VI

Companions

In December, 1924, a package containing a collection of vignettes, published in France under the title in our time, arrived at the New York City customs house. The author was “that Hemingway” of whom Fitzgerald had spoken a few months earlier. It was not until late February that Perkins read the sketches. Several of them chronicled the life of Nick Adams, a young man from Michigan who had fought in the World War. Max reported to Scott that the book “accumulates a fearful effect through a series of brief episodes, presented with economy, strength and vitality. A remarkable, tight, complete expression of the scene, in our time, as it looks to Hemingway.”

Hemingway’s writing had a distinctive sound, the likes of which Perkins had never heard: hard-hammered words that reverberated long after the short, staccato sentences had been read. “I was greatly impressed by the power in the scenes and incidents pictured, and by the effectiveness of their relation to each other,” Max wrote Hemingway, but added:

I doubt if we could have seen a way to the publication of this book itself on account of material considerations: it is so small that it would give the booksellers no opportunity for substantial profit if issued at a price which custom would dictate. This is a pity, because your method is obviously one which enables you to express what you have to say in very small compass.

It occurred to Perkins that Hemingway might be writing something that would not raise such practical objections, and so he assured him, “Whatever you are writing, we should be most interested to consider.”

Five days later Perkins followed up his letter to Hemingway with another. He had heard from John Peale Bishop—one of Fitzgerald’s friends from Princeton, who collaborated with Edmund Wilson on a book of verse called The Undertaker’s Garland—that Hemingway had been working on another book. “I hope this is so and that we may see it,” Perkins wrote the author. “We would certainly read it with promptness and sympathetic interest if you gave us the opportunity.”

Seven weeks passed with no response from Hemingway. It was Max’s first exposure to Ernest Hemingway’s habit of vanishing to some remote part of the world. On this occasion it was Schruns, Austria, where he was skiing. Hemingway read Perkins’s letters upon his return to Paris and was excited by his interest. But he had committed himself just days before to another publisher who had connected with him in the Alps and he told Max he did not see how he could talk seriously with him until he had seen the contract for In Our Time (by now Hemingway had capitalized it) being offered by Boni & Liveright. To show Perkins his appreciation and his interest in Scribners, he offered some notions about writing. He said he found the novel “an awfully artificial and worked-out form” and that he hoped someday to write an exhaustive study of the Spanish bullring. Priding himself on such unconventional ideas, Hemingway tried to console Perkins by suggesting he was a bad prospect for a publisher anyway.

“What rotten luck—for me I mean,” Perkins wrote back, sorry that he had not been able to locate Hemingway sooner. He asked him to remember that Scribners had been at least one of the first to try to publish him in America. “It is too bad about Hemingway,” Max wrote Scott Fitzgerald.

The Fitzgeralds rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Paris that spring, and in May, 1925, he and Ernest Hemingway met. Hemingway found Fitzgerald “very good looking in a too pretty way.” Scott was drinking hard that month and got so tight at their first meeting at the Dingo Bar that he started to pass out. Ernest observed that every time Fitzgerald took a drink his face changed, and after four shots the skin was so drawn that it resembled a death’s head. Scott found Hemingway to be “a fine charming fellow” who liked Max’s letters enormously. “If Liveright doesn’t please him,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, “he’ll come to you, and he has a future. He’s 27.”

By summer Scott and Ernest were seeing more and more of each other, occasionally at the home of Gertrude Stein. The walls of her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus were covered with paintings by young Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse, and other modern artists whom she sponsored before they became famous. Perkins had never met Miss Stein but he admired her novel The Making of Americans. However, he wrote Fitzgerald, he doubted if many readers would have patience with her peculiarly repetitious and impressionistic method, “effective as it does become.” Fitzgerald and Hemingway found her presence at least as commanding as her writing. They enjoyed mixing with the other literary expatriates who dropped in—among them John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Robert McAlmon, who had published a slim book of Hemingway’s work called Three Stories and Ten Poems.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald began going on expeditions together, which because of Scott’s childish impracticality always brought untold complications. Hemingway was amused enough by one trip, driving Scott’s car up from Lyons through the Côte-d‘Or, to write Max Perkins about it. The journey started with Fitzgerald’s missing his train from Paris, involved a lot of wine and a few wild-goose chases through the Maconnais region, and ended with Hemingway’s concluding, “Never ... go on trips with anyone you do not love.” Max replied, “My trips are only to Boston, Philadelphia and Washington and my companions then are those of the smoking compartment.”

Ernest’s earliest feelings for Fitzgerald were of great fondness and respect; he thought The Great Gatsby an “absolutely first-rate book.” But from the start he was impatient with Scott’s immaturity and he developed a paternalistic attitude toward him although he was three years Fitzgerald’s junior. By 1960, when Hemingway wrote about the first year of their friendship in A Moveable Feast, his reminiscences of his early days as a writer in Paris, his tone had changed from paternalistic to patronizing. He remembered finishing Fitzgerald’s novel and then feeling that “no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine asThe Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one.”

Hemingway and Fitzgerald each went his own way that summer, 1925. Ernest and his wife Hadley journeyed to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, Scott and Zelda to the south of France. Perkins met Fitzgerald’s repeated requests for money, assuring him on Scribners’ behalf that “if this puts you in a position to go straight ahead with a new novel, we are certainly mighty glad to send it.” Max wanted Scott to give him some idea of what he was writing, even though he knew “it does sometimes dull the edge for the writer to do this.”

Toward the end of summer Fitzgerald began his next book. It would take him five starts and seventeen versions before he could resolve it into his brutally personal work Tender Is the Night. As he wrote, Fitzgerald developed a number of substories, and at times, as Perkins followed Scott’s progress, he could discern what appeared to be three wholly different novels.

Scott’s first bulletin to Perkins about the book, written in August from Antibes, read: “Our Type is about several things, one of which is an intellectual murder on the Leopold-Loeb idea. Incidently it is about Zelda & me & the hysteria of last May and June in Paris. (Confidential).” Another element was a murder that followed the Leopold-Loeb case by several months, that of Dorothy Ellingson, a sixteen-year-old San Francisco girl who murdered her mother during a quarrel about the daughter’s reckless living.

As usual, Fitzgerald was going to people his novel with members of the sparkling society he so admired. Drawing on his recollections of his years in Europe, Fitzgerald found that one figure stood out, a paragon who, as Fitzgerald would later remark, “had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy.” That man was Gerald Murphy, lean and elegant, with a face just this side of overbred. At their Villa America in Antibes, Murphy and his handsome wife, Sara, entertained in a manner that captivated Scott and Zelda. The Fitzgeralds had shared “many fêtes” with the Murphys.

In his first attempt at the novel, Fitzgerald gave an account of a hot-blooded young man named Francis Melarkey who is touring Europe with his dominating mother. Melarkey is taken in by the Seth Rorebacks (the Murphys), pastors of the expatriate flock on the Cote d‘Azur, only to fall in love with Seth’s wife, Dinah. Fitzgerald did not immediately know how he would contrive Francis Melarkey’s murder of his mother, but the love triangle was clear to him. “In a certain sense my plot is not unlike Dreiser’s in the American Tragedy,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins several months later from Paris. “At first this worried me but now it doesn’t for our minds are so different.” By then he was calling the novel The World’s Fair.

Perkins heard little from Scott for the rest of the year except his occasional petitions for funds. “Will I ever be square?” he asked, fretting about his mounting debt to Scribners. Mindful of the steady decline in his sales since Paradise, Fitzgerald worried that his books might never sell again, that his newest anthology, All the Sad Young Men, would not reach 5,000 copies. Perkins thought the nine stories in that collection made a new and strong impression since they bridged commercialism and artistry. Thinking of “The Rich Boy” and “Winter Dreams” especially, he wrote, “They have more breadth ... than those of earlier collections. In fact, it is remarkable that you have been able to make them so entertaining for the crowd when they have so much significance.” Later he assured Scott, “Those who have believed in you can now utter another decisive ‘I told you so.’ ”

At the year’s end Scott fell into another of his “unholy depressions.” Perkins was all but powerless in trying to raise his spirits because Fitzgerald’s despondence was not caused by a feeling of failure as an author. “The [new] book is wonderful,” he wrote Perkins; “I honestly think that when it’s published I shall be the best American novelist (which isn’t saying a lot) but the end seems far away.” What terrified him was the prospect of growing old:

I wish I were 22 again with only my dramatic and feverishly enjoyed miseries. You remember I used to say I wanted to die at 30—well, I’m now 29 and the prospect is still welcome. My work is the only thing that makes me happy—except to be a little tight—and for those 2 indulgences I pay a big price in mental and physical hangovers.

Perkins thought Fitzgerald’s melancholy and expatriation were both curiously linked to his desperate attempts to maintain his youth. He observed Scott’s struggles to hold onto it by constant travel and knew he was bound to feel dejected seeing it dimmed by his drinking. The only suggestion the editor made was that the Fitzgeralds should settle in some typical American community for a while, “not for your future as a citizen so much as for that as a writer. You’d see a new surface of life that way,” he wrote Scott.

A few months later Fitzgerald announced that unless all the other Americans were first driven out of France, he would be returning to the United States. “God, how much I’ve learned in these two and a half years in Europe,” Scott wrote Max. “It seems like a decade&Ifeel pretty old but I wouldn’t have missed it, even its most unpleasant & painful aspects. ... I do want to see you, Max.” In Perkins’s stead, Ernest Hemingway had become Scott’s closest friend, the only one who could improve his mood. “He and I are very thick,” Fitzgerald added.

Max wanted to establish a relationship with Hemingway as well. Scribner’s Magazine had just received their first piece from him, “Fifty Grand,” and Perkins found the man’s writing “invigorating as a cold, fresh wind.” To Perkins’s regret the magazine did not accept the story outright but asked Hemingway to shorten it. “I wish with his very first story that we did not have to bring this up,” Max wrote Scott, “[because Hemingway] is one of those whose interest is much more in producing than in publishing, and he may revolt at the idea of being asked to conform to an artificial specification in length.” Hemingway never did cut the story, the equally prestigious Atlantic Monthly subsequently printed it, and Max feared this outcome would keep the author from ever signing any contract with Scribners. Fitzgerald sympathized with Perkins’s position. “I wish Liveright would lose faith in Ernest,” he wrote Max just after Christmas, 1925.

Days later, miraculously, Horace Liveright did. He cabled Hemingway: REJECTING TORRENTS OF SPRING PATIENTLY AWAITING MS SUN ALSO RISES WRITING FULLY. No sooner had the news been flashed than Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, “If he’s free I’m almost sure I can get satire to you first & then if you see your way clear, you can contract for the novel tout ensemble.”

The Torrents of Spring was a 28,000-word satire of Sherwood Anderson and his stylized, sentimental imitators. Fitzgerald loved it but said it would not be popular, and that the editors at Liveright had rejected it because their most recent work by Anderson, Dark Laughter, was in its tenth printing and The Torrents of Spring was “almost a vicious parody on him.” Under the circumstances, Scott thought, Hemingway would send Perkins his other book only on the condition that he publish the satire first. Since Liveright’s telegram, he said, Hemingway had intended to go straight to Scribners, but Fitzgerald thought he was wavering because of the company’s persistently conservative reputation.

Word among bookmen traveled fast. Within days William Aspinwall Bradley, at Alfred Knopf, and Louis Bromfield on behalf of his publisher, Alfred Harcourt, expressed interest in Hemingway’s manuscripts. Fitzgerald urged Max to act quickly. But Hemingway had no idea of double-crossing Perkins, to whom he had given his word months earlier.

By first sending the manuscript to Perkins, Hemingway told Scott, he felt he would be turning down a “sure thing” for a delay and a chance. But he was willing to take the risk because of the impression he had formed of Perkins through his letters and what Fitzgerald had told him. “Also confidence in Scribners and would like to be lined up with you,” he wrote. The instant Harcourt offered an advance, Fitzgerald notified Perkins that he could get Hemingway’s novel if he would promptly write without qualifications that they would publish both the novel and the “unpromising” satire. Perkins was eager to obey Fitzgerald’s direction precisely, but had to adhere to company policy on taste. He cabled Scott, PUBLISH NOVEL AT 15% AND ADVANCE IF DESIRED ALSO SATIRE UNLESS OBJECTIONABLE OTHER THAN FINANCIALLY HEMINGWAYS STORIES SPLENDID.

Max could do no better. “[There] was a fear that this satire ... might be suppressible,” he explained to Scott in a letter. “In fact, we could tell nothing about it of course in these respects and it is not the policy obviously of Scribners to publish books of certain types. For instance, if it were even Rabelaisian to any extreme degree, it might be objected to.”

Max was afraid the qualification in his cable had been fatal and was ready to accept the news that he had lost Hemingway. He conceded to Scott that Harcourt was an admirable publisher, but he insisted that Hemingway would be better off in Scribners’ hands “because we are absolutely true to our authors and support them loyally in the face of losses for a long time when we believe in their qualities and in them. It is that kind of a publisher that Hemingway probably needs,” Perkins said, “because I hardly think he could come into a large public immediately. He ought to be published by one who believes in him and is prepared to lose money for a period in enlarging his market. Although he would certainly, even without much support, get recognition through his own powers.”

After several lean years of free-lancing, Hemingway saw this as the time to strike. He decided to go to New York, where he could make arrangements immediately, without weeks elapsing between each offer and counterproposal. He could personally place The Torrents of Spring and his novel with a new publisher and then justify his action to Horace Liveright, if the publisher chose to fight. “To hear [Hemingway] talk you’d think Liveright had broken up his home and robbed him of millions,” Scott wrote Max, “—but that’s because he knows nothing of publishing, except in the cucoo [sic] magazines, is very young and feels helpless so far away. You won’t be able to help liking him—he’s one of the nicest fellows I know.” Fitzgerald’s last word on the subject was an emphatic reminder to get a signed contract for The Sun Also Rises.

Hemingway arrived in New York on February 9, 1926. After an amicable parting with Horace Liveright and a sleepless night of indecision, he went to see Max Perkins, who offered a $1,500 advance for the first refusal rights of The Torrents of Spring and the unseen novel. Hemingway shook hands on it.

Perkins was extremely grateful to Fitzgerald for all his help in landing the author. “He is a most interesting chap about his bullfights and boxing,” Max wrote Scott.

Scott was just as pleased that Scribners had got Hemingway. “I saw him for a day in Paris on his return,” he replied, “& he thought you were great.”

Hemingway returned to Austria, where by the end of March he finished work on the proofs of The Torrents of Spring and the draft of The Sun Also Rises. Then he returned to Paris and made plans to do some “fooling around with bullfighting” in the early summer. “Don’t get yourself killed with all this flying and bullfighting,” Max cautioned his newest author. Hemingway answered that he had no intention of letting The Sun Also Rises be a posthumous work.

One month later Ernest sent Max the novel and what he called a “long drooling letter.” The manuscript still needed further working over, Hemingway said, but he figured Perkins would be anxious to see the pig he had bought in a poke. Hemingway supposed the editor would be so engrossed “reading the pig” that he would not be much interested in the rest of his letter, but Max was concerned with all his news, especially that about Scott Fitzgerald, with whom Hemingway’s relationship had mellowed. Scott had relaxed from the eager posture he assumed when he wanted to make a new friend; Ernest, who still respected Fitzgerald’s writing, no longer considered him the irrefutable elder statesman of the younger generation. In fact, Ernest was now feeling especially fatherly. He was touched by Fitzgerald’s constant concern about money and had decided to alleviate it. His own meager income from European literary magazines had been supplemented in the past few years by income from the trust fund of his wife Hadley. Now he had still more money, the large sum from Scribners, and momentarily considered making some grand gestures. He spoke to Max of giving all his royalties to Fitzgerald, and even wrote Fitzgerald that he had just called in his attorney to make Scott his heir. If Fitzgerald found this tactless as well as facetious, there is no record of it.

Once Hemingway signed with Scribners, Max Perkins thereupon became the moderator in the literary friendship between Ernest and Scott. Until Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, Max’s office would be the clearinghouse for much of the emotion going back and forth between the two men, particularly when they wanted to communicate without risking a confrontation.

At the time Hemingway’s novel reached Max, Scott was staying on the Riviera, at Juan-les-Pins, with “every prospect of a marvellous summer.” Ernest was in Paris; after three weeks of continuous rain, he had had no exercise and consequently was suffering insomnia. Perkins’s next letter was just the right tonic:

The Sun Also Rises seems to me a most extraordinary performance. No one could conceive a book with more life in it. All the scenes, and particularly those when they cross the Pyrennees [sic] and come into Spain, and when they fish in that cold river, and when the bulls are sent in with the steers, and when they are fought in the arena, are of such a quality as to be like actual experience.

As a work of art the book seemed to Perkins “astonishing and the more so because it involved such an extraordinary range of experience and emotion, all brought together in the most skillful manner—the subtle ways of which are beautifully concealed—to form a complete design. I could not express my admiration too strongly.”

In New York publishing circles the rumor began to circulate that Max’s enthusiasm was not shared by all his colleagues. Max would not find it easy, said Charles A. Madison, an editorial executive at Henry Holt and Company, “to persuade [old Charles] Scribner to publish a book containing four-letter words and dialogue that crackled with obscenity.” It was one thing to call a female dog a bitch (though the elderly man in charge of the Scribner stock room had been aghast to find exactly such a reference in The Great Gatsby), but it was quite another to refer to a woman—in this case, the heroine, Lady Brett Ashley—as one. Worried, Max brought the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises home and discussed it with Louise. He explained that not only certain words but often Hemingway’s subject matter was shocking. Louise instinctively grasped the situation, clenched a fist, and told her husband, “You’ve got to stand up and fight for it, Max.”

A few days later Scribners’ board of editors convened for their monthly discussion of newly received manuscripts. Charles Scribner was seventy-two then, but his roar was as forceful as ever. Printing obscenities was to him unthinkable; keeping “dirty books” from sullying his imprint was a matter of great importance. He had been stunned by Hemingway’s book. He had, however, kept his wits and, before the editorial meeting, had sought the advice of a friend, Judge Robert Grant of Boston, a successful novelist then in his seventies. The judge had been properly appalled by Hemingway’s seamy language, but he had admired most of the novel. “You must publish the book, Charles,” he had ruled. “But I hope the young man will live to regret it.”

John Hall Wheelock remembered walking into the board meeting with this thought in his mind: that Judge Grant’s decision notwithstanding, “Charles Scribner would no sooner allow profanity in one of his books than he would invite friends to use his parlor as a toilet room.”

When the debate over The Sun Also Rises flared up, Max Perkins argued that the question went beyond this single book. He later wrote young Charles Scribner, who had not been present at the meeting, that he had asserted that it was “a crucial one in respect to younger writers—that we suffered by being called ‘ultra-conservative’ (even if unjustly and with malice) and that this would become our reputation for the present when our declination of this book should, as it would, get about.”

Charles Scribner listened patiently to Perkins’s determined presentation, which of course reminded him of the way Max had argued for Fitzgerald in 1919, and as he listened he slowly shook his head from side to side. Byron Dexter, a junior editor who was privy to the office gossip, later told Malcolm Cowley in confidence: “Perkins was the new idea and the younger people in the place were terrifically for him. I remember the moment of crisis.... Old Charles Scribner, Jr. ran the place then with a very firm hand—and no two ways about it. We knew that Perkins had to go to bat for Hemingway, and it was reported with hushed voices one evening that Charles Scribner, Jr. had turned down the book and Perkins was going to resign.”

It never came to that. After the vote, Perkins walked back to his office and wrote young Scribner, “We took it—with misgivings.” He admitted that his own view of the matter in regard to the house’s reputation “influenced our decision largely ... I simply thought in the end that the balance was slightly in favour of acceptance for all the worry and general misery involved.”

The Torrents of Spring, the satire, was published on May 28, 1926. Max wrote Fitzgerald that it received some “praise but not always comprehension.” Max himself saw as much real humor in the book as biting wit, which saved it from being “devastating.” Even so, Max said, his deepest interest was in getting to The Sun Also Rises, the publication of which he impatiently anticipated. “That,” he wrote Scott, “showed more ‘genius’ than I had inferred from Torrents of Spring, which I did not rate so very high.”

That The Sun Also Rises differed in style and subject from any book Maxwell Perkins had ever edited—or even read—made him unusually hesitant to offer advice. From France, Scott Fitzgerald wrote to suggest that Max ask for only the absolute minimum of changes, because Hemingway was already “so discouraged about the previous reception of his work by publishers and magazine editors.”

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway says he did not let Fitzgerald see The Sun Also Rises until after the revised manuscript had been sent to Scribners. In fact, Fitzgerald did read the manuscript that spring and he sent a critique of the work to the author. The novel was “damn good,” he said, once the reader got past the first fifteen pages. These pages were mostly introductory material about Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn. Fitzgerald felt they were too loosely written. They displayed, he said, a “tendency to envelope [sic] or (and as it usually turns out) to embalm in mere wordiness an anecdote that casually appealed to you.”

Days later, Hemingway suggested to Max that they lop off altogether those first fifteen pages. This threw Perkins into a quandary. He agreed with Hemingway that the information revealed in this opening section was also conveyed in the body of the book and therefore, from that aspect, unnecessary. But the material, he said, “is well said here ... and a reader to whom your way of writing will be new and in many cases strange, would be helped by this beginning.” Perkins yielded the decision to the author, noting, “You write like yourself only, and I shall not attempt criticism. I couldn’t with confidence.”

On other points, however, Max was less hesitant. The problems of The Sun Also Rises, he felt, had less to do with entire sections than with individual words and phrases—profanities and unacceptable characterizations which Perkins knew could result in the book’s suppression and in libel suits. As for language, he wrote the author, the “majority of people are more affected by words than things. I’d even say that those most obtuse toward things are most sensitive to a sort of word. I think some words should be avoided so that we shall not divert people from the qualities of this book to the discussion of an utterly unpertinent and extrinsic matter.” Max thought there were a dozen different passages in The Sun Also Rises that would offend most readers’ sensibilities. “It would be a pretty thing,” he said, “if the very significance of so original a book should be disregarded because of the howls of a lot of cheap, prurient, moronic yappers.”

You probably don’t appreciate this disgusting possibility [he continued] because you’ve been too long abroad, and out of that atmosphere. Those who breathe its stagnant vapors now attack a book, not only on grounds of eroticism, which could not hold here, but upon that of “decency,” which means words.

“I am as sure of your artistic integrity as anything,” Max insisted, but he urged Hemingway to reduce the obscenities so far as he rightly could.

Hemingway replied that he imagined that he and Perkins were on the same side regarding the use of language. He said he never used a word without first considering whether or not it was replaceable. He spent the next month making the final corrections on the proof, cutting every word he felt he could. By the end of August, 1926, he had dealt with all the hot spots Perkins had cited: Henry James, in a “historical” reference to his impotence, was identified only as Henry; direct references to such living writers as Joseph Hergesheimer and Hilaire Belloc were eliminated or changed; dashes were substituted for the letters in obscene words; and the Spanish fighting bulls were depicted without their “embarrassing appendages.” The word bitch remained in reference to Lady Brett because Hemingway insisted he never used that word “ornamentally,” only when necessary. IfThe Sun Also Rises was a profane book, Ernest said, well, he and Max would have to live with that and the hope that his next effort would be more “sacred.” He was already thinking about the many stories he wanted to write, about war and love and the old “lucha por la vida.”

Another editorial discussion concerned the book’s epigraph. Hemingway wanted one that would set a theme which was already important to him, the struggles of his contemporaries for their identities during the upheaval and rootlessness after the war. In A Moveable Feast Hemingway tells how he came upon his epigraph. Gertrude Stein, he wrote, was having “some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove, and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein’s Ford. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patron had said to him, ‘You are all agénération perdue.’ ” Later to Hemingway she remarked, “That’s what you all are. All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”

Hemingway saw how applicable that last phrase was to his characters in The Sun Also Rises. He wrote Perkins that in composing the book’s epigraph, he wanted to juxtapose Miss Stein’s remark with a passage from Ecclesiastes, the one that begins:

Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher.... One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose.

The epigraph made good sense to Perkins. Ecclesiastes was his favorite book of the Old Testament—he once told his daughter Peg that it “contained all the wisdom of the ancient world”—and he found the quotation perfectly apt. He readily agreed.

Even after The Sun Also Rises was published, in the fall of 1926, Hemingway kept mulling over the epigraph. He asked Perkins if the words “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher” might be cut. The deletion, he felt, would emphasize his “real point” in the book, which was that the “earth abideth forever.” Perkins again agreed. That relationship between the earth and its people was the strongest theme in The Sun Also Rises, he wrote Hemingway. “It has not been remarked upon by most reviewers,” he said, “but I often doubt if the emotion itself ... is felt by ... people of the book-reading class. I believe it is felt by simpler people.”

Max’s daughter Bertha remembered the relief with which both her parents read the reviews in the Sunday book sections, especially Conrad Aiken’s in the Herald Tribune:

If there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it. It is alive with the rhythms and idioms, and pauses and suspension and innuendoes and shorthands of living speech.

Max’s colleague Roger Burlingame recorded years later that The Sun Also Rises “convinced editors like Maxwell Perkins that another generation, ‘lost’ though it might be, had found an understanding of the writing craft of which most of their elders had little enough.” Referring to the increase in the novel’s sales from 8,000 to 12,000 and beyond, Max wrote Ernest, “The Sun has risen ... and is rising steadily.”

The following spring Donald Friede, one of the partners of Boni & Liveright, visited Hemingway in Paris and offered him lavish advances, trying to tempt him back to their firm. Ernest told him flatly that he could not even discuss the matter as he was absolutely satisfied in Scribners’ hands. He knew they had advertised The Sun Also Rises vigorously before it began to sell, when many publishers would have dropped it. Hemingway believed it was that advertising which eventually pushed its sale up to 20,000 copies. He did not, however, realize the extent of the support Perkins himself had given the book.

Irate reactions to the novel filled the Scribners mailbag almost every week, and they were delivered to Perkins. The Sun Also Rises was banned in Boston, and there were disgusted readers everywhere demanding, if not an apology, then at least an excuse for Scribners’ pandering to the public’s basest tastes. Perkins had become expert at answering hotheaded letters assailing the respectability of the house of Scribner; he was still receiving letters about that “foul-mouthed, vulgar, blustering upstart” F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Publishing is not, of course, dependent on the individual taste of the publisher,” Perkins replied to one reader of Hemingway’s novel. “He is under an obligation to his profession which binds him to bring out a work which in the judgment of the literary world is significant in its literary qualities and is a pertinent criticism of the civilization of the time.” He added:

There are two positions commonly taken with regard to books of this kind: one is, that vice ought never to be presented in literature as it actually is, because it is unpleasant, and the other is that the presentation of it as it is, actually, is valuable because it is, actually, repulsive and terrible, and if known to be so will be hated. But if ignored and concealed, it takes on a false glamour which is seductive.

It has not yet been decided which of these positions is the right one.

While Perkins was wrestling with Hemingway’s critics, Hemingway was having his own difficulties, not literary but matrimonial. He and his wife, Hadley, with whom he had had one son, were getting divorced. The situation had started, Hemingway wrote later, as all things truly wicked start, “from an innocence.” In A Moveable Feast he describes the predicament: “An unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.” The friend was a chic young woman from Arkansas, a fashion editor for Vogue in Paris, named Pauline Pfeiffer. In July, 1926, Ernest revealed to his wife that he and Pauline were in love. The dedication of The Sun Also Rises and the assignment of all its royalties to Hadley were the last rites of their marriage. Of her one meeting with Max Perkins a short time later, Hadley recalled, “I got an agreeable impression that he was somewhat flabbergasted that Ernest was trading me off for another (however nice) partner.” She also said: “I realized I had become an adjunct to Hem, and he felt he needed something more to stimulate him. Sometimes you get so close you have to part.”

Other marriages stay together because of distance. “Louise and Max were an odd pairing,” Louise’s sister Jean said. “Opposites attract, but they never really got together on anything. Oh, they loved each other, but look at the way Max worked hard in New York all day and couldn’t wait to get home to see his girls. And Louise—she never wanted to be stuck in the house; and once she had her family she did everything she could to get away from them.”

In the mid-1920s Louise was becoming ever more active as a writer of plays and pageants, produced locally, and as an actress. Max still did not approve—of the acting in particular and probably of the theater in general. He decided that she should write stories and books and in 1925, as an encouragement, he took one of her plays for children, The Knave of Hearts, and had Scribners publish it in a large-format volume with lavish illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, a friend of the Perkinses who lived across the Connecticut River from Windsor. Parrish collectors consider The Knave of Hearts among the artist’s most prized works.

In 1926, finally yielding to her husband’s prodding, Louise quit her playwriting and made two attempts at prose—short stories called “Formula” and “Other Joys.” Both sold, the one to Harpers, the other to Scribner‘s—without Max’s influence. He found it remarkable that she should break into print so easily and encouraged her to get right to work on a third story. All their daughters remembered his saying that if she would stick to writing, “Mother could become another Katherine Mansfield.” To Louise that prospect did not hold a candle to an acting career. But she wanted to please her husband.

Louise’s energy came in spurts—sometimes years intervened between stories—but her literary efforts showed a steady improvement in craftsmanship. Published under her maiden name, they became less heavy-handed in their plotting, more subtle in their characterization. Even her very first attempts contained perceptive observations that reflected deep, inner passions. None of her early stories was particularly autobiographical, but they were all about restless women—most often spinsters or widows living in opulent surroundings (which she sharply detailed) but suffocating in their withdrawn existences.

Louise’s new occupation proved to be an expensive luxury. Max explained to Fitzgerald: “Every time she gets a story under way, she feels that she is going to earn some money, and that this entitles her to be a little extravagant—so long before the story is finished, four or five times the amount of money that it could possibly bring in has been spent.”

After a year in New Canaan, Louise and Max were convinced they had done well to move there, if only because of the supply of interesting company. The Perkinses continued to see the Colums as much as they did anyone. One night that year Molly came over with the first four pages of a book she was writing on the principles of literary criticism. Called Wide Eyes and Wings, it reflected her belief, Max told Scott Fitzgerald, “that criticism should be emotional and that literature should not be measured by fixed intellectual standards.” Max added: “I admired her mind already, but I was astonished: there were surely four fresh ideas set forth and with absolute clarity—And I’ve so often argued (like so many others) that woman was incapable of grasping abstractions—But I’d gladly turn feminist with my multitude of girls.” Those opening pages caused Perkins to offer to publish the work.

Max still remained closest to his earliest friend, Van Wyck Brooks. In early 1926 the strength of their bond came under pressure when Brooks stumbled into a pit of depression. He had gone deep into his writing of a life of Emerson and got stuck. Only his intimate friends knew that it was not the Emerson book but his last work of literary criticism, the celebrated Pilgrimage of Henry James, that had driven him to melancholia. John Hall Wheelock said, “Van Wyck was disturbed by the numerous unpardonable things he had written about James, when he knew the man could not defend himself.” Later Brooks himself explained:

I was consumed by ... a feeling that my work had all gone wrong and that I was mistaken in all I had said or thought.... I was pursued especially with nightmares in which Henry James turned great luminous menacing eyes upon me. I was half aware, in connection with him, of the division within myself, and with all the bad conscience of a criminal I felt I had viewed him with something of Plato’s “hard little eye of detraction.” In short, in this middle of my life, I was thoroughly bedevilled. ... I could no longer sleep. I scarcely sat down for a year, I lived in a Plutonian psychical twilight.... All my affections and interests fell into abeyance.

Perkins took a long walk with Van Wyck every Sunday, sometimes in the rain and fog. It was a joyless ordeal for Max as Brooks’s depression turned grayer. He believed the cure for Van Wyck was to get him to finish his book on Emerson, but Brooks declared it an irremediable failure. Max read what had been committed to paper and suggested a whole new scheme to give it the structure it lacked, but Van Wyck refused to accept it. Instead, he insisted he must find some new work to do—a part-time job that would leave him time to write. Perkins believed that kind of arrangement would “suck a man under” and said, “What a shame at your age, with a foundation of reputation well laid. Set down the names of ten lesser American writers as titles for articles and I’ll sell them at five hundred apiece, and the result will be a book that will outsell any you’ve done.” Van Wyck said he could not write at command. Max thought he should learn.

The two men got no further. Max continued to walk in circles every Sunday with Van Wyck, who sank deeper into his crise à quarante ans and shrank from most human relations. “My world,” Brooks later confessed, became that “of a house with the shades drawn and a man sitting within, a man who could not hear the knock when life drove up to the door with her merry summons.”

Soon it became apparent to Perkins that something more than Henry James’s countenance was haunting Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks’s condition was complicated by guilt feelings involving Molly Colum. Only the innermost circle in New Canaan knew the story, which Max disclosed to Elizabeth Lemmon. Van Wyck, he wrote, was “shy and sensitive, and he always made friends with women. His wife, Eleanor, a fine, strong, honest woman, was not intellectually congenial. Molly Colum was. They were together a great deal.” John Hall Wheelock later added to these observations: “The Brookses were a highly conventional and respectable couple, though Van Wyck had been highly sexed in college ... and Molly was a most daring woman.”

When Molly Colum first noticed Brooks’s depression, she set out to rescue him: She tried to lure him into a love affair—“for his own good.” Wheelock said: “She wanted to have an affair in the European style. She thought she could tear him away from the conflict between his respectable duty to family and his responsibility as an artist. ‘He’s got so much talent, but it’s all being lost because of his dutiful attitude,’ Molly once shouted. ‘He has everything but the courage to be a real man. He has to go crazy to free himself.’ ”

Max believed Brooks was “utterly incapable of any actual disloyalty and so was Molly.” Brooks’s medical records indicate that physically the extent of his affair with Molly Colum was merely one erotic kiss. “But he did say things about Eleanor which he later felt were disloyal, and it seemed to him that he had done something unforgivable,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “Then he told Eleanor about it. She is what Louise calls possessive and she was jealous anyway of Molly’s mental superiority. Whatever she did or said intensified Van Wyck’s sense of guilt which sunk so deep in him as to become an obsession. It is this which seems to be at the bottom of his troubles now.” The result was what Brooks, thinking of Rimbaud, called “a season in hell.”

Brooks stopped seeing Perkins, and his depression intensified into a kind of insanity. It was somewhat mystifying to Max, but he followed Brooks’s condition as closely as he could. In the late twenties, John Hall Wheelock, the only person Brooks was willing to meet, reported to Max that Brooks had become “frightfully ill,” far beyond the professional insecurity that had throttled him years earlier. Brooks’s mother told Perkins that her son spent his days pacing back and forth mumbling, “I shall never see Max again.” After months in which they had disappeared from each other’s lives, Perkins received a note from Eleanor asking him to take a walk with Brooks again, as he used to. Max was glad to do it, afraid only “that something will be said that will make trouble.”

There was another, unspoken problem. It was the case with Max, as it was and is for so many editors, that writers became friends and friends sometimes became writers—an incestuous jumble that sometimes produced fine books and sometimes horrendous complications. Max’s friendship with Brooks was now jeopardizing certain business dealings with Molly Colum. Max divulged all to Elizabeth Lemmon:

Years ago Molly offered me, as publisher, a book of criticism she was doing. We never gave her a contract. The matter was so personal a legal document seemed to me inappropriate. Jonathan Cape, an English publisher, gets an American partner and starts an American house—and the very first move they make is to get Molly under contract for this book. Before signing, she said she must speak to me. We had a funny time. It was like a melodrama burlesque on business. They actually tried to make her break a lunch engagement with me, and they delivered a cheque to her by messenger while I was with her. I argued that we could offer every advantage over them and she granted this. But there was some impediment. I could not imagine what. Finally she told me in tears. She had somehow heard that I was to go to the Brookses. If I was to be a friend of the Brookses how could I be her publisher!

“Now how can a man ever hope to understand women?” Max asked Elizabeth. “Or a woman either. Can you follow that reasoning? She did sign for us in the end; and now I’m pledged to make her write the book. Truth enough ... in fact life grows more incomprehensible every day to me. I hope it does not to you.”

It was usually in the summers, when his family was away and he was alone, that Max’s world-weariness afflicted him most. But his emotions were on another cycle too. Over the years he had observed that his spirits were frailest during the first and last quarters of the moon. In 1926, knowing that Elizabeth Lemmon believed deeply in astrology, he mentioned to her that his saturnine moods seemed to recur at regular intervals, regardless of other facts, and that these intervals followed the moon.

To satisfy her own curiosity, Elizabeth drew Max’s astrological chart, the accuracy of which made believers of several skeptics who knew Perkins. It showed a close conjunction of planets that signified “genius” and as many as four planets in the house of Secrecy. Saturn in the Ninth House kept him from traveling. Elizabeth had once asked Evangeline Adams, the best-known astrologer of the day, what the strongest signs for a book editor would be. She said Virgo, the sign of the critic, and Libra, the lover of beauty. Born September 20, 1884, at 7 A.M., Max was a Virgo with Libra rising.

In early July, 1926, the stars apparently fell into joyful alignment, for when Max went to Windsor he learned from Louise that Elizabeth was coming to visit in two weeks. “I don’t really believe it,” he wrote Elizabeth, “but I like to pretend it’s true.” Elizabeth was not one to leave her part of the country any more than Max was his, but she traveled by train to Vermont and had a wonderful few days with the Perkinses. She especially enjoyed the quiet times with Max, traipsing through the piney dells of Paradise. “Pasture Hill and Mount Max have a different quality now that you have been here,” he wrote to her afterward. “But that is counteracted by the many other places that I see with rage that I did not somehow compel you to see, at whatever cost to my own reputation for maturity.”

Later in the summer Molly Colum visited Windsor and was impressed by its abundance of colorful Yankees. “As a critic,” she told Max, “I can’t get over all this superb literary material going to waste.” “I have always felt that way myself,” Max wrote Elizabeth, “—which I know is a disgusting way for a man to view his own people and place.”

At the end of the season Louise produced another of her plays in a clearing, hidden away in Paradise. It was just for the family—a crowd in itself. Max wrote Elizabeth that the performance was “incredibly beautiful—a most excellent feat of production in acting, scene, and costume; and wholly Louise’s work. At the end, when the audience cried ‘Author! Author!’ the children were all cast down. They thought the cry was ‘Awful! Awful!’ ”

Max applauded all his wife’s artistic ventures, but during periods when she was not writing, he made it clear that he felt she was wasting her talents. As with his authors, Perkins never made demands on Louise: He simply expected her to fulfill herself. By never questioning Max’s standards, by which writers rated higher than actors, Louise became trapped in a lifelong dilemma. She could either attempt an acting career and disobey her husband or she could disappoint herself by turning her back on her greater talent. She chose the latter, and in so doing lost some of his respect as well as her own self-respect. By never challenging her husband’s position on that matter, she failed to show the strength he admired most in her. Each resented the other and this resentment remained throughout their marriage.

Max did not write to Louise as often as before when they were apart; when he did he still addressed her as “My own darling,” repeatedly proclaimed, “I do love you so,” and signed himself, “Your own Max.” When they were together it was difficult just to maintain harmony. Their daughter Zippy once dramatized the kind of marriage it was by ramming her two fists together.

Max Perkins spent most of his life providing others, except for Louise, a warm shoulder and a sympathetic ear. “The most important obligation of friendship,” he explained to Zippy, “is to listen.” He confessed his own periodic melancholy only to Elizabeth Lemmon. Max would write her by hand, usually from one of his clubs in New York, trying to make every letter to her perfect and charming. While his letters to Louise were self-assured and hortatory, those to Elizabeth were eager to entertain—he told her of the female art director at Scribners who said to him: “It would do you good to get drunk”—and showed vulnerability. Max would apologize for the slightest discoloration in his stationery, then proceed to write a letter that was sparkling and epigrammatic or simple and sad. He opened himself to her—as much as he dared.

There’s a half long letter to you in New Canaan. I read it to the point at which it stands and found it too much an exposure of ego even for a letter, in which more egoism is admissable than in any other form of writing; and it’s curious and creditable to mankind that in view of this fact, letter writing is so generally unpopular.

Elizabeth delighted in every one of his letters, was always understanding, and asked no questions. “Don’t be curious,” he once wrote her. “But you are not.”

“That wasn’t true at all,” Miss Lemmon said years later. “I was as curious as anybody. I was dying to know more about him. But I never asked. I knew that if I did it would be the last I’d hear from him.”

And so Max remained convinced that Elizabeth Lemmon was the one person to whom he could reveal his insecurities. “Would you be willing to send me a line to say if things are going well or ill with you?” he wrote her in October, 1926. “I had prepared myself to lose all my friends about this time; to have every man’s hand against me. But the wind has now shifted a bit and favorably, which emboldens me to make this enquiry of you.” All he ever really wanted to know from her was that his goddess was in her heaven.

Quietly suffering the kinds of loneliness that his authors so often felt, Max Perkins downed heavy doses of the remedy his Yankee forefathers would have prescribed—work. The results greatly benefited Scribners. Indeed, the list of writers Max had acquired for his company by 1926 was remarkable. They all looked upon Perkins as Fitzgerald had recently described him to the novelist Thomas Boyd, as “a wonder—the brains of Scribners since the old man has moved into another generation.”

In the last several years, old CS had come to respect Perkins’s judgment very much, but he did not always accept it. In 1925 Max read the manuscript of Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows, a Madison Avenue interpretation of the New Testament. Roger Burlingame recalled that Perkins recognized its sales potential and took it up with Charles Scribner. “It treats Christ as a supersalesman,” Max said, “a go-getter, a man with a talent for business. Of course it might sell.” Scribner, with his long background of serious religious publishing, was properly shocked and insisted that it should be declined. Bobbs-Merrill accepted it, and at the start of the second book season of 1926 it was a runaway success. After seeing The Man Nobody Knows leading the best-seller lists month after month, the company patriarch sent for Perkins. “How about this book?” he asked. “Why haven’t we got it?”

“Why, we discussed that, Mr. Scribner,” Perkins replied. “I talked it all over with you a year ago, and we decided to decline it.”

“You discussed it with me? You mean the manuscript came to us?”

Perkins was startled by this example of Charles Scribner’s failing memory. “Why certainly, Mr. Scribner. Don’t you remember that I told you it portrayed Christ as a salesman? And I added that it might sell.”

The head of the company looked at Max a long time without a change of expression. With a faint twinkle in his eye, Scribner leaned forward, wagged his finger and said, “But you didn’t tell me, Mr. Perkins, that it would sell four hundred thousand copies.”