XV
Perkins spent only a few days in Vermont. Tom Wolfe was back in town, and that meant legal and romantic problems in addition to editorial duties. Max felt his presence in New York was essential.
After Wolfe had been back for more than a week and still had not answered Aline Bernstein’s last letter, she swallowed her pride and asked Perkins’s support once again. “I am in distress,” she wrote Max, “and I would be grateful if you will ask him to answer me. He must be in a great rage.” Then she left another letter without an envelope for Tom, so that Max could also read it.
I want you and Mr. Perkins to know that I will have nothing to do with the law in connection with you or your publishers, for what you may write of me or what you use of my material. This may or may not relieve your minds, I do not care. If I cannot come to a personal and human agreement with you, I may as well quit.... When we were together I believed that if you wrote this book about us, you would stand by me, as you often promised. Steadfast was your word. I know enough to know that I cannot command love of any sort, if what I am is not enough to hold it. Maybe I am a fool to expect honorable treatment: I had faith in you, Tom.
Thoroughly confused about how to proceed, Wolfe did nothing, not even his work. To get him thinking about his writing again, Max told him of the sacks full of mail waiting for him at Scribners. Perkins had seen the fan letters of many authors, but no one had received as many as Wolfe. His readers worshiped him and wanted to express their gratitude. Tom began coming to Scribners every day to work in the fifth-floor library, writing cordial responses to his admirers.
Perkins felt that Wolfe was adjusting to his return pretty well, though he still had not worked on the proofs of his book of short stories. Wolfe was just killing time until his writers’ conference in Colorado. Max knew Tom well enough to worry that he might stretch out his upcoming travels, leaving the anthology in limbo. So almost daily, over lunch or a drink, he urged Wolfe to get on with his writing. One afternoon not long after Wolfe’s arrival in America, while they were having “tea” at the Chatham Bar, Mrs. Bernstein appeared.
Aline was seated alone at a small table by the wall, with her head bowed down and her face partly covered by the brim of her hat. Perkins recognized her and pointed her out. Tom rushed over, but the bar was too public a place for a reunion like that, so he and Mrs. Bernstein and Perkins went back to Max’s office. There, Wolfe tactlessly spoke of compensating Aline in dollars for all the help she had given him. He asked Max if he might see him alone for a minute and in Perkins’s office he spoke of giving her some payment out of his royalties from Of Time and the River—the book had by then sold 40,000 copies. Mrs. Bernstein, meanwhile, was waiting in the railed-off receptionist’s area by the elevator. When Tom returned to her, Aline had a vial of pills at her lips. He lunged toward her and slapped the bottle from her hands. Aline swooned into his arms. Perkins, suspecting she had already swallowed an overdose of barbiturates, rang the elevator bell for the night watchman, who directed them to a dermatologist working late in her office in the Scribner Building. The doctor counted the pills, phoned the pharmacy, and ascertained that all of them were still there. Thus began a reconciliation of sorts between Tom Wolfe and Aline Bernstein.
A few days later Aline apologized to Perkins:
I have been on the rack for a long time, and I am taking punishment for two things I cannot help any more than the color of my eyes. I was born too soon, and I love too well. I wish I could show you what is in my heart, how I understand what you have done for Tom and how I understand your special quality. I have said things to you I should not have said for I know the road you have travelled with him.
What she could not make clear to Wolfe she explained to his editor: While Tom wanted to cancel his debts with cash, she would never accept any kind of reimbursement.
Whatever I did for him in those early years of his work was done from the fullness of our love and my faith in him. Let me keep that, it is the one best thing in my life. There will never be a question of any claim, there surely can be no question of repayment in money.
During this time Aline Bernstein was working day and night in the theater and was tired and sleepless. From time to time she saw Wolfe, but never with much satisfaction; his mind was on other things and they were uncomfortable together. In the last week of July she collapsed and remained unconscious for three days. She had developed pleurisy. “It is awful, I am gasping for breath in an oxygen tent and the pain is awful,” she wrote Wolfe when she came to. “I was never so sick but I’m going to get well, I have a lot to finish. I hope you never get pleurisy.”
Wolfe went west on July 27, to the writers’ conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and in mid-August Max received his first letter from him. “This has been, and is going to be, an extraordinary trip,” he wrote Max just before leaving for Denver and points south. After all the discussions, lectures, readings, and parties, he too was exhausted.
Perkins was most concerned about Tom’s anthology, now titled From Death to Morning. Still distressed by all the mistakes in Of Time and the River, Wolfe wrote Perkins, “You must not put the manuscript of a book of stories in final form until after my return to New York. If that means the book of stories will have to be deferred till next spring, then they will have to be deferred, but I will not consent this time to allow the book to be taken away from me and printed and published until I myself have had time to look at the proofs, and at any rate to talk to you about certain revisions, changes, excisions, or additions that ought to be made. I really mean this, Max.” He added: “I propose rather to prepare my work in every way possible to meet and refute, if I can, some of the very grave and serious criticisms that were made about the last book.”
Max had gone through the proofs and once again was impressed by them. “They show how objective you can be, and how varied you can be,” he wrote to Tom. As it was, he said, the entire book would be an effective refutation to earlier adverse criticism.
As Wolfe toured the West, spending time with, among others, Edna Ferber and, in Hollywood, Dorothy Parker, Perkins kept sending him reminders about the unmarked proofs. Wolfe’s only replies were postcards exclaiming about scenic wonders or relaying anecdotes. Finally, on September 1, Wolfe decided that his vacation, which had expanded to six months, enough for anyone, was over. He felt almost guilty enough, he told Max, to get back to work.
While on the road, Wolfe had mulled over his future projects. At Boulder and elsewhere the author had discussed a “book of the night” which was beginning to take hold of him. He explained to Perkins:
I have told how much of my life has been lived by night, also the chemistry of darkness, the strange and magic thing it does to our lives, about America at night, the rivers, plains, mountains, rivers in the moon or darkness.
Wolfe believed his realization that Americans were a “nighttime people” was one of the most precious ideas he had conceived, one to which he wanted to devote a special book. At last he wanted to try writing from the outside rather than from within, to invent a universe in which he himself was not the absolute center. He wrote Perkins, “I want to assert my divine right once and for all to be the God Almighty of a book, to be at once the spirit to move it, the spirit behind it, never to appear, to blast forever the charges of ‘autobiography’ while being triumphantly and impersonally autobiographical.”
“What are we to work on next?” he wrote Max as he started east. There was The October Fair, the “Pentland book,” The Book of the Night, short stories.... Or should he respond to numerous offers to lecture? Max had plenty of time to formulate his answer, for Wolfe was still loitering. In mid-September, for example, he stopped off in Reno and was bedazzled by the town with its casinos and bars and dance halls eternally ablaze in neon.
Perkins continued to believe that the volume of short stories must come first. He had corrected the proofs as much as he dared and returned them to the press to be sent back in revised galleys. “The moment Tom gets here I am going to try to make him read them,” Perkins wrote Frere-Reeves in London. “If he will not, I shall try to get them away from him and put them into pages unread.” The book now contained 95,000 words, a normal amount, and Perkins was afraid only that Wolfe would want to add stories yet to be written. “I shall fight hard against this,” he wrote Frere-Reeves. “He seems to feel a certain shame at the idea of turning out a book of reasonable dimensions.”
On Friday, July 25, Perkins had gone to Baltimore for an appointment with Dr. Bordley. The last time he had been in Baltimore he had made what he now considered a rash promise to Elizabeth Lemmon—to visit her home and spend the night, his first in Middleburg. She met him Saturday afternoon, and for only the second time in their thirteen-year friendship, Max went to Welbourne. Later in the day, Elizabeth drove him in her shiny new Ford coupe along the recently paved Skyline Drive, which ribboned among the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Mile after mile, Max’s pouched, unblinking eyes swept the lovely vista. He looked very tired to Elizabeth. She had never pushed him to discuss his work, but this day she did gently remark that she knew almost nothing about what his job actually entailed. Max said he would tell her someday, in a letter.
Max did sleep over at Welbourne, but early the next morning he was packed and clearly ready to leave. Elizabeth persuaded him to stay long enough to meet several of her friends and relatives. Then he departed for New York. Afterward, safely distant from her most affecting presence, he wrote her:
You really have had a wonderfully happy and good life, and have kept out of all the grime, and you always represented that to me.... Elizabeth, you always looked sad when you were thinking—maybe you haven’t been happy in the cheap sense—you wouldn’t be—but you have done good. If I survive in another life I’ll remember your comings to Baltimore in all the heat and I’ll thank you for them.
Perkins disliked being indebted to people, “but not to you—” he wrote Elizabeth, “which is fortunate for me because I owe you more than I ever could repay. After I have been with you I always feel again that those things that now generally seem to be an illusion really do exist.... As for last weekend, I’ll always have it to remember and shall think about everything and everyone there with gratitude and pleasure.” Max never visited Welbourne again, and its perfection never dimmed for him.
True to his word, Perkins described for Miss Lemmon a typical workday: Tuesday, July 29, 1935. As always, Max said, he began with the heap of mail waiting on his desk. “One letter,” he wrote Elizabeth, “was from an agent asking us to take over a young East Side ... author [named Henry Roth] who wrote Call It Sleep.” Perkins had skimmed the novel and wished that he had had a chance to publish it. From its tight, eloquent opening pages describing the huddled masses on Ellis Island, Max admired Roth’s penetrating recreation of a pocket of American life near “Avenyuh D” in New York City. Perkins told Elizabeth that “such a writer would make no end of trouble for me on account of his complete contempt for any conventional restraint—much worse than any one we have published. Still, I wrote encouragingly and sent for [his next] book. We are publishers after all.”
Later that day, Perkins told Elizabeth, he spoke to Charles Scribner about a book on the training of bird dogs, which they decided to accept. Then he and Scribner discussed a limited edition of William Butler Yeats’s works. Scribner was by nature skeptical of poetry, but Perkins thought Yeats was the most important twentieth-century poet in the English language, and contended there was a need for such a book. He reminded Scribner that they had profited from an equally unpromising set of O‘Neill’s plays. Scribner yielded and told Max to arrange with Macmillan for the reprint rights to the material.
Then, Max wrote, S. S. Van Dine called “to give notice” that he would bring in his newest manuscript—The Kidnap Murder Case—by the first of August. “Good,” Perkins remarked, “but why the ultimatum?”
“Because,” Van Dine replied, “you said I was not punctual after I got married.” Perkins did tease people who waited so late as their forties to marry, as Wright had done. “After all that time, why bother?” he would say.
For the rest of the morning Max dictated letters. He and Scribner went to the nearby “air-cooled” Longchamps for lunch, over which Perkins told him about that wonderful road that snaked across the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Back at the office, Max managed to dictate the rest of his letters just before the tennis champion Helen Wills Moody strode in. Scribners had published her instructional book on tennis. She now launched into a volley-by-volley account of her recent match with Helen Jacobs. “Certainly she is beautiful in her way, and strong and healthy, and natural in a way you like to think is American,” Max wrote Elizabeth. And, he conceded, her first book was successful. But, Perkins told Miss Lemmon, “Helen Wills can’t write.” He wanted to tell her “to have some children before it was too late, and forget writing.” Instead he looked up the sales figures on her book and ordered a new edition. “I don’t work properly on that kind of thing,” Max said, meaning nonliterary works, “because it bores me.”
Her appointment was followed by several others. Before the afternoon ended, Max also heard from Thomas Wolfe’s lawyer. Wolfe, he reported, had burrowed into his papers and found his correspondence with Madeleine Boyd, the agent who was suing him. To Max it looked as though that would end their trouble with her. Later Wolfe asked Max to help him in every way possible to keep him from this kind of “shameful and ruinous invasion” in the future. Perkins could be counted upon to do his best. He wrote Tom, however, that such assaults were a part of life. “Like fleas to a dog, as the fellow said, they are probably good for us.”
That day Perkins did not have to go off for a late-afternoon drink with anyone, so he stayed in the office and read, interrupted only by a little trouble with some advertising copy. On the whole, he told Miss Lemmon, “it was a fair day.” For his evening reading he stuffed into his briefcase a narrative by an old hunter in the Southwest who had fought Apaches.
“I have much more variety in work than most people,” Max once wrote Miss Lemmon, explaining how he talked himself out of taking vacations. In fact, he said, the work so suited him that he could see no reason not to do it seven days a week. “No one thinks a very good job was done with the Creation,” he told Elizabeth. “It was probably rushed to get the seventh day off. That’s why we don’t work on it and I hate it, and all other holidays, and also nights.”
In September, 1935, Louise and the two girls returned from Europe. Peggy had left behind her a European race-car driver who had proposed marriage, after knowing her less than a week, then attempted suicide because she turned him down.
In late September there was another important arrival. Tom Wolfe returned to New York. Max had been braced for a scrap with Wolfe over the proofs of the short-story collection. To his amazement, Wolfe corrected them immediately and without fuss or demand. Perkins’s arguments that the book must be brought out quickly had apparently been convincing. Within a month the book was in the stores.
Wolfe now moved into a new apartment at 865 First Avenue, just two blocks toward the East River from the Perkinses’ house. Soon Max was once again spending a great deal of time with him. Wolfe had already become a fixture at the Perkinses‘, but now, as Tom’s agent, Elizabeth Nowell, observed,
he all but lived there as a member of the family——or as Perkins’s son, which to all intents and purposes he was. Perkins never seemed to see enough of him, and Mrs. Perkins fed him, cared for him, listened to his problems and entertained his friends with the patience of a saint.
In the fall of 1935, Scott Fitzgerald sank into his deepest troubles yet. It began when Edwin Balmer of Redbook lost interest in Philippe, the Count of Darkness after printing the third installment. Scott fell heavily into debt, then grew ill and could not work. For weeks he languished. Perkins received only telegrams and brief requests for money. “I know that he has been sick and poor,” Perkins wrote Hemingway, “but maybe this sickness is partly his old hypochondria.”
That winter Fitzgerald expressed his anguish in a long article entitled “The Crack-Up.” It appeared in three monthly installments in Esquire.
I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone.... I saw that even my love for those closest to me was becoming only an attempt to love, that my casual relations—with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend were only what I remembered I should do from other days.
Perkins did not know what to make of Scott’s article. Scheduled to see his own doctor in Baltimore, he paid a visit to Scott and found him in bed with the grippe, wheezing and gasping for air. “I saw Scott, but it did not do any good at all, maybe harm,” Perkins wrote Hemingway after his house call. “It was not possible to talk to him, and I finally left him asleep, if you could call it sleep.”
Oddly enough, Fitzgerald’s depressing Esquire pieces proved to Perkins that Fitzgerald’s case was not hopeless. He explained to Hemingway:
Nobody would write those articles if they were really true. I doubt if a hopeless man will tell about it, or a man who thinks he is beaten for good. Those people I should think would not say anything at all, just as those who really intend suicide never tell anybody. So I thought that in some deep way, when he wrote those articles, Scott must have been thinking that things would be different with him. He may have lost that passion in writing which he once had, but he is such a wonderful craftsman that he could certainly make out well if he were able to control himself and be reconciled to life.
Perkins agreed with John Peale Bishop’s suggestion that only returning to the Catholic Church could save Scott. “I know and always did, from his very first writing, that he has a fundamental inclination that way,” Max wrote Ernest. Fitzgerald’s public confession of a crisis of the spirit made Perkins guess such an announcement might be forthcoming.
Desperate for money, Fitzgerald spent the spring writing sketches for Esquire and a few forgettable stories for the Post. His income that year plummeted to $10,000, the lowest it had been since the publication of This Side of Paradise.
Ernest Hemingway thought the “Crack-Up” pieces were “miserable.” People experienced emptiness many times in life, he said, and he thought they should come out of it fighting, not whining in public. He wrote Scott a few times to cheer him up but found him taking pride in his “shamelessness of defeat.” Ever since he first met F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway said, he had thought that if the man had gone to that war he always felt so bad about missing, he would have been shot for cowardice. Hemingway was convinced that Scott’s troubles were self-inflicted. It was a terrible thing for Scott to love youth so much that he leapfrogged from childhood to senility without experiencing manhood.
Hemingway made one of his infrequent visits to New York that season. He was nervous about the reception of Green Hills of Africa, and with just cause. As fascism rose in Europe in the thirties, leftist “essayists,” as many American literary critics preferred to call themselves, proclaimed that the purpose of literature was to remedy the world’s social ills. They were angry that Hemingway, one of the best-known voices of America, had not joined their cause. He remained unaffiliated with any group, committed only to his writing. His reputation was in great shape, he told Perkins—André Gide, Romain Rolland, and André Malraux, he pointed out, had just invited him to an international writers’ congress—but he was not deceived; the critics would have their knives out. He doubted, however, that they could kill him off for a while yet. “Papa is pretty durable,” he assured Perkins.
When Perkins received the proofs of Green Hills of Africa from Ernest in late August, 1935, he thought everything about them was all right, except for a backhanded swipe at Gertrude Stein which Ernest had inserted. “I think it was better not to call the old girl a bitch,” Perkins wrote Hemingway of the indirect reference to her. Hemingway pointed out that he had not mentioned Miss Stein by name and there was nothing that proved it was definitely she. Besides, he asked Max, what should be put in place of “bitch”? Certainly not “whore.” Hemingway offered to modify the noun with “lousy” or “lesbian,” but if anyone was ever a bitch, he said it was Gertrude Stein. He did not see what Perkins was fussing about, unless he thought the word would just give the critics something else to “burp about.”
In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway pointed out that writers who read the critics practically destroyed themselves.
If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren’t masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all.
Hemingway had discussed Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe with Perkins in almost identical phraseology.
At last he made what, for him, was a conciliatory gesture, by altering his reference to Gertrude Stein, calling her a “female.” He thought that would anger her the most, and please Perkins.
Max expected a cold critical reaction to Green Hills, but not because of the vendetta Hemingway predicted. Max had observed enough careers to believe in their natural ebb and flow. He knew that if the critics did not have an issue at hand on which to take Hemingway to task, they would invent one. “Every writer seems to have to go through a period when the tide runs against him strongly,” Perkins wrote Fitzgerald, “and at the worst it is better that it should have done this when Ernest was writing books that are in a general sense minor ones.”
And indeed, the reviews of Green Hills of Africa were tepid. Charles Poore in the New York Times wrote that it was the “best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere” and that Ernest’s writing was “better than ever, fuller, richer, deeper and only looking for something that can use its full powers.” Edmund Wilson took what Max called a “Marxian crack” at it in the New Republic, calling it Hemingway’s “weakest book.” Wilson had been one of Hemingway’s earliest admirers, but over the next few years he became one of his most outspoken critics.
Ernest took the reviews hard. It had been some six years since his successful A Farewell to Arms. He believed his new book was ruined by two specific flaws, both of which could have been avoided. The first, he maintained, was that he had offended the daily critics in the book by referring to the New York crowd as “angleworms in a bottle” and to critics as the lice that crawl on literature; they ganged up on him for it. But Perkins did not think there was anything either of them could have done about that. He explained, “I knew, and I never dreamed that you did not, that you were telling plain truths to the reviewers in Green Hills. I could have warned you about that, but I did not think you wanted it, and I do not believe you would have heeded it for an instant. Nor do I think you should have.... You told the truth about them and it won’t act against you over a fairly long space of time, but only momentarily.”
Hemingway’s second point was about the book’s advertising. Scribners’ former best-selling author John Fox, Jr. once wrote old Charles Scribner, “A publisher is a man who is blamed if a book fails and ignored if it proves a success.” Now Hemingway beefed that Scribners was not playing upGreen Hills enough. “Advertising,” Perkins said, “is a matter that nobody can ever speak of positively, and it would be silly to say they might not have done wrong about it.” But Green Hills got the same backing in advertising as Perkins’s other offerings that season, including Mark Sullivan’s latest installment of Our Times, S. S. Van Dine’s Garden Murder Case, and Robert Briffault’s controversial best seller, Europa. After years of experience, Max found that one could not “answer unfavorable reviews by following them up two or three days later.... It is stupid that this is so, but we have been convinced of it.”
After two months and a piddling sale, Perkins explained the book’s failure to the author this way:
It was mostly due to something that often happens in publishing: the public gets a superficial impression of what a book is and the one they got of this book was that it was an account of a hunting expedition to Africa, covering a short space of time, and was therefore a distinctly minor piece of work.
“I should have foreseen it,” Max wrote. “The public regards you as a novelist.” Once again, as he had several times that year, he told Hemingway that he must produce a novel.
Hemingway started right in on the kind of writing the public expected from him. He wrote Perkins that it would become a short novel or a “hell of a long story” set in the Gulf Stream. Max wished he could get down to Key West for a while, where they might discuss it, but the sudden temporary loss of his right-hand man prevented that. John Hall Wheelock had to go off for a rest, and nobody could tell for how long. “One of those mysterious breakdowns,” Max confided to Hemingway.
The pressures of the last few years, working through the Depression, had imposed a strain on Wheelock. Waves of fear made him feel ineffectual, unable to edit his authors or even complete his own book of poetry. Max had talked a great deal with Wheelock before his going off and guessed that “his feeling that people here think that he ought to brace up etc. is more or less part of the illness.” In fact, nobody at Scribners did feel that way about it. Wheelock went to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a rest; Max assured him there was nothing for him to worry about at Scribners. “You went at the very best time of year from the point of view of work. So don’t worry about that. I am telling you the truth.” It was a white lie. Within days he had written Elizabeth Lemmon, “I don’t see how I can do without him, but somehow I shall.”
In a complete reversal of their roles of just a few years earlier, Van Wyck Brooks visited Wheelock at Stockbridge in January, 1936. As before, Max remained the one person with whom all parties could discuss the situation. Brooks thought their friend’s condition was more critical than anyone supposed. “The illness is invisible,” he wrote Max; “I think Jack has a feeling that the general impression is that he is somehow playing possum.” Van Wyck suggested that Scribners get the manuscript of Wheelock’s poetry off to the press at once. “It will give him a strong outside interest during the spring months, and make him feel how much good work he has done.” Perkins acted on the idea immediately.
By February, Wheelock felt strong enough to return to work. His doctors said that he really was not well yet, and his return was mostly experimental. “He will find it mighty hard not to get submerged in work though,” Max wrote Van Wyck. “It is impossible to prevent it unless he does it by refusing to work except during certain hours. That is what he ought to do, and I hope will.” Perkins sat Wheelock down and worked out a limited schedule with him. Wheelock stuck to it and was practically as good as new when his book of poetry came out. The volume helped him win the Bollingen Prize.
With From Death to Morning, Thomas Wolfe’s first collection of short stories, Wolfe began to experience the same sort of critical backlash that Hemingway had. The reviews complained of his flabby emotionalism and lack of polish. Deep antagonisms surfaced and affected his behavior with Perkins. On November 29, 1935, Max and Louise joined Tom for a nightcap at a restaurant called Louis and Armand’s. It turned out to be a mistake because Tom was not a one-drink man, and after two or three he could become abusive. That night he got to ranting about “capitalistic injustice.” He elected Max the “King Capitalist” and said insulting things about him. Wolfe came to his office at one o‘clock the next day, contrite and affectionate, saying that he must get to work and that Perkins must help him decide what to work on. Max agreed to meet him the next night to discuss it—not in his house or a café but in the very middle of an East River bridge, where there would be no whiskey within half a mile.
A few weeks later, Wolfe squabbled again with Perkins. The dispute grew out of a renewal of Tom’s cockeyed plan to pay Mrs. Bernstein for past favors. On a Thursday night, he demanded that Max come up with $1,050 in cash by eleven o‘clock the following morning at the latest. Max said it could not be done; Tom said it had to be done. Perkins delivered the money by the appointed hour, but when he saw Wolfe again at seven that evening, he learned that Tom had snoozed the afternoon away. The wad of bills was stuffed in his pocket. Max made him promise to go directly to the Hotel Gotham, without stopping for any drinks, and lock the money in their safe until he could get to his bank on Monday. Afterward Perkins laughed over the episode.
Then came the dreadful evening when Tom showed himself at his very worst. The Countess Eleanor Palffy was an American friend of Louise and Max’s. She had recently lost an eye because of a tumor that resulted when her husband, out of jealousy, struck her with the butt of a revolver. On her first day out of the hospital the Countess phoned Max to ask if she could come to dinner. Eleanor had always been interested in writers, and Louise suggested they invite Tom as well. Max knew that would be like combining glycerin and nitric acid. He pleaded against it, knowing how this woman’s social attitudes, her title, and her cosmopolitan manner would infuriate Tom. Louise insisted that the evening would be fun.
Wolfe warmed up for the occasion with a good many drinks, and as Max feared, by the time he arrived he was very drunk. Hardly inside the door, he lashed out at Eleanor. The point of his tirade was that she wasn’t any better than anybody else, that he was as good as any man. Tom was so sure she was a snob and therefore anti-Semitic that he even told her that his father, the stonecutter W. O. Wolfe, was a rabbi. That only fascinated her. At one point, in frustration, Tom sprang up from the dinner table, pulled off his jacket to exhibit the label, and said, “From the best tailor in London!”
Max tried to stifle Tom’s vulgarity by joking as best he could, but he realized nothing short of Tom’s departure would put an end to it. Then Wolfe himself, almost in tears, got up and stomped toward the front door. Perkins caught him in the hall and persuaded him to come back and be civilized. That was a mistake. Tom returned to his chair but also the same line of talk. He pounced upon Eleanor’s every word, growing ever more vitriolic until, after one comment that infuriated him, he brandished his long index finger in front of her face and said, “That’s as false as—as that eye.”
Eleanor said it was time for her to return to the hospital. Tom volunteered to escort her there, but Perkins insisted that he was taking her back. Both men went, then stopped at Manny Wolf’s for a drink over which Tom resumed his invective. Perkins finally reached his boiling point. “I for that one time in my life,” he remembered ten years later, “lost my temper with him and told him off. When I do that, I always get to shouting, and it attracted a lot of attention.” Max laced into him so vehemently that the barman gave out a small cheer. A few weeks later Eleanor was asked again to the Perkinses’ for dinner. Max invited Tom to come in before, just to say something to make amends. “He did come very humbly, with a big bunch of roses,” Perkins recalled. Tom tried to apologize and did stammer out some well-intentioned words, but it later became apparent that forever afterward he resented Max’s having dragged him on the carpet that way.
All that year it was obvious to Perkins that Tom was testing him: Max’s friendship, his patience, and his confidence in Wolfe’s work. Once he even told Perkins that an editor at the Viking Press had read a carbon of his latest manuscript and had warned him that it must certainly not be published. Wolfe was overjoyed when Perkins responded violently to this false provocation. “I ought not to have believed this,” Perkins said, “but Tom always could fool me with such statements.” Max realized “Tom had a strange distrust of himself which made him apparently actually believe that no other publisher would take him, and he often intimated that he would leave us, but I think merely to observe my reaction, until the late spring of 1936.”
Perkins perceived that Wolfe was seeking excuses for disputes. “I don’t mean that Tom was deliberately and consciously inventing reasons for leaving us,” Max wrote years later, “but the underlying reasons were working so strongly in him and yet were not consciously acknowledged, that he thought the pretexts were true reasons.”
Wolfe was now working on a book that would combine Of Time and the River’s original preface with notes from his lectures and seminars in Boulder. It would not be fiction at all, but a short factual work, entitled The Story of a Novel.
Actually, The Story of a Novel grew from another notion that Perkins had planted in Wolfe’s mind, as the author acknowledged in the book’s opening lines:
An editor, who is also a good friend of mine, told me about a year ago that he was sorry he had not kept a diary about the work that both of us were doing [on Of Time and the River], the whole stroke, catch, flow, stop, and ending, the ten thousand fittings, changings, triumphs, and surrenders that went into the making of a book. This editor remarked that some of it was fantastic, much incredible, all astonishing, and he was also kind enough to say that the whole experience was the most interesting he had known during the twenty-five years he had been a member of the publishing business.
Wolfe told the whole story, and a short book developed, which the Saturday Review of Literature offered to serialize. Perkins privately worried that Tom would embroider on his dedication to Of Time and the River. He felt he had received enough public exposure already. Wolfe detailed his editor’s work but never mentioned Perkins by name. Max’s only contribution to the editing of The Story of a Novel was to persuade Tom to cut out two or three paragraphs that seemed unnecessarily political and therefore “extraneous to the purpose of the book which in itself showed how his heart was wrung by the poverty and injustice that he saw all about.” But, as Max had feared, everything that Tom had been unable to express about Max in his dedication of his last novel was spelled out in this book. It was as if Wolfe, by bestowing elaborate tribute upon Perkins, was attempting to pay him off, the easier to get rid of him—just as he had tried to assuage his conscience about Aline Bernstein by forcing money on her.
It now became part of Wolfe’s daily routine to walk to Scribners at four-thirty and fetch his mail. It was a good excuse to break from his work, and it was important to him to observe the people at Scribners who had been part of his life for the last six years. Although his publishers did not yet know it, he was evaluating them as both business partners and future literary material.
Wolfe realized that while he had been alone most of his life, he had never been independent. He had now entered one of those periods when he had to put his house in order—sweeping aside everything and everyone he thought he could live without. Such a decision would of course first and most particularly affect Aline Bernstein and Max Perkins. And so he seized upon the book that both had had so great a role in creating, Look Homeward, Angel. Tom calculated that the sale of the manuscript would forever clear the debt he owed Mrs. Bernstein. During the following months, he persisted in making it an issue with Aline and sought to involve Perkins in the negotiation. That manuscript had been a present to Aline, but Wolfe now perversely wanted her to write Max that it had been given in repayment of moneys that had passed from her to the author. Aline knew that simply was not the truth. “I understood at the time you gave it to me that it came as a gift of love and friendship, a token of the feeling you had for me at the time,” she wrote Tom. “I cannot regard it in any other light.” Within the week, though, Tom had bullied her into writing Perkins all that he dictated. She realized, she told him, that she was a fool to let Tom persuade her, but, she explained to Wolfe in another letter, “I love you a lot.”
Wolfe’s meetings with Perkins became sharp-tongued and humor-less. Even when Louise tried to heal the wounds by inviting Tom to the house, Wolfe continued his attacks at Turtle Bay. One evening the arguing grew so violent that the two men almost came to blows. Max soon regained his poise and retired for the evening. Tom slammed out of the door. That night Louise wrote Wolfe a note. “Listen Tom,” she said, “if anyone else were as man to man as you were tonight you would fight him! You know that he is your friend—really your friend—and that he is honorable. Isn’t that enough? Please don’t behave that way. It is partly because I have been so horrible and disappointed him so much that I beg you not to do it.”
The long hours that Max had spent with Wolfe in recent years had not helped to bring Max and Louise any closer. At heart she could only resent the attention her husband lavished upon Tom. To compensate for her hours alone, Louise still flirted with acting. She kept up a repertoire of classical roles and could perform monologues, speeches, and poems from memory. The dramatist Edward Sheldon, one of Max’s Harvard friends, said Louise had “talent galore for a career on stage.” One evening, at a small dinner gathering at which the Perkinses and Wolfe were present, Max and Tom embarked upon an intense discussion about literature. Eager to be a part of the conversation but seeing little chance to break in, Louise nudged her dinner partner and whispered, “Ask me to recite, ask me to recite.”
Elizabeth Lemmon said, “Louise was jealous of Max; she always wanted to be the center of attention.” But it is perhaps more accurate to say that Louise’s personality reached out and grabbed people, while it was Max’s remoteness that attracted them. Max generally kept any adverse opinions of people to himself; once when someone remarked that an author was a son of a bitch, he said, “Yes, but an unconscious one.” Louise, on the other hand, had her emotions on the surface, and it was not uncommon for her to make her disdain known. Toward the end of another small party, during which she had needled Tom Wolfe all evening, Louise sat staring at her adversary. She finally said to a friend, “God, how he hates me, and how I hate him.” The remark was barely audible, but Tom’s ears perked up. “No, Louise,” he drawled in a low voice, “I have great admiration for you.” Max’s hearing was too weak to pick up either comment. It was just as well. On other occasions Tom and Louise had spoken far into the night about their mutual love and respect for Max, and as they came to understand each other their rivalry faded.
To please Max and to fulfill her own creative needs, Louise returned to her writing in the mid-thirties. It delighted Max to see her report regularly to the studio she had rented on Second Avenue. She sold several new stories and poems. She had written children’s plays before (an anthology of them called Magic Lanterns has been selling ever since it was published in 1923), but in 1936 Louise put her mind to a more challenging work. She was inspired by the fact that their next-door neighbor was Katharine Hepburn. For Miss Hepburn, Louise wrote a play in nine scenes about Pauline Bonaparte. It was an ornate costume drama with stiff dialogue and few concerns weightier than the character’s jewels and gowns. Max’s lifelong obsession with Napoleon no doubt drew Louise to the period, but her own research led her to a fascination with the ravishing Pauline. She found the relationship between Pauline, the most exciting woman in court, and her older brother Napoleon very like her own feelings toward Max. Like Louise, Pauline Bonaparte was “capable of quick, kitten-like rages”; she had a childlike understanding of politics and a passion for theatricals. She lived under the sway of a man whom she exalted, though he had stunted her development. In Scene Five, when Napoleon sends away Pauline’s love, De Canouville, she says:
I am so tired of disappointment and unhappiness. I have only been dragged along behind Napoleon’s chariot and crushed and battered by the stones. All the intensity that I have put in my life has come to nothing.
Still, as Louise was to Max, Pauline remains Napoleon’s most ardent champion. “When people hate me,” she says, “I am sorry and try to make them like me again. But when they hate Napoleon, I loathe them with all my heart and could kill them.” Pauline’s comment on her brother’s abdication for the good of the country somewhat parallels Louise’s feelings, especially after having seen her husband subjected to years of authors’ abuse and personal sacrifices.
His soul is like a flash of lightning.... No matter what they do to him, they can never destroy his light. I love him now more than anyone in the world and I shall remain faithful to him until my death.
“She was a lovely-looking creature—reaching for something on her own which she never could attain, I felt—living in the shadow of a remarkable man,” Katharine Hepburn said of Louise Perkins. The actress thought Pauline was a “charming play,” with remediable flaws. But Louise’s dedication to it was at best fitful, and she never solved its problems.
“Mother was a woman of great energy,” her daughter Peggy said, “but she hated drudgery and was incapable of forcing herself to do it, which is probably why she didn’t write more.”
The two women, Louise and Katharine Hepburn, became friendly, but Miss Hepburn never got to know Max Perkins at all. “He used to walk up and down Forty-ninth Street either conversing or in happy silence with my driver ... who was known as the ‘Mayor of Forty-ninth Street,’ ” she recalled. “I always hoped that someday he would speak to me,” Miss Hepburn wrote of Max Perkins. But he never did.
Before The Story of a Novel was set in print, to be published on April 29, Perkins and Wolfe at last discussed the contractual details of the book. Because the slim volume would be much shorter than normal trade books—to say nothing of normal Wolfe books—it would have to be priced lower, which made it harder for Scribners to cover its costs. Perkins, therefore, had offered Wolfe a reduced royalty on the initial printing. Tom agreed to cut his usual 15 percent to 10 percent for the first 3,000 copies. Just before publication, however, Wolfe learned that the book was to be sold for $1.50, not the $1.25 he had been led to expect. He was furious. Scribners was paying him a lower royalty, yet selling the book for more. Tom met Perkins that evening to discuss the situation. It was not long before Wolfe began one of his tirades of ugly name-calling and insulting bombast. The following morning he wrote a note of apology. “The language that I used was unjustifiable and I want to tell you that I know it was,” he wrote his editor, “and ask you to forget it.”
Wolfe nonetheless felt strongly about the issue. He did not wish to rake up the embers of the night before, but he had accepted the lower terms because Max said that even though Scribners was not likely to profit from so small a book, its publication was worthwhile in itself. To prove he had not been taken advantage of, Wolfe thought Perkins should restore his former royalty.
“You have been my friend for seven years now and one of the best friends that I ever had,” Tom wrote Max. “I do not want to see you do this thing now which may be legally and technically all right, but is to my mind, a sharp business practice.” Wolfe granted that it was probably not Perkins himself who fixed the book’s price and royalties; but, he added, “I also know the way I expect and want you to act now as my friend.”
Wolfe became more and more outraged and more and more adamant. “If your refusal in this matter is final and you insist on holding me to the terms of the contracts I signed for The Story of a Novel,” Wolfe queried, “don’t you think I, or anyone else on earth for that matter, would be justified henceforth and hereafter, considering my relations with you and Scribners were primarily of a business and commercial nature, and if you make use of a business advantage in this way, don’t you think I would be justified in making use of a business advantage too if one came my way? Or do you think it works only one way? I don’t think it does and I don’t think any fair-minded person in the world would think so either ... you cannot command the loyalty and devotion of a man on the one hand and then take a business advantage on the other.”
The following day Perkins dictated that Wolfe’s royalties on The Story of a Novel be reckoned at 15 percent from the start. The difference Wolfe would receive amounted to $225. “We certainly do not think that we should withhold that sum of money if it is going to cause so much resentment, and so much loss of time and disquiet for all of us,” he wrote Tom. Perkins believed in the author’s freedom to act in his own best interests, but he knew that Wolfe had blown up this incident far beyond its just proportions. “I certainly would not wish you to make what you thought was a sacrifice, on my account ... ,” he wrote Wolfe, “and I would know that whatever you did would be sincerely believed to be right by you,—and I know that you sincerely believe the contentions you make in this letter to me, to be right. I have never doubted your sincerity and never will. I wish you could have felt that way toward us.”
The moment after Perkins restored the royalty of 15 percent, Wolfe said he preferred to stand by his signature on the contract. “That goes for all my other obligations as well,” he wrote Max. It occurred to him now that “life is too short to quarrel this way with a friend over something that matters so little.” He said he had made up his mind the day before he received word from Perkins. He had even called him up and gone around to see him, just to tell him “that all the damn contracts in the world don’t mean as much to me as you friendship means.” Wolfe wanted to bring his next book to life. For that, he told Perkins, “I need your friendship and support more than I ever did.”
On Perkins’s stroll home from work one afternoon a short time later, Tom caught up with him and said he wanted to talk. His voice sounded unusually insistent, and they turned off Forty-ninth Street at the Waldorf Hotel instead of their regular place, Manny Wolf’s. Once seated at the bar, Wolfe referred to the latest criticism against him. Then he said again that he wanted to write a completely objective, unautobiographical book.
“Tom was in a desperate state,” Max wrote years later of that afternoon. “It was not only what the critics said that made him wish to write objectively, but that he knew that what he had written had given great pain even to those he loved the most.” He referred to Wolfe’s family in Asheville.
Wolfe went on to describe the project; Perkins became excited about it. When Tom expressed doubts as to whether or not he would be able to write such a book, Perkins told him at once that there was no doubt that he should do it, that he had known for years that someday Wolfe would have to do it, and that Tom was the only person in America who could do it.
Wolfe was calling the book The Vision of Spangler’s Paul. He got to work, and soon he was making up a story largely out of imagination. Many of the characters he started to develop had no actual models in reality. For whole chapters the style was consciously lean, so free from embellishments that it read like nothing else Wolfe had ever written. It had lost the lyrical and poetic bounty of his earlier writing, but gained compactness along with objectivity.
Tom had, in his own words, “begun to go again like a locomotive.” At three o‘clock one morning that spring, when Wolfe was living near the Perkinses, another of Max’s neighbors, his author Nancy Hale, heard a monotonous singsong, which grew louder. She got up from bed and looked out the window of her apartment, which was on East Forty-ninth Street near Third Avenue. There was Thomas Wolfe, wearing a black slouch hat, advancing in his long mountaineer’s stride, with his billowing black raincoat, chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today—I wrote ten thousand words today.”
“God knows what the result will be,” Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon that season, “but I suspect it will be the end of me. A worse struggle than Of Time and the River, unless he changes publishers first.” The protagonist of Wolfe’s book assumed the name Paul Spangler, then Joe Doaks, then George Spangler. Later he adopted the family name Joyner, which was dropped for Webber. With each change, Wolfe slipped into the more familiar mode, autobiography. Except for some physical characteristics, George Webber was, in fact, practically the same person as Eugene Gant, the hero of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River.
But at least Wolfe was happily engaged in a new book, and it might have seemed to Max that his troubles with Tom were behind him, except for his deep-seated Yankee fatalism which surfaced whenever things were going too well. Days later, in the April 25, 1936, issue of the Saturday Review,Thomas Wolfe’s long-time nemesis, Bernard De Voto, justified Perkins’s anxieties.
Illustrating his lead article, “Genius Is Not Enough,” was a photograph of De Voto, with a Cheshire-cat grin, lowering a revolver into cocked position. It was Wolfe he was shooting at. After a few paragraphs De Voto observed that to a large extent, Wolfe’s growth as a writer had remained in darkness. “Well,” De Voto wrote, “The Story of a Novel puts an end to speculation and supplies some unexpected but very welcome light.
The most flagrant evidence of his incompleteness is the fact that, so far, one indispensable part of the artist has existed not in Mr. Wolfe but in Maxwell Perkins. Such organizing faculty and such critical intelligence as have been applied to the book have come not from inside the artist, not from the artist’s feeling for form and esthetic integrity, but from the office of Charles Scribner’s Sons. For five years the artist pours out words “like burning lava from a volcano”—with little or no idea what their purpose is, which book they belong in, what the relation of part to part is, what is organic and what irrelevant, or what emphasis or coloration in the completed work of art is being served by the job at hand. Then Mr. Perkins decides these questions—from without, and by a process to which rumor applied the word “assembly.” But works of art cannot be assembled like a carburetor—they must be grown like a plant, or in Mr. Wolfe’s favorite simile, like an embryo. The artist writes a hundred thousand words about a train: Mr. Perkins decides that the train is worth only five thousand words. But such a decision as this is properly not within Mr. Perkins’s power; it must be made by the highly conscious self-criticism of the artist in relation to the pulse of the book itself. Worse still, the artist goes on writing till Mr. Perkins tells him the novel is finished....
Mr. Wolfe can write fiction—has written some of the finest fiction of our day. But a great part of what he writes is not fiction at all: it is only material with which the novelist has struggled but which has defeated him. ... Mr. Perkins and the assembly line at Scribners can do nothing to help him....
One can only respect Mr. Wolfe for his determination to realize himself on the highest level and to be satisfied with nothing short of greatness. But, however useful genius may be in the writing of novels, it is not enough in itself—it never has been enough, in any art, and it never will be. At the very least it must be supported by an ability to impart shape to material, simple competence in the use of tools. Until Mr. Wolfe develops more craftsmanship, he will not be the important novelist he is now widely accepted as being. In order to be a great novelist he must also mature his emotions till he can see more profoundly into character than he now does, and he must learn to put a corset on his prose. Once more: his own smithy is the only possible place for these developments—they cannot occur in the office of any editor whom he will ever know.
In a single blow De Voto had destroyed Wolfe’s pleasure of accomplishment. It was one thing for Wolfe to give Perkins his due. It was quite another for the critics to turn his gesture against him, to make his books seem the product of a “factory.” Wolfe lashed out against De Voto to anyone who would listen, but on a deeper level the rage was probably directed at Max. The fact that Perkins, far from seeking this public credit, had yearned to elude it made no difference to Tom when his emotions were running. Max had taught him, by implication, that the editor remains in the background; now Max, thanks to De Voto, was forever to be out front. It was something Tom could not indefinitely abide, and no one knew this sooner or more surely than Max.