XX
Toward the end of the year Scott Fitzgerald had moved into Sheilah Graham’s apartment. On December 20, working there, he began Chapter Six of his novel, a crucial point in the development of his hero, Monroe Stahr. It contained a scene in which Stahr drank heavily, an early sign that the original portrait of Irving Thalberg was taking on qualities of Fitzgerald’s own life. By the end of the day he was able to tell Miss Graham: “I’ve been able to fix it. Baby, this book will be good. It might even make enough money for us both to leave Hollywood.” The next day, in her apartment, Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.
It was a Saturday, and Perkins was at home. He heard the news from Harold Ober, who had been notified by Miss Graham. There is no record of his wiring Zelda, but that is what he would have done. Her letter to him, which he received a few days later, reads like a reply. In the course of it she says:
I want to convey the height of my affections for you, and the devotion and pleasure with which [Scott] always looked forward to “getting in touch with Max.” ... Scott was courageous and faithful to myself and Scottie and he was so devoted a friend that I am sure that he will be rewarded; and will be well remembered.
Zelda wondered if the 50,000 words of his unfinished novel could somehow be published. “Scott cared so deeply about his work,” she said, “and would so have liked to reach his public again—and it would be so nice for Scottie.”
The day after Christmas, Perkins replied. It was too soon to know exactly what Scott’s financial situation was at Scribners, or what the prospects were for publishing the novel; these matters would be looked into right away. “Everything will be done that possibly can for Scott’s sake,” Max assured her, “—and yours and Scottie’s.”
Zelda did not come north for the funeral. Her doctors thought it would be too great a strain on her.
Perkins did his best to inform all Scott’s friends of the services but only a few could reach Baltimore in time. Louise and Max rode the train from Wilmington to Baltimore with Gerald and Sara Murphy and John Biggs, a Princeton friend of Scott’s and a former Perkins novelist who had become a federal judge on the Third Circuit bench in Philadelphia. It was a distressing day for Perkins, especially awful because, as he told John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald’s was one of those terrible “funeral-home” funerals. There was no alternative because the Catholic Church would not permit Scott—who died a nonbeliever—to be interred in the Catholic cemetery in Rockville, alongside his father’s family. At the burial in the Rockville Union Cemetery, Mrs. Bayard Turnbull, a friend of the Fitzgeralds from their days at La Paix, near Baltimore, observed Max. “He didn’t say a word to anyone ... ,” she said later, “and then, several times, without even paying attention to what was going on, he shook his head, lifted it slowly, and looked at the sky.”
Upon his return to New York, Max sat down to a duty he had put off: writing to Hemingway about Fitzgerald’s death. “I thought of telegraphing you about Scott but it didn’t seem as if there were any use in it,” he wrote Ernest, who was in Cuba and could be assumed not to have heard the news. “Anyhow, he didn’t suffer at all, that’s one thing. It was a heart-attack and his death was instantaneous—though he had some slight attack, as they realize now, a short time before.”
Fitzgerald had borrowed heavily against his life insurance in recent years, but, Max told Ernest, it was still worth $40,000—enough, Perkins supposed, to get Scottie through college and pay off her father’s debts. The will, however, was confused. In his original testament Fitzgerald had nominated Harold Ober as his executor. After their recent rift Scott crossed out his name and penciled in Perkins’s. The legality of the change was in question, and for the moment Max was enmeshed. “I am afraid this ends my last chance of getting to Cuba for a while,” he wrote Hemingway, “for it will take some weeks to clear up confusion in the will.” In due course Perkins and Harold Ober both simply renounced their claim as executors in favor of Judge Biggs. As it turned out, for the next several years Perkins was called upon to make every decision regarding Fitzgerald’s literary legacy.
Perkins then addressed himself to a handful of letters of condolence. The dearth of mourners underscored the pathos of Scott’s death. Frances Kroll, Fitzgerald’s secretary in Hollywood, wrote Perkins to say: “I was with him through the conception and writing of the novel and perhaps questions may come up when you read the finished manuscript.” Mrs. Turnbull’s son Andrew, then a junior at Princeton, also wrote Perkins. “I often heard Mr. Fitzgerald speak of you during the 18 months he spent here in 1932—1933, when I was eleven years old,” he said. He told Perkins that upon Fitzgerald’s death he had set down his memories of the writer for fear of forgetting them. He hoped Perkins might help him get them published, because Fitzgerald’s name had become “so largely identified with a dissipated and decadent generation; and I know from personal experience that no kid could hope to find a kinder companion or truer friend this side of paradise.” Perkins replied that he had read the pages with appreciation and regretted that he knew no way to help them into print. (Turnbull later became one of Fitzgerald’s principal biographers.)
In early January Max wrote again to Zelda. “In a way he got caught in the public mind in the age that he gave a name to,” he said, “and there are many things that he wrote that should not belong to any particular time, but to all time.” It was important, however, to proceed cautiously, to produce a work that would honor Scott and demonstrate that he ought not be identified solely with the Jazz Age. The painful part, he wrote Miss Lemmon, was “that this book which might have vindicated him—for the first part of it was extremely promising—was far from finished.”
While the estate was being probated, Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, had no income, so Perkins arranged with Judge Biggs, Gerald Murphy, and Harold Ober to loan her enough to pay her way through Vassar and provide her with a monthly allowance besides.
“I can’t thank you enough for the flowers,” she wrote Max, “for coming down to Baltimore, and most of all for your kindness in lending me the money to go to college.... If the world hasn’t completely collapsed by 1944, I’ll be able to repay the loan. I hope by then to have produced a novel for your inspection too.” Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. “Everyone has to find her own way of writing,” he wrote Scottie, “and the source of finding it is largely out of literature.”
Scottie had become conscientious in her studies, but she was talking now of dropping out of Vassar and going to work. Max knew how important it had been to Scott that she become the first in her family to earn a college diploma. In the same subtle tone he used to prod Scott on to the end of a novel, Perkins wrote Scottie at the end of her junior year, “You have practically one more year in college now, and that will go quickly, and then you will still be very young and equipped with a degree.”
Zelda’s financial situation was also poor, and she wrote to ask Perkins if there was any way he could send her some money so she could pay her board;—she was now living with her mother in Montgomery, Alabama. She wondered if this might be “the most auspicious time to get the book under way: if you are still in mind to publish it.” She wrote:
The book was a story of Irving Thalberg, as Scott may have told you. Those minds which so nearly control the direction of public sentiment engaged Scott deeply. He wanted to render tangible the indomitable constancy of purpose and the driving necessity to achievement and the capacity for judicious and dextrous juggling of mysterious forces that distinguished such men from others.
It was still too soon for Perkins to respond with a definite plan.
Sheilah Graham—who for appearances’ sake had not attended Fitzgerald’s funeral—visited Perkins in New York that January. For Max it was a great pleasure to see her, even under such circumstances. “I think she was mighty good for him, and a mighty good girl herself,” Perkins wrote Hemingway after their meeting. She spoke at length about Scott’s novel. Max had already begun to think that there might be parts of the incomplete manuscript that could be published separately in some fashion.
Three weeks after Fitzgerald’s death Sheilah Graham sent Perkins a typed copy of the original of the unfinished work, tentatively titled The Love of the Last Tycoon, and many of Scott’s notes. She directed Max to one memo in particular, which revealed Fitzgerald’s intention to recapture his readership. This book, Scott remarked, was aimed at two different generations, two readers specifically—“for seventeen as symbolized by Scottie, and for Edmund Wilson at 45.” Also enclosed was an unsent letter that Fitzgerald had written to the actress Norma Shearer, the wife of Irving Thalberg, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s chief officer until his death at the age of thirty-seven in 1936.
Dear Norma:
You told me you read little because of your eyes but I think this book will interest you—and though the story is purely imaginary perhaps you could see it as an attempt to prererve something of Irving.
My own impression of him shortly recorded but very dazzling in its effect on me, inspires the best part of the character of Stahr—though I have put in some things drawn from other men and inevitably, much of myself. I invented a tragic story and Irving’s life was, of course, not tragic except his struggle against ill health, because no one has written a tragedy about Hollywood—(a Star is Born was a pathetic story and often beautiful story but not a tragedy) and doomed and heroic things do happen here.
Miss Graham also found a fragment Fitzgerald had addressed to himself which was so moving in its irony that she sent it to Perkins.
I want to write scenes that are frightening and inimitable. I don’t want to be as intelligible to my contemporaries as Ernest, who as Gertrude Stein said, is bound for the museums.
I am far enough ahead to have some small immortality if I can keep well.
At the end of January Max sent Miss Graham a progress report. He regretted that he still had not come to any definite conclusion about printing the novel. “All I know,” he wrote, “is that it promised to be the most completely mature, and rich, and in a deep sense the most brilliant book he ever did. I think Stahr, though incomplete, is his best character.... It would break a man’s heart to see what this book would have been, and that it wasn’t finished.”
Perkins’s words brought Sheilah Graham to tears. “Please do something with it,” she begged the editor. “It drives me simply crazy to remember his enthusiasm and plodding work on it and then for him to die.” She agreed with Max that nobody except Scott could conceivably finish the book, but it seemed that if it were published as it was, eliminating only the most unrealized parts, which Fitzgerald himself would most likely have altered or cut anyway, there would be an important piece left to publish as “a sort of unfinished symphony.”
As he had done when Ring Lardner died, Perkins consulted Gilbert Seldes, who, Max thought, had “very good practical, as well as critical judgment.” Seldes read the manuscript and the next week Perkins reported to Scott’s executor, John Biggs, that he and Seldes were of the same mind.
The unfinished book is most interesting. It is a tragedy it is unfinished. It was a clear step forward. I don’t say that it was better in actual writing itself, or even that it would have been, than The Great Gatsby.But it has the same old magic that Scott got into a sentence, or a paragraph, or a phrase. It has a kind of wisdom in it, and nobody ever penetrated beneath the surface of the movie world to any such degree. It was to have been a very remarkable book. There are 56,000 words. If they were published alone it would only be read as a curiosity and for its literary interest, because people won’t read an unfinished book. But it ought somehow to be published for the sake of Scott’s name. My idea was to publishThe Great Gatsby, five or six of the best stories and then this unfinished novel.
Perkins and Seldes also agreed that Edmund Wilson, whose opinion, Max believed, Scott respected more than anyone’s, was the best person to write an explanatory introduction. After disagreements and discussions—mostly about “The Crack-Up” pieces, which Wilson wanted to include—Perkins finally got Wilson to consent to all his terms. Max even persuaded him to edit the manuscript and to write a summary of the plot Fitzgerald had in mind for the remainder of the novel. The book would include The Great Gatsbyand Scott’s most enduring stories—“May Day,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “The Rich Boy,” “Absolution,” and “Crazy Sunday”—together with the unfinished work.
Wilson first called upon Sheilah Graham, to extract every memory she had of what Scott had said about the book. He then spent months examining Fitzgerald’s notes. Within a half-year of Fitzgerald’s death Wilson had finished the anthology. He had done more than prove his loyalty to Fitzgerald in this, his first collaborative effort with Scott since the Princeton Triangle Club production of The Evil Eye in 1915. In his introduction Wilson wrote,
The Last Tycoon is ... Fitzgerald’s most mature piece of work. It is marked off from his other novels by the fact that it is the first to deal seriously with any profession or business. The earlier books of Fitzgerald had been preoccupied with debutantes and college boys, with the fast lives of the wild spenders of the twenties.... In going through the immense pile of drafts and notes that the author had made for this novel, one is confirmed and reinforced in one’s impression that Fitzgerald will be found to stand out as one of the first-rate figures in the American writing of this period. The last pages of The Great Gatsby are certainly, both from the dramatic point of view and from the point of view of prose, among the very best things in the fiction of our generation. T. S. Eliot said of the book that Fitzgerald had taken the first important step that had been made in the American novel since Henry James. And certainly The Last Tycoon, even in its unfulfilled intention, takes its place among the books that set a standard.
While Wilson wrote, Max labored to try to revive interest in Fitzgerald. He had heard a rumor that influential people at Princeton had come to look upon Fitzgerald with disfavor; hoping to squelch that rumor, he wrote Princeton to suggest that it bring out a book to honor Scott. He had no success. Not for fifteen years would the Friends of the Library of Princeton University produce a volume of Fitzgerald’s work.
Max also attempted to launch a biography of Fitzgerald; he realized that it might be considered a bit early for that, but the eclipse of Fitzgerald’s reputation was alarming enough to embolden him. He urged Matthew Josephson, a former staff member of the New Republic, to undertake the story of a “brilliant figure of a period ... the whole background of that strange period, with Scott very distinctly in the foreground.” Josephson took up his pen but soon had to throw it down. He later explained, “I knew the story of Zelda, and planned to tell it all as the central tragedy of Scott’s life.... I learned that she had just been released from another institution where she had been confined for a couple of years and declared entirely ‘cured.’ So I halted; for the time being I could not tell her story in public, though I was sure she would be back in again; and decided to wait.” While he waited, Arthur Mizener, a Princetonian who was then a professor at Carleton College in Minnesota, studied Fitzgerald’s career and came to know his family. His biography, The Far Side of Paradise, the first of several of Fitzgerald, appeared in 1951.
So much of Perkins’s spring had been devoted to Fitzgerald that Ernest Hemingway felt Max was giving him short shrift. He had gone to Hong Kong to cover the Sino-Japanese War, and since he had been in the Orient, he complained, four China clippers had flown in carrying not a word from Scribners. “What the hell is the matter?” he asked Perkins. Max wrote five times in the next month, mainly about the progress of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Sales were fast approaching the half-million mark. Concerned about the war in Europe, Perkins wrote Hemingway that he wished he “had the temperament of Van Wyck Brooks, who surveys the world like Buddha, with complete detachment apparently—and yet he really is deeply interested. He is able to do his work and not be bothered.”
Despite his friendship with Brooks, Perkins privately maintained that America’s most astute critic of contemporary literature was Edmund Wilson. The assertion may have been a bit painful for Perkins to make, for after The Last Tycoon he was no longer Wilson’s publisher. The Perkins-Wilson relationship was irreparably ruptured over Wilson’s most recent collection of essays, called The Wound and the Bow. In one of these essays Wilson had attacked Hemingway. Wilson charged that as the quality of Hemingway’s writing diminished, his craving for personal publicity increased, and that his work was now dominated by fantasies. Wilson examined Hemingway’s attitude toward women, especially toward the “amoeba-like little Spanish girl Maria” in For Whom the Bell Tolls. “This love affair with a woman in a sleeping bag,” he wrote, “lacking completely the kind of give and take that goes on between real men and women, has the all-too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream.”
Perkins defended Hemingway. He thought Wilson’s essay on Ernest was “fascinating” but dead wrong. Word around New York was that Perkins felt Wilson was hitting below the belt and that he refused to publish anything so derogatory to Hemingway. Caroline Gordon Tate remembered hearing that Wilson and Perkins had long conferences about that particular chapter of the book.
Meanwhile, Perkins met another literary critic, Maxwell Geismar, a thirty-two-year-old professor at Sarah Lawrence College, who was conducting a study of the modern American novel. He was proposing to examine the works of a half-dozen authors between the wars, in a book called Writers in Crisis. At the suggestion of a mutual friend, Geismer had sent Perkins chapters he had written on Ring Lardner, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck. Perkins was delighted that a scholar was at last recognizing Lardner’s talents, and he thought Geismar’s piece on Wolfe was “about the best that has been written.” Perkins knew that the young critic had previously written favorably about Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, but, cautious now, he would not accept Geismar’s book for publication until he had seen his essay on Hemingway. Perkins suggested that Geismar include William Faulkner in his book, and Geismar agreed.
Perkins’s dispute with Wilson grew more intense. During one debate, he mentioned Geismar’s work to Wilson. Wilson looked up Geismar and they became friendly. The two of them noted that Perkins had them both in the same spot—he was stalling about accepting their books. Wilson complained to Geismar about publishers in general and remarked that editors were not terribly busy people yet took outrageous amounts of time in making up their minds.
Then came the climax. Caroline Gordon Tate remembered hearing that, in one meeting with Perkins, Wilson shouted that “all publishers were sons of bitches.” Shortly thereafter he took his book to Houghton Mifflin, and since Scribners was still delaying about Geismar’s book, he was able to punish Perkins further by getting Houghton Mifflin to take that book too.
When Geismar showed Wilson his Hemingway essay, he was delighted to find that it met with approval. Geismar noted years afterward: “I hardly slept a wink all night. Wilson descended portentously and said in his slight high stammer: ‘I think your essay on Hemingway ... is better than mine.’ ” Geismar believed it was, for Wilson “did not get at the depth wound in Hemingway, or the complete social-historical ignorance that did him in as much.” After the book was published, Ernest and Martha Gellhorn Hemingway visited the Geismars at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, New York. “They came in from a walk along the Bronx River,” Geismar recalled, “talking as if it was a safari in deepest Africa and full of dears and darlings.” Over dinner at an Italian restaurant, Hemingway, who had few kind words for any critics of his work, remarked, “You know what I liked best in that essay of yours ... was the quotations you used. I never realized how good they were.”
Perkins was unhappy about losing both books to Houghton Mifflin and brooded for years over Wilson’s remark about publishers. Caroline Gordon Tate said she never saw Max again without his mentioning it, “sorrowfully rather than resentfully.” Perkins continued to tout Geismar as the best of the up-and-coming literary essayists. Wilson’s criticism was always somewhat personal, he said, while Geismar’s “is detached and yet alive with the enthusiasm that comes from perception of talent.”
“The development of American talent and literature, that was where his main interest lay,” John Hall Wheelock, Perkins’s closest colleague, wrote of the editor. “To the oncoming talents in countries other than his own, he was less alert.” By the 1940s Wheelock had also noticed other aspects of his taste: “Quite a few crotchety prejudices and quirks of unreason, a will ‘immutable and still as stone’—that was Max.... Science and abstract thinking interested him less than did books on controversial subjects or those based upon the application of a theory or ideas. His passion was for the rare real thing, the flash of poetic insight that lights up a character or a situation and reveals talent at work.” Perkins’s partiality toward novels, Wheelock said, became an almost exclusive interest; when he was attracted to a work of nonfiction, it tended to be “crack-pot.” And of late, Wheelock noted, in acquiring authors and helping shape their material “Max often became contrary and contradictory. Just plain Yankee stubborn.”
Frequently, now, Perkins signed up authors, then tried to pawn off on them ideas he had treasured for years. It seldom worked. While Dixon Wecter, for example, was writing a book for Scribners entitled The Hero in America, Max suggested he write a book Max wanted to call The Trouble Makers.
It would be a historical narrative to show how intelligence, in times of crisis, is almost always overcome, and, tragically, by emotion—that the men of good-will, detachment, far-sightedness, and intellect, are overborne by the men of powerful emotions, violence and strong will.
Perkins himself saw the flaw in this premise; he acknowledged that “No progress would be made, perhaps, without the impetuous ones. They do give the impulse which makes things move, even if through destruction.”
In 1942 Perkins was reading proofs of a book that did get published only because of his obstinacy. It was Alden Brooks’s Will Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand. For some time the book had been a mania with him. At every editorial conference Perkins brought it up and the board unanimously voted it down. “So, being a man of infinite patience,” one Scribners employee recalled, “he would reintroduce his suggestion at the next conference, with the same result.” What charmed Perkins about the work was that it credited Sir Edward Dyer, an editor, with Shakespeare’s success. Indeed, the book had convinced Perkins that “the man Shakespeare was not the author of what we consider Shakespeare’s works.” Eventually the board gave in, to please Perkins. Max sent copies to many critics, hoping to rouse support. Nearly every one dismissed the work as mere speculation. Still Perkins retained his faith in the book and his respect for it. It made him aware, he told Hemingway, “how frightfully ignorant I am in literature, where a publishing man ought not to be.”
Perkins encountered less opposition and more success editing the nonfiction of James Truslow Adams, the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Founding of New England, The Epic of America, and The March of Democracy. In August, 1941, Adams sent Perkins the introduction and chapter outlines for his newest work, The American. Along with the material came a request. Adams knew few men who personified as many of the nation’s essential characteristics as did Maxwell Evarts Perkins, and so he urged Perkins to set down his observations to help make up this mural of the American character. Max did, and in writing The American, Adams incorporated all of his comments, often quoting him directly.
One of the more striking was on the position and influence of the American woman, which Max said had never been fully treated in any book that he knew of. “When I was a boy in Vermont,” he wrote Adams, “I used to see the middle-aged and old men going to church, not with their wives, not in front of their wives, but about fifteen or twenty feet behind them.” He remembered commenting on it to his mother and her saying with a laugh “that it was supposed to be the New England way.” But Perkins felt it was more than that. New England women, he felt, exerted a moral leadership that was symbolized by their leadership in the march to church. Adams picked up on this point and remarked that whereas American men had regularly tried to place women on pedestals, the women had had the good sense promptly to descend, in order to get on with their work. Perkins, in fact, always respected women who were doers; he wanted them not just to stand on their own two feet but to venture out into the world. No woman writer better embodied this idea of Perkins’s than Martha Gellhorn, whose books Scribners began to publish. Not only was she the consummate venturer; she was also in full control of her career and her prose. She was in that select company of Perkins’s most skilled authors—those who required little help from him.
Some of the others needed a great deal. Following her success with Dynasty of Death, Taylor Caldwell had pulled several large manuscripts from the drawer and sent them to Perkins. He rejected them all. Not deterred, Miss Caldwell sat down and wrote a sequel to Dynasty of Death, called The Eagles Gather. She brought it down from Rochester to New York City in person and asked Perkins for an honest appraisal of the manuscript and of her writing talent in general.
Perkins thought the sequel was weaker than Dynasty of Death. But Scribners published The Eagles Gather, and Taylor Caldwell dedicated it to Perkins. The work did not discourage him about her future in the least. “What you have chiefly,” he wrote her, “is the superb talent for telling a story on a grand scale. It is a mighty rare talent.” Perkins said it was just a question of finding a theme large enough for her. He urged her to try a historical novel. In a letter on October 17, 1939, he said, “I do wish now that you would begin to consider the possibility of that kind of book.” She was impressed with the idea. First she came up with a title, The Earth Is the Lord’s. A few days later, while she was thinking of distant times to explore, Genghis Khan flashed into her head. “Why Genghis Khan,” she wrote to Perkins, “I simply don’t know. All I know about him is that he had an engaging little trick of slaughtering whole populations, and that he overran Asia and part of Europe, and lived somewhere towards the end of the twelfth century, and was a Mongol, son of a Mongol chieftain and a white woman, and was a fine figure of a man, and was definitely NOT Kublai Khan. But fragments keep drifting into my mind, from God knows where.”
Perkins generally believed in letting characters direct the plot of novels, but he instructed Miss Caldwell to think this book entirely through before setting pen to paper. He sent her all the historical information on Genghis Khan within his reach and books that described central Asia. He suggested that instead of making Genghis himself the central figure she should write a strong personal story about someone who accompanied him and suspend the novel from that.
Sometimes a book about periods far back like that and about great epic movements, becomes too generalized, too little about a particular individual or particular individuals. That is a danger you must guard against, particularly with your imagination which tends to see things in the large.
Perkins recommended she read Sir Walter Scott and Dumas to get the hang of writing historicals.
The Earth Is the Lord’s was published in 1941. Critics did not take her history seriously and the book was not a great success. But it served as the model for best-selling fictionalizations of real lives which she would write during the next four decades—Saint Paul, Cicero, and Pericles among them. With his simple intuition that Taylor Caldwell should write historical novels, Perkins had founded one of the most enduring and profitable careers in the history of book publishing, one that continued three decades after his own death.
Another successful author whom Perkins had launched during the thirties was Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. While The Yearling was enjoying its two-year tenancy on the best-seller lists—with sales of 500,000 copies, and winning a Pulitzer Prize—Max was thinking about her next book. It was even clearer to him that her gift lay in describing life in the territory she knew. Her writing lost its charm and authority when she departed from it. Perkins advised her to consider a book of true stories about her Florida scrub country.
“Your suggestion about the non-fiction book is actually uncanny,” she wrote back. In fact, she said, she had been thinking of doing just such a work about her home, Cross Creek, before tackling another novel. But she wasn’t yet sure. At the end of the summer of 1940 Mrs. Rawlings sent Perkins several sketches she had written, for his inspection. She asked him to tell her how he saw the book. He replied on September 20 that he envisioned it as being organized around events, with the locale itself as the protagonist.
I think that the book should be a narrative, varied somewhat by description and by reflection—to use a figure it should be a single piece of string, with knots in it, the knots being the episodes, but each connected with the other by the incidents, etc.
Max knew that generalizations would not be enough for Mrs. Rawlings. As she had done while beginning The Yearling, she insisted on receiving detailed directions. And so he let his letter run to 1,800 words, full of specific suggestions. He said, for example, that the opening chapter should run no more than a few pages and proposed that her little piece called “The Road” be worked into it. “Walking along that road,” he pointed out, “could enable you in the most natural way to give, at the start, a conception of the neighborhood.” And that was the way Cross Creek began.
Cross Creek is a bend in a country road, by land, and the flowing of Lochloosa Lake into Orange Lake, by water. We are four miles west of the small village of Island River, nine miles east of a turpentine still, and on the other sides we do not count distance at all, for the two lakes and the broad marshes create an infinite space between us and the horizon. We are five white families; “Old Boss” Brice, the Glissons, the Mackays, and the Bernie Basses; and two colored families, Henry Woodward, and the Mickenses. People in Island Grove consider us just a little biggety and more than a little queer.
Perkins offered other devices for making the episodes mesh—a cycle of the four seasons, to name one. He also told her which characters he thought should reappear and which adventures should be extended. Mrs. Rawlings followed Max’s advice to the letter, and, after four drafts, written in almost two years, Cross Creek became another of her highly acclaimed best sellers.
Nancy Hale’s was another career which had to be guided painstakingly. In her case the problem was not the prose but the author’s morale. Her third novel, The Prodigal Women, had been interrupted by the dissolution of her second marriage and a nervous breakdown.
Perkins’s compassion for troubled writers had not lessened. At about this time he wrote to one author in almost the same words he had used earlier with Thomas Wolfe and Scott Fitzgerald, advising a creative pause:
You won’t have lost time for the rest will have made you younger, so to speak. And turning things over in your mind, and reflecting upon them and all, is something that a writer ought to have to do in quiet circumstances once in a while. That is one of the troubles with writers today, that they cannot get a chance, or cannot endure to do this. Galsworthy, who never over-rated himself as a writer but was one of great note in fact, always said that the most fruitful thing for a writer to do was quiet brooding.
For Nancy Hale, Max prescribed this effective remedy. She spent months in the Southwest and at the end of 1941 returned to resume her writing. Again she reached an impasse. Perkins reacted with the calmness of one who had seen this sort of situation often enough not to be daunted by it:
You cannot worry me about your novel. I remember so well the quality of all that I saw of it, and I know that you have a rich and sensitive mind and memory. In fact I would be much more concerned if you did not have to go through periods of despair and anxiety and dissatisfaction. It is true that a good many novelists do not, but I think the best ones truly do, and I do not see how it would be otherwise. It is awfully hard work, writing of the kind you do.
I, myself, feel certain that it will end very well indeed, if you can endure the struggle. The struggle is part of the process. There is no sign that Jane Austen had any trouble at all, but I am sure Charlotte Bronte must have had, and almost all of the really good ones, except Jane, who is good as gold, of course.
Nancy Hale overcame her block and worked straight through to the conclusion of The Prodigal Women.
Marcia Davenport’s writing was also interrupted—in 1940, when Wendell Willkie ran for president and she and her husband joined his barnstorming team of speech-writers and policy-makers. Knowing Perkins’s feelings about Roosevelt made her less ashamed about putting aside her novel. Within weeks of Willkie’s trouncing, though, she was back at her story of an industrialist’s family in Pittsburgh. Perkins stayed in close touch with her for the next several months while she drafted the book, sending her short notes periodically, inviting her to tea. His advice throughout remained the same: “Just get it all down on paper and then we’ll see what to do with it.” When she at last delivered it in 1941, the novel was amost 800,000 words long and totally disjointed. It was not until she was deep into the book, she said, that she had realized she could not find her way out. Now she was prepared to scrap it altogether.
Perkins thought The Valley of Decision was the most chaotic manuscript he had ever seen in his life. He brought it home night after night to puzzle over it. Once Louise, not knowing whose manuscript it was but recognizing it by the yellow paper as the same thing that Max had been working on for so many evenings and weekends, said, “Why do you put so much time on that?” Perkins replied: “Because I am a damned fool.” He later told Marjorie Rawlings that he had believed it was “only worth the time because it would not do to allow Marcia to fail on this big undertaking. It might ruin her career to get beaten that way. She was so completely entangled in the underbrush of the book that she could not manage it.” After weeks of slowly going through the manuscript himself, he wrote her:
I really think that the great difficulty in bringing “The Valley of Decision” into final shape is the old one of not being able to see the forest for the trees. There are such a great number of trees. We must somehow bring the underlying scheme or pattern of the book into emphasis, so that the reader will be able to see the forest in spite of the many trees. And that will mean reducing the number of trees if we can possibly manage it—though, so far, I haven’t found that easy.
Several readings later, Max organized his suggestions into a series of letters, one of them thirty pages long. His approach to the material was as orderly as that of a genealogist drawing a family tree. He started at the beginning and picked out the most important story lines, those he felt should run through the entire novel; anything that weakened those strands had no business in the book. Ignoring Mrs. Davenport’s divisions, he separated the novel into three major parts and told her the principal purpose of each. Then he provided an extensive chapter-by-chapter breakdown, with detailed commentary. Finally, he clarified the characters for the author, sharpening their definition in short summaries of their traits—all this for a novel he was never quite sure would prove publishable.
Later Marcia Davenport told Malcolm Cowley, “Everything Max does is directed toward the whole effect of the book.... He believes in your characters; they become completely real to him.... He can take a mess of chaos, give you the scaffold, and then you build a house on it.... His dish is a big, long thing full of agony and confusion.” Like so many of his authors, she discovered as she returned to work that Max’s comments were effective almost subliminally; he had a way of gently tossing them out as one would pebbles into a pond, making rings of meaning which enlarged until they touched the author’s consciousness.
Mrs. Davenport put Perkins’s letter on one side of her typewriter and the manuscript on the other, and revised her novel according to his plan. The job took five months. Perkins assumed the outcome would be perfunctory, but she surprised him. She rewrote nearly the entire book, reorganizing and tightening it with great speed and skill, and she cut the length almost in half. “She is a woman of character and determination,” Perkins told Marjorie Rawlings. As for Marcia Davenport, everywhere she went she sang Max’s praises, giving him full credit for his help, calling it a “case of Trilby and Svengali.” Max readied the novel for publication in 1942, hardly suspecting the immense success it would attain.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor intensified Max’s obsession with the war, and he read everything about it he could find. As usual, Elizabeth Lemmon was his relief. “No use to talk about the war,” he wrote her on December 23, after almost a year of silence. “You have always managed to more or less stay home,” he observed, “and I think that was probably the wisest and happiest thing that could be done.” Max himself was becoming home-bound, office-bound, reducing his own social contacts. Even Windsor saddened him now. “I don’t like to go there,” he admitted, “and it is hard to see how, as memories accumulate through the generations, people can stay in one place through hundreds of years. The past would be too much with them, I should think. You want to get back there, but it can’t be done. You can’t go home again.”
In the last few months of 1941 Perkins’s correspondence with Hemingway had slackened again noticeably as well. Max had been thinking about some kind of anthology of Hemingway’s shorter works, but the idea was so nebulous to him that he could not define it, he told Ernest in September, much less urge it upon him. Perkins said he had heard from the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who was assembling an anthology of fiction for college use. Warren wanted to include Hemingway’s “The Killers” and follow it with a study of the story. Perkins imagined the essay would be “altogether too elaborate and theoretical,” but, he said to Ernest, “there is nothing better to make a writer permanent than to have him read in the schools.” Hemingway agreed about the importance of having it in the classroom, “no matter how hard it is on the poor students.”
As for Scott Fitzgerald’s claim on posterity, Max prayed it would be strengthened by The Last Tycoon. It was published in November, 1941, and Max’s hopes were somewhat fulfilled. A number of reviewers said the novel made it plain that Fitzgerald was something more than just a Jazz Age chronicler. The New York Times reviewed the book well, and Stephen Vincent Benét, writing in the Saturday Review, declared: “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”
To a few old friends Zelda expressed her dislike of Scott’s heroine, an Englishwoman named Kathleen Moore, but said she liked the novel as a whole. “I hope the book will sell,” she wrote Max, “—at least enough to repay your interest.” Despite all the praise and prayers, The Last Tycoon sold only 3,268 copies in its first year.
For a while Hemingway was not sure if he should tell Perkins what he thought of The Last Tycoon. When he did, he was brutal. He said he found some very fine parts in it but felt that most of the book had a “deadness” which he thought was unbelievable coming from Fitzgerald. He likened the novel to a slab of bacon on which mold had formed. One could scrape off what was on top, but the meat still tasted like moldy bacon. Still smarting from Edmund Wilson’s criticisms of his own work in The Wound and the Bow,Hemingway, while conceding that Wilson had done a “very credible job” in explaining, sorting, padding, and arranging, said that Scott would never have finished the work according to that “gigantic, preposterous outline” that Wilson had fabricated.
Hemingway knew that Perkins would be impressed by the novel’s thrilling “stuff about riding in aeroplanes.” But, he said, that was because Max had traveled so little. Fitzgerald had flown so recently that it had impressed him too, and he had managed to instill something of the “old magic” into his writing about air travel. When he wrote about the relationships between men and women, however, Scott’s skill had faltered badly. Fitzgerald, he said, had thoroughly failed to understand his people and the characters had come out as very strange. Perkins, he knew, had recently written Martha Gellhorn that Hollywood had not hurt Scott. Ernest guessed perhaps it had not, but that was because he was long past being hurt before he went out there. Scott’s pulse had faded out in postwar France, he said, and the rest of him “just went on dying progressively after that.” For Hemingway, reading The Last Tycoon was like watching an old baseball pitcher with nothing left in his arm coming out and working with his intelligence for a few innings before getting batted out of the box.
Years later, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway summed up Fitzgerald’s career with an image that had first struck him when reading The Last Tycoon:
His talent was natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
Exercising restraint, Perkins told Hemingway that he found his criticism “very interesting,” then called Hemingway’s attention to the intelligent and often favorable reviews Fitzgerald was getting. “I am glad we did the book,” he said simply. “People did not give Scott proper credit for Tender Is the Night.”
Ernest and Martha had been in Sun Valley, Idaho. Early in 1942 they returned to the finca in Cuba, and Max wrote that he hoped they would both be able to “work in some degree of calm.” Hemingway got detoured from his short stories, however, by a man from Crown Publishing Company who asked him to write a foreword to an anthology of great writing on war, accounts from Thermopylae to Caporetto. The book was to be called Men at War, and to Hemingway the assignment sounded worthwhile. But he told Max he thought that the selections to be included were terrible, and so he had insisted on including other pieces.
In time, his introduction lengthened, and he became the book’s anthologist. He was sorry to disappoint Perkins by not having the manuscripts for his stories in early July as he had planned, but the “damned war anthology,” he kept insisting, was holding him up.
The Men at War book fascinated Perkins. When he saw that Crown was going about it in a slapdash way, the editor in him was dismayed. He could not refrain from offering his own advice and did so at every opportunity. He recalled for Hemingway some of his favorite war passages—from Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Winston Churchill, and Thomas Nelson Page. He urged him to include at least one excerpt from Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat, and he directed him to Tolstoi’s most dramatic passages. Eventually Max became annoyed that Hemingway was so involved with the anthology that he was neglecting his own short-story writing. But the result, especially Hemingway’s patriotic essay at the start of the book, made him feel better. “When I read the introduction,” he wrote Ernest in September, “I was mighty glad of it. I can’t forget it. It raised my morale a good many points.”
Perkins’s morale needed raising. That April his nephew Robert Hill Cox, his sister Fanny’s son, had been killed in the battle for Tunisia. Afterward Max had come across a story the young man had written and seen that he was talented; he felt sorry he had never had the chance to talk to him about it. The boy’s death saddened Max enormously and continued to affect his spirits. And then, in August of 1942, Will James died. Not just a prolific Scribners author but a close friend of Max’s, the cowboy who had sent him a ten-gallon hat, James was fifty—eight years younger than his editor. Another beloved author gone.