XVII
On January 2, 1937, Hemingway wired Max that he had finished his Gulf Stream novel. Max was already excited. The book, he felt, had one great “superficial advantage in being about a region that I think nobody has ever written well about, and a very rich and colorful scene.” He thought back to that first time he had sailed in those waters, eight years before, when Hemingway told him he would not be able to write about them until he understood even the pelican’s role. “But you did get around to it,” Max now wrote Ernest, “when you had absorbed a sense of it and knew what part everything did play in the scheme of things. So I am not more anxious for anything than to see this novel.” Because Hemingway generally gave himself several weeks away from a manuscript before he reread it himself for a new perspective, it would be another few months before Max could inspect it.
Hemingway’s immediate plan was to go to Spain to cover the war there as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. His new interest in Spain came from Martha Gellhorn, the striking twenty-nine-year-old author of a novel called What Mad Pursuit. Hemingway had met her that winter, just a year after she had been introduced to Harry L. Hopkins, Roosevelt’s Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Hopkins had assigned her to survey living conditions of people on relief in industrial areas. She wrote four sections of her report as short stories and grouped them into a book called The Trouble I’ve Seen. Miss Gellhorn’s social convictions extended beyond America. She was particularly well informed about the Spanish Civil War, and Hemingway hung upon every word she said. During a brief visit to New York, well before he was ready to relinquish his novel, he tipped Max Perkins off about the possibility of publishing Martha Gellhorn. She had, in fact, written a story called “Exiles” which she hoped might appear in Scribner’s. Max had admired The Trouble I’ve Seen, and days later the magazine bought “Exiles.”
On February 27, Perkins saw Hemingway, a friend named Evan Shipman, and bullfighter Sidney Franklin off on a liner bound for France. “I hope they won’t all get into trouble over there,” Max wrote Scott Fitzgerald. “They seem to be quite bloodthirsty.” Martha Gellhorn joined Hemingway in Madrid one month later. After six weeks in Spain, Ernest left, picked up the manuscript of his novel in Paris, and went to Bimini to revise it. There he was reunited with his children and Pauline. A few weeks later he came to New York again to deliver a speech before the Second American Writers’ Congress at Carnegie Hall. Martha sat by his side during the speeches that preceded his. Her influence perhaps explained a new political tone that his speech displayed. “Really good writers are always rewarded under almost any existing system of government that they can tolerate,” he said before the writers’ congress. “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.”
While still in New York, Hemingway stopped off at Perkins’s house. Just before he arrived, someone told him that Scott Fitzgerald was also in town. Louise Perkins, never particularly smitten by Hemingway, cared even less for him after this visit. She resented his taking her husband for granted. “Ernest Hemingway came in here,” Louise later told Elizabeth Lemmon, “hardly looking at Max and barked, ‘Where’s the telephone? I have to talk to Scott. He’s the only person in America worth talking to.’ ” But Ernest did find time to talk privately to Max, and to him he expressed doubts about his new novel; he was afraid it was too short to stand alone, and he suggested beefing up the book with a few short stories. He promised to deliver his manuscript to Max for his opinion by July 5.
Flying south, Hemingway had a brainstorm. He thought he might come out with something entirely new—“a living omnibus.” Under the overall title To Have and Have Not, he wrote Max, the volume would include: Harry Morgan, his novel of 50,000 words; three of his latest stories; an article on the hurricane of 1935 entitled “Who Murdered the Vets?”; one of his news dispatches from Madrid; and the text of his recent public address. He said Perkins could plug the agglomeration as a “major work,” and it would give the buyers their money’s worth. Most of the task of its assembly would fall into Perkins’s hands, it seemed, because there was going to be a lot of blood spilled in Spain during the next several months, and Hemingway wanted to be there, ringside.
It was not until a few days later that Perkins could obtain a copy of the speech. It made him hesitate about the omnibus book. “I do think that bringing in a speech just because it is one, does tend to make the book seem too miscellaneous perhaps,” he wrote Hemingway. Perkins said he preferred leaving it out but would continue to weigh the merits of the potpourri.
Hemingway returned to New York the first week of July, and Perkins was able to read Harry Morgan for himself. He pronounced it “very good, very moving” and left most of his criticism unsaid. He was glad Hemingway had returned to writing action-packed fiction: “It is a tough story, full of violent action that ends in great sorrow,” Perkins wrote Hemingway’s friend Waldo Peirce. “You get to admire Harry Morgan, bad man though he is—or almost because he is.” The Hemingway philosophy seemed hard as ever: “No matter how[,] a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance,” Harry Morgan spits out before dying. But Perkins considered the characters little more than cartoons. He kept referring to Morgan as a “type.” To Hemingway, Perkins maintained his silence. He had once told his daughter Jane, “When you have a suggestion for Ernest you have to catch him at the right time.” Max knew that at this point Hemingway wanted unquestionable support rather than constructive criticism, and that was what he gave him.
By the end of July, Perkins had untangled most of the confusion about the book. A book of short stories had been considered, eliminating the novel entirely. But ultimately, Hemingway was persuaded to publish the novel on its own, without any short stories, under the title To Have and Have Not. “It is a very satisfactory book for our lists,” was as enthusiastic as Perkins got in recommending the work to Jonathan Cape in England. Once it was in print, Max did mention some of his criticism to the author over “tea” at his house in New York. He wanted Hemingway only to consider some of his comments for whatever help they might be to Hemingway’s future writing. But Ernest was still in no mood to take such criticism. When he had heard enough, he whacked his hand down on the coffee table and said, “Hell, let Tom Wolfe write it for you then!”
Like Perkins, practically all the reviewers found To Have and Have Not exciting and alive, but they too were restrained in their praise. The writing verged on self-parody. In an essay written some years afterward, Edmund Wilson said: “The heroic Hemingway legend has at this point invaded his fiction and, inflaming and inflating his symbols, has produced an implausible hybrid, half Hemingway character, half nature myth.” Though Max admitted it seldom and reluctantly, that was his own view exactly.
To Have and Have Not became a national best seller in weeks. Its 25,000 copies sold placed it fourth on the lists. Perkins was surprised how popular it became, for he did not think it was nearly as important as Hemingway’s earlier works. Whether it was the freshness of the material or that Hemingway had gone back to fiction, Perkins never did decide. But it did at least allow Hemingway to reclaim his championship title in American letters, which he had forfeited once A Farewell to Arms fell from sight.
On the eleventh of August, days before sailing back to Spain, Hemingway dropped by Scribners without calling ahead, took the elevator to the fifth floor, and roamed back to his editor’s corner office. Sitting with Perkins, his back to the door, was Max Eastman. They were planning a new edition of his Enjoyment of Poetry. Ernest barged in and quickly realized who the other party was. Because Hemingway had often told Perkins what he would do if he ever met Eastman, because of that piece Eastman had written several years earlier, “Bull in the Afternoon,” Perkins swallowed hard and thought fast. Hoping humor would work, Perkins said to Eastman, “Here’s a friend of yours, Max.”
Hemingway shook hands with Eastman and they swapped amenities. Then Ernest, with a broad smile, ripped open his shirt and exposed a chest which Perkins thought was hirsute enough to impress any man. Eastman laughed, and Ernest good-naturedly reached over and unbuttoned Eastman’s shirt, revealing a chest as bare as a bald man’s head. Everyone laughed at the contrast. Perkins got ready to expose his chest, sure that he could place second, when Hemingway truculently demanded of Eastman, “What do you mean [by] accusing me of impotence?”
Eastman denied that he had, and there were sharp words back and forth. Eastman said, “Ernest, you don’t know what you are talking about. Here, read what I said.” He picked up a copy of Art and the Life of Action on Perkins’s desk, which the editor had there for some other reason, not even remembering that it contained “Bull in the Afternoon.” But instead of reading the passage Eastman pointed out, Ernest began part of another paragraph, and trailed off into muttered profanity. “Read all of it, Ernest,” Eastman urged him. “You don’t understand it.... Here, let Max read it.”
Perkins saw that things were getting serious. He started to read, thinking that would somehow calm things down. But Ernest snatched the book from him and said, “No, I am going to do the reading.” As he started again, his face flushed, and he turned and smacked Eastman with the open book. Eastman rushed at him. Perkins, fearful that Ernest would kill Eastman, ran around his desk to grab Hemingway from behind. As the two authors grappled, all the precariously balanced books and papers on Perkins’s desk toppled off, and both men fell to the floor. Thinking he was restraining Hemingway, Perkins grabbed the man on top. But when Max looked down, there was Ernest on his back, gazing up at him, his broken glasses dangling and a naughty grin from ear to ear. Apparently he had regained his composure instantly upon striking Eastman and put up no resistance whatever when Eastman landed on top of him.
After Hemingway and Eastman parted, Perkins spoke to the crowd of employees who had gathered. All agreed to say nothing. Max Eastman, however, wrote out an account of the incident, and the next night at a dinner where there were a number of newspaper people, he read it aloud, apparently at the urging of his wife. The next day Perkins’s office swarmed with journalists, and another group interviewed Ernest at the docks just before he sailed for Europe. According to the Times, “Mr. Hemingway explained that he had felt sorry for Mr. Eastman, for he knew he had seriously embarrassed him by slapping his face. ‘The man didn’t have a bit of fight. He just croaked, you know, at Max Perkins, ”Who’s calling on you, Ernest or me?“ ’ So I got out.”
Perkins maintained a public position of silent neutrality, but to special friends such as Scott Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Lemmon he told all. He believed Hemingway could have annihilated Eastman if he had wanted to; but he noted that Eastman did have both Hemingway’s shoulders pinned. Fitzgerald was grateful for the blow-by-blow account, because he had heard every possible version of the tussle “save that Eastman has fled to Shanghai with Pauline.” Of Ernest, Scott wrote Max further:
He is living at the present in a world so entirely his own that it is impossible to help him, even if I felt close to him at the moment, which I don’t. I like him so much, though, that I wince when anything happens to him.
Hemingway went off to Spain to report the “big war of movement” which he thought would liberate Madrid.
Scott Fitzgerald was on the move all that year too, but without Hemingway’s sense of purpose. After passing through New York in early 1937, he wrote Perkins that he was still suffering from that “same damn lack of interest, staleness, when I have every reason to want to work if only to keep from thinking.” Perkins feared Scott was losing his obsession to succeed. Max believed it stemmed from his always playing a role, and his role of late was that of “the man burned out at forty.” “Now there is somebody who ought to go to Spain for the sake of seeing something totally different from what he ever did see,” Perkins wrote Marjorie Rawlings. Instead, Scott retreated to Tryon, North Carolina, where he once again placed himself under medical observation.
In the spring, Fitzgerald thought of going to Hollywood. He needed all the money he could get, because after paying the most pressing debts from his share of his mother’s estate, he had only a few hundred dollars left. And Hollywood promised a change of scenery. He wrote Perkins, “I have lived in tombs for years it seems to me.”
Fitzgerald’s agent, Harold Ober, arranged for him to work at M-G-M for $1,000 per week. Out west, Scott wrote Max that he was happier than he had been in years. Everyone was warm to him, surprised and relieved that he was not drinking, and he approached his screenwriting seriously while sticking to a strict budget. He planned to work there until he had paid all his debts and stockpiled enough security so that his “catastrophe at forty” would not recur. Scott was sorry that he was allotting Scribners only $2,500 that first year, but he also had to repay thousands of dollars to Harold Ober who, like Perkins, was an individual, and had priority over a firm. Perkins told Fitzgerald not to repay his personal loan to him any sooner than he wanted to. But Fitzgerald began to pay. Max wrote Hemingway, “My pockets are full of money from the check that comes every week. If he will only begin to dramatize himself as the man who came back now, everything may turn out rightly.”
Fitzgerald wanted to hear about his fellow Scribners authors. He asked Perkins to tell him of Hemingway and Wolfe, and of whoever was new. The best story Max had to tell was of the unusual experience Scribners had had with Marcia Davenport’s first work in five years, a novel called Of Lena Geyer.
Most books succeeded from the start or never at all—sales seldom carried them into a new year. Without good reviews, Marcia Davenport’s story of a great diva took months to run through 10,000 copies. Then, inexplicably, it caught on. It quickly sold another 10,000 and sales continued to climb. Neither the editor nor the author considered Of Lena Geyer a solid novel. When Perkins first read Mrs. Davenport’s Mozart, it had seemed very plain to him that she could write fiction. And now he saw Of Lena Geyer merely as a necessary stage in her development as a novelist. But even with Perkins’s encouragement, Mrs. Davenport realized that unlike such a writer as Thomas Wolfe, as she admitted in her memoirs, Too Strong for Fantasy, “I was driven more by the need to write what I knew than what I was.”
Marcia Davenport had met Tom Wolfe aboard ship after she had written Of Lena Geyer, when he was returning to America from the Munich Olympic Games. It was perhaps the most incongruous pairing of any of Perkins’s writers—in physical appearance, manner, and outlook. Mrs. Davenport was small, refined, and cosmopolitan. Wolfe looked like a wild buffalo and was loud and obtrusive. They went into the ship’s bar, and Wolfe ordered drinks and began to talk. Five hours later they were still sitting there, and Wolfe was still talking. “The subject was himself,” Mrs. Davenport recalled, “only and always.” She could not remember exactly what he said, “but the core of it was his intention to prove that he was not, as he claimed the literary world believed, the creature of Max Perkins.”
“I’m going to show them I can write my books without Max. I’m going to leave Max and get another editor. I’m going to leave Scribners,” he told Mrs. Davenport.
“How about the dedication in your last book?” she asked, “Are you that much of a hypocrite?” Wolfe ignored the remark and went on to complain that Perkins had kept out of that book some of the best things he had ever written. Over and over he repeated his need to leave Scribners, until Marcia Davenport let him have it.
“I think you’re a rat,” she said. “You’re ungrateful and treacherous. That dedication was disgusting. It didn’t mean devotion to Max, it was just spilling yourself. You have no devotion and no loyalty either. Where would you be without Max and Scribners too? You can’t face the truth.” Months later, those accusations were still festering in Wolfe’s mind.
After Tom had returned from New Orleans to New York and their long letters had been exchanged, he and Perkins felt as though their friendship had been wounded. But Wolfe still walked the few blocks to the Perkinses’ house almost every day, as though everything had been patched up. He wrote Hamilton Basso, another Perkins novelist, in April, 1937:
Yes, Max Perkins and I are all right. I think we always were, for that matter. Periodically, I go out and indulge in a sixty-round, knock down and drag out battle with myself but I think Max understands that.
Tom continued to war with himself but believed he would pull through in the end, having read somewhere that “no writer has ever yet been known to hang himself as long as he had another chapter left.”
The calm did not last long. Late one afternoon that April, Wolfe telephoned Perkins to say that a friend from Chapel Hill and his wife had arrived in town. It was Jonathan Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, who was soon to become an aide to FDR. Tom asked if Max and Louise could join them and several others, including Noble Cathcart, the publisher of the Saturday Review of Literature, for dinner. The Perkinses accepted, and Louise immediately insisted they all assemble at her home for cocktails. When Max welcomed Tom’s guest of honor, Daniels made a trite and tiresome remark. He said he had supposed Maxwell Perkins would have a long white beard. From then on, Perkins found him “bumptious.”
The dinner party at Cherio’s began on a festive note. Wolfe was riding high, until a woman who had accompanied the Cathcarts and had her eyes glued on him for an hour had a jolt of recognition and burst out, “Oh, I know who you are. I read an article about you in the Saturday Review. It was by Bernard De Voto.” Perkins was dismayed. He knew immediately that she could have said nothing worse, that the De Voto article had not lost its power to infuriate Tom.
Max watched Wolfe coil up inside, withdrawing into silence. Then Daniels began to wonder out loud why it was that Scribner’s was the only magazine to publish Wolfe. He asked Perkins what was the matter with Scribner’s anyway, meaning somewhat facetiously that it should be a better magazine than that. “But to Tom, with his mistrust of his abilities,” Max said later, “it seemed to mean that they showed bad judgment in publishing him.” Within the next half-hour, Tom’s humor turned acidic, and he needled all the guests at the table. Everyone took it lightly, but Wolfe’s face blanched as it did when he drank a great deal. Max had witnessed the condition enough times to know “all of his doubts and fears were seething up to his mind. He was in a murderous state.”
Then a man who was dining with a woman in the opposite corner of the restaurant zigzagged over and mumbled something at Wolfe in a friendly, drunken way. Max foresaw a melee, so he went over to tell the woman she had better keep her escort at his own table. By the time Max returned to his seat, everybody had gotten up except Wolfe. They had realized what a state things were in and slipped out the door. Tom focused all his anger on Perkins. Cherio stood by anxiously and seemed worried about what could happen. Perkins was unable to hear what Wolfe was saying, but with the six-and-a-half-foot man standing there winding up like a baseball pitcher, Max understood. “Tom,” he said, “I know if that old sledgehammer landed it would do considerable damage, but it might not land.” Wolfe kept staring at Max with eyes burning. Partly on Cherio’s account, Max said, “Well, if we must fight, let’s do it in the fresh air.” As they made their way to the door, another publisher, Harrison Smith of Harcourt, Brace, walked in, shook hands, and quipped half-knowingly, “I see you are having author trouble.” Perkins spoke to him for a moment, then left the restaurant. Tom was standing off the sidewalk, waiting in the street. Perkins said later he thought that “only a miracle could prevent something dreadful happening that everyone would regret.” In fact, something like a miracle did occur.
Out of a neighboring restaurant emerged a group of people including a tall, handsome, black-haired young woman. She ran straight to Tom and inexplicably threw her arms around him, saying, “This is what I came to New York to see.” The daughter of a prominent Richmond family, some of whom Max and Tom had met in Middleburg, she had just finished dining with Elizabeth Lemmon’s sister and brother-in-law, the Holmes Morisons. She really had been eager to meet Tom. Within the next three or four minutes this Virginia country girl was cussing jocularly at Tom in the vilest language Perkins had ever heard from any woman’s mouth. (“A night club hostess couldn’t excel her,” Max wrote Elizabeth.) The woman completely diverted Tom’s attention, and both parties trooped harmoniously to Manny Wolf’s.
Back in his apartment, Wolfe again tried to draft a letter to be sent to all publishers other than Scribners. He expressed his hope that he might reach someone interested enough in his writing to listen to his story and publish his future manuscripts. He described at length the schism between him and Perkins. He did not send the letter, but he became so obsessed with breaking free that he spoke of little else, even to Max’s face. Finally, in exasperation, Perkins exclaimed one day, “All right then, if you must leave Scribners, go ahead and leave, but for heaven’s sake, don’t talk about it anymore!”
Whereupon the prodigal son decided that, for the first time in years, he would go home again. That summer he told friends and family that he had come back to Asheville—he rented a cabin in the woods—“to set a spell and think things over.” One of the items that crossed his mind was his story “Chickamauga,” which he had written after his spring travels. He believed it one of the best pieces he had ever done and had instructed Elizabeth Nowell to submit it to the Saturday Evening Post. The Post had rejected it, saying it did not have enough “story element.” While he was in Asheville, The American Mercury turned it down too, and Wolfe told Miss Nowell to try several small magazines. He knew he had Scribner’s to fall back on, but he wanted to be published elsewhere, to prove he was not entirely dependent on Charles Scribner’s Sons. Wolfe hoped for an acceptance by the time he returned.
The Perkinses also left Manhattan for the summer, moving back to New Canaan, but Max often stayed in the city, working until very late. Tom’s abandonment left him more forlorn than usual. He wrote Elizabeth Lemmon that August, after a year of silence, one of the most melancholy letters he had ever written. He did not specify the reason for his unhappiness, but it was no doubt the painful decline of his relationship with Wolfe.
I, in a way, have fallen upon evil days and that’s why I haven’t written you. I never could write when things were going wrong. That always worried me about the children, but they seem to be made on another pattern and only write if things go badly. And as for the evil days: we all have to have them, and what the hell, if we can take them. But I want you to know how it is, why I haven’t written. You were my friend and nothing pleases me more than to know that. The future be damned, I’ll remember the past.
Louise Perkins had no intention of whiling away a quiet summer in New Canaan. She had been invited to join the great Shavian actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell and a theatrical troupe in Milford, Connecticut—as Mrs. Campbell’s understudy. Realizing such opportunities seldom knocked twice, especially at this stage in her unstarted career, Louise accepted. Unfortunately, the star was frustratingly healthy and Louise waited in the wings all summer. After that experience, Max wrote Tom Wolfe in a newsy letter that summer, “I think she’s pretty fed up with the thespian temperament.”
By the end of the season, Wolfe’s “Chickamauga” ended up in the Yale Review, and Elizabeth Nowell successfully placed another half-dozen of his stories. Tom even received compliments from Scott Fitzgerald for his story “E” in The New Yorker. Scott laid out his admiration of Wolfe’s writing, calling his talent “unmatchable in this or any other country.” Then Scott tried to make “a good case for your necessity to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you....
Now the more the stronger man’s inner tendencies are defined, the more he can be sure they will show, the more necessity to rarefy them, to use them sparingly. The novel of selected incidents has this to be said, that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe (in his case Zola) will come along and say presently. He will say only the things that he alone sees. So Madame Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with age.
“The unexpected loquaciousness of your letter struck me all of a heap,” Wolfe wrote back to Fitzgerald. “Your bouquet arrived smelling sweetly of roses but cunningly concealing several large-sized brickbats.” He found Scott’s case against him not far from the common criticism of the day, and he expected better. Wolfe did not see what Flaubert and Zola had to do with his writing.
“I am going into the woods for another two or three years,” Wolfe wrote Fitzgerald:
I am going to try to do the best, the most important piece of work I have ever done. I am going to have to do it alone. I am going to lose what little bit of reputation I may have gained, to have to hear and know and endure in silence again all of the doubt, the disparagement, the ridicule, the postmortems that they are so eager to read over you even before you are dead. I know what it means and so do you. We have both been through it before.
He thought he could survive it, but he would be looking for intelligent understanding from friends outside Scribners. “Go for me with the gloves off if you think I need it,” he wrote Fitzgerald. “But don’t De Voto me. If you do I’ll call your bluff.”
That fall Scribners spruced up their library on the fifth floor with a new paint job and carpeting. Perkins told everybody the place “now resembles a boudoir,” but he knew that some of the women literary agents in New York would feel more comfortable there, and he seemed to be dealing with more of them every day. In fact, women were entering the profession in such rapid numbers that Max had suggested that Diarmuid Russell, the son of the Irish poet A. E. (George William Russell), and Wolfe’s friend Henry Volkening, a former English instructor at N.Y.U., join forces and start their own agency before “the damned women take over the entire business.” In the process of redecorating, three large packages were discovered at Scribners which contained manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe. One of them was a chunk of The October Fair, a novel Tom never finished. Wolfe thought that he or Scribners had lost that, but Max remembered that Tom himself had put those manuscripts in that very place. “So,” Max wrote Elizabeth Nowell, “everything of Tom’s that was in our hands is still in them and in fine condition!”
Except Wolfe’s career. Back in New York after three months in his cabin in North Carolina, Wolfe was still reassessing his relationship with his publisher. Another potshot by Bernard De Voto, in the August 21 Saturday Review, criticizing both Wolfe and Melville for their “long passages of unshaped emotion,” made Tom even more determined to be published elsewhere.
One late summer morning, Wolfe called several major publishing houses on the telephone, babbling to the first editor he was connected to at each place that he was Thomas Wolfe and asking if they were interested in publishing him. Some of the publishers assumed the calls were practical jokes. But Bernard Smith at Alfred A. Knopf said he would be delighted to talk to Wolfe about his publishing future. Alfred Harcourt paid a visit to Perkins and Charles Scribner and asked them if Harcourt, Brace could in fairness accept the offer Wolfe had made to him. Perkins said he “didn’t think there was any other possibility,” meaning that Wolfe was too great a writer to pass by. He and Scribner both assured Harcourt that they would harbor no resentment against him, for Wolfe was evidently determined to change publishers at last. Harcourt left Perkins with the impression that Wolfe would be signing with his firm. But after almost ten years of fidelity to Scribners, Wolfe wanted to revel in this new attention. He flirted with all the suitors for his hand.
A few weeks later, Robert Linscott of Houghton Mifflin met Wolfe in their New York office. In no time they were calling each other by their first names. He and Tom arranged for the safekeeping of Tom’s huge trunk of manuscripts. As a business formality, Linscott gave the author a note acknowledging receipt of the trunk. That night Wolfe, lighthearted about having found himself a publisher he liked, reached into his pocket and found the receipt. It read, in part: “I hope you realize that, under the circumstances, it [the trunk] will have to be held entirely at your risk.” Wolfe broke off with Houghton Mifflin that instant, raging in an unsent letter, “It seems to me that you must assume the risk, that the entire and whole responsibility of safe-guarding an author’s property, once you have requested it, is yours and yours alone.” He went back to playing the field.
For weeks Wolfe’s family remained unaware of the separation between Tom and Perkins. Max got a postcard from Julia Wolfe, who was worrying because she had not had word from her son for over a month. Max also heard similarly from Tom’s brother Fred. Perkins replied that Tom was all right but that mail should now be sent in Elizabeth Nowell’s care, not his at Scribners. In his letter to Fred, Perkins said: “He has also turned his back on me, and Scribners, and so I have not seen him at all, though I would very much like to.” It was not long before all the stories of the separation were passed among the garrulous Wolfes. Tom confirmed to them that he was no longer with a publisher and that the cause of his separation had its origin as far back as 1935. Wolfe now realized the ties between him and Scribners had not been cut cleanly. In a 5,000-word letter to Perkins, he tried to answer all the accusations he had heard attributed to his editor. “In the first place,” he wrote, “I did not ‘turn my back’ on you and Scribners, and I think it is misleading and disingenuous for anyone to say this was the case.” Secondly, he did not think it was truthful for either of them to assert he had no conception of what their separation was about. Tom believed Max knew all the reasons very clearly, for they had threshed them out hundreds of times.
“You owe me nothing, and I consider what I owe you a great deal,” Wolfe said. “I don’t want any acknowledgment for seeing and understanding that you were a great editor, even when I first met you, but I did see and understand it, and later I acknowledged it in words which have been printed by your own house, and of which now there is a public record. The world would have found out anyway that you were a great editor,” Tom insisted. But when people now solemnly reminded him that Perkins was great, he found it ironically amusing to reflect that he himself was the first one publicly to point out that fact. “I, as much as any man alive, was responsible for pulling the light out from underneath the bushel basket,” he bragged.
“This letter,” he went on, “is a sad farewell, but I hope it is for both of us a new beginning.” And he added,
I am your friend, Max, and that is why I wrote this letter—to tell you so. If I wrote so much else here that the main thing was obscured—the only damn one that matters is that I am your friend and want you to be mine—please take this last line as being what I wanted to say the whole way through.
Perkins was glad to see Wolfe’s handwriting again. “I am your friend and always will be I think,” he replied. What had grieved Perkins most deeply in the last few months, he said, was that in making his move Tom had maneuvered behind Max’s back. All that dealing under the table had been “humiliating,” Perkins said. He had written Fred truly when he said he did not understand Tom’s action. In the end, Max said none of this made any difference. “I hope we may soon meet as friends,” he wrote, now that they were no longer associates. In December, Perkins learned from Robert Linscott that Wolfe was ready to sign with Edward C. Aswell, an assistant to Eugene F. Saxton at Harper & Brothers.
The Christmas before, Wolfe had been with the Perkinses. This Christmas he was in Chappaqua, New York, with the Aswells and their friends, drinking champagne and exchanging emotional toasts with them.
Wolfe regarded his move to a new publisher as “one of the most fortunate and happy experiences” of his life. Harpers was giving him a large advance, but more than money had been involved. Wolfe’s decision was based on a personal hunch, because he was to be associated with Ed Aswell, a fellow North Carolinian, exactly his age. “I think it’s going to turn out to be a wonderful experience,” Tom wrote a friend, Anne Armstrong, of Bristol, Tennessee. “I feel that the man is quiet, but very deep and true: and he thinks that I am the best writer there is.... However, I am still a little sad about the past.” But, he asked her, “You can’t go home again, can you?”
Perkins accepted Wolfe’s departure with grace, for he believed in its inevitability—“I can easily imagine a biography of Tom written twenty years from now that would ascribe this action to his instinctive and manly determination to free all his bonds and stand up alone,” he wrote Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings a few months later. But Max already knew that an important part of his life was gone. At the end of the year he wrote Tom Wolfe, “I drink a lonely glass of ale every night in Manny Wolf’s while waiting for the paper.... We really had a mighty good Christmas, but we missed you.”