in America for more than one good writer, & you’ll admit it wasn’t like me.”
Perkins thought everything Fitzgerald said about Wolfe was as true as truth can be, but there was little anyone—even Perkins—could do about it. “Even if one had an utterly free hand, instead of being subject to constant abuse ([with accusations of] God damned Harvard English, grovelling at the feet of Henry James, etc.),” Perkins explained to Fitzgerald, “it would be a matter of editing inside sentences even, and that would be a dangerous business.” Max thought criticism and age might make an impression and that Wolfe’s writing would mature on its own. For the present, he said, “It is not that he thinks he is better than anyone else. He just does not think about the other people at all. When he reads them he is quite keen about them for a while, but [they do not seem important to him] because what he is doing seems to him momentous.”
The appearance of Of Time and the River was the most fervently anticipated literary event of the spring season of 1935. The book had been talked about for months before the March 8 publication date. Max sent first editions to most of his friends and authors, even though he was sure some of them would never trudge through the 912-page volume. Van Wyck Brooks saw the sweat of Perkins’s brow on every page, unable as he was to forget the hundreds of hours Max labored “through jungle-like nights in the middle of summer,” slowly going under as he tried “to hang onto the fin of a plunging whale.” Ernest Hemingway said the book was “something over 60% shit.”
Wolfe believed the best way to avoid the same kind of public hysteria and private confusion that had accompanied his first book would be to leave America. He later gave his thoughts on exile in You Can’t Go Home Again, through his character George Webber:
When his first book had come out, wild horses could not have dragged him from New York: he had wanted to be on hand so he could be sure not to miss anything. He had waited around, and read all the reviews, and almost camped out in [his editor‘s] office, and had expected from day to day some impossible fulfillment that never came.... So now he was gun-shy of publication dates, and he made up his mind to go away this time—as far as possible. Although he did not believe there would be an exact repetition of those earlier experiences, just the same he was prepared for the worst, and when it happened he was determined not to be there.
Wolfe booked passage on the Ile de France, and crated for storage everything he owned. His itinerary was as vague as his plans upon returning. On the night of March 1, the eve of Wolfe’s departure, a cab pulled up to 246 East Forty-ninth Street. A man leapt out and pounded on the Perkinses’ door. Max came down, not surprised to find Wolfe standing there, but astonished that he had brought a wooden packing case, five feet by two feet by a foot and a half. It contained every page of his manuscript, including the bundle of sheets they had worked over during the last five years. Tom and Max and the driver hauled it from the taxi and set it down inside the house. Then Tom asked the cabby his name. He said, “Lucky.” “Lucky!” whooped Tom, pumping the man’s hand. It seemed a good omen. The three had just completed a great effort together. They all stood there, smiling at one another for a moment, then they all shook hands. “Lucky” drove off, and the large packing case blocked the Perkinses’ hall for days.
After Wolfe sailed, a letter from Aline Bernstein arrived for him at Scribners. Perkins wrote her back that he could do no more than hold it, because Tom had expressly forbidden him to forward any mail. He had left with the idea of taking a complete vacation for a couple of months, to be disturbed by neither personal mail nor even reviews.
As it happened, Tom himself had written Aline Bernstein a twenty-page message which he had mailed from Sandy Hook before the Ile de France reached the high seas. In it he told her about a copy of his book that he had left for her in Perkins’s care. Then he wrote “how wonderful and great a person” Max was. Aline realized that provoking Max’s hostility would kill any hope of her ever reaching Tom again. Ironically, getting through to Perkins was her last resort. In a friendly tone she now wrote Perkins a long letter, this one from Hollywood, where she was working for RKO Pictures. She really was not well enough to take the job, she wrote—“all these years of pain and sorrow about Tom have finally worn me out”—but she wanted to help her family, who had tried to help her mend the heartbreak of the last several years. Mrs. Bernstein asked Max to send her copy of Tom’s book to California. “I cannot read it now,” she explained, as “I am too deeply moved by anything concerning Tom, even his name in a newspaper sends a dart of pain through me. I cannot understand his complete betrayal of me, but I have reached a place in life where all is a mystery. Forgive me, that I write you this way, but ... I think that you and I have been closer to Tom than any other beings. I still live all my life with him, as I did the many years we were together, and now I want life no more without his friendship.”
At Mrs. Bernstein’s request Max returned those of her letters that were sitting at Scribners and sent her her copy of Tom’s book.
It was because of her family that Aline wrote to Perkins once again. She knew about Of Time and the River’s conclusion, in which Eugene Gant coming home from a European journey beheld a rosy-cheeked Jewish woman older than himself. Aline realized that Wolfe was soon to write about their relationship. The next book, she feared, would expose their love affair for all the world to see. She wrote Perkins:
I have already lived the great part of my life. But some time ago, he read [me] certain portions which he had written about my sister and my children, that must never be published ... they have all stood by me when Tom almost wrecked my bright soul and loving heart. I will not have them traduced, no matter what means I take to prevent it. This concerns not only me, but yourself in your editorial capacity.
Tom has often told me that you hate women, no doubt you think I am behaving like one. Well, I am. I consider it a curse to be a woman, a double curse to be a woman and an artist, but I cannot help it any more than I can help the color of my eyes. When Tom and I were first lovers, I told him it was the only time I was glad to be a woman, to complete him. I am still proud of my relation to him, in all its horror and beauty.
Wolfe had sworn that he would show Aline Bernstein The October Fair before any of it went to Perkins for editing. That was a long while ago, when it was to be his second book. “He has broken his word of honor to me so many times that I cannot trust him in this,” she wrote Perkins. “So I appeal to you.” She begged him to understand that “He cannot, he must not, I will not allow him again to betray me.”
Perkins replied:
From your earlier letter I judge that you suppose that Tom had given me reason to think of you as a “monster,”—this is the reverse of the truth, but I now begin to suspect that he must have given you to suppose that I was one. You are enough of a psychologist to know that the men who are thought to hate women are the ones who are affected just the other way, so that they had to set up a “defense mechanism.” I think women are extremely annoying, but that is because a man sees them in perspective. At any rate, nobody could fully understand that part of your letter in which you address me as an editor, but October Fair will not be published anyway for a year, and perhaps not as soon as that, and I cannot tell much about it until Tom returns.
On publication day of Of Time and the River, Perkins violated his vow of silence to Wolfe, but not in regard to Aline Bernstein. He sent a cable to the American Express office in Paris about the book: MAGNIFICENT REVIEWS SOMEWHAT CRITICAL IN WAYS EXPECTED FULL OF GREATEST PRAISE. Expecting no mail but checking for some, Wolfe received the message, then rambled along the boulevards of Paris in a reverie. Later he could remember almost nothing of the next six days. But Perkins’s words were only a tantalizing morsel of the glory for which he hungered. Wolfe wired back: YOU ARE THE BEST FRIEND I HAVE. I CAN FACE BLUNT FACT BETTER THAN DAMNABLE INCERTITUDE. GIVE ME THE STRAIGHT PLAIN TRUTH. Perkins’s second telegram poured it on even thicker than the first: GRAND EXCITED RECEPTION IN REVIEWS. TALKED OF EVERYWHERE AS TRULY GREAT BOOK. ALL COMPARISONS WITH GREATEST WRITERS. ENJOY YOURSELF WITH LIGHT HEART.
That same day Perkins wrote further, “Everybody outside of this house, outside the business, was amazed by the reception of Of Time and the River.” Most of the reviews drew parallels with the venerated writers, from Dostoevski to Sinclair Lewis. “Honestly, unless you expected no degree of adverse criticism at all, because of course there was that about too great length and the sort of thing we all talked of,” Perkins wrote him, “I cannot imagine why you should have any restraints upon your happiness in this vacation. If any man could rest on laurels for a bit, the man is you.”
The economy in the spring of 1935 continued to worsen, the book business along with it. But Scribners soon had printed five editions of Wolfe’s book, totaling 30,000 copies. Within weeks they had sold most of them, putting Of Time and the River in the top three on every bestseller list. By the end of the year, another 10,000 copies were printed.
The Times, Tribune, and Saturday Review gave Wolfe full front pages, and his picture was everywhere. Those who went out on Sunday afternoon to tea, as Louise did, found that even where there were no publishing people the book was excitedly talked about. Even Perkins’s seventy-seven-year-old mother, who spoke of literature as “mental candy,” was reading it, though her reaction was atypical. For five or six days she sat with it, emoting as much as a wooden Indian, until someone asked how she was getting on. As though she had waited a week for the question, she dropped the closed book to her lap, lifted her face and declared, “I’ve never read such language in my life.” To one of her granddaughters she called, “Molly, go upstairs and get me a volume of Jane Austen so I can purge my mind!”
For weeks Wolfe traveled incommunicado. He had been completely worn out upon landing in Europe and in a state of nervousness over Of Time and the River that made even letter-writing impossible. That book, which had induced this state, now snapped him out of it. “Max, Max,” Wolfe wrote his editor, “perhaps you think I hate all forms of criticism, but the sad truth is how much more critical am I, who am supposed to be utterly lacking in the critical faculty, than most of these critics are.” The bulk of Wolfe’s first letter home was his own reaction to Of Time and the River. He carried a copy of the book under his arm wherever he went but found it torture to read, save for a page or two at a time. Even then he found “at every point the deficiency of my performance compared with the whole of my intent, stares me in the face.” The prickliest nettles were the countless mistakes in wording and proofreading, and the textual discrepancies. He absorbed the blame for all of them. During the first two months after publication, the staff at Scribners discovered some 200 errors, including the mysterious reappearance of Mr. Wang. Wang is the round-faced Chinese student from whom Eugene Gant borrows fifty dollars in his midnight race to old Gant’s deathbed. Eugene arranges to mail the money to Wang. Wolfe wrote: “The boy never saw him again.” Sixty-five pages later, however, Eugene raps on Wang’s door and asks the Chinaman if a friend can spend the night on his couch.
“I fell down on that final job,” Tom admitted. “The book was written and typed and rushed in to you in such frantic haste day after day that I did not even catch the errors in wording the typist made in an effort to decipher my handwriting—there are thousands of them.” He listed some:
Battersea Lodge should have read Battersea Bridge
the character of my brain—the diameter of my brain
African beings—African kings
shaking his beard—shaking his head
“Max, Max, I cannot go on,” Tom wrote after listing a fraction of the corrections that had to be made. He said, “We should have waited six months longer—the book, like Caesar, was from its mother’s womb untimely ripped—like King Richard, brought into the world ‘scarce half made up.’ ”
Wolfe worked at a four-part letter to Perkins for over a week. After registering his own criticism of the book, Wolfe reviewed his critics, interpreting every complaint as an attack on him personally. In response to Mark Van Doren’s remark, a year before, that “The public is justified in asking Mr. Wolfe whether he can keep himself out of the picture in books to come,” Tom now reminded Perkins, “You yourself told me you took one of your daughters through the Grand Central Station and showed her twenty people who might have stepped right out of the pages of Dickens, all just as true to life, but worthy of fiction.” Because Burton Rascoe said that Wolfe had no evident sense of humor, Tom listed the scenes he considered comical. Reacting to Clifton Fadiman, who said it was debatable “whether he is a master of language or language a master of him,” Wolfe ranted for paragraphs.
He closed Section 1 of his letter with the hope “that we have had a genuine and great success and that when I come back I will find my position enormously enhanced. If that much is true—if it is true that we have successfully surmounted the terrible, soul-shaking, heart-rending barrier of the accursed second book—I believe I can come back to work with the calm, the concentration, the collected force of my full power which I was unable to achieve in these frenzied, tormented, and soul-doubting last five years.”
That spring Louise Perkins decided to tour Europe with her daughters Zippy and Peggy. When Wolfe learned of the plans in the making, he asked her to persuade Max to take a short vacation as well. “The one thing I have observed in Max in the last few years which worried me and which seemed wrong,” Wolfe wrote Louise, “was a growing tenacity in the way he stuck to business—what seemed to me sometimes an unreasonable solicitude and preoccupation with affairs which might be handled by proxy or in less exhausting ways.” He thought it was surely a sort of vanity, even in so modest a man as Max, to feel that a business could not run itself in his absence for a few weeks. Tom believed Max was at the “summit of his powers,” that his best work was still before him. “[It] would be a tragedy,” Wolfe wrote Louise, “if he in any way blunted or impaired his great faculties at this time simply because he failed to take advantage of a chance to recuperate and replenish his energies.”
Perkins gave no indication that he had considered leaving his office even for a day. He wrote Elizabeth Lemmon that very month, “I’m in for a horrible summer alone here, but in a way I look forward to it. There won’t be much I want to do, but still I won’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. Or maybe I’m fooling myself about that.” He certainly would not have to go out to parties, as he and Louise had been doing many nights since moving to New York.
Before her trip, Louise Perkins had one of her paroxysms of spring cleaning. To burn off some of her energy, she weeded the bookshelves. She filled barrels with several hundred volumes, then paid a dealer $5 to haul them away. Weeks later, David Randall, the Scribners rare book authority, was walking down Second Avenue, window-shopping at the used book stores, when one display practically jumped out at him. There were dozens of books inscribed to Maxwell Perkins by Galsworthy and other eminent authors. When Max learned the facts, Randall went to buy them back, and was told the collection would cost $500. “We settled on $25,” Randall recalled years later, “when I said it wasn’t Mrs. Perkins, but the crazy maid who sold all the books to him. I said we’d meet him in court if he charged anything more.” Max, Randall remembered, “laughed that quiet laugh of his, shaking his head back and forth, as if only his wife could have done such a thing.”
Perkins’s summer proved to be as horrible as he had anticipated. “You don’t know how lonely it is here at night,” he wrote Elizabeth Lemmon on June 28, 1935. “I forget about it in the day and when people ask me to do things at night I say I can’t and then regret it. But I’d regret the other way too and get less work done. It’s as bad here as in Baltimore when you’re not there. It’s worse, because there I always did have the hope that some miracle would bring you.” With a Spartan spirit, Max told the maid who was supposed to look after him that all he wanted for dinner one night was cream cheese and bread. She fixed her eyes on his, then rolled them heavenward as if he had gone mad, which perversely made him request the same thing the next night. Each evening she hovered in puzzlement to watch him eat his meager meal. Stubbornly, Max ordered the entree for nights on end. “So now it’s got to be bread to eternity,” he wrote Elizabeth. In fact, however, he would occasionally duck out to the dining room at the Hotel Barclay, where he dined alone but had some good food.
The appearance that season of an old friend broke Perkins’s loneliness. Van Wyck Brooks dropped in unannounced and seemed just as good as ever. Until recently, he had still been in the grasp of his long-lived depression. Perkins was convinced that Brooks never could have recovered if his wife, Eleanor, had not stood by him—patiently raising the family and running the house until he was back on his feet. “It was one of the best things I know of anyone’s doing,” Max told Elizabeth Lemmon, “and I don’t believe there’s a man would have been equal to the equivalent of it.”
Brooks’s only other stroke of good fortune in the last five years was in his professional life, and that had been the result of Perkins’s devotion. For years Max had regarded Brooks’s Life of Emerson as the log that was jamming his career. With Perkins’s patient encouragement, Brooks had completed the biography in 1931. But this did not free him of his psychological torment.
Brooks still maintained he was hopeless as a writer, that nothing of his could possibly be worth printing. Perkins and Jack Wheelock both read the manuscript and repeatedly insisted that it was “quite good” and that they were eager for Scribners to print it. When Brooks explained his commitments to E. P. Dutton and Company, Max persuaded Van Wyck to let go of the manuscript, then carried it by hand to Dutton’s publisher, John Macrae. At the same time, Perkins contacted Carl Van Doren at the Literary Guild and urged him to get the Guild to adopt the book as one of its selections. Dutton and the Guild both accepted The Life of Emerson, but Brooks refused to let it be typeset. In the spring of 1931 Max delegated Wheelock, whom he considered Van Wyck’s most trusted friend, to go to Four Winds, a small, private sanitarium in Katonah, New York, and talk some sense into him.
“The boys have gone berrying,” the attendant at Four Winds told Wheelock upon his arrival. Wheelock walked into the woods and found Van Wyck with an empty pail in his hand. He was all but mute and utterly remote. He stared at Wheelock as though looking right through him, but Brooks knew exactly why he had come. They walked among the brambles in silence until Wheelock pleaded, “Won’t you let the Guild publish it?”
“No,” Brooks snarled.
Wheelock assured him that they would not want the book if it were less than first-rate.
“Bad! Bad! Bad!” Brooks exclaimed, and Wheelock left.
Perkins himself saw Brooks during the next several months and insisted he agree to the offers. Van Wyck slowly came around and eventually asked Max to be his publisher—only if “the thing can be managed without hurting the feelings of Mr. Macrae who has been so decent to me.” Perkins saw no way of managing it. In 1932 Dutton published the book. It became a critical success and solved Brooks’s financial crisis. Van Wyck realized that he could earn a good living as a writer, and he recovered enough to write steadily for the next thirty years of his life. When he visited Max in the summer of 1935 he was in the middle of writing The Flowering of New England, his masterwork. Two years later it won the Pulitzer Prize—and was dedicated to Maxwell Evarts Perkins.
Despite the enormous success of Of Time and the River, Tom Wolfe experienced the same unrest that afflicted him after his first book. When he could stand the distress no longer, he suddenly thought of Germany with intense yearning. As for George Webber, inYou Can’t Go Home Again,Germany was for Wolfe the country
after America, which he liked the best, and in which he felt most at home, and with whose people he had the most natural, instant, and instinctive sympathy and understanding.... And now, after the years of labor and exhaustion, the very thought of Germany meant peace to his soul, and release, and happiness, and the old magic again.
Besides Wolfe’s passion for Germany, there was Germany’s for him. Look Homeward, Angel had been translated and published there in 1933, and though Tom was not aware of it, the Germans were awaiting his return with great eagerness.
“I have heard it said that Lord Byron awoke one morning at twenty-four to find himself famous,” Thomas Wolfe wrote Max Perkins on May 23, 1935. “Well, I arrived in Berlin one night, when I was thirty-four, and got up the next morning and went to the American Express and for the last two weeks at least I have been famous in Berlin.” He found letters, telephone messages, and telegrams from all sorts of people—German journalists and publishers and various diplomats. For two weeks Wolfe met throngs of admirers, attended parties, and gave interviews.
But Wolfe told Max he had some “disturbing things” to tell him about Germany. Wolfe had heard the sounds of booted feet and rolling army trucks clashing with the sounds of singing, dancing, and laughter in the peaceful villages. The discord frightened him, but the nationalistic fervor got him thinking about America. It renewed a sense of pride and faith in his own country and himself. Once again in Berlin he wrote Perkins, “I feel myself welling up with energy and life again and if it is really true that I have had some luck and success at home I know I can come back now and beat all hollow anything I have ever done before, and certainly I can surprise the critics and the public who may think they have taken my measure by this time—and I think I may even have a surprise or two in store for you.”
Wolfe begged Perkins not to proceed too far on the book of short stories Max had wanted to bring out, and for which Max had requested a title. “There are things I can do that will make them much better,” he assured Max, “and if you will only wait on me I will do them and we will have a fine book of stories and unlike any I know of.” But as Wolfe had got sidetracked in the past, now he was already living for another book about his characters the Pentlands. It was swelling and gathering in him like a thunderstorm, he told Perkins; “and I feel if there is any chance of my doing anything good before I am forty it will be this book.” Tom resolved to become more withdrawn in his life than ever before. As he plunged into this new work, he also wanted to intensify his relationship with Max. “I will go down deeper in myself than I ever have before,” he vowed to Perkins, insisting, “You must try to help me in every way to do this.”
In the midst of his planning Wolfe received a letter from one Henry Weinberger, counselor-at-law. He represented Madeleine Boyd, who was claiming full agent’s commissions for royalties on Of Time and the River as well as on Wolfe’s future books. The action struck Wolfe like a bombshell. “This was the thing you said could not ‘happen,’ the thing she ‘would not dare to do’ because she knew she was ruined by her dishonesty,” Tom wrote Perkins, remembering the scene in Perkins’s office just two years earlier. “Well, she has done it, as I told you she would—because we were foolish, benevolent, soft-hearted, weak—call it what you like.” Wolfe believed they should have made “the thief sign the confession of her theft when she was weeping, sobbing, crying in abject fear at the discovery and possible consequences of her crime.”
While the legal business hung in abeyance until Wolfe’s return, Perkins forwarded him an invitation to be the visiting novelist at the Colorado Writers’ Conference in July. The symposium offered to pay Wolfe $250 for ten days of round-table discussions and conferences with student-authors. Hopeful that this might lure him home to complete his anthology of stories, Max asked Wolfe to cable his reply and a probable date of return. Three days later Wolfe wired: ACCEPT COLORADO OFFER RETURN EARLY JUNE, NO TITLE STORIES YET ... WAIT FOR ME.
Max could not wait much longer. A half-year had passed since Aline Bernstein’s fears regarding Wolfe’s writing about her had possessed her, and she was becoming hysterical again. She impulsively visited Perkins to demand justice. Her screams could be heard through the walls of his office. The following day she was more in control of herself, but her feelings still ran high. “I wish I could have been able to show you a better side, that part of me which my friends love,” Mrs. Bernstein wrote Perkins. “It is not easy for me to be hard, and I had to push myself in that direction, in order to speak to you at all of what was in my mind.” She was not acting out of vengeance, she explained.
I still love Tom and wish him no evil, what I demand is only because of my feeling for my own family, and I sincerely believe that my love for Tom, and his for me, while it lasted, is not a matter for public consumption, nor do I think that he has any right to use material that I have given him, since he has chosen to break every tie that bound us.
“I know nothing of the way the publishing business is handled,” she wrote Perkins.
I do not know if you yourself make all the decisions for your firm. If not, if there is some committee or some individual who shares the responsibility with you, I want to state my case, though I have little hope that anyone, in this vale of tears, would come to any decision contrary to his own best interests.
A point is reached where one has literally to choose between good and evil. I know the complexity of duties and friendships, of all the threads that bind us to life, how complex a man’s relation is to himself. Whether or not this book is published by you, or another, you are faced with your own decision, whether a family and a human being is to be destroyed or not.
Aline was more convinced than ever that Perkins had tampered with her life, that he had told Tom to break with her. Days later she wrote him again, “I trust that never again will you try to play providence.”
Perkins did his best to inject some reason into this affair. He would not allow Mrs. Bernstein to assume that he had meddled with her life. He wrote:
I do not interfere in people’s private affairs. Certainly anyone who has lived for any length of time would never venture to interfere in a situation of that sort.
I have every wish to do anything that would be of advantage to you in so far as I can do it rightly in view of the various obligations which I am compelled to fulfill, even if they are to my own personal disadvantage.
Mrs. Bernstein took Perkins’s advice and tried appealing to Wolfe in a letter, which she sent in Perkins’s care.
As near as Perkins could guess, Wolfe was due to return to America on Independence Day. For the week Wolfe was still aboard ship, Max fretted about his recent exchanges with Mrs. Bernstein. At one point she had mentioned a gun, but whether it was to be aimed at him, or Tom, or at herself Perkins did not know. “I’d much rather it was aimed at me,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “I’m so fed up on contention, and struggle with irrational people.” Max first thought he should prepare Wolfe for trouble, then decided it would be easier to mind his own business and go to Windsor.
Thomas Wolfe arrived on a blazing-hot Fourth. By then Mrs. Bernstein’s protestations about the publication of Tom’s next book had become utterly illogical. Max believed the effect on Wolfe of this sudden tirade might be to ruin his entire future, and so he stayed in New York and went to the pier to break it to Tom gently. He found Wolfe’s baggage already on the wharf and waited by it, long after everyone else had come ashore. When Tom finally disembarked, Perkins was sitting on one of the valises with his head down. Max was pondering the problem of Aline Bernstein when he heard a low Southern voice say, “Max, you look so sad. What’s the matter?” Max said nothing immediately about Aline Bernstein’s hysteria. They stored Tom’s baggage and went to the Mayfair Yacht Club. There on the East River, with boats scudding up and down, Tom asked to hear everything that concerned him. Max then told him all about Mrs. Bernstein. Wolfe, however, did not seem to take the matter too seriously. He asked if that was all. When Max assured him it was, he said, “Well then, now we can have a good time.”
They were on their way to the Lafayette Hotel when Tom stopped at Eighth Street and pointed. “There, Max, is the place where I lived in the attic and wrote Look Homeward, Angel,” he said. “Let’s go up and see if we can get in.” They climbed the stairs and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. While Tom was still rapping, Max looked out the window at the rear of the building and saw a fire escape that ascended to the open dormer of Wolfe’s loft. “Well, Tom,” Max said, “if you really want to see the nest where the young eaglet mewed his mighty youth, it can be done!” And so the editor-in-chief of Charles Scribner’s Sons, in fedora and suit, led the way on a second expedition of breaking-and-entering. He crawled out to the fire escape, clambered up to the window and stepped in. Wolfe followed. “You could call it an attic,” Perkins wrote John Terry years later in trying to reconstruct the scene, “for it was at the top of the house and there was a certain amount of slope to the upper halves of the walls, but it was magnificent—not the kind of attic you think of poets residing in at all. In fact, I would say it was the best place Tom ever did live in.” Before leaving, Wolfe scrounged for a pencil, then scribbled on the wall of the vestibule: THOMAS WOLFE LIVED HERE.
After a drink at the Lafayette they crossed the East River into Brooklyn. The sun was setting, and Max and Tom went to the Saint George Hotel, where from the rooftop they looked down upon the city. It was like a spectacle about to begin. The sunlight dimmed to darkness and Manhattan came to life in a million twinkling lights.
They left Brooklyn and returned to the Lafayette for another drink, then walked uptown through the heat, with their coats slung over their shoulders. They talked all the way. Around three in the morning, they parted in a bar on the East Side, near Forty-ninth Street. At nine o‘clock, Perkins, red-eyed, his head swimming, was sitting in a Pullman seat of the White Mountain Express, as the train chugged northward to Windsor.