PART FOUR
XIX
Within a decade of the crash on Wall Street, warfare thundered around the world. Max Perkins’s family and friends observed that he was obsessed with the war. He did not believe Neville Chamberlain’s boast that the Munich agreement meant “peace for our time.” “I can’t help thinking about these things all the time,” he wrote Hemingway in December of 1938.
This preoccupation was perhaps an example of the old Yankee manner of dealing with emotion, transforming anxiety over a personal tragedy into concern for something distant or impersonal. Thomas Wolfe’s death, no doubt, had also sensitized Max to violence and destruction.
Another sign of his distress was that he again resorted to his instinctive remedy for grief: At fifty-four, aging, tiring, he enclosed himself within his job. “He came back to the office from Wolfe’s funeral,” Miss Wyckoff remembered, “and started working harder than before.” And there was a third indication. Once he had written Miss Lemmon: “I always found War and Peace a help in time of trouble.” Now, several times that season, John Hall Wheelock discovered Max reading from his office copy of the book.
Wolfe’s will, drawn up in the spring of 1937, designated Perkins as his executor. Perkins hated to take on the responsibility; but, as he wrote his mother, “there did not seem to be any decent way of not doing it.” Within days of Wolfe’s burial, he could already see that the appointment was going to result in endless trouble and abuse. “The Wolfes are strange people with many magnificent qualities,” he told his mother, “but full of suspicions and incapable of letting anything in their hands get out of them, even though it can be proven to be to their own advantage to do it.” That tangle of duties kept Perkins so busy that he barely had time for melancholy.
Wolfe’s death was followed by a profusion of articles and remembrances. The Carolina Magazine of the University of North Carolina asked Perkins himself to write about Wolfe, but Perkins sent his regrets. It seemed impossible for him to find the time or the emotional strength to do it. But the magazine was insistent, and so because he knew that the school had meant so much to Tom, he wired back: WILL BREAK MY NECK TO SEND YOU SEVERAL THOUSAND WORDS BEFORE OCTOBER TEN. Perkins wrote 3,000 words. At the core of his remarks was this paragraph:
The one important thing in the universe to him was his work, and this was so simply because it was so. It was not due to ambition in the cheap sense, and it was not what is generally meant by egotism. He was under the compulsion of genius, and all the accidents of life that got in the way of its expression seemed to Tom to be outrages and insults. He knew in his mind that man was born to trouble—that everyone was beset with anxieties and thwarted by obstacles—but that this work which he was bound to do should be interfered with by trivialities, was maddening. And so was the struggle with the work itself.
For months poems, tributes, letters of sympathy, and requests for information about Thomas Wolfe poured into Perkins’s office. Max responded to each one. To those who were aware of his rift with Wolfe he sent a copy of Tom’s last letter, to prove the author’s loyalty in his final days. No one wrote Perkins with more perception than F. Scott Fitzgerald. He said he knew “how deeply his death must have touched you, how you were so entwined with his literary career and the affection you had for him.” It was all but impossible for Fitzgerald to imagine that “great pulsing vital frame” quiet at last: “There is a great hush after him.” Fitzgerald was struck by the irony of Perkins’s role as literary executor. He supposed that Perkins was, oddly enough, more in control of Wolfe’s literary destiny now than when Tom was alive.
Wolfe’s estate included the rough draft of his last novel, which was under contract to Harpers and was in their safe. It was Perkins’s job, as executor, to see to its orderly publication and to arrange for the publication of other work Wolfe had left behind. He approached the crates of manuscript, which Aswell sent over to him, as though Wolfe were still his author and reviewed the material methodically. He itemized every piece of manuscript as best he could, and clipped together pages which Elizabeth Nowell might sell as magazine articles.
The most immediate consideration was the disposition of the journal which Wolfe had written during his travels in the West. At first reading, Perkins found it difficult to get a coherent impression of the 10,000 words —mostly sentence fragments—which had tumbled onto the pages. Wolfe’s jottings were meant to be the raw stuff of a large, dynamic novel, but as soon as Max had the pages typed and read them again, he suggested publishing the journal as it was. He tactfully reminded Aswell and Miss Nowell that in all the editing of Wolfe’s previous books, no change had ever been made without the author’s approval. Since Wolfe could no longer approve changes, the material must be published as Tom had written it, with only those corrections which one could reasonably infer that Tom would have made himself. The sprawling diary of his trip through the great western national parks appeared the following summer in the Virginia Quarterly Review—incomplete sentences, spotty punctuation and all—under the title “A Western Journey.”
As for the novel, after Max had gathered and arranged the bulk of it, he turned the 750,000 words back to Aswell. “Studying the mass of his manuscript was something like excavating the site of ancient Troy,” the Harpers editor wrote of Wolfe’s unpublished treasure trove. “One came upon evidences of entire civilizations buried and forgotten at different levels. Some parts of the manuscript had been written as recently as four months before he died; other parts dated back to Look Homeward, Angel, and had, in fact, been cut from that book; still other parts had been written in each of the intervening years.” Aswell realized what Perkins had known for years, that Wolfe did not write “books” in the usual sense:
Tom really wrote only one book, and that runs to some 4,000 printed pages comprising the total of his works. The individual titles that bear his name are only so many numbered volumes of this master book. The parts should be thought of as having been brought out separately merely for convenience.
Perkins often maintained that the whole conception of Wolfe’s work was clear in the author’s mind. Whether or not the labeled parts could now be assembled by someone else was open to question. Guided by Perkins’s rubrics—the notations he had made as he examined the novel—Aswell discovered the “wonderful thing about the manuscript—the really incredible thing—was that once the extraneous matter was removed, once the unfinished fragments and great chunks of stuff that did not belong in the books were taken out, the parts that remained fell into place and fitted together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”
At the end of the year Perkins, as executor, indicated that one mammoth novel called The Web and the Rock would be published by Harpers in the early summer of 1939. He also said that there seemed to be enough remnants of material for an anthology of stories, to be published still later.
Perkins found no portion of the material more curious than the long section Tom had written about Foxhall Morton Edwards. For almost 1,000 pages—in a script so sprawling and hurried that there were usually only about twenty-five words to a page—Thomas Wolfe caricatured his editor. Wolfe had always believed that the way to characterize a person was to observe him from the moment he got up in the morning, chronicling his everyday habits, no matter how trivial. In the course of this depiction, eccentricities became slightly magnified. His portrait of Perkins was a perfect example, except that it is most unlikely Wolfe ever saw him in bed or soon after arising. The author undoubtedly felt he knew his subject so well that he could safely extrapolate from what he had seen:
The Fox asleep was a breathing portrait of guileless innocence. He slept on his right side, legs doubled up a little, hands folded together underneath the ear, his hat beside him on the pillow. Seen so, the sleeping figure of the Fox was touching—for all his five and forty years, it was so plainly boylike. By no long stretch of fancy the old hat beside him on the pillow might have been a childish toy brought to bed with him the night before—and this, in fact, it was!
Wolfe then imagined the Fox sitting up, grabbing his hat and yanking it down onto his head, swinging out of bed and heading for the shower.
Unpajamaed now, and as God made him, save for hat, starts to get in under shower with hat on—and remembers hat, remembers it in high confusion, is forced against his will to acknowledge the unwisdom of the procedure—so snaps his fingers angrily, and, in a low, disgusted tone of acquiescence says: “Oh well, then! All right!” So removes his hat, which is now jammed on so tightly that he has to take both hands and fairly wrench and tug his way out of it, hangs the battered hulk reluctantly within easy reaching distance on a hook upon the door, surveys it for a moment with an undecided air, as if still not willing to relinquish it—and then, still with a puzzled air steps in beneath those hissing jets of water hot enough to boil an egg.
Wolfe then had the Fox put his clothes on:
They fit him beautifully. Everything fits the Fox. He never knows what he has on.... His clothes just seem to grow on him: whatever he wears takes on at once the grace, the dignity, and unconscious ease of his own person.
Wolfe trailed the Fox through every step of his workday:
O, guileful Fox, how innocent in guilefulness and in innocence how full of guile, in all directions how strange-devious, in all strange-deviousness how direct! Too straight for crookedness, and for envy too serene, too fair for blind intolerance, too just and seeing and too strong for hate, too honest for base dealing, too high for low suspiciousness, too innocent for all the scheming tricks of swarming villainy—yet never had been taken in a horse trade yet!
Even his deafness was explicated:
Deaf, hell! Deaf as a Fox, he is! That deafness is a stall—a trick—a gag! He hears you when he wants to hear you! If it’s anything he wants to hear, he’ll hear you though you’re forty yards away and talking in a whisper! He’s a Fox, I tell you!
Thus Wolfe, with the instrument of his exuberant imagination, revealed the man who was the fascination of his life. It is not known how Perkins took all this at first, except that he did say to Miss Lemmon with mild annoyance that he wasn’t aware that he, as Wolfe said the Fox had done, went around “sniffing scornfully.” It is known that he did not ask Aswell to alter or delete any of the Foxhall Edwards material; he had passed the ultimate test of his own policy of noninterference with an author’s work.
During the seven and a half months it took Harpers to assemble Wolfe’s book, Perkins tidied Tom’s estate. He answered all the questions of inquisitive scholars and suggested articles to others to keep Wolfe’s name alive. He haggled over medical fees and tried to take some kind of lead in directing the publishing activities without stepping on anyone’s toes. After weeks of not writing to Elizabeth Lemmon because he had been so busy, Max now confessed to her, and only to her, his emotional exhaustion. He often thought of her pastoral life in the Church House in Middleburg, and in a letter in December, 1938, he told her: “I wish I could get a touch of TB and have to go to Saranac for six months and then be all right again,” He said. “I’d like it if it were dull and I was bored and an afternoon seemed long. You’ve found the right way to live.”
That same month, Willard Huntington Wright—S. S. Van Dine—came up to the fifth floor and asked Perkins to be the executor of his estate. Merely the thought of it was like salt on Max’s wounds, especially as Wright was several years younger than Perkins. But Max agreed. He saw that Wright was in poor health and depressed about the world. Wright and Perkins had recently taken “tea” together, and, staring into a snifter of Courvoisier, Wright had said in a tone of resignation, “I’m so glad I’ve had all the brandy I’ve had. I’ve enjoyed the brandy. I only regret I didn’t drink more of it.”
Three months later, Wright suffered a mild heart attack. He had started to make a good recovery when another attack killed him. It seemed perfectly characteristic to Perkins that Willard Huntington Wright left, upon his death, the manuscript of a completed novel,The Winter Murder Case, flawless to the last comma.
Perkins continued to immerse himself in work, through the winter and into the spring of 1939. During that time the book that consumed more of his hours than any other was Artillery of Time, a Civil War saga about slavery and industrialism by Chard Powers Smith. As he had to so many other writers, Max had sent Smith a copy of War and Peace, and Smith had been inspired to try to capture the spirit of an entire nation at war. But for months he had been floundering. “It may be very good,” Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “but only long hard work will make it so. I’ve made trouble for a lot of writers—and for myself —by getting them to read War and Peace.” Smith was not an important author, and it was soon clear to Perkins that his book would never be great. Yet he labored for Smith as diligently as for any of his more celebrated writers, and suffered as much for him.
The manuscript had rambled to half a million words. Perkins felt that for all that verbiage there was too little story. For weeks he studied the manuscript; then he gridded it into plots and subplots, and looked for scenes which might be developed. “I am sure he never suggested the change of a word, unless an obvious mistake,” Smith recalled. “Instead, he would make shy little right angles in red pencil around the beginnings and the ends of passages, sometimes running to pages, and he would suggest diffidently that if it wouldn’t be too much trouble I might consider deleting them.” In detailed letters, Perkins gave his reasons. He reminded the author, for example, that his first responsibility was to tell a story and that the reader
cannot bear to be too much interrupted, and moreover he cannot absorb all the information and description you give from the middle of page 32 on throughout the chapter. You must generalize the description of the town. ... You must remember too that if you give the right impressions at the start, the knowledge of the reader will grow by gradual accretion as the story goes along. You try to tell far too much.
Perkins explained why Smith’s elaborate description of a train ride, however interesting in itself, did not help the narrative:
It seems to be given almost wholly to show what a railroad journey was like in those days, and does not in many respects further the actual story of the book.
And so on ... and on. Smith, an author with an unusually serene ego, found Perkins’s proposals invaluable and, with trifling exceptions, he accepted them all. Picking up from his editor’s counsel, he went on to make a good many improvements of his own. Then, for Max, came eternities of the most extensive editing. At the end Perkins confided to Elizabeth Lemmon that Smith’s book “almost brought me to suicide.” Upon reading the proofs, however, he said, he realized “the book is magnificent and [I] feel ashamed that I should have despaired about it, or doubted the author. He never knew I did though, and he did his work wonderfully.” It was an example of two qualities that distinguish the professional editor: the vision to see beyond the faults of a good book, no matter how dismaying; and the tenacity to keep working, through all discouragements, toward the book’s potential.
Late in 1938 Ernest Hemingway had written Perkins from Paris about Thomas Wolfe. It was almost the last of the condolence letters that were still dribbling in. Hemingway said he had not written sooner because he found it never did any good to discuss “casualties.” He agreed that Wolfe’s deathbed letter was a good one—Max had sent him a copy—but said that everybody writes fond letters to loyal friends when he thinks he is going to die. Hemingway imagined Perkins would therefore amass quite a collection, including many which he himself hoped to send during the next fifty years.
Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories was published in late 1938. Perkins sent Hemingway all the reviews that were of any importance. Not many critics were as impressed with the play as Perkins was. Edmund Wilson particularly thought very little of it. Hemingway explained to Perkins that all the alleged revolutionaries who were really cowards and took no part in the defense of the Spanish republic, such as Wilson, felt a natural obligation to discredit those who had laid their lives on the line. Hemingway said that was all right with him, though he was full of animosity toward “the poor pricks.” Those guys could still gang up to put a book down, but he told Perkins, he would still be around and going “pretty good” after they had been superseded by a whole new generation of critics. When Ernest riffled through the 600 pages of his book, he said, he knew he’d be all right as a “sort of lasting business,” even if he should die the next day.
Hemingway had been caught up in the Loyalist cause in the last few years, but he was already viewing the revolution with his former objectivity. In this war that was ending in defeat for the Republicans, he told Perkins, there was a “carnival of treachery and rotten-ness” on both sides. Disillusionment had combined with his depression about the reception of his book and made it difficult to work. “Writing is a hard business,” he wrote Perkins, but, he said, nothing made him feel better. Before anything fatal happened, Hemingway said, he wanted to assure Perkins that he thought just as much of him as Tom Wolfe ever did—“even if I can’t put it so well.” Hemingway told Max he would take a final trip to Spain before coming home to work on a novel.
By the end of 1938, Perkins’s saddest year, friends could see the toll that sorrow had taken. His hair was completely gray now, except for the widow’s peak, and his depression showed in his eyes and in his remarks. Of Christmas and New Year’s, he wrote to Fitzgerald: “Whoever called these days the Holidays must have been a master of sarcasm.” In January, 1939, Perkins went to Vermont and saw the destruction of Windsor that had been inflicted by the hurricane of the preceding fall. Almost everything he truly cared about there was devastated. Max walked among the cracked limbs and uprooted remains of Paradise. In one part a fringe of pines had stood up to the storm, and Max told his daughter Zippy that those stalwart trees would make a good central image for a poem, but he never wrote it.
Back from Spain, Hemingway again passed through New York, where he saw Perkins before going to Key West. He told Max about three long stories he wanted to write. The clearest in his mind was about an old commercial fisherman alone in his skiff fighting a swordfish for four days and nights and vanquishing it, only to have sharks finally devour it because he had been unable to boat it. If he could write that and two war stories he had in mind, Hemingway said, he would make enough money to support his family for the rest of the year and could resume work on his new novel.
Meantime Hemingway waited to hear from the people who had promised to produce The Fifth Column. He figured they were hedging because the play read a little like yesterday’s headlines. After months of talk and no action, he regretted that he had not writtenThe Fifth Column as a novel, especially now that he had a lot more to say about the war. (The play was eventually put on, and had a ten-week run.) In Key West he had recurring nightmares about the war, in which he got caught in the latest Spanish retreat. Perkins prescribed drinking a bottle of stout before going to bed. “It has made me go to sleep many a time,” he wrote, “and sleep well.”
Hemingway left Key West for Cuba—alone; his second marriage had broken up—and took a house that proved to be a wonderful place to work. There was no telephone and nobody could bother him. He began writing at 8:30 every morning and worked straight through until two in the afternoon. He had meant to start the three new stories he had outlined for Perkins, but got sidetracked. By spring, when Martha Gellhorn joined him, he had 15,000 words of a novel set in Spain during the civil war. He was reluctant to discuss it with Max—he thought talking about a book was bad luck. He did tell Max that, in order to be free to work on the novel, he had turned down Hollywood propositions and lecture tour engagements, and thus he might have to draw money from Scribners to keep going. If Max wanted collateral, he said, he could have it; but Ernest assured him that Scribners would not need it, because the book was going so well. Each day he would read every word over from the start, and each day he concluded that he was writing as expertly as he knew how.
Perkins told Hemingway that another of his authors, Alvah Bessie, who had fought with the Lincoln Brigade, was writing a collection of personal narratives about his experiences in Spain. Hemingway was not worried about competition. He thought Bessie was one of those “ideology boys,” while Hemingway himself, as he later admitted, was not a “Catholic writer, nor a party writer ... not even an American writer. Just a writer.” He held himself to no more than 1,000 words a day. Just as the thing to do with a war was to win it, he said, the thing to do with a novel was to finish it. He felt that he had lost a great deal in the last two years, and he wanted to win with this novel.
In Cuba, Hemingway happened upon a copy of Tender Is the Night and read it for the third time. He told Max he was amazed how “excellent” much of it was. He thought if Fitzgerald had “integrated” it more carefully it would have been a fine book. As it was, Hemingway said, it read better than anything Fitzgerald had done. “Is it really over,” Ernest wondered, “or will he ever write again?” He asked Perkins to include his great affection when he corresponded with Scott next, admitting that he had a very stupid, immature feeling of superiority toward Fitzgerald, like that of one little boy, tough and durable, sneering at another, talented but delicate.
At the end of 1938, Fitzgerald briefly left Hollywood to visit his daughter. Scottie, blonde and petite, was midway through her first year at Vassar College, a year behind Max’s fourth daughter, Jane. Scott was going with some idea of disciplining her. He feared Scottie had been taking too much interest in dates and dances, rather as Zelda used to do. En route, Fitzgerald saw Max and asked for advice, and Max offered the simplest but soundest philosophy he knew: “Never on any account ... allow any hostility to grow up between yourself and a child.”
On his way back from Vassar, Scott called on Max again. During the first visit Perkins had been delighted to see Fitzgerald looking younger and healthier than in years and appearing quite sure of himself and of his writing. But now Scott had something on his mind. This Side of Paradise had gone officially out of print, and Scott was worried that his literary reputation was lapsing too. Back in California he wrote Max:
I am still a figure to many people and the number of times I still see my name in Time and the New Yorker ect. make me wonder if it should be allowed to casually disappear—when there are memorial double deckers to such fellows as Farrel and Stienbeck.
Perkins spoke to Whitney Darrow about keeping This Side of Paradise in print, but Darrow demonstrated that it was not economically feasible for Scribners to accommodate Perkins’s wishes. And so, as Max had done with Fitzgerald’s manuscript of the very same book exactly twenty years earlier, he brought it to another publisher. He urged the American Mercury House, a reprinter, to publish it in one of their very cheap editions, but they argued right off that it belonged to a bygone era. Perkins promptly spoke of the great demand for it in the libraries of Windsor, Vermont, Plainfield, New Jersey, and New Canaan, Connecticut, to name but three towns. They agreed to an edition of 25,000 copies, to be kept in active sale for only a month, but they never published it.
M-G-M also backed out of a deal with Fitzgerald. After eighteen months of farming his screenplays out to other contract writers for revision, they decided not to pick up his option. Despite the loss of a weekly paycheck, Fitzgerald regarded the pink slip as a blessing in disguise. He knew it was self-destructive to continue any longer on that “factory worker’s basis.” He explained to Max that the studios’ attitude was, in effect: “We brought you here for your individuality but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.”
Do you know [he wrote Perkins] in that “Gone With the Wind” job I was absolutely forbidden to use any words except those of Margaret Mitchell, that is, when new phrases had to be invented one had to thumb through as if it were Scripture and check out phrases of her’s which would cover the situation!
A year later he admitted to Perkins, “I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack—that, like everything else, requires a certain practised excellence.”
Fitzgerald was eager to get to work on several ideas and felt exhilarated to be writing again instead of just “patching.” He permanently buried Philippe and conceived a modern novel—“One of those novels that can only be written at the moment and when one is full of the idea—as ‘Tender’ should have been written in its original conception, all laid on the Riviera.”
Just when Perkins thought Fitzgerald was finding a new self-discipline in Los Angeles, Scott skipped town for a vacation with Zelda. He took her from Highland Hospital in Asheville, and they went on a drunken spree in Cuba. In the last few years Zelda’s condition had steadied enough to allow her to take short trips to be with her mother, daughter, or husband; but it seemed that whenever she and Scott confronted each other, she regressed into madness. This time, however, it was Scott who went to pieces. His binge landed him in Doctors Hospital in New York. While Scott was bedridden, Max spent a few hours with Zelda, who seemed much improved to him. “Anyone who did not know of her trouble would not have suspected it,” he wrote Hemingway, “but she looked as if she had been through plenty too.”
Perkins really believed that Scott did have a novel in mind and the will to write it. Extremely secretive about the idea, Fitzgerald had only hinted of its substance to Max when he had visited him in New York. Shortly after Fitzgerald returned to Los Angeles, Charles Scribner wrote him a friendly note which suggested that Scott, having worked in Hollywood, would logically find it a vast source of material for his book. Scott wrote Perkins back in terror that “this misinformation may have been disseminated to the literary columns. If I ever gave any such impression,” he told Perkins, “it is entirely false; I said that the novel was about some things that had happened to me in the last two years.” The book was undeniably rooted in Hollywood, but, he insisted, it was definitely “not about Hollywood (and if it were it is the last impression that I want to get about).” This time Fitzgerald blocked the entire novel out, so that he would be able to drop it for a month, if he needed to earn money, and pick it up again “at the exact spot factually and emotionally” where he left off.
Weeks later Fitzgerald was bedridden again, with a touch of his recurring tuberculosis. His worries were compounded when his agent, Harold Ober, who had always been his lender of last resort, decided to bail him out no longer. Fitzgerald flew off the handle. Over the years he had borrowed heavily from Ober, but he had never welshed on him. In the last eighteen months alone, Fitzgerald had paid back to Ober his entire debt of $13,000, and enabled Ober to earn $8,000 in commissions.
Scott borrowed $600 from Scribners to tide him over and asked Perkins for the names of two or three of the best agents in New York, in case he wanted to leave Ober. Perkins recommended Carl Brandt as “an extremely shrewd, and an agreeable chap, if perhaps a little bit slick,” but reminded Scott that Harold Ober was one of the most loyal friends Fitzgerald had in the world. “I hope to God you will stand by him,” he wrote. Fitzgerald told Max he suspected that a tiff between Scottie and Mrs. Ober— in which Mrs. Ober had accused Scottie of visiting them merely to use their New York house as a pied-à-terre—lay at the bottom of the matter. (It is more likely that with the slate between Ober and Fitzgerald wiped clean at last, the agent simply did not want to begin lending money to Scott all over again.) Perkins’s final note on the subject was, “If there is a wife at the bottom of it, one ought to be charitable.... Wives have a strange effect upon their husbands at times, and husbands ought not to be held accountable.”
Perkins may have been thinking of his own marriage. His fellow workers noticed that when it came to the subject of religion, his sense of humor disappeared and he could become quite caustic. Louise’s conversion and Max’s reaction to it had all but destroyed whatever happiness they had shared. It became easier for them to avoid each other than to try to talk, for religion dominated Louise’s conversation and life. She went to church every day and spent most of Sunday there. It became increasingly common for Max to come home in the evening and find her entertaining a parlor full of priests and nuns. Max barely tolerated the situation. If forewarned of such an evening, he would usually remain in New York for the night. Not only Max but his daughters and the family’s friends wearied of Louise’s incessant proselytizing. If asked, Max grimly told people that she was a happier person because of her new religion. But to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings he remarked, at the end of Louise’s first year in the Church, that he looked forward to the day when she would no longer be a novice; more seasoned Catholics, he said, “do not take it nearly so hard.”
In early 1939, Max’s third daughter, Peggy, decided to marry Robert King, a good-looking doctor from Alliance, Ohio. Max liked him very much but found him so gentle that he was afraid Peg would dominate him. On the last Saturday of March, a few dozen guests went through twelve cases of champagne at the small private wedding in the Perkinses’ New Canaan house.
As the thirties drew to a close, Perkins began to urge Charles Scribner to hire more young people. He found those entering publishing better educated in literature than he had been at their age. And he realized his editorial hunches about manuscripts were not as accurate as they once had been. When he was younger, he had been able to predict an author’s brilliant future by a dramatic final page or a single catchy phrase. Sometimes he would promise to publish a writer after one witty conversation. He was always partial to reminiscences and autobiographical fiction by people he felt had lived interesting lives filled with colorful characters and dramatic events. But often, he eventually realized, these were the very people who lacked the perseverance or talent to write. Perkins gave a middling advance to one artist who was famous for his exploits and wanted to write his life story. The artist used the money to hire a succession of beautiful secretaries. “No matter what chapter from his life he set out to dictate,” Malcolm Cowley related in The New Yorker in the early forties, “he found that the only words he could say were, ‘Miss Jones, did anyone ever tell you that you were beautiful?’ The book hasn’t been started, but Perkins thinks the artist still has it in him, and that someday, barring accidents, he will get it out.”
As did every publisher, Scribners gambled away thousands of dollars on books that never materialized, and the responsibility for every one of them weighed heavily on Max’s conscience. When a manuscript came in and was unpublishable, Max felt even worse. “This is the way of it,” he explained to Elizabeth Lemmon. “All my life, always, I’ve got myself into a jam and had to get out of it or die, all because of carelessness and folly. So I take on these books from something in the writer and my response to it. Then comes the ms. or the first part of it. I can’t give it to anyone else. They would say it was rotten, or not worth labor. I have to do the work, and I do it over and over in desperation. Sometimes I’d be ashamed to show it.” Now, whenever he found himself with such a problem, he took heart by remembering the fix he was in with Chard Smith’s Artillery of Time, which turned out to be a best seller and was hailed as the “Northern Gone With the Wind.”
For Max, who listened to so many authors’ laments, his correspondence with Elizabeth was still his greatest emotional release. “I wish I could talk to you, but I never can or will,” he wrote one night in June of 1939 when he could not go home because Louise was entertaining her coreligionists. Alone at the Harvard Club he thought of the times he had spent with Elizabeth. “I’m so happy to be with you,” he wrote, “that I can’t say anything—not that it makes any difference anyhow. I mean truly that it makes no difference. I think you’ve found a good life in that house, with the garden and all. I think you’ve been good and unbeatable always, and that it wasn’t easy at all. And everything should have been easy for you by rights.” Since its beginning in 1922, their exchange of letters had remained pure and private, as was their love for each other. Louise knew they wrote, but not as often as they did nor what they had to say to one another; Elizabeth sent her letters to Max’s office. When one of the Perkins daughters learned of the relationship thirty years later, she smiled and said, “I’m so glad Daddy had someone to talk to.”
A great source of unrest for Perkins, in the spring of 1939, was the approaching publication of Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock. “Here I am with just as much anxiety about Tom as ever,—in fact, more,” he wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. Max’s primary worry was Aline Bernstein. After Wolfe’s funeral, she and Perkins found themselves drawn amicably to each other on several occasions. But the book Mrs. Bernstein had for years fought so hard to suppress was about to reveal the details of her love affair with Tom. “I’m so afraid that woman may kill herself,” Max confided to Miss Lemmon. “I like her and I admire her, but I can’t say anything to her.”
In the first 300 pages of Wolfe’s posthumously published manuscript, he retraced his steps to the beginning of his life story, though he wrote not about Eugene Gant of Altamont but about George “Monk” Webber of Libya Hill. Perkins saw evidence of the fresh vitality that had invigorated Tom since they worked on Of Time and the River, but he was sorry Wolfe felt compelled to avoid the lyrical and autobiographical. Perkins understood Wolfe’s reasons. One was:
He knew that his family had suffered very deeply, and certain other people too, because he had used them as characters, though transmuted from their real selves by his imagination. His family never complained but they did suffer, as they knew Tom had thought of them as “great people, great characters,” and had not realized the personal side of the matter. He brooded over this always, and in the end I think he thought he must find a way of using them and his friends and others under a complete disguise.
Wolfe, however, had only one story to tell. The names were changed, but when Wolfe caught up for the second time to his extraordinary shipboard meeting with Esther Jack, it was through Eugene Gant’s eyes once again that the reader saw Aline Bernstein:
From that night on, Monk was never able again to see that woman as perhaps she really was, as she must have looked to many other people, as she had even looked to him the first moment that he saw her. He was never able to see her as a matronly figure of middle age, a creature with a warm and jolly little face, a wholesome and indomitable energy for every day, a shrewd, able, and immensely talented creature of action, able to hold her own in a man’s world....
She became the most beautiful woman that ever lived—and not in any symbolic or idealistic sense—but with all the gazing, literal, and mad concreteness of his imagination.
For the next 600 pages every emotion and event of their love affair was recorded with unflinching intimacy. Perkins went so far as to warn some of his writers not to read The Web and the Rock at all, even though he thought the first half contained some of the very best stories Wolfe ever wrote. Max told Marjorie Rawlings:
It is true that the last half of the book—the love affair—is and always was not what it ought to be. It should have been written fifteen years later maybe—And there was Tom’s predicament. He had caught up to himself in time, and when he wrote about things too near, he could not make them what they should have been. It was a real predicament, and I don’t know what could have come of it.
By the time The Web and the Rock was published, in June of 1939, Perkins finally understood what had taken Aswell so long to compile it. The manuscript Tom left behind had been so enormous that it was necessary to divide it arbitrarily into two books. Also, it was built from blocks of writing intended to be used in half a dozen different books. Wolfe’s inchoate attempts at his novel The Vision of Spangler’s Paul, for example, turned up in the first section of The Web and the Rock. What Tom had designated as People of the Night, containing the portrait of Foxhall Edwards, would be worked into the sequel of The Web and the Rock, which would pick up exactly where that book left off. Its final line would serve as the next volume’s title: You Can’t Go Home Again.
The threat of public exposure as the Fox made Perkins uneasy, and he admitted to friends that he was concerned about it. It was not that Wolfe had maligned Perkins in his portrait. “I just hate to be written about on any account,” Max wrote Scott Fitzgerald, “and it seemed odd that with all the designs he had upon Scribners, the only part that he wrote that fits into the book—and it’s pretty long—should be about me.”
Harpers published You Can’t Go Home Again in 1940, hailing it as Wolfe’s “latest and maturest” work. Perkins, who had seen the manuscript earlier in sections, remained less than enthusiastic about the book, partly because it suffered from the same jerry-built construction as The Web and the Rock, more because it would indelibly make him “the Fox,” the hero George Webber’s editor. Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “I was never a Fox. Do you think I was? I don’t mean for you to answer unless just ‘Yes’ for I don’t think you should ever speak to me again. But I never was. Maybe something worse, but not that. Not Machiavelli ever.” Two weeks later Max saw all those chapters in print and read them through. “I was wrong about the Fox business,” he wrote Elizabeth again. “I had shrunk from reading it all, and the part I did read, I got the wrong impression from I guess.” Once Perkins realized the portrait was mostly sympathetic, he wrote Fitzgerald, “In reading some of it I even thought if I really were like that man I would be quite proud of myself.” In time he told Miss Wyckoff, “I didn’t make out so bad after all.”
Max’s daughter Peggy remembered her father reading You Can’t Go Home Again and shaking with laughter at the Fox’s behavior. But Max wrote agent Henry Volkening, “I see where we will lose all our lady writers if they read it, on account of the way he has me going around muttering curses against the women.”
Especially ironic, for it had been composed just months before Wolfe fell ill in the Northwest, were the final lines of Thomas Wolfe’s great twin-volumed novel. It concluded a thirty-six-page open letter from George Webber to Foxhall Edwards.
Dear Fox, old friend, thus we have come to the end of the road that we were to go together. My tale is finished—and so farewell.
But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you:
Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year: something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:
“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing: to lose the life you have, for greater life: to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving, to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth—
—Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.“
On September 1, 1939, German troops marched into Poland and war broke out in Europe. At the peaceful L-Bar-T Ranch in Montana, Hemingway was writing his novel about Spain. Once he received the news, Ernest wrote Perkins that he had various commitments in regard to this war, but none would be honored until he finished his manuscript. He was in no hurry to get over there, because he thought there would be “war enough for all of us from now on.” With the fatalism he felt whenever he smelled battle, he wrote Max that he would certainly not expect to survive this one.
Perkins hoped that England would accept Winston Churchill as its leader at least for the duration of the war. “Maybe he might be a Fascist,” Max had written Ernest in July, 1939, “but he would be good in a war.” Months later Perkins heard a fascinating rumor that Churchill was writing a history of the English-speaking people. This took Perkins aback at first because it was he, almost ten years earlier, who had suggested that Churchill write such a book. During the last decade, Scribners had published what Perkins considered Churchill’s “magnificent” histories of the last war and his “truly great biography” of the Duke of Marlborough, which “would have been a little better if he had not been somewhat partisan as a descendant.”
When Churchill had visited America in 1931 to lecture about “this new tyranny” Soviet Russia, and the need for greater cooperation between England and the United States, Perkins and Charles Scribner had a long talk with him. Max never saw a man whom he liked better in the instant of meeting him.
He is much more an American than an Englishman [Perkins wrote Professor Copeland]. He got up and walked around the office with his cigar sticking out from his mouth, and talking. I suggested to him then that he do a history of the British Empire. It was then that he got up and began walking about rapidly, and it seemed as if at that moment he hit upon a project—a history of the English race, which was to include us. He must truly have thought of it previously, but it was as if he took the idea from the Empire and immediately enlarged and changed it.
While Churchill was in New York thinking about Perkins’s suggestion, he asked for the services of a secretary for just one day. Max offered his own. Irma Wyckoff was naturally intimidated by so awesome a presence as Churchill, but she realized what most of Perkins’s authors did: “When there was work to be done, Mr. Perkins could convince you you were the only person in the world to do it.” The day before she was to report for duty at the Waldorf, Perkins reminded her that Churchill dictated most of his letters from bed in the morning, and that he did not wear pajamas. And, he joshed, “He’s liable to jump out at any time—without warning.” But Irma Wyckoff was game and Churchill was a gentleman.
Perkins found Churchill to be one of those who “thinks very little about money but needs a great deal.” And so instead of publishing in the regular fashion, by negotiating a contract, Churchill would propose a book and sell it in advance for a huge sum to an English publisher. He did just that with the scheme for the history of the English race, signing with Cassell’s in London for the very considerable advance of £20,000. The English publisher then auctioned it to American houses. Scribners was on a tight budget then, and for the family-operated business to put up $30,000 or $40,000 for a book not even on paper was beyond consideration. Dodd, Mead got it. Perkins remained so ardent an admirer of Churchill that he always kept a photograph of him in his office.
Churchill would have to table his project for many years, but Hemingway did not delay his. Ernest moved from Montana to Sun Valley, a new resort village in Idaho. Soon he had over 90,000 words done on his Spanish novel, which would tell how the war there really had been. If he was ever going to bring off a “hell of a big book with all sorts of people in it,” he told Max, he thought it best to get it done before going off and possibly getting killed. If Perkins would visit before the close of the gaming season, he added, Hemingway promised to paddle him down a trout-filled stream and introduce him to “very beautiful glamour girls” who were getting their divorces in Idaho. Martha Gellhorn was covering the war in Finland for Collier’s. So Ernest, now separated from Pauline, named his bachelor suite at the Sun Valley Lodge “Hemingstein’s Mixed Viceing and Diceing Establishment.”
Perkins could not budge from New York until Tom Wolfe’s estate had satisfied the state tax officials. Then he saw that he had to be on hand to prepare his spring list, which he hoped would include Hemingway’s novel. He wrote Ernest, “I would give anything if I knew just a few of the elements in it to make a note from, and the title.” In January, 1940, when Hemingway was back in Cuba, he sent Perkins the first eight pages of the book and some thirty more from the middle. In them, the protagonist, an idealistic American college professor named Robert Jordan, has gone to Spain to fight for the Republican army. His duty is to blow up a bridge of strategic importance. Perkins wired the author almost immediately: EXTREMELY IMPRESSED STOP OPENING PAGES BEAUTIFUL AND CHAPTER 8 TREMENDOUS. WILL SEND CONTRACT.
As the novel approached completion, Hemingway’s generally solid work habits crumbled. Weekends, he indulged himself with friends and liquor. Every Sunday began with a hangover and a soggy note to Perkins. He hoped Max would make allowances for occasional incoherencies and would agree that it was better for him to write personal letters in that condition than “hung over” pages of the novel. Nothing really made things right for Hemingway until Martha Gellhorn arrived from Helsinki in the middle of January. His weekend binges continued, but her enthusiasm for his novel made the final pages of work on the book seem easier. After several more Sundays—“damned if they don’t go fast”—Hemingway arrived at the end of his story. But he was temporarily stumped by the conclusion of this, his longest novel. Perkins said he supposed Ernest knew what the outcome was to be but did not know how to express it. “Well,” Max wrote him, “endings are mighty difficult anyhow.”
Meantime, Hemingway hunted for a title, as Perkins had persistently requested. The author wanted a big one, and he was not worried about “over-titling” this book. “She’ll carry quite a lot,” he said. Hemingway often searched for titles in anthologies of English literature. When he had delved as deep into his Oxford Book of English Prose as the close of John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” which began “No man is an Island,” he decided he had found the right one. In meeting Perkins’s arbitrary deadline of April 22, Hemingway sent him the first 512 pages of the manuscript under the provisional title For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway thought it had the “magic” that a title had to have and that the book itself might make it quotable. If it did not seem that way to Perkins, the author had some thirty others. But this, Ernest said, was the first that made the bell toll for him—unless people thought of tolls as long-distance charges and of Bell as the telephone company. ALL KNOCKED OUT, Perkins wired, THINK ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT AND NEW ... TITLE BEAUTIFUL CONGRATULATIONS.
Much of Perkins’s excitement came from the fact that more than a decade had passed since Hemingway had written a big novel. More came from Hemingway’s superb depiction of war. Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls became an actual battle experience for Perkins. He wrote the author, “It has got so these things go through my head as if I had seen them. It is truly amazing.” Perkins was convinced, he told Elizabeth Lemmon, that “Hem has written his best book. That’s sure.”
On July 1, 1940, Hemingway wired BRIDGE ALL BLOWN. That meant he had found the way to complete For Whom the Bell Tolls. He hand-carried the conclusion of his book to New York and applied the finishing touches there, handing each completed section of manuscript to Perkins, who in turn sent it to the printer. Perkins told Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings that he read it with intense concentration even though most of the time Ernest was standing behind his chair and reading it over his shoulder. When Hemingway was not in the Scribner Building, he was at the Barclay Hotel, roistering. By August the harried weeks with Hemingway in town were over.
Perkins and Hemingway, who was in Havana again, were soon working over their respective sets of the book’s proofsheets. The editor’s marginalia were mainly questions on points of style but there were a few substantive matters—several passages, for example, which Max and Charles Scribner thought should be toned down. Scribner found the old woman Pilar’s foreboding speech about the “smell of death to come” definitely horrifying; Ernest insisted it was neither gratuitously obscene nor unpublishable. Another scene portrayed Robert Jordan masturbating on the eve of an attack; Hemingway reminded Perkins that it was the small things of that sort that made the man credible, not just a hero. In the end, Hemingway trimmed the onanism scene. Perkins assured him the “death” speech was “right as written” and the other passage as corrected.
Then Hemingway got the idea of concluding his book with an epilogue. He wrote two new chapters that recapitulated the failure of the Segovia offensive, discussing the blowing up of the bridge and Jordan’s disappearance, and accounted for all the rest of the characters. He said that they read well but seemed like going back into the dressing room after the fight. “Should I put on the epilogue? Is it needed?” he wrote Perkins. Or, he wondered, would it just be rhetoric and detract from the genuine emotion on which the book originally ended? Perkins felt the first ending was tremendously effective. He decided against the epilogue, and the pages were dropped for good.
Scribners converted their bookstore that season into a Hemingway shrine, filling up all their Fifth Avenue windows with copies of the novel. “It has got all round town that this book is a truly great book,” Perkins wrote the author, “and that its publication is a great event. People outside all publishing and writing circles know about it.”
As Hemingway’s career reached its brightest point since his association with Perkins, another of Max’s publishing relationships burned out altogether. That season, twenty years after writing his renowned Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson informed Perkins that he was dissatisfied with Scribners’ handling of his books. “I have felt all the time Max, a curious lack of interest in what I am doing, what I propose to do,” he wrote.
Anderson’s career at Scribners had begun in 1933, the year Horace Liveright died and his firm went bankrupt. Perkins had then written Anderson immediately, suggesting that Scribners become his publishers. They met in New York. Max proposed that Anderson should write either a personal novel or some continuous personal narrative, something after the fashion of Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story. When the author returned to his farm in the hills of Troutdale, Virginia, he wrote of his decision to join Perkins’s company of writers—“not because of any advance you might give me on a particular book, any amount of advertising of my books you might do, etc., but because of a genuine respect I have long had for the position of the house of Scribner’s in the publishing world, and also, may I say, because I instinctively liked you, Mr. Perkins.” Writing under the tentative title I Build My House, Anderson started his memoirs. In the same letter, Anderson spoke of his desires and expectations in working with his new editor:
I think I should feel free to come to you from time to time and talk of plans as to a friend. I have a certain conception of what I conceive to be the right relationship between a writer and publisher, a relationship that might be, at its best, a kind of intellectual marriage....
Anderson’s subsequent letters, however, revealed that he was more interested in a silent partner. And in the ensuing years, he used Perkins mostly as a sounding board. In one letter he indicated his superstition against even talking about novels while he was in the middle of them.
Anderson delayed working on his memoirs, as though a book of reminiscences would be the swan song of his career. He had several other ideas for books, which he fitfully attempted. In 1934, for example, he sent his editor batches of unrelated essays to be compiled into a book. Perkins pieced some of them together, and they were published under the title Puzzled America. Anderson worked next on a novel, Kit Brandon. Scribners published it in 1936, exactly as Anderson wrote it. Then the author wandered into another project which he thought of as “a novel without a purpose, not intended to reform anyone or make any new world, just the story of a rather shy little man and his half-amusing, half-tragic adventures.” He told Perkins, “Most of the time as I write I sit giggling.” After approaching the novel from several angles, he set off in another direction, coming back toward Perkins’s original suggestion. There were several other false starts and returns.
Anderson’s years at Scribners were his most restless. Like Scott Fitzgerald, he could not fulfill the promise of his brilliant early reputation. He peregrinated from one project to another, fiddling for seven years with the autobiographical work. By the summer of 1940, at the age of sixty-four, Anderson was suffering from dissatisfaction with his career. He blamed his publishers, specifically Max Perkins.
As you know, Max I have come to see you from time to time, being fond of you personally, as you must know, but rarely, when I have been with you have you made any inquiry at all as to what I am up to. You have indeed Max, on such occasions shown a great deal of interest in some of your other writers and I cannot blame you if you have not been interested in my own work. But in the meantime other publishers have certainly shown interest.
When people asked Anderson if he was content with his present publisher, he said, he answered, “I would be but feel they are not much interested in me.” He felt “that it would be better for me to go to some house that makes me feel they really want me.”
Perkins hoped that would not be Anderson’s next step. In one of the most self-abasing letters of his career, Perkins explained his behavior by saying that he did not feel Anderson needed to be watched like some novice writer. “It all came only from my feeling that you knew so very well indeed what you were about and had so much your own way of doing things,” wrote the man who denied he was a fox, “that it would be almost an impertinence for me to question you, or urge you, or certainly to try to direct you. I had looked upon you for so long as a master, and as the father of so many of these other people who became notable, that I could not help talking to you about them for my own enlightenment largely.”
Perkins’s letter touched Anderson deeply. At the same time, he told Perkins, “I can’t live by merely being thought of as a sometime master of my craft.” It was Anderson’s conviction that books were not bought by the American people; they were sold to them. A publisher had to “back” his books. “I had a feeling when I went to Scribners,” he wrote Max, “that I might get this kind of interest. I have a suspicion that perhaps I didn’t get it because Mr. Scribner thought of me as a man too old to spend money on.”
A few months later Anderson, Scribner, and Perkins met in the Scribners offices. The sales ledger showed that the three Anderson books published by the house had totaled no more than 6,500 copies. The author excoriated his publishers for the puny figures. Perkins understood Anderson’s disappointment, that “even if the question of money were not necessarily involved, an author writes his books to have them read, and wants to have them read by as many as possible, and ought to.” But he did believe the slickest huckstering in the world could not have put those books across.
Anderson remained adamant and went to Harcourt, Brace. Only months later, in June, 1941, he died of peritonitis. (Harcourt, Brace later published the memoirs he and Perkins had discussed for so many years.) At about the same time Max was upset by the suicide of Virginia Woolf, whom he had never met but admired. With her death, Perkins thought, a great part of a literary era had passed away. “Writers are certainly dying like flies,” Hemingway commented stonily.
In October of 1939, Scott Fitzgerald had given Perkins reason to believe he and his career were very much alive. He wired Max: PLEASE LUNCH IF YOU CAN WITH KENNETH LITTAUER OF COLLIERS IN RELATION TO SERIAL OF WHICH HE HAS THE OUTLINE OBER TO BE ABSOLUTELY EXCLUDED FROM PRESENT STATE OF NEGOTIATIONS I HAD MY LAST DRINK LAST JUNE IF THAT MATTERS TELL LITTAUER THAT I FOOLISHLY TURNED DOWN LITERARY GUILD OFFER FOR TENDER NIGHT LETTER ME IF YOU CAN NOVEL OUTLINE ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENTIAL AS EVEN A HINT OF IT WOULD BE PLAGIARIZED OUT HERE.
The hero of the novel was a motion-picture studio mogul named Monroe Stahr. The character was based on the head of M-G-M, Irving Thalberg, who had fascinated Fitzgerald for years. Scott assured Max that after outlining “every scene and situation ... I think I can write this book as if it was a biography because I know the character of this man.” From just the outline, Perkins tried to persuade Littauer “that no [other] human being could handle such a scheme as this one.” Littauer, naturally wary of Fitzgerald’s reliability, said Collier’s was interested but would have to see some piece of manuscript before they could make an offer for it.
After having been all but emotionally and financially ruined, Fitzgerald had had two strokes of good fortune: He had found happiness with the Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham; indeed, he was contemplating marrying her, Miss Graham later wrote, if Zelda “recovered sufficiently to live for the rest of her life with her mother or if she went so permanently mad that she lost all contact with the real world about her.” At the same time, Fitzgerald had been selling a series of short stories to Esquire about a Hollywood hack writer named Pat Hobby. Fitzgerald received only $250 perEsquire piece, less than a tenth of what the Post had formerly paid him. “When you’re poor,” he said, “you sell things for a quarter of their value to realize quickly.” The money helped keep him going. But, naturally, Fitzgerald was banking as much as ever on Perkins.
By November 20 he was ready to show Perkins the first 10,000 words of his new novel. “A lot depends on this week,” he wrote Max. The material was “strong,” so it was even money whether Collier’s would take it. “Of course, if he will back me it will be a life saver,” Fitzgerald wrote of Kenneth Littauer, “but I am by no means sure that I will ever be a popular writer again. This much of the book, however, should be as fair a test as any.”
The editors at Collier’s deliberated for a week before they rejected it. In an instant Perkins received a hasty telegram from Fitzgerald to rush the copy to the Post. Scott added: I GUESS THERE ARE NO GREAT MAGAZINE EDITORS LEFT. Perkins read the material and wired Scott: A BEAUTIFUL START, STIRRING AND NEW, CAN WIRE YOU 250 AND A THOUSAND BY JANUARY. The next day he wrote:
I thought the book had the magic that you can put into things. The whole transcontinental business, which is so strong and new to people like me, and to most people, was marvelously suggested, and interest and curiosity about Stahr was aroused.... It was all admirable, or else I am no judge any more.
The $1,000 Perkins promised in his telegram was to come from a small bequest he was receiving at the end of the year from the estate of his godmother. It was “what they used to call ‘velvet,’ ” Max wrote Scott, “and you are welcome to it if it will help with this book. I can believe that you may really get at the heart of Hollywood, and of what there is wonderful in it as well as all the rest.” He instructed Fitzgerald to “push on with courage for you have a right to.”
“Your offering to loan me another thousand dollars was the kindest thing I have ever heard of,” Scott wrote his editor. “When Harold [Ober] withdrew from the questionable honor of being my banker I felt numb financially and I suddenly wondered what money was and where it came from. There had always seemed a little more somewhere and now there wasn’t,” he explained.
The Post then rejected Scott’s novel. Perkins immediately told Scott that if he was in a desperate pinch, he could call for the loan anytime after Christmas. Fitzgerald wrote Perkins for the money on December 26.
Perkins decorated his next letter, written at the turn of the decade, making it into a New Year’s card. Ever proud of his ability to draw (especially his profiles of Napoleon, which still retained a recognizable touch of self-portrait), Max sketched a man standing with a drink in his hand, smiling and saying, “Here’s how!” As an afterthought, Perkins labeled the drink Coca-Cola. Fitzgerald’s paranoia got the better of him and he sent Perkins a starchy response. “Beneath the surface of your letter and in the cartoon of the man with coca cola I detect a certain perturbation,” he said, then hastily went on to defend himself. “What happened the first part of December or thereabouts was that I quarreled with Sheilah Graham, and then encountered a New Orleans prick ... from Collier’s who told me my novel was no good.... That was all ... after about five heavy days in which I stayed close to home, Sheilah Graham and I were reconciled.” He had not had a drop for four weeks and insisted even a jiggerful made him deathly sick.
Perkins expected no such response to his letter. “I am not a subtle fellow. I am a simple fellow,” Max wrote back. “There was nothing implied by that drawing. I thought you would admire the art.—And the man was not meant to be you. It was meant to be me, and to indicate my own good resolutions. Don’t read any hidden meanings into what I write or draw. I only wanted to reveal to you another talent.” Max could not resist repeating the story to a few friends. “See what a guilty conscience will do to a man!” he wrote Struthers Burt. Fitzgerald apologized for reacting as he had done and admitted that he insisted on reading into things. He reminded Perkins of the time he accused Max of sending him Grant’s memoirs to show him the life of another failure.
Fitzgerald’s career dwindled to grinding out quick stories and taking on pickup screen-writing assignments. Buying his way through the weeks one day at a time, he could see no farther ahead than to the completion of this one book and getting Scottie through Vassar. “The greatest privilege,” he wrote Max, “would be to be able to do work so absorbing that one could forget the trouble abroad and at hime.”
During Fitzgerald’s years in Hollywood he made a lot of money and mixed with the rich and famous, but he felt himself to be an outcast, a has-been that the literary world had given up on and forgotten. He told Max he imagined how odd it would be in a year or so when Scottie “assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable.” Whatever the reasons for that, he knew it was no fault of Perkins’s. “You (and one other man, Gerald Murphy) have been a friend through every dark time in these 5 years,” Scott wrote Max, adding, “Once I believed in friendship, believed I could (if I didn’t always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian’s cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.” Scott asked his friend:
Would the 25¢ press keep Gatsby in the public eye,—or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers—I can maybe pick one—make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody. But to die—so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bare my stamp—in a small way I was an original.
After three years in California, Fitzgerald’s illusions were shattered; it was a land of dreams imprinted on celluloid strips. Throughout his letters to Max Perkins, the Murphys, and Edmund Wilson (with whom he had renewed his friendship) ran expressions of hope and belief that he could still create despite the many fallow years behind him and the paucity of time ahead. He wrote his daughter, Scottie, that fall:
Anyhow I am alive again—getting by that October did something—with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggle. I don’t drink. I am not a great man but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort.
Faithfully, Scott wrote Zelda, who was hospitalized again in North Carolina. In one letter that summer he broke down in a few sentences and noted ruefully:
Twenty years ago This Side of Paradise was a best seller and we were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling for us much too early.
Never had Fitzgerald felt so removed from the life in the East that had always enthralled him. He relied on Perkins for his news about all their friends, including Hemingway and Elizabeth Lemmon: “the lovely and unembittered and sacrificed virgin, the victim of what I gradually found was the vanity of her family.” Scott himself had given up all contact with her, but he could not forget what he considered some of the graceless characters around Welbourne parading as aristocrats. “And in the midst, the driven snow of Elizabeth. It was too sad to bear,” he said. After years of closing his letters to Max with an “Ever yours” or “Always yours,” Scott signed this once with “Love to all of you, of all generations.”
Miss Lemmon had been on Perkins’s mind too. He and Louise had just seen her, during one of her short visits to New York; she was showing some of the pedigreed boxers she raised. The Perkinses seemed to her more remote from each other than ever. “Louise always played the misunderstood wife,” Elizabeth recalled. Once when the two women were alone, Louise had impulsively asked, “Elizabeth, if I divorce Max will you marry him?” There was never a serious question of their separating. It was just her way of venting frustrations. As for Miss Lemmon, her friends in Middleburg insist she never met a man who she felt measured up to Perkins. She never married.
Before she returned south, Elizabeth reminded Max that the astrologer Evangeline Adams said everything would go to ruin for America in late 1941 or early 1942. “I wish you hadn’t told me,” he wrote Elizabeth. “I can’t forget it.” By then Perkins felt fatalistic even about his friendship with Miss Lemmon. “Elizabeth, I don’t think I’ll ever see you again,” he wrote her in May, 1940. “But I remember everything about every time I ever did see you and there was mighty little in my life to compare any of it to. I’ve always thought of you and all the time.”
They did see each other again. In 1943 Elizabeth came to New York and met Max at the Ritz Bar. They sat at a small table and for the first time he started to speak about their relationship. “Oh, Elizabeth,” he said, reaching toward her hand but not quite touching it. “It’s hopeless.”
She looked him in the eyes. “I know,” she replied. That closed the last and only discussion they ever had on the subject. They continued to correspond.
In October, 1940, Perkins went to Windsor to visit his mother. Days later, Elizabeth Perkins, the last of Senator Evarts’s children, died at eighty-two.
Perkins had noticed that people around New York were finally “very much alive to the war and anxious we should get prepared and should help England in all ways ‘short of war’ in the meantime.” Hemingway, on the other hand, usually bellicose, happily isolated himself in what he called his “joint on top of a hill.” His large, breezy Finca Vigia overlooked Havana Harbor. It was supposed to be a secret, but Max told Scott Fitzgerald that Martha Gellhorn was living with Ernest. “You know, I guess that Pauline and he are to be divorced, and presumably he will marry Martha Gellhorn,” Max wrote Scott. “This is so well known about that you must have heard of it, but otherwise it ought to be regarded as strictly confidential.” Fitzgerald thought it “odd to think of Ernest married to a really attractive woman. I think the pattern will be somewhat different than with his Pygmalion-like creations.” Hemingway and Martha passed through New York in late November on their honeymoon. No sooner were they made “legal” than she headed for the Burma Road, to cover for Collier’s the war that was marching into China. Ernest had some plan to join her in the Far East a month later.
By then, For Whom the Bell Tolls was published. Perkins sent complimentary copies to almost everyone he knew; everyone else in the country seemed to be buying his own. Perkins gloated at the dozens of critics who had so much crow to eat. “They should have seen that [Hemingway] was going through a confused time,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “and while he might not come out of it and go forward, he could only go forward by going through such a time.” The book’s sales were skyrocketing, and the Book-of-the-Month Club anticipated selling no less than a quarter of a million copies as well.
Ernest inscribed a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls to Scott Fitzgerald “with affection and esteem.” Fitzgerald did not think the book was all that Perkins and everyone seemed to be claiming. He confidentially told Sheilah Graham that it was “not up to [Hemingway‘s] standard. He wrote it for the movies.” But Fitzgerald responded to Hemingway without a hint of resentment. “It’s a fine novel,” he said, “better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication.” After picking out his favorite scenes and equating some of the paragraphs with Dostoevski’s “in their undeflected intensity,” Fitzgerald included his congratulations on the book’s great success. “I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this,” he wrote. (Years before, in his notebooks under “L” for Literary, Scott had scribbled, “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.”)
Fitzgerald could not afford it, but he decided to give himself entirely to his book about Hollywood. On December 13, 1940, he wrote Max that the novel was progressing rapidly. “I’m not going to stop now till I finish a draft which will be sometime after the 15th of January,” he said. “However, let’s pretend that it doesn’t exist until it’s closer to completion. We don’t want it to become—‘a legend before it is written’ which is what I believe Wheelock said about ‘Tender Is the Night.’” In a postscript Fitzgerald asked, “How much will you sell the plates of ‘This Side of Paradise’ for? I think it has a chance for a new life.”
The printing plates of Paradise were theoretically the author’s to take to another firm, if he would pay for their cost, approximately $1,000. Max replied: “I would hate to see the book leave us.” It was where their history together had begun. Maxwell Perkins and Scott Fitzgerald had come full circle: His oldest book had expired and a new book was about to be born. The hopes of the two men rested on the novel that Fitzgerald said would be completed in draft by the middle of the next month. With Christmas but eight days away, Perkins wrote, “Well, I hope that ‘some time after January 15th’ will come soon.”