VIII
As autumn 1928 arrived, a vivacious Frenchwoman named Madeleine Boyd, wife of literary critic Ernest Boyd and the New York agent for many European authors, came with an armful of manuscripts to see Perkins. In the course of their meeting she spoke of an extraordinary novel of great length written by a huge North Carolinian named Thomas Wolfe. Then she went on to talk about other books. When Perkins brought her back to Wolfe’s O Lost, she seemed hesitant. “Why don’t you bring it in here, Madeleine?” he said, pressing further. She finally consented upon Perkins’s promise that he would read every word of it. They agreed that he could pick up the manuscript at five o‘clock that afternoon. “But,” Mrs. Boyd said with a smile, “you’ll have to send a truck for it.” At exactly five, one drove up before her apartment house. She turned the huge package over to the driver, who asked if that was one book. “Jeeesus Christ!” he said when told that it was.
“The first time I heard of Thomas Wolfe,” Max wrote two decades later in an unfinished article, “I had a sense of foreboding. I who loved the man say this. Every good thing that comes is accompanied by trouble.”
When O Lost reached Perkins, he had a lot of other work on his hands. This new manuscript of hundreds upon hundreds of pages was easy to ignore in favor of the dozens of smaller proposals and first drafts of books that crossed his desk every week. But accompanying the manuscript was a moving note for the publisher’s reader in which the author explained a few of the elements of his work. It said, in part:
This book, in my estimate is from 250,000 to 380,000 words long. A book of this length from an unknown writer no doubt is rashly experimental, and shows his ignorance of the mechanics of publishing. That is true. This is my first book....
But I believe it would be unfair to assume that because this is a very long book it is too long a book.... The book may be lacking in plot but it is not lacking in plan. The plan is rigid and densely woven.... It does not seem to me that the book is overwritten. Whatever comes out of it must come out block by block and not sentence by sentence. Generally I do not believe the writing to be wordy, prolix, or redundant.
I have never called this book a novel. To me it is a book such as all men may have in them. It is a book made out of my life, and it represents my vision of life to my twentieth year.
I have written all this, not to propitiate you ... but to entreat you, if you spend the many hours necessary for a careful reading, to spend a little more time in giving me an opinion. If it is not publishable, could it be made so? ... I need a little honest help. If you are interested enough to finish the book, won’t you give it to me?
Max took up the pages and was at once enthralled by the opening, in which the hero’s father, W. O. Gant, as a young boy, watched a procession of ragged Confederate troops. Then followed 100 pages about W. O.’s life, long before the birth of his son Eugene, the actual protagonist of the story. “All this was what Wolfe had heard,” Max later recalled, “and had no actual association with which to reconcile it, and it was inferior to the first episode, and in fact to all the rest of the book.” He then was distracted by other work and gave the manuscript to Wallace Meyer, thinking, “Here is another promising novel that probably will come to nothing.”
Ten days later Meyer came in to show Perkins another extraordinary scene in that same huge manuscript, and that was enough to bring Max back to the book. He began to read it again. Soon he and Meyer were passing pages back and forth and John Hall Wheelock and the rest of the staff were grabbing whole sections at a time. When Max had finally lived up to his end of the bargain he had struck with Madeleine Boyd, he had not a shadow of a doubt about the value of the book. But he did recognize major stumbling blocks that could keep it from getting into print. He knew, for example, that so intense a work would be resented by a good many people at Scribners, for it was “very strong meat.” The book would also require considerable “reorganization” and a great deal of cutting. Max realized he should not even try to get Scribners committed to it before determining what the author was like and how difficult it would be to get him to revise. But he was determined to see the book published. Remembering his battles to publish Fitzgerald and Hemingway, he was sorry for a moment that he was not a publisher on his own.
In late October, Mrs. Boyd tracked Thomas Wolfe down and sent Perkins an address in Munich where she thought he could be reached. The editor wrote the author that he did not “know whether it would be possible to work out a plan by which [the manuscript] might be worked into a form publishable by us, but I do know that, setting the practical aspects of the matter aside, it is a very remarkable thing, and that no editor could read it without being excited by it and filled with admiration by many passages in it and sections of it.... What we should like to know is whether you will be in New York in a fairly near future, when we can see you and discuss the manuscript.”
When Wolfe received the letter, forwarded from Germany to Austria, he knew that editors from several houses had, in fact, already turned down the fictional autobiography. A few of them had nice things to say about it, but not one had expressed the vaguest interest in printing the book. “I can’t tell you how good your letter has made me feel,” Wolfe wrote Perkins on November 17, 1928, from Vienna. “Your words of praise have filled me with hope, and are worth more than their weight in diamonds to me.” He expected to be home in America shortly before Christmas, and not having looked at his book in months, he believed he could come back with a “much fresher and more critical feeling.” He admitted, “I have no right to expect others to do for me what I should do for myself, but although I am able to criticize wordiness and overabundance in others, I am not able practically to criticize it in myself.
“I want the direct criticism and advice of an older and more critical person,” Wolfe continued, not quite sure whether the signature on his letter from the editor read Perkins or Peters. “I wonder if at Scribners I can find someone who is interested enough to talk over the whole huge monster with me, part by part.” Wolfe was astonished he had managed to make even a connection with Charles Scribner’s Sons, which “I had always thought vaguely was a solid and somewhat conservative house.” He closed his letter with two hopes: first, that Perkins would be able to decipher the lightning flashes that were his script, “which is more than many people do”; and second, “that you will not forget me before I come back.”
Perkins had little trouble with the first wish, none with the second. Mrs. Boyd had recently told him of Wolfe’s being beaten almost to death at Munich’s Oktoberfest. That event, together with the facts Perkins had gleaned from Wolfe’s autobiographical work, gave him a glimpse of the pandemonium ahead. During the next few weeks, Max worried about the two “Moby Dicks” he would have to restrain—the man even more than the book.
Perkins returned to work from his New Year’s holiday on Wednesday, January 2, filled with trepidation at meeting the creator of the manuscript that covered his desk. Max had been forewarned of Wolfe’s unusual appearance, but he was nonetheless startled by the massiveness of the six-foot six-inch, black-haired man leaning against the jamb, filling his doorway. Years later Max recalled, “When I looked up and saw his wild hair and bright countenance, although he was so altogether different physically, I thought of Shelley.He was fair, but his hair was wild and his face was bright and his head disproportionately small.”
Wolfe lumbered into the office and sized up the editor, finding he was not as he had pictured him. The author later wrote Margaret Roberts, his most influential schoolteacher back home in Asheville, that the man who had summoned him was not at all “Perkinsy.”
[The] name sounds Midwestern, but he is a Harvard man, probably New England family, early forties, but looks younger, very elegant and gentle in dress and manner. He saw I was nervous and excited, spoke to me quietly, told me to take my coat off and sit down. He began by asking certain questions about the book and people.
Perkins talked first about a scene early in the manuscript between the hero’s father—the stonecutter W. O. Gant—and the madam of the local brothel, in which she was purchasing a tombstone for one of her girls. In his eagerness Wolfe blurted, “I know you can’t print that! I’ll take that out at once, Mr. Perkins.”
“Take it out?” Perkins exclaimed. “It’s one of the greatest short stories I have ever read!”
Max proceeded to discuss different parts of the book from a stack of notes he had made, suggestions for revisions and rearrangements of scenes. Wolfe reeled off whole paragraphs he was willing to excise immediately. At each one, it seemed, Perkins interrupted him to say, “No—you must let that stay word for word—that scene’s simply magnificent.” Wolfe’s eyes grew moist. “I was so moved and touched to think that someone at length had thought enough of my work to sweat over it in this way that I almost wept.”
Out of an instinctive tendency to postpone what was difficult, not out of cunning, as Wolfe might have suspected, Perkins left the hardest point for the last. O Lost lacked any real form, and the only way he could see to provide that structure was by selective cutting. Specifically, Perkins thought that despite the wonderful first chapter about the hero’s father as a boy, the book should begin with the father already grown in Altamont, the fictional name of Wolfe’s hometown, thus framing the story within the experience and the memory of the boy Eugene. Wolfe was not yet willing, during this first editorial session, to agree to so radical a cut as the first 100 pages. But he was not put off by the suggestion. In fact, he had never been so light of heart. “It was the first time, so far as I can remember,” Wolfe recorded later, “that anyone had concretely suggested to me that anything I had written was worth as much as fifteen cents.”
A few days later Perkins and Wolfe met again. Tom brought notes along indicating how he proposed to set to work in shaping his novel. He agreed to deliver 100 pages of corrected manuscript every week. When he asked if he could say something positive about publication to a dear friend, a theatrical designer named Aline Bernstein, who had given his manuscript to Madeleine Boyd in the first place, Max smiled and said that he thought so, that Scribners’ minds were practically made up. As Wolfe left Perkins’s office, he met John Hall Wheelock. The poet-editor took him by the hand and said, “I hope you have a good place to work in. You have a big job ahead.”
On January 8, 1929, Perkins wrote Wolfe that Charles Scribner’s Sons had formally accepted O Lost for publication. Drunk with glory, Tom came in to sign the contract and receive his advance on royalties. Some years later he described in The Story of a Novelthat euphoric moment: “I left the publisher’s office that day and entered into the great swarm of men and women who passed constantly along Fifth Avenue at 48th Street, and presently I found myself at 110th Street, and from that day to this I have never known how I got there.” For days he walked on air with his contract tucked in his inner breast pocket, a check for $450 (10 percent having been deducted by his literary agent) pinned to it. “There is literally no reason why I should walk around New York with these documents,” he wrote Mrs. Roberts, “but in a busy crowd I will sometimes take them out, gaze tenderly at them, and kiss them passionately.”
“But now,” he wrote his former schoolteacher on January 12, 1929, “is the time for sanity. My debauch of happiness is over. I have made promises.” He had a part-time teaching job at New York University, but revising his book took precedence over correcting his students’ themes. Already he thought of quitting his job for a professional writing career. Feeling nothing less than devotion for Scribners, he wrote Perkins, “I hope this marks the beginning of a long association that they will not have cause to regret.” Wolfe retired to his second-floor, rear apartment on West Fifteenth Street to face some of the problems that he and Perkins had underscored.
O Lost was a portrait of a writer in his youth, living within the mountains that encircled Asheville, North Carolina. Even before it had been edited, publishing gossip had bloated the book’s length into titanic proportions. People who had seen the manuscript swore it stood several feet off the ground. In fact, it was 1,114 pages of onionskin, contained some 330,000 words, and stood five inches high. Wolfe himself realized a book that size was probably unreadable and certainly unwieldy. And so in one of his writing journals, he drafted a proposal for condensation: “First to cut out of every page every word that is not essential to the meaning of the writing. If I can find even 10 words in every page this wd. = 10,000 or more in entire mss.” By the middle of January he had begun.
“When they accepted my book,” Wolfe wrote his friend George W. McCoy of the Asheville Citizen, “the publishers told me to get busy with my little hatchet and carve off some 100,000 words.” Perkins gave Wolfe some general suggestions for keeping his hero in sharp focus and let him go off alone to cut. The author put in long hours and returned a few weeks later, pleased with his new version of O Lost. Perkins was enthusiastic as ever about the poetic quality of the writing, but was not satisfied: For all Wolfe’s work, the book was only eight pages shorter. He had made many of the deletions Perkins had suggested, but the new transitions he wrote to connect the severed portions of the narrative had swollen into thousands of words.
Wolfe told Madeleine Boyd that cutting his manuscript was a “stiff perplexing job.” Practically speaking, he knew it was desirable to reduce the length of his typescript, but for hours at a time he stared at the pile of pages. “Sometimes,” he wrote her, “I want to rip in blindly and slash, but unless I know where the result would be disastrous.” Mrs. Boyd instructed Wolfe to listen to Max Perkins carefully, because, she said, “he is one of those quiet and powerful persons in the background, the sole and only excuse ... for Scott Fitzgerald having been successful as he is.” Once, sometimes twice a week, without appointment, Wolfe went to Scribners, carrying 100-page sections. If he did not appear, Perkins wrote Wolfe or simply called him up to find out why.
By spring Tom and Perkins were working every day on the revision of the book. “We are cutting out big chunks,” Tom wrote his sister, Mabel Wolfe Wheaton, “and my heart bleeds to see it go, but it’s die dog or eat the hatchet. Although we both hate to take so much out, we will have a shorter book and one easier to read when we finish. So, although we are losing some good stuff, we are gaining unity. This man Perkins is a fine fellow and perhaps the best publishing editor in America. I have great confidence in him and I usually yield to his judgment.”
In time, rumors about the editing of O Lost were exaggerated as much as those about the size of the original manuscript; Perkins’s evaluation of his efforts on it diminished proportionately. Ultimately he characterized his work as “a matter of reorganization.” Whole chunks of the narrative were, in fact, lifted and replaced elsewhere in the book. In truth, however, the most dramatic labor done on the novel was in cutting. Ninety thousand words—enough to fill a large book—were eliminated.
As a rule every deletion was suggested by Perkins, discussed and fought over by him and Wolfe, then removed. No part of the manuscript was extracted without mutual consent; no pages were destroyed. Wolfe saved every remnant ever associated with his writing, and Perkins suggested that much of the excised material in storage might be used in some future pieces.
To create cohesion among the stories and lives which crisscrossed within O Lost’s hundreds of pages, Max recommended that the whole saga be “unfolded through the memories and senses of the boy, Eugene.” The first and largest cut, then, was the typescript’s introductory 1,377 lines. Tom finally agreed with Perkins’s criticism that when he had tried to go back into the life of his father before he arrived in Asheville, events not drawn directly from Wolfe’s own experience, “the reality and the poignance were diminished.” So Gant’s history before he arrived in Altamont was reduced to three pages and his remembrance of the Civil War to twenty-three words: “How this boy stood by the roadside near his mother’s farm, and saw the dusty Rebels march past on their way to Gettysburg.” For years it weighed on Max’s conscience that he had persuaded Tom to cut out that first scene of the two little boys on the roadside with the battle impending, but without it, the reader was drawn right into the story.
Getting through to the end of the story, however, was more difficult. After a point Perkins had to search not for whole pages to be excised but often merely single phrases. His criterion throughout was his conviction that the interaction between Eugene and his family was the book’s absolute center and that any sequences leading the reader away from this central theme had to be removed. A satirical episode about the wealthy landowners building their estates outside Asheville, for example, was deleted, as was a parody of T. S. Eliot’s poetry, because the tone clashed with the pattern of the rest of the material. Cuts made because of obscenities or improprieties amounted to 524 lines.
On twenty different occasions Wolfe spoke to the reader in direct address. If the book was meant to demonstrate a growing awareness as Eugene matured into manhood, Max thought there was no place for the writer years later to make contemporary comments on the scene. They were removed.
Deletions were as difficult for Perkins to suggest as they were for Wolfe to execute. Still, he pointed out several characters he felt did not warrant as much attention as Wolfe had given them. “I remember the horror with which I realized ... that all these people were almost completely real, that the book was literally autobiographical,” Max said almost twenty years later to another of his authors, James Jones. “But Mr. Perkins, you don’t understand,” Tom would appeal every time Max sentenced a character to the chopping block. “I think these people are ‘great’ people and that they should be told about.” Max agreed with Wolfe but he would have felt negligent not to argue for these deletions because he was convinced that, instead of propelling the story, the large crew of characters slowed it down. Four pages about Wolfe’s mother’s brother—to name but one of many examples—were reduced to: “Henry, the oldest, was now thirty.”
Perkins and Wolfe made real progress with O Lost that April. They continued to meet whenever a section was done, and they believed the manuscript would soon be short enough for one volume. Max proposed new revisions, and Wolfe retreated to his apartment either to make further repairs or to begin new parts. With the last of Perkins’s suggestions came a confession: his disapproval of the title. Neither he nor any of his colleagues especially liked O Lost. Tom came up with many others and finally brought in a list. Max and John Hall Wheelock were each drawn to a three-word phrase from Milton’s Lycidas, the one title Wolfe had also secretly thought the best—Look Homeward, Angel.
By the summer of 1929 Madeleine Boyd believed, as she would for years to come, that “without that other genius—Max—the world would never have heard of Tom Wolfe.” At the end of July, upon reading the revised and edited novel, she wired Max Perkins: WOLFE’S BOOK SO GOOD THANKS TO YOU. Indeed, after witnessing the bold new kind of editorial work Perkins was undertaking with Wolfe, Mrs. Boyd worked up the courage to ask Max a question that had long intrigued her. “Why don’t you write yourself?” she inquired in a letter. “I have a feeling you could write so much better than most of the people who do write.” Perkins delivered his response when they met next. She recalled, “Max just stared at me for a long time and said, ‘Because I’m an editor.’ ”
Once he left college, Perkins had spent his entire life working with words. While his first professional inclination toward journalism indicated an interest in becoming a writer, he never showed signs of the frustrated novelist in his publishing career. He vented any repressed desires to write by volunteering his ideas to authors who had the time and temperament to devote to a single project. And he expressed himself in his letters. During his editorial career Max dictated tens of thousands of them, often two dozen a day, “all as if the person he was writing to was in the room,” remarked his secretary, Irma Wyckoff. “Mr. Perkins even dictated his own punctuation”—which included a propensity for semi-colons and for following commas and periods with dashes—“which made his letters especially conversational. So many of his authors said that he coud talk about literature better than any writer. That was especially true in his letters.”
Van Wyck Brooks analyzed Perkins’s letters from a more scholarly point of view and observed that “Max’s epistolary style was distinctly eighteenth century—the result of a taste I shared with him for the world of Swift, Addison, Defoe and Pope that especially included the circle of Dr. Johnson.” One point in a Perkins letter that especially impressed Brooks for its illustration of his friend’s “writer’s sensibility” was what Max remembered of the life of Swift. It was, said Brooks,
not the romance of Vanessa, which everyone talked of, but something a novelist would have observed, that Swift liked to sit in taverns on greens listening to the talk of teamsters and coachmen. Just so Stephen Crane had sat by the hour in Bowery saloons, fascinated by the rhythm and tempo of living speech, and this went far to explain to me Max’s intuitive understanding of the writers of his own time in his own country.
Less than a handful could understand the writer’s point of view, Perkins said, while “the true artist has always insisted upon making his book what he wanted it” and should never be censored by editors or any outsider. This understanding enabled him to outline whole novels more than once that subsequently his authors executed or to suggest that in writing their books they should follow certain forms that proved to be entirely responsible for their ultimate success. Meanwhile he affirmed that “the only important things” were “loyalty, fortitude and honour” and he felt that to be “born knowing this” meant going at least a part of the way towards being “a great writer in more than the technical sense.”
Though he never became a “creative” writer, Perkins came as close as he could by being a truly creative editor.
To Brooks, one of the most interesting things about Max was that “perpetual war with himself that made him in the end a ‘prey to sadness.’ ” It was the “despairing refusal to be oneself” which really means that a man “does not give the consent of his will to his own being.”
Max and Tom Wolfe spent five or six evenings together that summer. The city fascinated Wolfe, and when he was not working, he enjoyed nothing more than walking through every part of town with his editor. When they were together, Wolfe seemed to inhale an entire city block’s sights, sounds, and smells. And it was on these occasions that Perkins noticed that Thomas Wolfe, like Swift or Stephen Crane, was a keen observer. “He frequented saloons, and drank there, and knew a hundred bartenders as friends,” Max said; “but it was not because of the drink. He loved the live, expressive talk of natural people at a bar when their tongues are loosened a little or much and they speak in the language of life.”
During his walks with Max, Tom usually talked about what he would write next. He knew unconsciously what he had to say but he was often confused about how to express it. When Wolfe became silent and the burden of conversation fell on Perkins, he used to make up ideas for books, just stories that did not amount to anything, sometimes maundering until something caught Tom’s attention. Years later, Max told William B. Wisdom, a great admirer of Wolfe’s work, of one particular walk when
I said to Tom that I had always thought a grand story could be written about a boy who had never seen his father, his father having left when he was a baby, or even before that, as a soldier of fortune say,—and of how this boy set out to find his father and went through a series of adventures—a picaresque kind of novel—and finally did find him in some odd situation. I just said this idly for of course such a story as I was thinking of could only be written by one of those fairy tale writers that we all publish.
But Tom ruminated on this as if it were a serious matter, then said, “I think I could use that, Max.” Perkins was puzzled, because his idea was merely a superficial story of adventure, far below Tom’s talents. He was even a little worried that Wolfe should consider it, until he realized the underlying truth of the idea for Wolfe, that Tom himself was “taking the search for a father in a profound sense, and that is what he was bound to write.” The death of Wolfe’s father in 1922, when Tom was earning his Master of Arts degree at Harvard, so traumatized the author that it took hundreds of pages in graphic detail before he wrote it out of his system. It was at the core of his writing for the next four years.
While Wolfe revised his proofs of Look Homeward, Angel, there were still passages that needed surgery. But he found himself constantly adding to the book, for each cut from the original body of material now appeared to him as a gaping wound that needed suturing. He was not deliberately countering his editor’s advice. “I am simply not able intelligently to select between what I have left,” he explained to John Hall Wheelock. “At times getting this book in shape seems to me like putting corsets on an elephant,” he wrote his editors in apology for causing so much trouble. “The next one will be no bigger than a camel at the most.” It was not until August 29, 1929, that everyone finished reading the final proofs.
Once the work was completed, another problem in Wolfe’s life started erupting. It was the summer of 1929 when Tom first discussed with Perkins his relationship with a married woman, the celebrated scenic designer for the Neighborhood Playhouse, Aline Bernstein. (Wolfe did not mention her by name.) During the years ahead, Max would read thousands of words of description about her, for Tom transformed her into one of his fictional characters, Esther Jack.
Aline Bernstein was forty-two and Tom Wolfe was twenty-four when they met on the deck of the S.S. Olympic in 1925. She was a small but energetic woman, Jewish, with a fresh, ruddy, good-humored face. Tom’s first impression of her was that of a “nice-looking woman” of middle age. She was settled in a passionless marriage. During their affair, Aline Bernstein supported Wolfe in every way through his struggles as an unproduced playwright and then inspired him to write his first novel. Now he found he “greatly admired but no longer loved [her] in the modern sense of the word.” But she still was desperately in love with him.
Tom needed advice, and so he spoke candidly to Perkins of his almost four tender and violent years with this woman old enough to be his mother. Max thought such a matter was beyond his jurisdiction as an editor and evaded the topic on several separate occasions. Finally he said that he did not see “how the relationship could continue and that since she was so very much older, it would certainly eventually have to end.” That was as far as Max would involve himself.
Shortly thereafter, Wolfe sent in his dedication for Look Homeward, Angel. It read “To A. B.” and was followed by six lines of poetry portending farewell—John Donne’s “A Valediction: Of His Name in the Window.” His personal dedication of the first copy of the book to Aline Bernstein spoke of their past together, not their future. “This book was written because of her and is dedicated to her. At a time when my life seemed desolate, and when I had little faith in myself I met her. She brought me friendship, material and spiritual relief, and love such as I had never had before. I hope therefore that readers of my book will find at least part of it worthy of such a woman.” Madeleine Boyd thanked Max again for all he had done for Wolfe and said Tom wanted very much to dedicate his first book to him—“but his friend Aline Bernstein who sent him to us, has first claims. So I told him I was sure you would not mind waiting for another one. I only wanted you to know by mentioning this how grateful he is, and how he understands what he owes to your kindness, patience, and understanding.”
Wolfe accepted one final suggestion from Perkins by cutting from his foreword all references to his editor’s assistance in shaping his book, then went home to Asheville to prepare its citizens for the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. “I have had a very remarkable visit down here,” Tom wrote Max on a penny postcard. “The town is full of kindness and good will and rooting and boosting for the book. My family knows what it’s all about, and I think is pleased about it, and also a little apprehensive.”
“Although I’m aware of no book that had ever been edited so extensively up to that point,” John Hall Wheelock said about Look Homeward, Angel, “Max felt that what he had done was neither more nor less than duty required.” During all the time of editing the book, Wolfe expressed nothing but admiration and appreciation for Perkins’s literary expertise and accepted the suggestions with grace. Wolfe believed in his writing but trusted Perkins’s opinions deeply. “I have the greatest respect and liking for him,” Tom wrote Madeleine Boyd that year. “My faith is too simple but I believe he can do almost everything to make a book go.” Max felt uneasy about the young author’s growing dependence upon him, but he understood one of Wolfe’s major problems in becoming a writer, namely that he still seemed “to his family to be doing something queer,—something that really wasn’t work in their opinion.” As an artist, Wolfe was made to feel like a one-eyed monster. That someone should have befriended him made him excessive in his gratitude and devotion to his protector, but blind to any dangers in their working together. “He had more respect for an editor then than later,” Max once wrote John Terry, a friend of Wolfe’s from Chapel Hill, in his usual understated manner.
On December 6, 1928, Perkins received a telegram from Ernest Hemingway’s mother, Grace: TRY TO LOCATE ERNEST HEMINGWAY IN NEW YORK ADVISE HIM OF DEATH OF HIS FATHER TODAY ASK HIM TO COMMUNICATE WITH HOME IMMEDIATELY. Within an hour Perkins received another wire, this one from Ernest himself, who was on the Havana Special bound for Florida after a few days in New York. From Trenton he had asked Perkins to wire to the North Philadelphia Station the $100 he needed to go home again. A few days later Hemingway wrote Perkins from Oak Park that his father had shot himself, leaving a wife, six children, and “damned little money.” His father was the parent Hemingway really cared about. From that day forward his relationship with Perkins deepened. Max became the solid, trustworthy older man in Hemingway’s turbulent life, someone to turn to and rely on.
By the end of the year his father’s affairs were put in order, and Ernest returned with one of his younger sisters to Key West, where he worked on his World War novel, revising for six to ten hours every day. By the second week of January, most of the chapters carried the author’s final corrections and were being typed by his sister Sunny. Hemingway planned a short vacation out in the Gulf Stream. He invited Perkins to join him and made the offer impossible to refuse by insisting the only way Max could get hold of his manuscript would be for him to pick it up in person. Max immediately thought it might be a good idea to get Fitzgerald to join the junket, for both their sakes, but Scott stayed behind to work on his novel.
Max met Hemingway in Florida on the first of February and spent the next eight days in Key West, a place he found full of wonders. He and Ernest started out every morning at eight and often did not get back until moonlight bathed the coconut-palmed maritime village. The sun shone every day while he and Ernest fished in the Gulf Stream. There, with the shoal refracting almost every color of the rainbow, Perkins asked, “Why don’t you write about this?” Directly overhead a silly-looking, clumsy bird flapped by. “I might someday but not yet,” Ernest said. “Take that pelican. I don’t know yet what he is in the scheme of things here.” Max had a hunch Hemingway would soon find out, for he had observed that Ernest’s mind was always at work, always absorbing and creating.
Hemingway was determined that Perkins should catch a tarpon, one of the most prized species in the sea; Max, however, after exhausting struggles with barracudas, doubted his ability to land one. At the very last possible moment, on Perkins’s final day in Key West, Hemingway hooked one. He instantly and insistently forced the rod into Max’s hands. After staggering all over the boat for fifty desperate minutes, made more exciting by a sudden storm which sprayed them all the time and added to the tarpon’s chances, Perkins and Hemingway reeled it in.
Max did not forget what he had gone to Florida for. He read Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, in manuscript between outings and was wild about it. He discussed serialization in Scribner’s, though he doubted they would accept it, begrimed as it was with “dirty” words. He wired Arthur Scribner from Key West, BOOK VERY FINE BUT DIFFICULT IN SPOTS. When he returned to New York he tried to explain in a letter to Charles Scribner that “given the theme and the author, the book is [no] more difficult than was inevitable. It is Hemingway’s principle both in life and literature never to flinch from facts, and it is in that sense only, that the book is difficult. It isn’t at all erotic, although love is represented as having a very large physical element.” Max felt constrained in specifying the troublesome areas in the book because he dictated his letter to Miss Wyckoff. But he thought the publisher’s “familiarity with Hemingway’s way would sufficiently supplement what I have said.”
The conference between Maxwell Perkins and old Charles Scribner, when they met face-to-face, over the unprintable words in Hemingway’s manuscript has become publishing legend. Malcolm Cowley’s rendition of the story is generally regarded as the most reliable, for he got it from Perkins himself. When old CS got to the office, Max told Cowley, Max explained to him that there were probably three unprintable words in the manuscript. “What are they?” Mr. Scribner asked. Perkins, who seldom used a stronger phrase than “My God,” and that only in moments of great distress, found that he simply couldn’t speak them. “Write them, then,” said Mr. Scribner. Perkins spelled out two of them on a memo pad and handed it to him. “What’s the third word?” Mr. Scribner asked. Perkins hesitated. “What’s the third word?” Scribner asked again, giving the pad back to him. Finally, Perkins wrote it, and Mr. Scribner glanced at the pad. “Max,” he said, shaking his head, “what would Hemingway think of you if he heard that you couldn’t even write that word?”
Over the years the incident was recounted in numerous apocryphal renditions. Irma Wyckoff corrected the one that held that the three questionable words were written on Max’s calendar under the heading “Things to Do Today.” She recalled, “Mr. Perkins did leave his desk for lunch, and halfway out the building he returned to his office to hide the list.”
To his surprise, the only opposition to the manuscript that Perkins faced from the magazine staff was over those specific words. Robert Bridges, editor of Scribner’s, thought the book was very well done, even in its portrayal of an explicit love affair between a wounded soldier and a nurse. Bridge’s young heir apparent, Alfred “Fritz” Dashiell, was at least as enthusiastic and regretted that even a word would have to be altered.
At the first possible moment, Perkins informed Hemingway of the magazine’s offer of $16,000, more than Scribner’s had ever paid for first serialization rights. Max discussed the problem of those “certain words” to him in forthright terms, explaining, “I always exaggerate difficulties, partly as a matter of policy on the theory that it is better to begin by facing the worst.” It was true, however, that the magazine was used as collateral reading by many schools which taught mixed classes, and Scribner’s believed the ears of all those schoolgirls were too sensitive for the vulgarisms of Hemingway’s soldiers.
Ernest replied that he did not see how any section of the manuscript could be lifted because the book was so tightly written, with each passage dependent on every other. He told Perkins that emasculation was a minor operation to perform on men, animals, and books, but its effect was great.
Perkins intended to widen Hemingway’s public with A Farewell to Arms. His primary reason for serializing, he wrote Ernest, was “in making you understandable to a great many more people, and generally in helping you to gain complete recognition.” In a letter Max reminded the author that there was a great deal of hostility to The Sun Also Rises:
It was routed and driven off the field by the book’s qualities and the adherence which they won. The hostility was very largely that which any new thing in art must meet, simply because it is disturbing. It shows life in a different aspect and people are more comfortable when they have got it all conventionalized and smoothed down, and everything unpleasant hidden. Hostility also partly came from those who actually did not understand the book because its method of expression was a new one ... it was the same failure to be understood that a wholly new painter meets. People simply do not understand because they can only understand what they are accustomed to.
Perkins tried to make Hemingway realize that “if we can bring out this serial without arousing too serious objection, you will have enormously consolidated your position, and will henceforth be further beyond objectionable criticism of a kind which is very bad because it prevents so many people from looking at the thing itself on its merits.”
This issue of words was no mere squabble to Hemingway but a fight for a return to the “full use of the language.” He believed what they might accomplish in that direction could be of more lasting value than anything he would write. Ernest told Max that there had always been first-rate writing, then American writing. He wanted to be the writer who reversed that order. But Perkins’s argument swayed him and he yielded again in blanking out the profanities.
During one of his visits to his publishers, Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, made a point of talking to Perkins about Hemingway’s use of profanities. He objected that they were completely unnecessary and only aroused prejudice. By then Perkins realized that Hemingway did not use those words simply to exercise his literary rights, but to maintain the integrity of his style. In a letter Max told Hemingway that Wister did not seem to see
that any circumlocutions, etc. would be inconsistent with the way you write. I tried to explain this, but I really never fully grasped how you do write, so I couldn’t very well. But I pointed out as an instance that you almost never even used a simile. It is a different way of writing. I always knew it wasn’t just a simple matter of not using words—that it really did mean a deviation from your style or method or whatever, to avoid them.
In March, 1929, Hemingway prepared to leave for Europe. Before boarding his ship, he dashed off a note to Max pleading with him not to give his French address to Scott Fitzgerald, who Hemingway understood was thinking of leaving for Europe as well. The last time Scott had been in Paris, he got the Hemingways locked out of one apartment and in trouble with the landlord all the time. When Ernest heard their visits were going to overlap again, it filled him with horror. He said he would meet Scott in public places, where he could walk out and leave him at any time, but he would never again let him within striking distance of his home.
The biggest hardship in Fitzgerald’s life remained his unfinished novel, of which Perkins had seen only the inspiriting first quarter. “I’m sneaking away like a thief without leaving the chapters,” he wrote Max early that March from Ellerslie. “There is a week’s work to straighten them out and in the confusion of influenza & leaving I haven’t been able to do it.” Planning to work on the boat and post the manuscript from Genoa, he sent his editor a thousand thanks for his patience. “Just trust me a few months longer, Max,” he pleaded. “It’s been a discouraging time for me too, but I will never forget your kindness and the fact that you’ve never reproached me.”
Perkins worried more about the author than the manuscript. Afraid that Scott was “losing his nerve,” he wrote Hemingway that if Fitzgerald held on to that, “he will come out all right. And in spite of his faith in youth, he will do better in age if he will only keep out of trouble enough.”
All summer, Perkins debated whether Fitzgerald ought to retreat from this present book or whether that surrender would be an irreversible setback in his career. “Do you think he ought to chuck this novel altogether, and begin another?” he asked Hemingway. After several “very bad reports” from mutual friends and but one tight-lipped message from Fitzgerald himself in which he mentioned his book as if he did not like to talk about it, Perkins wrote Scott, asking if there wasn’t anything he could do for him in America. “I do not want to have you write me letters except when there is a reason because your hands are full enough,” Max said.
Fitzgerald did have a reason to write Max, however; he was making progress on the novel again. That year he had written a short story, one of many for the Saturday Evening Post, called “The Rough Crossing.” It told of a successful playwright and his wife who take a voyage to Europe to escape the Broadway crowd. Aboard ship the playwright is attracted to a beautiful brunette with ivory skin—the “pretty girl of the voyage”—and his brief infatuation rocks his marriage just as an Atlantic hurricane tosses the ocean liner. “The Rough Crossing” sent Fitzgerald in a new direction with his novel. He constructed a new love triangle, this one involving a bright young motion-picture director and his wife, Lew and Nicole Kelly. Aboard ship they meet a young woman named Rosemary who wants to break into the movies.
“I am working night and day on the novel from the new angle that I think will solve previous difficulties,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins hopefully. But this Kelly version didn’t work either. Still, it was not without consequence. Many of its elements remained in Fitzgerald’s imagination, where they continued to incubate. Fitzgerald went back to his Melarkey story and made one last attempt at it, then laid it to rest.
Though stymied with Scott, Max got good results with several of Scott’s friends, particularly Ring Lardner, whose reputation he fought to enhance, even though Lardner’s career as a journalist still seemed to deny him a position as a serious writer. While Max was assembling And Other Stories, Lardner’s first collection in two years, the Literary Guild approached him. They wanted Perkins to bring out an omnibus of Lardner’s stories, binding together those in How to Write Short Stories, The Love Nest, and the new ones already in type. More important than their $13,500 payment, which Scribners proposed dividing equally between the author and themselves, Perkins told Ring it was a highly advantageous offer because “it will put a very fine book by you in the hands of some 70,000 people to say nothing of those to whom we can sell copies through the regular trade. And so your public will be very greatly enlarged. It will also lead, we think, to a re-estimation of you as a writer of stories, etc., in all the reviewing papers, which would also be most advantageous.” Perkins even got Scribners to agree to investing their $6,750 from the Literary Guild in advertising. “We have never thought that you have had the sale your books are entitled to,” Max wrote Ring, “and we are going to try to get it now, and to build for the future.”
Perkins dropped And Other Stories, and started thinking about the new omnibus’s title—“one of a collective sort which would emphasize the peculiarly national character of the author, or perhaps that of the people and conditions he writes about.” Max submitted a list of his own suggestions to the Guild, expressing a preference for Round Up. “It is an American word,” Max explained, “and it implies a collection—and although it might at first seem to be especially western, it is now used about almost every sort of gathering together,—even that of crooks.”
During the late winter’s search for a title, Lardner left for the Caribbean, but not as early as Max had thought. To meet their deadlines, Perkins went ahead arranging with the Literary Guild to call the book Round Up without even consulting the author. When the news finally caught up to Lardner he wired Perkins that he preferred his own title, Ensemble. Max was chagrined, but the title pages, covers, and jackets were already printed. “I am sorry this was so,” Max apologized. “We did not want to take a title you did not fully approve, and I was stupid about your visit to Nassau.” But the Literary Guild was enthusiastic about Max’s title and Scribners was printing another 20,000 copies themselves. Round Up reached almost 100,000 readers.
Again Perkins asked Ring if he could not write some long story, perhaps 40,000 words, as they had talked about for years. “Now would be the time for it,” Max urged, “with the great distribution of Round Up as a background.” To Perkins’s regret, Lardner was still stagestruck, so busy writing plays and vaudeville routines that he had not even considered a novelette. “But show business is slow on financial returns,” he wrote his editor, “and maybe I’ll be asking you for some advance soon.”
Another of Perkins’s writers, also a friend of Fitzgerald’s, had been having especially difficult times but had managed to publish, even though he was heading for a breakdown. Edmund Wilson, overcome by disloyal-ties and disaffection, was trying to decide whether to divorce his first wife for another. To compound his depression, he had recently sent the manuscript of a novel, I Thought of Daisy, to Max Perkins and was suffering from the blues that generally follow finishing a book.
“It is the sort of thing that has to come off completely or it is likely to be impossible,” Wilson wrote Perkins.
I mean that, from beginning to end, I have made characters and incidents and situations subordinate to a set of ideas about life and literature, and unless the ideas are really put over, unless they are made interesting enough to compensate the reader for what he is missing in action and emotion, for what he ordinarily gets in a novel, the whole performance will fail.
Wilson had corresponded with Perkins ever since the editor had expressed interest in The Undertaker’s Garland years earlier. Among the indecisions which Max never could help Wilson resolve was what genre he should concentrate on. I Thought of Daisy was his first long work of fiction, and Leon Edel, the editor of Wilson’s papers and journals, noted, “He was surprised to discover that this could be a quite different enterprise from any other kind of writing.” In the process of revising the manuscript, Wilson began work on a series of long critical essays, which would become Axel’s Castle. He wrote Perkins that they were “easier to do, and in the nature of a relief, from Daisy.” The novel sold only a few thousand copies, but its excellent reviews won him the respect of the literary crowd. Years later, Max’s daughter Zippy asked her father why Wilson’s novels did not have a wider public appeal. He replied, “Wilson is one of the most intellectual Americans writing, but he sounds like a smarty-pants when he writes fiction. Whenever he writes something that isn’t over everybody’s head, it reads as though he’s writing down to the public.” In another, more revealing, moment he said, “Edmund Wilson would give his eyeteeth to have half the reputation as a novelist that Scott Fitzgerald has.”
Max managed to retreat for a month that summer to Windsor, where he had a splendid, practically rainless vacation. He was startled several times that August by his two oldest daughters maturing so rapidly. Bertha had once been a grave little girl behind horn-rimmed glasses; Max used to brag about her ability “to see the justice of a thing even when it was against her wishes.” Zippy, the one Perkins girl who could always charm extra movie privileges out of her father, was becoming a traffic-stopping beauty. Together now the teen-agers went to dances in Windsor, Cornish, and Woodstock and stayed out until two in the morning. Max thought it insulting to wait up for them.
In the past Perkins had often left Windsor for New York to watch the impact of a particular new book he had had his hand in. This year he returned in time to preside over the publication of several. Look Homeward, Angel and A Farewell to Arms came out in September, 1929. The reaction to each work, by critics and readers, was overwhelmingly favorable.
Hemingway told Perkins to keep right on printing his novel; this was their “big shot.” With the impact it was making, he guessed, they would go through 100,000 copies. Within just a few weeks A Farewell to Arums had sold one third that much. Ernest already had plans for the royalties from the book. He was going to establish a trust fund for his family with the earnings from the first 70,000 copies; everything beyond that was going toward the purchase of a boat.
As for Thomas Wolfe, Eugene Gant’s childhood dreams of fame were coming true for his creator. Wolfe was praised as a new writer of the first rank, and he reveled in what he understood to be “the best reviews of any first novel in years.” The only bad reaction to speak of was in Wolfe’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. When the townspeople realized that they had been transformed into the citizenry of the fictional Altamont, with all their failings revealed to the nation at large, they were up in arms. One of them threatened to drag Wolfe’s “big overgroan karkus” across Asheville’s Pack Square. But in North Carolina, as elsewhere, the book was being bought. Scribners quickly sold some 15,000 copies.
It was a happy time for Perkins. Even the skies smiled. As October drew to a close New York basked in an Indian summer—not a hint of winter in the air. Nor was there a sign in that golden autumn of the imminent Depression and the strenuous years that lay ahead.