XXI
Daddy, don’t you drink too much?“ Max’s youngest daughter, Nancy, asked him one day in 1942.
“Churchill drinks too much,” Max replied. “All great men drink too much.”
There was no question that this particular great man was drinking too much. More and more often he ducked out of the office in the late morning “to buy a newspaper”—and a drink—returning calmer, face flushed. At his round table at Cherio’s, Max’s preprandial martinis had become doubles, and the more of them there were, the less he ate. He often dined alone, reading a newspaper from beginning to end, examining every page for war news. “Always the same from one day to another,” Cherio, the proprietor, remembered. “He like quiet. He never say one word unless you speak to him. He talk very delicate, very soft, and you won’t want to miss a word.”
Max, in his behavior, never showed the slightest indication of heavy drinking, according to friends and colleagues, and none of his powers appeared impaired. But his appearance showed his years and the strain. Below the brim of his hat, now battered and worn and pulled even lower on his head, his face had paled. Often the blue washed from his eyes, leaving them gray. Under his eyes the circles had deepened and darkened. He frequently wore the benign grin of the deaf person who has not heard a word that has been said but wants to seem friendly and attentive. The hacking cough from a lifetime of cigarettes was growing more severe. His hands sometimes trembled visibly.
In July, 1942, Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon: “We are having a lonely summer, Louise and I.” The differences between Max and his wife had become even more pronounced. Their conversations were now shorter and their arguments keener. Louise would say anything to break Max’s Yankee composure, and Max would say anything to silence Louise. His behavior was now typical of the unhappily married man. He would delay going home. First he would stop off at his regular spot, the Ritz Bar, for a few drinks. Then he often would drop in on a married daughter—Zippy, who was living in the city, or Bertha in New Canaan—and visit with her and her family. Some evenings he never got all the way home, having spent the night in an armchair; next morning he would arrive at work wearing the same rumpled shirt and suit he had worn the day before.
And he went even deeper into his work. He complained that the Scribner Building was locked on Saturdays. “A two-day weekend ... ,” he wrote a friend, “is too much.” At home, reading became his only passion. If Louise suggested going out somewhere, he would reply, “I have work to do,” and spend most of the night reading manuscripts. If she invited friends to the house, Max would try to excuse himself, complaining that he was “stuck” in a manuscript. Some evenings he would not descend the stairs to greet the guests.
At the office he grew irascible. He took to commenting tartly on small matters such as a colleague’s departing from work a few minutes early. His humor turned mordant, sarcastic. When his devoted secretary, Miss Wyckoff., asked for her annual vacation, his retort was a cruel insult: “What would you need a vacation for?” Once one of his authors wrote to say that Miss Wyckoff deserved a medal for diligence and efficiency. Max called in the selfsame Miss Wyckoff and dictated his reply: “No secretary was ever treated with more indulgence and affection. And after all, though she does work hard ... she only works five days in the week.”
Sometimes Perkins sat stock-still at his desk, mooning into space. Periodically he dozed off, and Miss Wyckoff would gently close the door to ward off intruders. One afternoon while Perkins was thus disposed, one of his more obtrusive authors came by. Miss Wyckoff said Mr. Perkins was busy. Hearing no sound from within the office, the writer determined to see for himself, dragged a chair over to the door, stood on it, and looked through the transom. Miss Wyckoff scolded him indignantly: “Don’t you know he doesn’t get much sleep?”
Even when the door was open, Perkins was not very approachable. His customary silences were now accentuated by forbidding stares that intimidated many of his authors. “That silence could on occasion be terrifying,” said John Hall Wheelock, “and when driven to desperation by some long-winded speaker, Max would sometimes puncture it with an irritable, ‘Well, what about it?’ which usually served to bring things to a head. He was not by any means always amiable.” And yet Perkins’s testiness became part of his charm.
Late in the summer of 1942 Hemingway wrote Perkins that he had an opening for a “good old Dry Tortugas man.” It had been almost ten years since Ernest had been able to cajole Max into vacationing with him, and he did not succeed this time. Scribners was somewhat short-staffed-some men were in the service, some had been let go because business was not good, and some of those who remained were themselves on vacation. Max felt he had to stay in New York. “Honestly, Ernest,” he wrote, “I couldn’t.”
With rare exceptions Perkins was seeing no one outside the office. In the last few months, however, he had renewed his friendship with Alexander Woollcott. They had been young reporters together on the New York Times, and when Max had gone off into publishing, Woollcott had gone on to become a famous drama critic and a flamboyant figure of his time. The two men had a mutual attachment to Vermont. Since the twenties, Woollcott had held court at his summer place on a small island in Lake Bomoseen. More recently, he had chosen to live there year-round. In January, 1943, Woollcott told Max that he was abandoning his country home. “I am sorry you have had to leave Vermont, the best place there is to be,” Perkins wrote him on January 18. “I have already given it up myself because too many people have died. There are too many ghosts where I come from.” Perkins told Woollcott that he wished they could turn the clock back, that their whole pack of young reporters could be together again on the seventeenth floor of the Times Building. One week after Perkins’s letter arrived, Alexander Woollcott died.
Perkins for years had talked of retiring to Vermont and editing his own country gazette. He wanted to print all the news he saw fit to print, perhaps reaching millions of people through his writing as the paper won fame beyond its precinct, and perhaps—a daydream about which only his closest friends knew—making him a national power ... even president. “Of course, Max never really wanted to be president,” John Hall Wheelock said; he merely held himself in secret readiness, articulating his positions on the issues to whoever would listen, maintaining perpetual concern for his country. The notion of retiring to Vermont had evaporated. (“I had always meant to end up there,” he had written Woollcott, “but I can’t do it.”) The concern, however, had not lessened.
As the New Deal moved farther and farther from his Jeffersonian principles, Max became greatly irritated. The purest tenets of American democracy, as he understood them, were being undermined by “that man in the White House.” In February, 1943, Perkins wrote to a Mr. Raymond Thompson:
I think these extreme New Dealers are for the most part men of the best intentions, but that if they have their way it will inevitably lead to the concentration of all capital, and all power, in the hands of a government, and that that government must then necessarily become a dictatorship, whether it will or not. And then it will rule the nation through a bureaucracy which will become, as has happened in Russia, a kind of aristocracy, a privileged class.
Perkins believed that the only hope of man lies “in the diffusion of power. If it ever gets into the hands of any single group we are done for in every way excepting conceivably a material one. Everyone might get enough to eat, etc. but he would have no freedom. But then, on the other hand, it may be that Capitalism cannot function any longer, and that we shall have to acquiesce to communism.”
Perkins’s politics were reflected in Scribners’ forthcoming publication of The Fifth Seal, Mark Aldanov’s staunchly anti-Soviet novel. In a concluding passage the Russian émigré author had one of his characters say:
“Yes, of course I hate Hitler more than I hate the Bolsheviks. But if freedom and human dignity are to be defended, they must be defended honestly: against all tyrants and all corrupters.”
That was just how Perkins felt. The American Communists did everything they could to scare Scribners out of publishing The Fifth Seal, and the book became a cause celebre early in 1943. It was a strong best seller.
Publishing companies, unlike toothpaste companies, do not produce identical products year after year. Each book is a brand-new product, with individual qualities and requiring individual attention. A toothpaste company creates a market for its product and then needs only to maintain that market. A publisher must make a new market for each book—several hundred, perhaps, each year. (This hard fact of publishing life partially explains why so few books are sold—in a nation of over 200 million people, a mere 5,000 copies is an excellent sale for a first novel—and also why publishing is not an especially lucrative endeavor.) Furthermore, while the toothpaste manufacturer can forecast his sales with some accuracy, the publisher seldom can, because each book—except for those by well-established authors—is a different sales problem. Sales may be unpredictably low—or the publisher may be surprised by sudden bounty. Books contracted for years earlier and labored upon in obscurity may suddenly skyrocket. That is what happened to Scribners in 1943. The Fifth Seal was one in a string of no fewer than seven best sellers. In the first nine months of the year their combined sales totaled 2 million copies.
Only one of the seven was nonfiction: Paris Underground, a book of personal narratives about the war in Europe, by Etta Shiber. The others were all novels, a fact that led Perkins to attribute the surge of prosperity to the public’s being “cut off [by the war] from their former ways of amusement.” One novel was For Whom the Bell Tolls, which in its third year sold 150,000 copies. There was also Edmund Gilligan’s The Gaunt Woman. And there were three others whose success was especially cheering for Perkins.
Marcia Davenport’s The Valley of Decision, which had come out in the fall of 1942, sold 300,000 copies within twelve months and eventually reached twice that figure. She was overwhelmed by the sales and flabbergasted by the favorable press. One evening when she was at dinner with the Charles Scribners and Max, the conversation veered to Thomas Wolfe and his problems, and Max said that Tom could have advanced with his work only by leaving Scribners, as he had done. “Oh no!” Mrs. Davenport said. “He needed you as much as I do. I couldn’t write a book without you.”
“If that were true,” Perkins replied, “you would not be worth the work that has gone into you.”
Perkins believed Marcia Davenport would not discover her full talents until she revealed more of herself in her writing. He wanted to help her to overcome her resistance against writing autobiographical fiction, for he felt she was denying herself a deeper integrity and passion in her material. He kept urging her toward it and after a year or so she capitulated. In 1945 she began a novel the theme of which was drawn from her own life in Manhattan: East Side, West Side.
Marcia Davenport had once made Charles Scribner shudder by divulging her dearest wish: She wanted to write a book that might sell only 1,200 copies but would be called a work of art. Under Perkins’s aegis, she felt that was attainable. When she talked with him, he never stressed financial results. Once, she knew, when he had listened to someone complain about the commercial emphasis of a certain publishing house, Perkins had commented: “What you mean is, those people don’t love books.”
Nancy Hale did not have Marcia Davenport’s difficulty with personal writing. Her novel The Prodigal Women, published alongside The Valley of Decision in Scribners’ colossal year of best sellers, was a crystallization of her own experience. The book did extraordinarily well. Beyond that, Perkins admired it for revealing female character so deftly. “From the very beginning,” he wrote her in reply to a letter of gratitude, “I believed in you and said so, and while I don’t believe that sales are in themselves a proof, they are the only proof and the irrefutable proof to a lot of people to whom I have to say things, booksellers and such. So don’t thank me for any pleasure. It is I who must thank you.”
Perkins disliked business dealings, but he had long since become well known as a shrewd negotiator. An overtipper in restaurants and a soft touch to any friend or stranger who needed to borrow money, he was a Yankee mule trader in business. In discussing advances and royalties with agents or authors, Max would sit in silence at his desk, poker-faced, doodling his portraits of Napoleon, while the other person stated his demands. With his words falling on Perkins’s almost deaf ears, even the toughest bargainer would gradually talk himself down. Old CS’s grandson George Schieffelin said, “Max would close the deal whenever his terms were reached or his drawing was completed—whichever came first.”
The seventh book in Scribners’ record-breaking season was Indigo by Christine Weston. She was introduced to Perkins in the spring of 1939 by their mutual friend Waldo Peirce. “I had been told that Perkins liked to have aspiring writers show up with enormous amounts of manuscript,” Miss Weston recalled, “and mine was certainly enormous. I was very green and timid, and had no confidence that the manuscript would ever be looked at by the great man, though Waldo Peirce assured me that once Max had undertaken to read something he never failed to do so.” Perkins admired her first novel and published her second as well. Together they sold 5,000 copies. Her third novel was set in India, where she was born and lived until she was twenty. Published in 1943, Indigo attracted 230,000 buyers in just a few months.
One did not have to sell like Hemingway, Davenport, Hale, Rawlings, Weston, or Taylor Caldwell to get Perkins’s backing. In fact, his heart went out most readily to the person who desperately desired to be a writer but who could not produce a good book. As it happened, many such were women, who, charmed by his manner, could not resist coming back to Scribners again and again. One woman dropped by every Thursday for months, always with a different hat. Perkins would take her to “tea,” not knowing how else to accommodate her persistence. When his colleagues asked why he spent so much time with so unpromising an author, he replied, “I’m afraid she might commit suicide if I didn’t.” Perkins would take her to the bar of the Chatham Hotel, where she usually became tipsy. One afternoon she started to fall down drunk. Max knew he could not leave her at the bar, so he led her upstairs to a room where she could sleep it off. Once inside the room, she unzipped her dress, kicked off her shoes, flopped on the bed, and passed out. Max placed the key beside her and left. Not until the moment after he quietly but firmly shut the door, automatically locking it behind him, did he discover his overcoat was caught in the jamb. A chambermaid eventually unlocked the door, poked her nose in, and gave Max a contemptuous stare that he never forgot.
Women: the gossip in publishing was that Perkins was as critical of them as ever. Christine Weston, for one, had been told that Perkins was much more relaxed with his own sex. Her view was that
he was more at ease with one sort of person than with another. I fancy he felt most at home with the big noisy egotistical types like Hemingway and Waldo Peirce, and that he had to feel his way cautiously with the shy intense ones who very likely made him feel self-conscious.... Personally, I found him attractive though emotionally remote.
Max still complained about women: “Lady writers expect you to do many things for them apart from their books,” Perkins wrote Professor Copeland in the early forties. The big novelists insisted that he host a tea upon publication of each of their books. Another woman called Max up in tears to say, “My cat, John Keats, is dying.” Perkins offered only sympathy. She said, “You must send a veterinary.” He replied he did not know much about animal doctors and asked if she couldn’t get one in her neighborhood. “But I haven’t any money,” she whimpered. “Will you pay for it?” In order to get her back to work, he did.
To persuade Michael Strange, the poet and former wife of John Barrymore, to finish her book of memoirs, Max had to dine several nights alone with her just to get her to listen to his suggestions. But she planned such sumptuous dinners and was so engaging a conversationalist that the evenings generally accomplished little. Most often the two of them indulged in political and economic discussions, for she was a radical and believed in a classless society. Michael Strange was sermonizing on that very subject one night over coffee while the maid was washing the dishes; suddenly the author interrupted herself, flinging over her shoulder, “God damn it, Kate, stop rattling those dishes.”
Despite his difficulties in dealing with the gender, Max found himself working with more women than he ever had before—novelists Dawn Powell, Edith Pope, Ann Chidester, and Catherine Pomeroy Stewart, all well-known names in their day. He urged Anaïs Nin to publish her diaries. Most of the women who worked with Perkins spoke of him adoringly.
One woman, who still writes, has carried the torch for Max since the thirties. She showed little ability but great desire. To her endless letters, full of grandiloquent literary ravings and amorous overtures, he responded crisply but courteously. He spoke to her in person only twice, and then for no more than fifteen minutes. “That wasn’t important,” she declared forty years later, “for ours was a love of the eyes. I came into his life when he was somewhat weary and he took a deep interest in my fortunes.... The glow of his genius left a flame in my head.” Year after year she continued to write poetry and prose; none was published, except by vanity presses. Still she worked on, because of Max’s “faith” in her talent. Indeed, Max’s faith was more than reciprocated. “From the day I met Max and we fell in love,” she confessed, “I never shared a bed with my husband again. I would not be unfaithful to Max.”
In February, 1943, Perkins attended Scottie Fitzgerald’s marriage. He and Harold Ober, who gave the bride away to Lt. (j.g.) Samuel Lanahan, paid for the ceremony. As Scottie walked down the aisle of the church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York, Perkins thought she looked very much as Zelda had almost twenty-five years earlier—“not as pretty as she was,” Max wrote Hemingway, “and yet she looked better than Zelda.”
The bride’s mother had been unable to attend the wedding, for she was patriotically employed as a machinist apprentice in Montgomery. (She soon got fired.) She wrote to thank Max for his letter detailing the beautiful ceremony. It gave play to her own remembrances of the “mica-ed attenuation of spring so many years ago when somewhat under your friendly auspices we were married,” she said. A few months later she wrote Max again. “I perform a great many foolish overtures to the past,” she said dreamily, “and greatly look forward to the Judgement day.”
Into his sixtieth year, Max passed several fascinating, poignant days reading his correspondence with Scott Fitzgerald. Edmund Wilson wanted some of the letters for a book of Fitzgeraldiana, the centerpiece of which was “The Crack-Up.” Scribners was not publishing it, because Max maintained that Scott would not have wanted those grim pieces in book form; nonetheless Perkins approved publication of the book by another house for the same reason he consented to infrequent requests to include F. Scott Fitzgerald in fiction anthologies. He wanted to do everything in his power to keep Fitzgerald’s reputation alive.
Another author whose writings Perkins was rereading was Thomas Wolfe. As Christmas, 1943, approached, he wrote Wolfe’s sister Mabel: “I think of Tom a great deal at this time of the year, and remember the old days when we might expect him to drop in at the office at almost any moment.” At home late at night Max would pore over the same favorite passages in Of Time and the River.
Thomas Wolfe had been dead for five years but his literary reputation was rising steadily. Generally, Perkins observed, even a noted author faded out shortly after his death. But the reverse had happened in the case of Wolfe, and the affairs of his literary estate still took up a great deal of Perkins’s time.
Aline Bernstein, who was living in Mount Kisco, New York, learned that William B. Wisdom, Wolfe’s friend from New Orleans, was buying up all of Wolfe’s papers. She was upset because her letters would be included. “There could be no need for it,” she wrote Perkins in the middle of 1943, “and I think I am not wrong in thinking that I should have been told. It is the one thing I have ever known you to do that was lacking in rightness, or what I consider rightness to be.”
The contents of her letters—the words on the pages—were hers and no one could publish them without her permission; but the documents themselves that were in Wolfe’s possession upon his death belonged to his estate. Perkins explained to Mrs. Bernstein, “It was my duty to sell whatever I could for the financial advantage of the estate.” Perkins was not interested in raising money so much as in making Wolfe’s papers available to writers and scholars. He thought this was essential for the reputation and influence of any important writer. It was the least one could do for Thomas Wolfe, who, Perkins said, would always be read, because “there will always be a new generation of sophomores to discover and delight in him.”
William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe’s writings for years. He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard—a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. Their sweetest and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, “My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits.” In June, 1943, Aline wrote Perkins,
I daresay I will get used to the idea of my letters to Tom being sold, but I’m not used to it yet in spite of the fact that it is legal. It is all a shock to me, but amounts to little in the scale of people’s sorrow now on earth. So this is the end of it from me to you. I carry with me always though, the pain of the fact that our relationship, Tom’s and mine, was never resolved during his life. Maybe it never could have been. It held so much, for so long a time, time that was magnificent, and even at the end he must have known in his heart’s core, how we were to each other.
In due course Perkins asked Mrs. Bernstein to surrender her own letters from Tom for the collection. She consented, but would not give them to Wisdom—whom she suspected of profiting from the Wolfe material—for nothing. After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased the collection. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to Max about this stipulation, she said: “It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me.”
That summer Perkins saw the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was delighted when he first heard that Gary Cooper was going to play the lead role. Perkins admired him so much that he had seen him in Sergeant York twice. After seeing the new film, though, Max realized the limitations of his favorite actor and the medium itself. He wrote Evan Shipman:
Of course Gary Cooper is just the way he always is—which is good, but is not Robert, nor anything like him. That is partly because all the subjective part of the story, or almost all, has got lost. Perhaps necessarily.
The only other motion picture that Perkins had ever shown any interest in was The Charge of the Light Brigade. He did not want to view the entire film, just the charge itself. Max made his middle daughter, Peggy, accompany him to the theater. He stationed her so that she could watch both the screen and her father, who stood in the lobby. They waited an hour and a half for the climactic moment. When she saw that Errol Flynn was about to lead the charge, Peggy signaled, Perkins advanced through the lobby, stood in the aisle, and observed the Brigade’s routing. Then Max and his daughter promptly retreated.
Ernest Hemingway had been in Cuba for the better part of the last year—“doing whatever it is he is doing,” Max wrote Evan Shipman. Papa was busy patrolling in his boat, searching for German submarines. This was important work, he said, and he could not write while the war was going on. Perkins wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but knew there was more to it than that. Martha Gellhorn Hemingway had just sent Max a novel which Scribners was publishing, and she had spent the three years of their marriage traveling and writing powerful articles for Collier’s. “When we came home from the sea,” Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory, recalled of that time, “Marty thought Papa would resume his writing. But he had other plans. ‘You’re the writer in the family now, Marty,’ he announced—and he meant it completely and wholeheartedly! ... Marty was flattered at first, then amazed, and finally disgusted. To help her career was fine, but for America’s foremost novelist to retire at forty-four [sic], two years after the completion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, was unthinkable—even for a pioneer women’s libber like Marty.” She wondered what had happened to the spirit in Ernest that had driven him to Spain some six years earlier. Already there were rumors that she and Ernest were estranged. While he moped around the Gulf Stream, she went to England to continue her war correspondence. In Ernest’s mind, she had turned her back on him. Hemingway wrote Perkins that he was “damned lonely” and “damned anxious to write again.”
Yet soon Hemingway, peevish, feeling unloved, erupted over a minor dispute concerning royalties for the reprinting of his books, and he came to believe that Charlie Scribner wanted to pick a fight with him. Hemingway said that was fine with him if Scribner thought old Papa was “insufficiently respectful” or more bother than he was worth. For a hotheaded moment, it appeared that his publishing relationship might follow the path of most of his others during the last decade. Gregory Hemingway said of his father, “He broke off with all the early friends who helped him: he split with Sherwood Anderson, he split with Gertrude Stein, he split with Scott Fitzgerald ... now his own Papa myth was getting too big for him to handle.” Even during the blossoming of Hemingway’s megalomania, however, Gregory recalled, “he never broke away from Perkins.” Max’s unwavering decency was the reason.
Hemingway said he would stay with Scribners on one condition. He demanded that Perkins never fight with him—“because you are my most trusted friend as well as my God damned publisher.” He pleaded with Perkins to realize that his inability to create was not because he had “run dry, become a rummy or a problem writer.” In fact, he wanted to write so much sometimes that it was “worse than being in jail not to have the time to do it.” He wished Perkins would believe that for one year he had literally not had the hours to put out a single word. He assured him that all this time he was gathering plenty to write about, so when he was ready, he would be able to invent out of what he had experienced and learned. He told Max it would take a while to “cool out,” as it always did, before he could get back to his work. Perkins never expressed any disbelief to Ernest, but he told a colleague, “I’m afraid Ernest’s believing his own legends about himself ... and that he might never be able to write truly again.”
By May, 1944, Hemingway realized that all his sub-chasing in the Gulf Stream was pointless. He decided to catch up with Martha and go see the war in Europe. He went to New York and visited Perkins, who found him looking well, sporting the magnificent gray beard he had raised for protection against the seafaring sun and wind. In June, as a correspondent for Collier’s, he reported from both sides of the English Channel, covering the D-Day invasion. Then he joined the Fourth Division and for weeks was near every action it took part in. If he got back alive, Hemingway promised Max, he would write Scribners a very valuable property, having hit “very fine pay dirt on this last prospecting trip.” The book, he said, would have “the sea and the air and the ground in it.” Hemingway also told Perkins that his recent activity had “cured” him of his wife. It was funny, he said, how it should take one war “to start a woman in your damn heart and another to finish her.”
Marcia Davenport once asked Toscanini how he endured an entire day of exhausting rehearsal. The maestro said he drew strength from the music of his composers. Max Perkins renewed himself from his authors, but Harold Stearns, James Boyd, and John Peale Bishop had recently died. He had been close to all of them. Max withdrew even more than ever. His privacy became a passion. In the early 1940s he received an increasing number of invitations to discuss publicly his role as an editor and he usually refused with a simple explanation: “An editor should strive for anonymity.” Now he was fervent about being left alone.
In the fall of 1943, one of Elizabeth Lemmon’s relatives thought of writing an article about Max Perkins for Town & Country. Perkins’s first instinct was to refuse to speak to him at all, but then he saw how Poyntz Tyler’s article in the small magazine might shield him from an even greater exposure. Max explained to Elizabeth that September:
I hate to be written about at all. I wouldn’t dare say that to you if it were not true, for you know too much about me. I really have that passion for anonymity that Roosevelt talks about. What’s more, I think an editor ought to be anonymous. He should not be important, or known to be so, for the writers are the important ones in his life. But Mr. Tyler did point out what I myself had thought of—that if Town and Country had a piece, the New Yorker would not do a Profile. And a Profile has been hanging over my head like the Damoclesian sword for months. But I think it fell through.
The editors of The New Yorker had first proposed the idea of writing a profile on Perkins to Thomas Wolfe in the thirties. Wolfe assigned his agent, Elizabeth Nowell, to learn if Perkins would consent to such a piece. “Perkins seemed to pretend to pooh-pooh it but wouldn’t flatly refuse,” Miss Nowell recalled, “and Tom and I wondered if he might secretly—beneath his shyness—rather like the idea.” Still trying to figure him out, she finally went to his office one day and said, “Goddamit, Mr. Perkins, do you want a New Yorker profile of you or not? Answer yes or no.” He scowled at her reproachfully and said, “Miss Nowell, you’re a Yankee too?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well then,” he said, “you ought to know better than to ask me that.”
Wolfe dropped the project, but years later the critic Malcolm Cowley picked it up, and The New Yorker encouraged him. Cowley believed there was no person so important in the field of contemporary literature who at the same time was so unknown as Maxwell Perkins. Just what an editor did was a mystery to those outside the book trade, and Cowley believed Perkins obscured what little there was to be seen by standing in the shadows, like some “gray-hatted eminence.” Before seeking an interview with Perkins, Cowley set about collecting facts. “Perkins, I discovered, is the nearest thing to a great man now existing in the literary world,” he explained to William Shawn, his editor at The New Yorker. “Legends are clustered round him like truffles round an oak tree in Gascony.” In late 1943, after months of research—correspendence and interviews with Perkins’s friends, authors, and colleagues, and much digging up of details—Cowley was ready to confront the Fox himself.
A literary figure of importance and a charming man as well, Cowley soon worked his way past Perkins’s pathological self-effacement. Perkins spent some time diminishing his own accomplishments (“I don’t see why they give us credit for discovering books when we merely read manuscripts.”) and blustering about the obscenity of being written about; then he settled down and acquiesced to a formal interview. In fact, he submitted to several sessions.
At one point he told Cowley that the man he would most like to resemble was Major General John Aaron Rawlins. According to the Dictionary of American Biography, Rawlins was “the most nearly indispensable” officer of General Grant’s staff. It was his job to keep Grant sober; edit his important papers and put them in final form; apply tact and persistence in order to make critical points; and often restore the general’s self-confidence.
During their time together, Cowley and Perkins discussed contemporary writers. Lately, Robert Penn Warren had become of interest to Perkins; and, of course, William Faulkner had attracted his attention early on. Perkins was most enthusiastic about Faulkner’s early books and had never read anything he had written since without admiration. “My only fear about him,” he told Cowley, “is that he has fallen into a certain position which is not nearly as high as it should be, and once that happens to a writer, it is extremely difficult to change the public’s opinion. Anyone would be proud to publish him, but I would only be afraid that we could not do enough better than his present publishers to satisfy him.”
One of Faulkner’s most admiring interpreters, Cowley was aware that the author had been relegated to limbo. When he sent his Mississippi friend a “New York market report” on his current standing as a literary figure, Cowley wrote, “In publishing circles your name is mud. They are all convinced that your books won’t ever sell, and it’s a pity, isn’t it? they say, with a sort of pleased look on their faces.” Faulkner had written seventeen fictional works, then all out of print, bearing the imprints of a half-dozen houses. Now Cowley advised him to find still another publisher. He thought of Scribners because of his respect for Max Perkins and what he assumed Perkins felt for Faulkner’s writing. So, not long afterward, he talked to Max about the author, only to find Perkins less than eager. Perkins had long regarded the man as a virtuoso, but thinking of the author’s future writing rather than his reputation, he told Cowley emphatically, “Faulkner is finished.”
It was implicit in all Perkins’s comments to Cowley that he had little faith in the writing of the forties and even less hope for that which would follow. “Perhaps the trouble with literature in our time,” he told Cowley, “is that there aren’t as many rascals as there used to be.”
Cowley completed his interviews and went off. While he was writing, Perkins tended to business. One current project involved not a rascal but a delightfully mischievous author, Arthur Train. After Train’s success in writing his own autobiography, Perkins had suggested that he write the definitive story of Mr. Tutt, his celebrated hero whose fictitious adventures had delighted millions of readers over the last quarter-century. The result was Yankee Lawyer: The Autobiography of Ephraim Tutt, with an introduction by Train. The book was “authenticated” with “photographs” of young Tutt and his portrait from the Saturday Evening Post in his familiar pose of his thumbs grabbing his waistcoat—a portrait which, curiously enough, bore no small resemblance to Max Perkins. Upon the publication of Yankee Lawyer in 1943, people who had admired Tutt’s legal skill but had wondered whether or not he was imaginary, hopped onto the side of belief. Every mail delivery brought letters to the publishers from people anxious to retain Mr. Tutt’s counsel. One lonely old woman propositioned him. Another woman called Scribners and was accidentally switched onto Max Perkins’s private wire. For a long time she refused to accept his assurance that there was, in fact, no Ephraim Tutt. “But there must be a Mr. Tutt,” she insisted, and when finally convinced, she began to sob.
Then the literary prank boomeranged. In March, 1944, a marshal from the New York Supreme Court served Arthur Train with a summons. The complainant was Lewis R. Linet, a Philadelphian, who described himself as “a lawyer given to reading, who, deceived by the jacket, title-page, illustrations and printed content of Yankee Lawyer, had been tricked into parting with three dollars and a half in exchange for a piece of spurious fiction.” Linet sought a rebate of $1 on the purchase price, not just for himself, but for each of the 50,000 other purchasers of the book. He was also suing Charles Scribner’s Sons and the author’s editorial co-conspirator, Maxwell E. Perkins, for “fraud and deceit.”
The story, when it broke in the press, seemed so incredible that Perkins was accused of having cooked the whole thing up as a publicity stunt. But the injunction and $50,000 rebate that Linet sought were a matter of court record. The defendants retained the best lawyer they could think of, John W. Davis, former Democratic candidate for president, ex-ambassador to England, and an admirer of Mr. Tutt for years. It was true that misinterpretations of fact were subject to suit; the question was whether or not rules for commodities applied also to books. The defense’s argument was rooted in the literary tradition of apocryphal biography or historical narrative for purposes of political or literary satire. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, both published as bona fide accounts, were obvious examples. While the case was still pending, Arthur Train died, before seeing Mr. Tutt cleared of charges.
Another unusual project occupying Perkins late in 1943, when Mr. Cowley came to call, involved a thirty-five-year-old man from Junction City, Kansas. Joseph Stanley Pennell (“rhymes with kennel,” he used to say) had completed his first novel, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters, just before his induction into the army. A friend had consented to handle the business of selling his manuscript, and she sent it to Scribners in early 1943. Perkins first learned of the book when he overheard two of his associates talking about it. One of them said, “Another of those damned works of genius.” Some editors are put off by brilliant but idiosyncratic manuscripts and some, such as Perkins, are enticed by them. Perkins took the book home and started to read. The syntax and punctuation were unconventional, and in general the difficulties in the manuscript seemed insuperable, but Max found value. He told a friend: “An editor does not come across such talent more than five or six times in his life. And when he does, he is bound to do what he can for it.”
If that declaration echoed Max’s reaction to Thomas Wolfe, it was no wonder. Pennell had been inspired by Wolfe, and his book bore many similarities to Wolfe’s work. First there was the clearly autobiographical nature of the story, written in keeping with Wolfe’s dictum that “we are the sum of all the moments of our lives”; practically all Pennell’s moments seemed to be in the book. Fork City, Kansas, Pennell’s name for his hometown of Junction City, was the equivalent of Wolfe’s Altamont. The prose often had the quality of blank verse, and Pennell’s chapters were often introduced by sections of italicized lyrical philosophy, some of which could have passed for Wolfe’s own dithyrambs; indeed, Pennell’s narrator, Lee Harrington, went Eugene Gant one better and actually composed sonnets to his lady, a beautiful blonde named Christa, to whom he was recounting the story of his ancestors in hopes of impressing her, and the sonnets were inserted in the narrative. Finally, Pennell intended his novel to be the first in a trilogy, which he was calling An American Chronicle.
Perkins found Rome Hanks a complicated admixture of narrations, flipflopping between centuries, blending a contemporary love story with a retelling of the Civil War. After several days with the tricky manuscript, he wrote Pennell and admitted that he had “not yet got the hang of the book—don’t know exactly what the motive is of mixing the present with the past, etc.” But, he added, “I am having a grand time reading it, and I should like to tell you that a colleague here showed me that Pickett’s Charge piece, and I really do not believe I ever saw a war piece that excelled it, not forgetting Tolstoi.”
Perkins was excited and tantalized. Undoubtedly he sensed that Rome Hanks offered him the possibility of another Tom Wolfe. But he was careful not to raise Pennell’s expectations too much. He had not finished the book, and he already saw problems arising. On March 29, 1943, he wrote Pennell again:
We have all said we have got to find some way of publishing this book, and yet there are some obstacles that are very serious, and that in fact can only be got over by drastic elimination. And I don’t know whether you will consent to it. Yet I do think you should publish, and I don’t think any publisher could publish a good many things that are in your book.
Perkins’s first objection was that the contemporary parts seemed trivial as compared to the historical passages. The reader, he said, was conscious as he read the modern story that
it did not blend with the rest, and was not equal with it,—and that in fact while one was reading those parts, he was impatient to get back to the early America, the war and after the war.
The second difficulty with the modern tale was that most of the “obscene” material was there; Perkins felt that much of the love story could not be printed as written. And then there was Christa, the object of the hero’s love poems. With her St. Louis background and blonde, leggy looks she resembled Martha Gellhorn so much that Perkins feared libel; the similarity, he said, was “unmistakable unless there has been a most amazing series of coincidences.” Perkins told Pennell that nobody could print this portrait of her without being sued; and in any case, since Scribners published Miss Gellhorn, they could not defame her, whatever the law. “It does seem to me that you would have produced something masterful,” Perkins wrote, “and even conceivably better than it is now, if you took out most of what is contemporary, and merely gave the Civil War and post Civil War days—the old America.”
Pennell, now in California, replied that he had considered the “drastic elimination” which Perkins urged but found it hard to accept. “First,” he explained, “there is the perhaps unreasonable love of one’s own words, and second, there is the plan of the longer work of which Rome Hanks is a part.” Still, Pennell wanted to weigh Max’s proposals a little longer. “Life, Sir,” he said, “is most strange and wonderful—and it seems extremely amazing to me that I should sit here, near some guns in California, writing this to you in New York, whom I had for some time admired as a name with certain qualifications and then as a portrait in a book by a man from North Carolina—a man who died searching for a leaf and a door.”
The whole matter gnawed at Perkins. He wanted the book, but he felt he had to alter it. Experimenting, he removed all the contemporary parts of the manuscript, then gave the remainder to another Scribners editor to read. Afterward, Perkins showed the man what had been deleted. This man, Max reported to Pennell, “with much more certainty than I who am also not very confident of my judgments, believes that this book itself would be a finer one without the contemporary parts.” But, said Perkins, still not offering a contract, “you must not let me beguile you into going against your own opinion.”
Pennell finally agreed to Perkins’s prescription. For the better part of a year they worked together through the mail. Both compromised. Pennell worked within Perkins’s boundaries but sandwiched in a few of his modern-day interludes. Christa was no longer so clearly based on Martha Gellhorn.
“What a joke if Martha picked the wrong genius!” Marjorie Rawlings wrote Max, after learning about the novel. Perkins spoke of the book to everyone, for none in years had excited him so much. He read pages aloud to friends in the evening and handed out advance copies to visitors to his office. And when The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters was published, in the summer of 1944, it appeared that his enthusiasm was justified. The novel ran through its entire first printing overnight and commanded national attention. “Nobody is going to be so foolish as to argue that the novel is flourishing particularly these days, because it just isn’t,” Hamilton Basso began his review in the July 15, 1944, New Yorker,
but there is evidence around ... to suggest that those who are waiting to nail down its coffin lid might, at least for the time being, put those hammers away.... [Rome Hanks is] a book which, unless I am greatly mistaken, will cause more fuss than any first novel since Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.
One thing that is bound to happen, and I will lay bets, is that Mr. Pennell, an ex-newspaperman now in the Army, is going to be hailed, by those who go in for hailing, as another Thomas Wolfe. There will be some reason for this, because Mr. Pennell, like Wolfe, commits just about every sin known to literary man, and, again like Wolfe, thinks up a few ones all his own.
Within six months of publication, Rome Hanks sold close to 100,000 copies.
While Rome Hanks was making its author’s reputation, Malcolm Cowley’s profile appeared in The New Yorker and gave Max the fame he had for so long fled. It was entitled “Unshaken Friend,” a phrase from Wolfe’s dedication of Of Time and the River, and it was published in two successive issues in April, 1944. Profiles so long they had to be published in two parts were rare for the magazine, but William Shawn had been convinced that Perkins was every bit as important as Cowley made him out to be. In the first shock of his notoriety, Max went so far as to consult a lawyer as to what means might be taken to suppress the articles, but he never carried the effort any farther. Instead, he sought to distance himself from the portrait. When asked about the articles, he told several people: “I wouldn’t mind being like that fellow.” The man in the profile, he said, was “a great sight better person than myself.” Perkins’s friends said he groused for weeks about Cowley’s comment that he dressed in “shabby and inconspicuous grays.” “I felt like telling him,” Cowley wrote William Shawn, “that if The New Yorker said he dressed in shabby and inconspicuous grays, by God he dressed in shabby and inconspicuous grays.”
In time Perkins concluded that he had come off rather well in the articles, and he was pleased that Cowley had often moved away from Max himself and expanded into an informative discussion of publishing. But the articles caused trouble for Perkins. It seemed for a while that every would-be writer in America had read Cowley’s depiction of the loyal and compassionate editor and his gift for identifying neglected talent, and had been stirred to seek his services. The flow of manuscripts into Scribners became nearly overwhelming, and Miss Wyckoff had all she could do to fend off phone calls from strangers. And visitors. Cowley had quoted Max as saying, “One can tell as much by seeing an author as by reading the manuscript,” whereupon unpublished authors began demanding to be seen.
That spring Max’s friend and neighbor Hendrik Willem van Loon died. The same week, Colonel John William Thomason, the author and illustrator of such Scribners books as Fix Bayonets and Jeb Stuart, died in the Naval Hospital in San Diego at fifty-one. That summer Perkins was further grieved by the horrible progressive illness of an even closer friend, the playwright Edward Sheldon. Sheldon, whom Max had known since Harvard, had been bedridden with arthritis for fifteen years. Now the disease had rendered him deaf, dumb, and blind, and had frozen him completely rigid. He existed in a dreadful monotony of dark, silent days.
And then Perkins’s own health began to deteriorate in ways that even he could not ignore. One day one of his ankles and both his hands swelled up alarmingly. The doctor told him it was probably exhaustion. Perkins said he didn’t feel tired, though he realized that he wasn’t reading as attentively as before. He was persuaded to take time off, and for two weeks he mainly slept.
Perkins had had a great-grandmother who used to say, “It’s wicked to be sick,” and he had always acted as if he believed her. Now, however, Louise was able to coerce him into having a thorough medical examination. To his own amazement the tests turned out favorably. There was nothing dreadfully wrong—just fatigue. But the doctors were distressed that Perkins seemed to be getting about one third of his nourishment from alcohol, and that he wasn’t eating nearly enough.
In recent years Max had become increasingly fussy about food. He showed little interest even in his standbys—breast of guinea hen and the Ritz’s house special of venison. Louise dreamed up tempting meals for the cook to prepare, but he never ate them. (The two youngest girls, Jane and Nancy, once drew up a list of foods which he would agree to eat if placed before him, and they made him sign it. It was probably the only contract he ever willfully broke.) The doctor put Perkins on vitamins and limited him to two cocktails a day; Max indulged in a third on weekends. The cocktails made him less aware of his loneliness and the passage of time. “Everything moves too fast nowadays,” he told Marjorie Rawlings, “and John Barleycorn slows things up. I had always thought that if I got very old, I would take up hashish, which completely destroys the sense of time, so that you sit in eternity.”
To everyone’s surprise, when Max returned from his rest he said his recent exhaustion had made him resolve to take a real vacation. He decided to take more time off in October and go visit his daughter Peggy in Alliance, Ohio. Her husband had bought two saddle horses that needed exercising. “That’s something I’d like to attend to,” Max wrote Mrs. Rawlings, “—the first idea of a vacation that has interested me for many years.” By October, however, Max was afflicted with another ailment—eczema, which spread up from an ankle over much of his body and kept him from getting around. Again doctors told him he was run-down. “I am absolutely well,” Max protested, though he admitted, again to Marjorie Rawlings, “I keep getting worse, and worse, and worse.” He remembered Arthur Train’s once telling him, “Never change your habits.” Now he swore that changing his ways for some doctor had brought on this illness. He canceled his vacation plans and went back to working, eating, and drinking as he always had, resuming the rate of four or five martinis a day.
In spring 1944 Scribners published a novel by Taylor Caldwell, The Final Hour, which gave a picture of the room in which Max was playing out his life. One of its characters was a gray-haired, frosty-blue-eyed descendant of New England Puritans named Cornell T. Hawkins, an editor who was seldom without his weathered hat. In depicting his office Miss Caldwell exactly described Max’s own:
Here was no pretense, no thick rugs and fine furniture to impress the vulgar. Heaps of manuscripts lay on the splintered desk, overflowing ash-trays, disorderly piles of letters, scattered pens and pencils. The floor was grimy and discolored. Chairs with squeaking legs were thrust back against the mildewed walls. Yet, out of this disorder, this untidiness and indifference to elegance, had come some of the world’s finest and noblest literature. There was an air about this man, in this casual room filled with stark sunlight, of greatness and simplicity. One knew instinctively that the veriest tyro of a frightened author would be accorded the same courtesy and consideration as the most gilded and popular writers who could boast ten or twenty “large printings.”
Perkins was amused by this portrayal of the editor’s milieu but feared the sordid details would frighten authors away. He commissioned Miss Wyckoff to oversee a general renovation. Even after it, the office was hardly elegant, just neat enough to make Max uncomfortable. He told Malcolm Cowley, “I was lucky to get off without a carpet on the floor.”
By the mid-forties, World War II dominated America’s reading. In 1944, for example, seven of the nation’s ten most widely read nonfiction selections were war books, from Bob Hope’s amusing front-line chronicles to Ernie Pyle’s war reportage. They sold by the hundreds of thousands, but publishing was also affected adversely by the war. There were shortages of paper, for example, that made it very hard to keep books in stock. To make sure there was paper for the best sellers—the books that paid the rent—Perkins had to cut back on less commercial books, and he found himself saying to some authors what he had been obliged to say to Scott Fitzgerald twenty-five years earlier regarding The Romantic Egotist, that Scribners could not undertake any new ventures. That hurt. Perkins was already depressed about the state of publishing. The values of the culture were changing, and works of pure literature seemed unwelcome. A new world of materialism and expediency seemed to be corrupting serious book people. “I wish all this were over, and that there would be a quiet life again,” Perkins wrote Hemingway early in 1945.
But I know there never will be, and that what seemed to be was illusory. I even thought after the other war that things would get that way, and I thought you would, for instance, just live quietly somewhere, and fish and shoot and write.—But that became impossible, and I suppose it may always be so.
When Hemingway returned from Europe, he stopped in to see Max and then went on to the Finca Vigia in Cuba. He soon began to send Max letters stating how hard it would be now for him to write a fine book; it got tougher every time, he explained. In the old days Max would have gently exhorted Ernest to get back to his typewriter. Now he was uninspiring, indulgent. “I think you ought to take it easy ... ,” he wrote. “Get out into that old Gulf Stream where things always seem to be right—not necessarily for you yourself, but in the big way.”
But if Max’s vitality and hope were ebbing, his reputation was not. He was well known to everyone who wanted to write, and unpublished authors continued to think of him as a miracle worker. When turned down, some writers thumbed through You Can’t Go Home Again to find which traits of “Foxhall Edwards” had kept Maxwell Perkins from responding to their work. The rejected often harassed him for explanations, and it was not uncommon for Perkins to spend entire days answering them.
There was one woman in particular, an aspiring author whose novel had been declined, who railed at Perkins in a number of letters, each more inflammatory than the last. She felt she had been spurned because of her politics, that her ultraliberalism, as expressed in her book, had conflicted with Max’s conservative beliefs. She complained that Max was depriving her of her right to give the world her message. She attacked him as arbitrary, a man so blinded by his prejudices that he had become an irresponsible publisher. For two years she maintained a running assault on Perkins.
Max thought the woman’s manuscript had some merit, despite certain serious defects in her mastery of the English language. He kept on replying, at first out of politeness, then for the sake of justice, finally in sympathy. His many letters articulated an informal credo for publishing in America and conveyed his editorial criteria.
The ideal of publishing would be a forum where all sections of humanity could have their say, whether their object was to instruct, entertain, horrify, etc. Nevertheless, there are certain rules of quality and relevance, which can only be determined by some sort of selection and this the publisher, representing humanity at large, attempts—with many mistakes—to make. Or, to put it differently, artists, saints, and the other more sentient representatives of the human race are, as it were, on the frontiers of time—pioneers and guides to the future. And the publisher, in the capacity mentioned, must make some sort of estimate of the importance and validity of their reports, and there is nothing he can base this on but the abilities to judge that God has given him.
The woman accused Perkins of being afraid to publish her work for fear of public reprisal. But Perkins knew he was not a censor. He pointed out that Scribners had published Ben Hecht’s attack on anti-Semitism, A Guide for the Bedevilled, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.
At one point in the debate, fed up with the woman’s continuing vituperation, Perkins stated: “Our correspondence is futile and had better be ended.” The furious author asked Perkins just who he thought he was. Max took the question literally. “I am,” he said in a letter dated May 19, 1944, “or at least should be if I fulfilled myself, John Smith, U.S.A.” He went on to develop his view of himself in some detail:
He is the man who doesn’t know much, nor thinks that he knows much. He starts out with certain ambitions but he gradually accumulates obligations as he goes along, and they continually increase. They begin with his inherited family, and grow with the family that results from his marriage, and further increase with his associates, and those whom he represents. He soon finds that about all he can do, and that not too well, is to fulfill those obligations. He knows that he is a failure, and is bound to be, because he is not in the confidence of God, like some, and does not know God’s plan. He does know what he has undertaken to do, and he hopes to Heaven that he will manage, to some considerable extent, to do it. That’s what he is serious about, for he can’t, in view of his observation of the rest of the world, be very sure about himself, or think that his fate is a matter of moment. He can accept the kiss of death too, as long as he doesn’t let himself in for it by his own negligence, which would mean the betrayal of others.
John Smith, U.S.A. is always aware of the fact that he may be, and probably is, wrong. That is tolerance. He simply does his simple best in the world and hopes to God that he will never let anybody down or betray any principle in which he believes.
For Perkins, then, the path of aspiration that had started in Paradise had darkened before his great objectives could be reached. He knew it, yet he carried on, maintaining a convincing impression of steadiness even as personal disappointments and professional pressures increased. There was no Gulf Stream for Perkins to glide off in, just a multiplying burden of anxieties. His authors’ plights, laid upon him, became more horrific, often macabre: One wanted Perkins’s counsel regarding her daughter who was having a breakdown; another sent him glimpses from her own traumatic childhood—true Gothic tales of being forced to dig up a dead sister’s corpse and dress her in doll’s clothes. There were distant relatives who had to borrow money or were seeking jobs, marriage problems of inlaws, women’s clubs campaigning against smut in literature, ethnic and political groups protesting certain characterizations, young people constantly seeking advice on becoming published writers, more family war casualties, authors whose books demonstrated that the earth was round but that we lived inside of it, or who had written five-volume novels entitled God. Through it all he kept his head while all about him were losing theirs.
Once again, only Elizabeth Lemmon knew. In May, 1945, she sent him several letters Tom Wolfe had written her, thinking Max might want them for an anthology of Wolfe’s letters that Scribners was compiling. Max replied: “I myself would have written you often, except that unlike Tom I cannot write letters when I am in despair. I have got myself into too many things outside of my work here, and I really should have avoided them.” Perkins said his susceptibility to entanglements stemmed from that resolution he had made on the brink of manhood, the day he almost let Tom McClary drown—“never to refuse a responsibility.”
“I did not do this formally,” Max told Elizabeth, “but I know just when I did it, half-unconsciously, and it got to be like an obsession of General Grant’s which made it impossible for him ever to retrace his steps, and so he did get into Richmond in the end.”