XVI
Wlolfe’s Story of a Novel is unbearable ... ,“ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote Max Perkins. The honesty, ferocity, and beauty of expression of the writer’s anguish made it painful for her to read. ”When a little of the torment has expended itself he will be the greatest artist America has ever produced.“ In the same letter, she wrote Perkins of another opinion of which she was at least as sure: ”When all of us are done for, the chances are that literary history will find you the greatest—certainly the wisest—of us all.“
With her last novel, Golden Apples, long since forgotten, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was finally able to give herself to the boys’ book Perkins had suggested some years earlier and had tenderly encouraged ever since. In March, 1936, she holed up in an abandoned cabin to write a book for children about a boy raising a young animal in the scrub. She asked Max if he liked the title The Fawn. “I am glad you have the book well thought out,” Perkins replied; “I think The Fawn is a good title, but I am not sure that it would be a wise one for it might seem too poetic, or even a little sentimental.” The author agreed to reconsider it.
Mrs. Rawlings found her first attempt at the book difficult, and she often wrote Perkins for advice. She also kept harking back to the letters he had written her in 1933, especially one in which he said: “A book about a boy and the life of the scrub is the thing we want.—It is those wonderful river trips and the hunting and the dogs and guns and the companionship of simple people who care about the same things which were included in South Moon Under.” After a while, three of Perkins’s points began to sink in. The first was that her book should not be written for a boy so much as about a boy. She also realized that her forte was not complex plotting but stringing small episodes together. And she came to understand that the material she handled best was the raw, regional tales she had dug right out of the scrub swamplands, rather than anything she might derive from flights of imagination. She wrote scenes about alligators, rattlesnakes, wolf packs, the dance of the whooping cranes, the Northeaster of 1871, and the floods that followed.
Marjorie Rawlings wanted a bear hunt in the story, so she prowled the countryside for someone with the appropriate experience. Finally she met a briary old pioneer living on the Saint Johns River, a famous “bad man” in those parts. She lived with him and his wife until she had gathered enough of his anecdotes and hunting yarns and details of the ways of the wilderness people to expand her cast of characters and add some basic dramatic situations. When she returned to her homestead she worked out the concept of the book and then wrote Perkins about it:
It will be absolutely all told through the boy’s eyes. He will be about twelve, and the period will not be a long one—not more than two years. I want it through his eyes before the age of puberty brings in any of the other factors to confuse the simplicity of viewpoint. It will be a book boys will love, and if it is done well enough otherwise, the people who liked South Moon will like it too. It is only since Golden Apples that I realize what it is about my writing that people like. I don’t mean that I am writing for anyone, but now I feel free to luxuriate in the simple details that interest me, and that I have been so amazed to find interested other people—probably just from the element of sincerity given by my own interest and sympathy....
Now please don’t write me another of those restrained “You must do it as seems right to you” notes. Tell me what is really in your mind.
Perkins replied:
When I write in that do-it-as-it-seems-right-to-you way, it is because it has always been my conviction—and I do not see how anyone could dispute the rightness of it—that a book must be done according to the writer’s conception of it as nearly as perfectly as possible, and that the publishing problems begin then.—That is, the publisher must not try to get a writer to fit the book to the conditions of the trade, etc. It must be the other way around.
Perkins told Marjorie Rawlings he wanted her to rely on her own resources, but he threw in occasional suggestions. He encouraged her to write about going down a river—“because the rivers there are so good, and the journey element in a narrative is always a fine one, particularly to youth.” Perkins said he knew the book would work well if she would just keep it simple and unaffected. “I would not be a bit surprised if it were the best book you have done,” he declared, “and it might well be the most successful.”
Like many of Perkins’s writers, Mrs. Rawlings often had spells of doubt and depression. She asked him to help her through them:
I am one of your duties, you know, Max, and you really must write me at least every couple of weeks. Sometimes a letter from you is the only thing that bucks me up. When everything else fails, I can know that it really matters to you whether or not I get a piece of work done, and how well.
He never neglected her.
Six months into the writing, Marjorie Rawlings was still hunting for a title. She sent a list of alternatives to Perkins and asked for his opinion. He did not care much for The Flutter Mill. Of Juniper Island he said: “I do not think place names are good for a book. There is not enough human suggestion in them.” Of her third title he wrote, “I would think one which carried the meaning of The Yearling was probably right.” The more he spoke of it, the better it sounded to him. He wrote her in the spring of 1937, “It seems to have a quality even more than a meaning that fits the book.” It stuck.
After almost a year on the book, Mrs. Rawlings abruptly decided that what she had written was poor, and she threw out the manuscript. Perkins was shocked when she told him. There was nothing for him to do but to try to get her going again. He kept sending heartening letters, and eventually she resumed writing, more slowly but with more confidence.
In December, 1937, she sent the manuscript off to Perkins. He took days to read it, but, as he told her, that was a good sign. “The better a book is, the slower I go,” he explained. “I think the last half is better than the first and that the book gets increasingly good. But the very beginning now is perfect, it seems to me, and of course the father and mother, and all about that life, and Jody’s on the island, are as good as can be.” He felt a few parts of the book were tainted with theatricality and romanticism and suggested that they be sacrificed in order to maintain the book’s naturalism, its honest depiction of a world that was sometimes cruel and terrifying. The Yearling was full of very tough people, he reminded Mrs. Rawlings, “and the toughness ought to be more evident.”
Marjorie Rawlings’s previous books had had hard luck, but everything went right for this one. The Book-of-the-Month Club made The Yearling its main selection in April, 1938. In general, book sales that year were only a third of what they had been before the Depression, but The Yearlingbecame a runaway best seller overnight. It also won the Pulitzer Prize.
Two years before this bonanza, in June, 1936, Marjorie Rawlings had gone game-fishing in Bimini with a friend. There she learned that Ernest Hemingway had become the hero of the most popular legends down there. The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. “You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big fat slob’s in the harbor.”
When Hemingway heard that one of Max Perkins’s authors was in the same waters, he called on her. “I should have known from your affection for him that he was not a fire-spitting ogre,” Marjorie wrote back to Perkins, “but I’d heard so many tales in Bimini of his going around knocking people down, that I half-expected him to announce in a loud voice that he never accepted introductions to female novelists. Instead, a most lovable, nervous and sensitive person took my hand in a big gentle paw and remarked that he was a great admirer of my work.”
The day before she left, Hemingway tussled six hours and fifty minutes with a 514-pound tuna. When his Pilar cruised into harbor at 9:30 that night, the whole population of the island flocked to see his fish and hear his tale. “A fatuous old man with a new yacht and a young bride had arrived not long previously, announcing that tuna-fishing, of whose difficulties he had heard, was easy,” Mrs. Rawlings wrote to Perkins. “So as the Pilar was made fast, Hemingway came swimming up from below-decks, gloriously drunk, roaring, ‘Where’s the son of a bitch who said it was easy.’ The last anyone saw of him that night, he was standing alone on the dock where his giant tuna hung from the stays, using it for a punching bag.”
In just her short stay in Bimini, Mrs. Rawlings detected an inner conflict in Hemingway. “He is so great an artist that he does not need to be ever on the defensive. He is so vast, so virile, that he does not need ever to hit anybody,” Mrs. Rawlings wrote Perkins. “Yet he is constantly defending something that he, at least, must consider vulnerable.” She thought the conflict might be due in part to the company he was keeping, mainly sportsmen.
Hemingway is among these people a great deal, and they like and admire him—his personality, his sporting prowess, and his literary prestige. It seems to me that unconsciously he must value their opinion. He must be afraid of laying bare before them the agony that tears the artist. He must be afraid of lifting before them the curtain that veils the beauty that should be exposed only to reverent eyes. So, as inDeath in the Afternoon, he writes beautifully, and then immediately turns it off with a flippant comment, or a deliberate obscenity. His sporting friends would not understand the beauty. They would roar with delight at the flippancy.
Hemingway was having what he called a “belle époque” that year, 1936. He had written two short stories whose background was Africa, and he was pleased with them. After he got back from Bimini, he traveled to Wyoming, where he got back to work on his new novel. All Perkins knew about the book was that the setting was the Florida Keys, Havana, and the waters between, and that Harry Morgan, the hero of two of Hemingway’s Esquire stories, would be the central character. “I cannot give any idea of the plot,” Perkins wrote the English publisher Jonathan Cape; but he imagined that the “characters will some of them be the boatmen who live by fishing and smuggling, and have a finger in the Cuban revolutions, etc. and one of the important episodes will be a hurricane. I think it sounds very fine indeed, and am looking forward to it with great impatience.”
The green hills of Wyoming proved to be an adequate substitute for those of Africa. There Hemingway bagged two antelope, three grizzly bears, and 55,000 words. His plan was to complete the first draft, deposit it in a vault, and then go to Spain. Perkins worried every time Hemingway threw himself into the eye of danger—he had even told Ernest to let the grizzlies alone until he finished his book. But he knew that nothing could keep Hemingway from the Spanish Civil War. Just from what he had read in the newspaper, Perkins told him, he imagined that a magnificent tale could be written on the recent defense of the Spanish fortress, the Alcázar. “If you had been there, and got out of it safely, what a story! But I wish you would not go to Spain.... Anyhow, I hope you will let nothing prevent the publication of a novel in the Spring. And it should be early too.” Hemingway was determined to go to the battle-front, but he was in no great hurry. He suspected the Spaniards would be fighting for a long time.
During the spring of 1936 Hemingway had resumed his bullying of Scott Fitzgerald. In several letters to Max and to Scott himself, Ernest jabbed at the now staggering Fitzgerald. He said he did not want to believe that Scott had become the “Maxie Baer” of writers, down and out; but now the man seemed so hell-bent on wallowing in his “shamelessness of defeat” that Hemingway had no choice.
In June, 1936, Fitzgerald was back in Baltimore, living in a seventh-floor apartment across the street from Johns Hopkins. Zelda, sick as ever, had been moved to Highland Hospital, a rest home near Asheville, North Carolina. Scott was still too rattled to start any major writing, but he was full of ideas for books, mostly republications of his old works. He needed money badly, but he resisted asking for it for a time. Then, in July, he addressed a plea for $1,500, this time to Charles Scribner himself, the president of the firm. Scribner sent the check, but he also sent for the company director—Max. The two of them examined Fitzgerald’s account and computed that the author’s debt to the company had grown to $6,000, not including this last payment. “All this is rather painful and I hope it will not give you a headache,” Scribner wrote Fitzgerald in sending a detailed reckoning of all his advances. “Max and I thought it only fair, however, by you as well as ourselves to get the figures on paper, to make sure that we agreed with you.”
In addition to the company loans, Fitzgerald received dozens of loans from Perkins himself. Fitzgerald never owed Perkins at any one time more than $3,000, but it was that much on several different occasions. There had been seven loans in just the past eighteen months, for a total of $1,400. Perkins once wrote Thomas Wolfe’s friend John Terry that he advanced the money “because there simply was no business justification in this house running his debt up further. I wanted to enable him to keep at writing and avoid Hollywood and that sort of racket.”
In mid-July Perkins went to Baltimore and saw Fitzgerald briefly. Scott’s own writing of the period is the best record of what Max found. His essay “The Crack-Up” had described Scott’s deep depression of the preceding winter; now he wrote a piece for the August Esquire, “Afternoon of an Author,” describing an upswing:
When he woke up he felt better than he had for many weeks, a fact that became plain to him negatively—he did not feel ill. He leaned for a moment against the door frame between his bedroom and bath till he could be sure he was not dizzy. Not a bit, not even when he stooped for a slipper under the bed.
In his 1938 story “Financing Finnegan” an editor named George Jaggers, who is constantly bailing out the “perennial man of promise in American letters” with personal loans, says: “The truth is Finnegan’s been in a slump, he’s had blow after blow in the past few years, but now he’s snapping out of it.”
Into the summer of 1936, Fitzgerald rode the upswing. He lived in Baltimore or North Carolina, close to Zelda, feeling well. Then, in July, swimming in a pool near Asheville, he did a swan dive from a fifteen-foot board. Scott was in no shape for that kind of diving. He struck the water awkwardly, breaking his clavicle and pulling his left shoulder out of its socket. He was fitted into a special halter which allowed him to write but which kept him in the rigid position of a fascist salute.
While his shoulder was healing, Scott concerned himself with a new version of Tender Is the Night that he had urged Bennett Cerf to consider for his Modern Library. He began the labor of revision by reviewing the criticisms of the book that Perkins had made when it was first serialized two years earlier. He saw now that Max had been right when he had said that the beginning of the book lacked clarity. Fitzgerald heeded the comment this time and switched Part One, on the Riviera, and Part Two, Dick Diver’s history, so that the story was presented chronologically, without flashbacks. The only other significant alteration was the omission of one sentence: Dick’s saying, “I never did go in for making love to dry loins.” Scott now thought it was “a strong line but definitely offensive.”
As Fitzgerald turned back to already written works for new publication, he also withdrew socially. “Me caring about no one and nothing,” he confessed to his Ledger.
Eight pages preceding Scott Fitzgerald’s “Afternoon of an Author” in the August Esquire was Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which Max now saw for the first time. It was the story of a writer on safari in Africa, who hoped to “work the fat off his soul” so that he could write “the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.” The protagonist thought to himself—
... you said that you would write about these people; about the very rich; that you were really not one of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of.
There was, of course, a similarity between this writer’s self-doubts and those of Hemingway. But toward the end of the story, Ernest drew a bead on his real target. Again writing about “the rich,” he said:
He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, later said: “That dig at Scott went right by me. I didn’t think twice about it.”
Fitzgerald, though, never forgot it. In all fairness, he told Hemingway, writing from Asheville, he thought “Snows of Kilimanjaro” was one of Hemingway’s finest stories, but he felt it was written in malicious response to his own “Crack-Up” articles. He resented Hemingway’s writing about him with all the solemnity of a pallbearer. “Please lay off me in print,” he said, adding:
If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate [the story] in a book would you mind cutting my name?
As an afterthought, Fitzgerald wrote, “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.”
Hemingway in turn wrote Perkins about Fitzgerald’s reaction. Here Scott had been exposing those “awful things about himself” for the last half-year in Esquire, but the moment Hemingway reproved him for his alleged breakdown he got sore. For five years, Ernest said, he had not written a line about anybody he knew because he felt so sorry for them all. He finally realized that time was getting short and he was going to cease being a gent and go back to being a novelist.
Fitzgerald also wrote to Max. Hemingway, he said, had replied to his request not to use Fitzgerald’s name in future printings of his fiction:
He wrote me back a crazy letter telling me what a great Writer he was.... To have answered it would have been like fooling with a lit firecracker. Somehow I love that man, no matter what he says or does, but just one more crack, and I think I would have to throw my weight with the gang and lay him. No one could ever hurt him in his first two books. But he has completely lost his head and the duller he gets about it, the more he is like a punch-drunk pug fighting himself in the movies.
The exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway about the very rich, with Ernest trumping Scott’s line, survives as one of the notable literary anecdotes from that time. But it is spurious, for, as Max Perkins well knew, the truth was otherwise. Perkins had been present when the rejoinder had been made—in a New York restaurant. Scott Fitzgerald was not there. Those present were Hemingway, Molly Colum, and Perkins, and it was Hemingway, in fact, who spoke of the rich. “I am getting to know the rich,” he declared. Whereupon Molly Colum topped him, saying: “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” Bested by a woman, Hemingway salved his ego by expropriating the witticism, having it come from his own lips, and making Scott, once again, the victim. Perkins thought Hemingway’s behavior contemptible, and told Elizabeth Lemmon as much in a letter. He did not write Hemingway to correct him, but he saw to it that Fitzgerald’s name did not appear in Hemingway’s next book of stories.
Hemingway’s attack ended another sorry summer for Fitzgerald. In September Scott wrote to Max about all that had happened to him since his shoulder had been cast in plaster. “I had almost adapted myself to the thing when I fell in the bathroom reaching for the light, and lay on the floor until I caught a mild form of arthritis called ‘Miotoosis’ which popped me in the bed for five weeks more,” he said. During that time, adding further to his anguish, Fitzgerald’s mother died. He tried to reach her deathbed in Washington but he could not manage the trip. Similarly, he had been within a mile and a half of Zelda all summer in Asheville, but he had not been able to visit her more than a half-dozen times. Affectionate words still passed between Zelda and Scott, mostly letters revealing their love of their former love; but Zelda was now often embarked on flights of fantasy and had taken to carrying a Bible everywhere she went.
The $26,000 in cash and bonds that Scott was inheriting from his mother’s estate was less than he had hoped for. He planned to use some of it to pay off his creditors and take two or three months’ rest. Finally, Fitzgerald admitted to Perkins, “I haven’t the vitality I had five yrs. ago.” His total accomplishment for the summer was one story and two Esquire articles.
With this latest decline in Fitzgerald’s health, Perkins thought of sending in some reserves to boost his spirits. He wrote Marjorie Rawlings, who in her search for a quiet place to get on with The Yearling had settled in Banner Elk, North Carolina, not far from Asheville. He thought a visit from her would do Fitzgerald a great deal of good.
The day after he wrote her, there was another disheartening development. On the occasion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fortieth birthday the New York Post ran a front-page article under the headline “The Other Side of Paradise.” It consisted of a long interview conducted by Michael Mok, the purpose of which was apparently to determine just how cracked up Scott Fitzgerald actually was. It gave Perkins a chill just to read it, for it seemed as if Scott were bent upon destroying himself. Mok evidently had maneuvered his way into Fitzgerald’s confidence, gotten him talking, then published all Scott’s comments, even those that Scott felt had been off the record. “He was trusting the reporter,” Perkins wrote Hemingway, “and so was his nurse—when a man gets himself a trained nurse, it’s time to despair of him—and both of them said things which the reporter must have known were not meant to go into print.” Perkins got the impression of a “completely licked and very drunk person, bereft of hope, acquiescing in his ruin.”
“It might easily be the last straw for Fitzgerald,” Marjorie Rawlings wrote Max after reading the article. She said she was appalled that a reporter could perpetrate so cruel an article, although she was just as tempted to damn Fitzgerald without sympathy. But, she wrote Max, “I know how that state of mind creeps up on you and I have had to fight it myself.” She had had her own years of stormy marriage and alcoholism, so she understood why Max wanted her to see Scott: “The man has taken a licking and ... you know I too have been through a great deal but that I refuse to be licked.”
At Perkins’s insistence, Fitzgerald agreed to meet with Mrs. Rawlings, though he was sick in bed with arthritis and a high temperature the afternoon she visited him. He perked up from the moment of her arrival. “Far from being depressing,” she reported to Perkins afterward, “I enjoyed him thoroughly, and I’m sure he enjoyed it as much. He was as nervous as a cat, but he had not been drinking—had had his nurse put his liquor away.” At lunch they drank only sherry and a table wine, and they clinked their glasses to Max. They proceeded to talk their heads off until, at five-thirty, Fitzgerald’s nurse fussed about his not resting, and Marjorie Rawlings left. Later she sent Scott a note urging him to fight depression. She closed with the admission, “If anyone knew how good my little .32 revolver has looked to me sometimes.”
Max thanked Mrs. Rawlings deeply for seeing Scott. “I have known him so long, and have liked him so much,” he explained, “that his welfare is very much a personal matter with me too. I would do anything to see him recover himself.” But for months Fitzgerald still believed he was washed up.
Perkins asked another of his novelists who lived in North Carolina, Hamilton Basso, to run bedcheck on Scott. Under Max’s supervision Basso was writing Courthouse Square, an autobiographical novel. (Twenty years later, Max himself would become a character in Basso’s most successful book, The View from Pompey’s Head.) For Basso the meetings with Fitzgerald were difficult, but he was eager to oblige their editor.
The root of Fitzgerald’s trouble was, as usual, his empty bank account. He figured a new book would require two years’ leisure and there was no way he could see to reduce his annual expenses below $18,000. Little would be left from his inheritance after he paid his debts. And after the financial failure of Tender Is the Night, he could not hope to be advanced any such sum as $36,000. Fitzgerald guessed that he would have to do piecework for the Post or go panning for gold in Hollywood again. But, Scott observed to Perkins: “Each time I have gone to Hollywood, in spite of the enormous salary, has really set me back financially and artistically.
I certainly have this one more novel, but it may have to remain among the unwritten books of this world. Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to public school and putting my wife in a public insane asylum have been proposed to me by intimate friends, but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil end of a point of view.
“My God,” Fitzgerald moaned, “debt is an awful thing.”
That November, Fitzgerald gave his publishers a “business justification” for any future emergency requests by transferring all his rights, title, and interest in and to the estate of his mother to Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Perkins had become well informed on the ways authors reacted to criticism. Hemingway, for one, usually protested too much about his indifference to assaults. Thomas Wolfe, on the other hand, had taken to saying frighteningly little of late. Wolfe had spent months in silent torment, and Perkins was sure that images of Perkins and the Scribners “factory” assembling his books continued to plague him. Max knew that Bernard De Voto’s questions still haunted Wolfe: Was genius enough? Had he developed as an artist? Could he write a book by himself?
At first Wolfe took De Voto’s article as a challenge. Encouraged by Perkins to continue his “objective” book, he wrote thousands of words a day. By the summer of 1936 his anger had inflamed him into believing he was equal to “all the De Votos in the world.”
Wolfe bickered constantly with Perkins that summer, principally about the writing he planned to do. He now talked of basing his new set of characters on the people he had known at Charles Scribner’s Sons. “When Tom gets around to writing about all of us, look out!” Max had joked for years. But now he admitted real anxiety to John Hall Wheelock and Charles Scribner and his other associates. “Charlie reacted humorously,” Perkins recalled some years later, “though I daresay he was worried secretly. He apparently took the matter very lightly, and as if it were amusing more than anything else. In fact, I was the only one who was very much worried, and that was largely because I personally had let us in for it.”
Much of Tom’s material was the result not of direct observation but of inside information he had absorbed from Max after hours when they were unwinding after long days over Of Time and the River. “Max was a sturdy drinker,” John Hall Wheelock said, “and though he never spoke carelessly, he drank enough with Tom to open up and speak to him trustingly as a man might to a son—the son Max never had.” The first transcription of this material was “Old Man Rivers,” a story which Elizabeth Nowell called a “bitter portrayal of Robert Bridges,” the retired editor of Scribner’s Magazine. Another was “The Lion at Morning,” which portrayed Charles Scribner II. The third was “No More Rivers,” based upon editor Wallace Meyer. The last showed the working of a publishing house—James Rodney and Company, and it was the first story Tom tried on Perkins. Max read it in Elizabeth Nowell’s presence; and, the agent remembered, “At first he sat bolt upright at his desk, with unusually pink cheeks and blazing eyes, and refused to discuss the story.” Soon he relented enough to take Miss Nowell to the Chatham for a drink, and there he began to talk.
Perkins felt like kicking himself. “I should have known batter,” he admitted to her, “but I’ve told Tom all kinds of highly confidential things about the firm and about the people there.” Wolfe knew, for instance, of one Scribners executive who “never was much good.” There was another, more venerable company official whom Max encountered one night in the arms of his equally venerable secretary. Perkins did not object to Tom’s writing about Perkins himself. But he was distressed by what Wolfe might divulge about his colleagues.
“Can’t you see,” he said to Miss Nowell, “if Tom writes those things up and publishes them, it’ll ruin those people’s lives, and it’ll be my fault!”
Perkins persuaded Miss Nowell to request changes that would make Wallace Meyer less recognizable. Then, after a moment of thought, he blurted out: “I’ll have to resign when that book is published.” Suddenly realizing what he had said, Perkins insisted that she never repeat it to anyone—least of all to Tom.
Miss Nowell later said that “the idea of Perkins’s resigning from Scribners was as unthinkable as that of God’s resigning from heaven.” But she tactlessly told her author exactly what he had said, and that set Wolfe off again. “He seems to think that while it was all right to write about those humble people down in North Carolina ... his own friends at Scribners are a special race,” Tom replied in anger. If that was Perkins’s attitude, he said it was too bad, because he was going to write what he damn well pleased. He revised “No More Rivers” by making the editor a concert pianist and eliminating the inside gossip about the publishing company. But Perkins knew that Tom “brooded over this, and that it got to seem worse and worse, and anyhow it was at this time that it became perfectly evident he would leave us.” Wolfe actually drafted letters to other houses earnestly asking if they wished to print his works. “At the present time, I am engaged upon the completion of a long book, and since I have no obligation, whether personal, financial, contractual, moral of any kind soever to any firm of publishers, I am writing to inquire if you are interested in this book.... Frankly with no disparagement of any connection I have had—I feel the need of a new beginning in my creative life,” he wrote in a letter he thought of sending to Macmillan, Harpers, Viking, W. W. Norton, Little, Brown, Houghton Mifflin, Longmans-Green, Dodd, Mead, and Harcourt, Brace.
Both friends needed a respite from the other. Wolfe returned to Germany at the end of July. The towns were mobbed with visitors to the Olympic Games, but the whole country seemed wonderfully clean and cool after New York. In Berlin he saw phalanxes of soldiers goose-stepping. “We can never learn to march like these boys,” Tom wrote Max on a card of Die Wachtruppe am Brandenburger Tor, in Berlin, “and it looks as if they’re about ready to go again.” He met a woman named Thea Voelcker, a divorced artist. Into just a few days they crammed a tempestuous love affair, exploding with the passion and torment that accompanied all his relationships. For weeks after leaving Berlin, Tom thought of marrying her, until he found the difficulties of bringing her to America too great to make it worthwhile. They separated as friends.
While Wolfe was away, Max went to Quebec with Louise for two quiet weeks. In September he gave his daughter Zippy in marriage to Douglas Gorsline, a handsome painter she had introduced to Max in Boston the previous year. Her four sisters were attendants. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were invited but could not attend. Thomas Wolfe had set foot on American soil just the day before, and Louise asked a mutual friend to see that he arrived at the church in New Canaan on time and properly attired. He chose his tie on the train from an assortment he had hastily stuffed in his pocket, but all was not perfection. In the quiet just after the ceremony, the guests heard his Southern voice boom, “You didn’t tell me my hatband stank of sweat.” At the reception Louise gushed about losing another of her babies. Max felt the same way but went around saying, “That’s two down, and only three to go.”
Wolfe had returned from Germany especially to vote in the 1936 presidential election, the most important, he felt, since 1860. Wolfe considered himself a “social democrat” but to get Perkins’s goat often played the soapbox Communist, and he believed that Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms should get the largest mandate possible. Perkins was an independent Democrat. He feared the New Deal was becoming a juggernaut which needed the restraints that only a vigorous opposition party could impose, and so, believing that FDR was certain to be reelected, he decided to vote Republican. That appalled and angered Wolfe. He called Perkins a “conservative,” denouncing him as a member of the managerial class who was removed from the struggles of life because of inherited money.
The deterioration of the Wolfe-Perkins relationship became more rapid. Wolfe acknowledged he had once needed Perkins; in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again, his protagonist, George Webber, says to his editor:
For I was lost and was looking for someone older and wiser to show me the way, and I found you, and you took the place of my father who had died.
But Webber adds: “The road now leads off in a direction contrary to your intent.”
By November, Wolfe’s impulse to sever himself from his father figure had all but overwhelmed his feelings of loyalty and gratitude. That month a woman named Marjorie Dorman unwittingly became the instrument of schism.
“I always felt somewhat guilty about the Marjorie Dorman affair,” Perkins confessed a decade later.
Miss Dorman had been Wolfe’s landlady in Brooklyn and was the model for “Mad Maude” Whittaker in Wolfe’s story “No Door.” Wolfe told of Maude’s intermittent insanity and of the mental illness of her father and three sisters. Though slightly unstable herself, Maude had kept her whole family going since she had been a girl. The story was first published in Scribner’s, then in From Death to Morning, the collection of Wolfe short stories. Miss Dorman had come to see Perkins shortly after the story appeared in the magazine. She wanted him to read an article she had written—Max later examined it and returned it to her—and while there she took the opportunity to tell Perkins how deeply hurt she had been by what Wolfe had written.
Many months passed, and nothing more was heard from Miss Dorman. Perkins assumed that since she had not sued for libel when the piece appeared in the magazine, which was read by 300,000 people, she would not do so when the piece reappeared in a book that would be read by perhaps only 30,000. In December, 1936, however, Miss Dorman and her family filed suit. Perkins told John Terry he imagined they had sued because they were hard up and had been told they could get money from the publishers.
Since almost every word Wolfe wrote was autobiographical, nearly all his characters based closely on real people, there had always been a risk of prosecution. “I doubt if Tom thought about the matter at all,” Perkins later said to John Terry, “but of course it was up to me to guard Tom from legal dangers insofar as possible.”
Perkins thought Scribners could win in court. But lawsuits drove Tom frantic, and while they waited for the case to be docketed, he became so tormented that he spent his days brooding or raving. His writing came to a halt. As the Dorman family fished for a settlement, and Max fretted about the unpredictability of juries, Wolfe grew even wilder. Perkins and Charles Scribner knew that they had to free their author of this crippling worry. One day Wolfe came up to the fifth floor of Scribners and the three men stood by the window in Perkins’s office overlooking Fifth Avenue. Charles Scribner explained that it would cost far more to win the suit and that the publicity of a trial might provoke libel suits from other quarters; several others had already been threatened. Wolfe agreed to a settlement, but soon he was telling everyone how angry he was with his publishers for refusing to defend him.
Toward the end of the year Wolfe spent an evening with Perkins and ranted about the injustice done him on all hands in this “blank blank country,” while Germany in contrast was “white as snow.” He often spoke of “dear old Adolf” and his SS, who knew what to do with thugs who picked on artists. America was the place, he said, “where honest men were all robbed and bludgeoned by scoundrels.” Then, shaking his finger at Perkins, he shouted, “And now you have got me into a $125,000 libel suit!” Wolfe and Scribners finally settled with the Dormans for $3,000. The legal fees amounted to $2,000 more. According to Tom’s contract, he should have borne the entire expense, but Scribners volunteered to pay half.
On November 12, 1936, Wolfe wrote the final draft of a letter he had been contemplating for many months and mailed it to Perkins:
I think you should now write me a letter in which you explicitly state the nature of my relation with Charles Scribner’s Sons. I think you ought to say that I have faithfully and honorably discharged all obligations to Charles Scribner’s Sons, whether financial, personal or contractual, and that no further agreement or obligation of any sort exists between us.
In view of all that had happened in the preceding year, Wolfe said, the differences of belief, the fundamental disagreements that they had discussed “so openly, so frankly, and so passionately, a thousand times, and which have brought about this unmistakable and grievous severance,” he felt that Perkins himself should have long since written this letter that he was now asking for.
Wolfe’s letter arrived just before the monthly meeting of Scribners’ board of directors. The meeting lasted through the entire afternoon, and so Perkins did not have time that day to respond at length. But he did get off a handwritten note which said in part: “I never knew a soul with whom I felt I was in such fundamentally complete agreement as you. What’s more, and what has to do with it, I know you would not ever do an insincere thing, or anything you did not think was right.”
The next day Perkins dictated a letter which said that Wolfe had “faithfully and honorably discharged all obligations to us, and no further agreement of any sort exists between us with respect to the future.” He went on to say:
Our relations are simply those of a publisher who profoundly admires the work of an author and takes great pride in publishing whatever he may of that author’s writings. They are not such as to give us any sort of rights, or anything approaching that, over the author’s future work. Contrary to custom, we have not even an option which would give us the privilege of seeing first any new manuscript.
In a third, more casual, reply to Wolfe’s declaration of independence, Perkins wrote Wolfe by hand on his personal stationery to say:
I can’t express certain kinds of feelings very comfortably, but you must realize what my feelings are toward you. Ever since Look Homeward, Angel your work has been the foremost interest in my life, and I have never doubted for your future on any ground except at times, on those of your being able to control the vast mass of material you have accumulated and have to form into books. You seem to think I have tried to control you. I only did that when you asked my help and then I did the best I could do. It all seems very confusing to me, but whatever the result I hope you don’t mean it to keep us from seeing each other, or that you won’t come to our house.
Two days later, as requested, Scribners sent Wolfe what moneys were due. “I wish I could see you,” Perkins wrote in a covering letter, “but I don’t want to force myself on you.”
Perkins did see Wolfe, without untoward incident. Tom came to the Perkinses’ for Christmas dinner and spoke happily of his leaving for New Orleans the next day. He said nothing of a long personal letter he had written on December 15, 1936, in which he had outlined his reasons for breaking with Perkins completely. Nor did he mention a supplement to that letter, a “business” letter, which he had written on December 23. He held onto both letters for weeks, carrying them with him on his trip, and debated with himself for weeks as to whether or not he should send them. He never mailed the business letter, but, as December of 1936 passed into January of 1937, he was resolving to send the personal letter.
He was at last provoked to do so by an unfortunate misunderstanding. A lawyer named Cornelius Mitchell, who was representing Wolfe in another legal matter, wrote him in New Orleans. Tom assumed that Perkins had given Mitchell Wolfe’s New Orleans address, contrary to Tom’s request. Mitchell’s letter reached Wolfe the day that Wolfe was to dine with a newfound friend and admirer of his writing, William B. Wisdom. Tom drank at dinner and kept drinking that evening after Wisdom left him. On January 7, the morning after, he wired Perkins, HOW DARE YOU GIVE ANYONE MY ADDRESS? and lapsed back into stupor. Two days later Tom awoke to find himself reclining in his hotel bathtub with the knee of his trousers torn and his mind still a muddle. For reasons unknown he sent another telegram to Perkins asking, WHAT IS YOUR OFFER? Perkins did not understand either message and replied, IF YOU REFER TO BOOK WE SHALL MAKE IT VERBALLY WHEN YOU RETURN AS ARRANGEMENTS WILL DEPEND ON YOUR REQUIREMENTS. He went on to say, in his wire, that he had not carelessly given out Tom’s address but that when Mitchell, Wolfe’s own lawyer, had told Max it was important for Wolfe to communicate with him, Max had felt the disclosure justified.
Wolfe, now sober, apologized for telegraphing as he had; in fact, he had been so drunk that, he said, he could not recall what he had wired. Seeking sympathy he wrote: “All this worry, grief, and disappointment of the last two years has almost broken me, and finally this last letter of Mitchell’s was almost the last straw. I was desperately in need of rest and quiet—the letter destroyed it all, ruined all the happiness and joy I had hoped to get from the trip—the horrible injustice of the whole thing has almost maddened me.”
Mitchell’s letter concerned what Wolfe called a “blackmail” threat from an autograph dealer named Murdoch Dooher, who had been involved in selling Wolfe’s manuscripts and had withheld some that Wolfe had wanted back. Perkins suggested paying a settlement at whatever cost; he felt it crucial to put an end to these suits, which were having such an awful effect on Tom. Full of self-pity and self-doubt, Wolfe denounced Perkins for choosing to settle, seeing it as proof that Max wanted to weaken him. He wrote in still another letter, which he mailed with his “personal letter”:
Are you—the man I trusted and reverenced above all else in the world—trying, for some mad reason I cannot even guess, to destroy me? How am I going to interpret the events of the past two years? Don’t you want me to go on? Don’t you want me to write another book? Don’t you hope for my life—my growth—the fulfillment of my talent? In Christ’s name, what is it, then? My health is well-nigh wrecked—worry, grief, and disillusionment has almost destroyed my talent—is this what you wanted? And why?
At the base of all Wolfe’s anger was the general belief that without Perkins, Wolfe was unpublishable—a writer manqué. Wolfe himself had given currency to that notion, by making public facts that Perkins had fought to keep private. Wolfe had written the dedication of Of Time and the Riverand the extensive sections of The Story of a Novel that detailed Max’s contributions to strengthen the bonds between the two men, but they were having the opposite effect. They now were impelling Wolfe to strike out on his own. In his personal letter Wolfe cited the charges of the critics that Wolfe was dependent on Perkins’s “technical and critical assistance” and branded them so “contemptible, so manifestly false, I have no fear whatever of their ultimate exposure.”
Wolfe granted that “you gave me the most generous, the most painstaking, the most valuable help.” But, he contended, “that kind of help might have been given to me by many other skilful people.” It was rather the understanding of “a fellow creature whom you know and reverence not only as a person of individual genius but as a spirit of incorruptible integrity—that kind of help I do need,” Wolfe admitted, “that kind of help I think I have been given, that kind of help I shall ever more hope to deserve and pray that I shall have.”
Wolfe, in his letter, agreed with Perkins that in some strange way they were in “complete and fundamental” agreement with each other. It was one of the greatest ironies of their artistic marriage, because, Wolfe asked, “Were there ever two men since time began who were as completely different as you and I? Have you ever known two other people who were, in almost every respect of temperament, thinking, feeling and acting, as far apart?” Wolfe did not know exactly how to label the two extremes they represented, but he thought Maxwell Perkins was essentially the “Conservative” while he was the “Revolutionary.”
In the last two months, Wolfe believed he had conceived of the highest challenge of his life, a great work of imagination. But he hardly dared speak of this work to Perkins “for fear that this thing which I cannot trifle with, which may come to a man but once in his whole life, may be killed at its inception by cold caution, by indifference, by the growing apprehension and dogmatism of your own conservatism.” This hesitation of Wolfe’s, this feeling of alienation from Perkins, seemed proof enough to Wolfe, he said, that there was already in effect a severance between them. If Max disagreed, Tom said, then he should “tell me what there is in the life around us on which we both agree: We don’t agree in politics, we don’t agree on economics, we are in entire disagreement on the present system of life around us, the way people live, the changes that should be made.”
Perkins had asserted repeatedly that he wanted to publish whatever Wolfe wrote. But Tom said he doubted Max’s honesty of intent:
There are many things that I have wanted you to print which have not been published. Some of them have not been published because they were too long for magazine space, or too short for book space, or too different in their design and quality to fit under the heading of a short story, or too incomplete to be called a novel.
Without criticizing Perkins or the mechanics that made the publication of these works impractical, Wolfe said, he maintained that “some of the best writing that a man may do is writing that does not follow under the convenient but extremely limited forms of modern publication.” But as the “revolutionary” Wolfe had been telling Perkins, “the way things are is not always the way, it seems to me, that things should be.”
Wolfe now described the great work he had in mind. He was about to write his own equivalent of Ulysses, a work of enormous originality and power which would pay no heed to publishing restrictions. The first volume was already under way, entitled The Hound of Darkness. “Like Mr. Joyce,” Tom informed Perkins, “I am going to write as I please, and this time, no one is going to cut me unless I want them to.” Since the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe said, he had sensed Max’s hope that the years would temper the author to a “greater conservatism, a milder intensity, a more decorous moderation.” To a degree, Wolfe said, this had already happened, but in yielding to this benevolent pressure, Tom said, he felt he had allowed himself to falter in his purpose—to be diverted from the destination toward which the whole impulsion of his life and talent was driving him. “Restrain my adjectives, by all means, discipline my adverbs, moderate the technical extravagances of my incondite exuberance,” Wolfe wrote Perkins, “but don’t derail the train, don’t take the Pacific Limited and switch it down the siding towards Hogwart Junction.”
Wolfe believed Perkins had become fearful about what he might write and about whom—and that these fears might cloud his editorial judgment. If this timidity persisted and were applied to everything Wolfe wrote from then on, it would strike “a deadly blow at the very vitals of my creative life.” Wolfe gathered that if he wished to continue writing books for Scribners, he must henceforth submit himself “to the most rigid censorship, a censorship which would delete from all my writings any episode, any scene, any character, any reference that might seem to have any connection, however remote, with the house of Charles Scribner’s Sons and its sisters and its cousins and its aunts.”
This was of course a reference to the brouhaha of the previous summer about the stories Wolfe had peopled with Scribners employees. After Perkins had told Elizabeth Nowell he would have to resign if the stories were published and she had passed this on to Wolfe, Perkins had had to explain his position to Tom. Perkins was “always with the man of talent,” he told him, and that rather than restrict Wolfe, he would indeed resign. Perkins’s offer was probably sincere. He did not want Wolfe to start censoring himself, and he felt that by resigning from Scribners he could take upon himself the responsibility for whatever Wolfe might write about that firm.
“Well,” Wolfe now wrote in his letter, “don’t worry, you’ll never have to.” In the first place, Tom said,
your executive and editorial functions are so special and valuable that they could not be substituted by any other person on earth. They could not be done without by the business that employs them. It would be like having a house with the lights turned out.
Secondly, Wolfe said, he would let no man resign on his account “simply because I won’t be there to be resigned about.”
“Let’s make an end of all this devil’s business,” he continued in his letter to Perkins. “Let’s stand to our guns like men. Let’s go ahead and try to do our work and without qualification, without fear, without apology.” Wolfe said he was prepared to try to proceed with his work. “If that cannot be done any longer upon the terms that I have stated here,” he wrote Perkins, “then I must either stand alone or turn to other quarters for support, if I can find it.”
What are you willing to do? ... You yourself must now say plainly what the decision is to be, because the decision now rests with you. You can no longer have any doubt as to how I feel about these matters. I don’t see how you can any longer have any doubt that difficulties of a grave and desperate nature do exist.
Finally, on January 10, Wolfe put his twenty-eight-page, handwritten letter in the post.
There is no record of how Max Perkins’s face looked as he read the letter. It is known that as he perused it he made notes in the margins. He responded, over the next several days, in three separate letters.
The first was brief. Max merely wanted to state two basic principles. It was his belief, he said, that the “one important supreme object” was to advance Wolfe’s work.
Anything in furtherance of that is good and anything that impedes it is bad. What impedes it especially is not the great difficulty and pain of doing it—for you are the reverse of lazy, you work furiously—but the harassment, the torment of outside worries. When you spoke to me about the settlement, it was, and had been before, very plain that this suit was such a worry that it was impeding you in your work. It was only because of that that I gave the advice I did. I thought, then get rid of it, forget it, and clear the way for what is really important, supremely. Now this blackmail talk puts a new face on that matter altogether.
Secondly, he said, he stood ready to help if he could, whenever Tom wanted.
You asked my help on “Time and the River.” I was glad and proud to give it. No understanding person could believe that it affected the book in any serious or important way—that it was much more than mechanical help. It did seem that the book was too enormous to get between covers. That was the first problem. There might be a problem in a book, such as prohibited publication of Joyce for years in this country. If you wished it, we would publish any book by you as written except for such problems as those which prohibit—some can’t be avoided but I don’t foresee them. Length could be dealt with by publishing in sections. Anyhow, apart from physical or legal limitations not within the possibility of change by us, we will publish anything as you write it.
That night Max read Wolfe’s letter more carefully. He did not understand why Tom should have delayed its delivery for so long. “There was mighty little of it that I did not wholly accept,” Perkins wrote, “and what I did not, I perfectly well understood.” He thought it was “a fine writer’s statement of his beliefs, as fine as any I ever saw, and though I have vanities enough, as many as most, it gave me great pleasure too—that which comes from hearing brave and sincere beliefs uttered with sincerity and nobility.” Perkins took issue only with the few things he thought Wolfe had greatly misunderstood. In his attempt to explain them, Perkins said, he realized he would first have to look within his own soul. “But what a task you’ve put me to to search myself—in whom I’m not so very much interested any more—and give you an adequate answer,” he wrote the day after receiving Tom’s letter. Two days after that, on Saturday, January 16, 1937, he embraced the task and responded in full.
Perkins completely subscribed to Wolfe’s credo as a writer. He said, “If it were not true that you, for instance, should write as you see, feel, and think, then a writer would be of no importance, and books merely things for amusement. And since I have always thought that there could be nothing so important as a book can be, and some are, I could not help but think as you do. But there are limitations of time, of space, and of human laws which cannot be treated as if they did not exist.” Perkins thought the writer should be the one to make his book what he wanted it to be, and that if because of the law of space it must be cut, he should be the one to cut it.
“But my impression was that you asked my help, that you wanted it,” he wrote Wolfe. “And it is my impression too that changes were not forced on you (you’re not very forceable, Tom, nor I very forceful), but were argued over, often for hours.” Unless Wolfe wanted help in the future, it would not be thrust upon him. “I believe,” Perkins wrote, “the writer anyway, should always be the final judge, and I meant you to be so. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.”
Perkins knew that Tom’s memory was miraculous, but it seemed as if Tom had forgotten the way they had worked together. Wolfe had never once been overruled during all the labor on the books. (“Do you think you are clay to be moulded!” Perkins wrote in disbelief; “I never saw anyone less malleable.”) There were indeed segments from the large manuscript of Wolfe’s life which had been deleted, but the cutting was always for artistic reasons. (At one point during the editing of Wolfe, Perkins had said to Jack Wheelock, “Maybe it’s the way Tom is. Maybe we should just publish him as he comes and in the end it will be all right.”) Perkins asked Wolfe now what he had often asked himself in the past: “If we had [refrained from cutting], and the results had been bad at the moment, would you not have blamed me? Certainly I should have bitterly blamed myself.” Perkins did not want the passage of time to make Wolfe “cautious or conservative” but to give him a full control over his talents.
Perkins turned to the question of whether or not they were in “fundamental agreement.” “I have always instinctively felt that it was so,” he explained to Wolfe, “and no one I ever knew has said more of the things that I believed than you. It was so from the moment that I began to read your first book. Nothing else, I would say, could have kept such different people together through such trials.”
Perkins’s concept of social change was indeed less radical than Wolfe’s:
I believe that the only thing that can prevent improvement is the ruin of violence, or of reckless finance which will end in violence. That is why Roosevelt needs an opposition, and it is the only serious defect in him. I believe that change really comes from the great deep causes too complex for contemporary men, or any others perhaps, fully to understand, and that when even great men like Lenin try to make over a whole society suddenly the end is almost sure to be bad, and that the right end, the natural one, will come from the efforts of innumerable people trying to do right.
But on this issue, too, Perkins insisted they were essentially in agreement: “It is more that I like and admire the same things [you do] and despise many of the same things, and the same people too, and think the same things important and unimportant—at least this is the way it seemed to me.”
Perkins’s heartfelt, reasoned reply to Wolfe’s letter appeased Wolfe enough to delay his departure from Scribners. But inside Wolfe the separation had already taken place. Sometime in January, 1937, he started a letter (probably to his lawyer Cornelius Mitchell), which he never finished. “I know I am alone now,” began one paragraph. “As for Mr. Perkins—” he wrote in the letter’s final fragment, “he is the greatest editor [of] this generation. I revered and honored him also as the greatest man, the greatest friend, the greatest character I had ever known. Now I can only tell you that I still think he is the greatest editor of our time. As for the rest—he is an honest but a timid man. He is not a man for danger—I expect no help from ...”
After Perkins had written to Wolfe, he put Wolfe’s letter in his desk, not in the regular files. John Hall Wheelock said that Max often pulled it out during the day, trying to read between the lines. Max, he said, was hurt that Wolfe had complained of his timidity and weakness. “Tom had moved from thinking Max was a cowardly man to not a man at all,” Wheelock said. “That particular letter very nearly killed Max. But he never struck back. Thomas Wolfe was the ultimate editorial challenge, part of which meant dealing with his personal temperament.” One day that spring, Wheelock happened unexpectedly into Perkins’s office and found him almost in tears over the letter. When Max saw Wheelock, he slipped it furtively into the drawer and carried on with business. He never shared it with anyone or asked for sympathy.