PART TWO
IX
On Thursday, October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed. “What effect that will have nobody can tell,” Max Perkins wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald at the end of the month. “It may have a very bad effect on all retail business, including that of books.”
When the stocks on Wall Street started nose-diving, Fitzgerald was in France, writing his novel. The stories about him all intimated that his friendships, career, and marriage were on the skids. Perkins heard one about his miskeeping the time in a boxing match between Morley Callaghan and Hemingway, which resulted in severe blows to Ernest’s jaw and Scott’s pride. His self-esteem dropped even further as he became aware that Hemingway was reluctant to tell Scott his whereabouts. Hemingway and Fitzgerald still exchanged letters, but they were not always friendly. In one of them Ernest called Scott a “damned fool,”, then exhorted him “for Christ sake” to “go on and write the novel.” He warned Perkins never to trust Scott with a single word in confidence as he was absolutely incapable of keeping secrets when sober and “no more responsible than an insane man” when he was drunk.
Scott’s relationships with other friends were becoming strained as well. The Murphys, for example, had wearied of his studying them for his novel. Gerald said:
He kept asking things like what our income really was, and how I had got into Skull and Bones [a senior society at Yale], and whether Sara and I had lived together before we were married. I just couldn’t take seriously the idea that he was going to write about us—somehow I couldn’t believe that anything would come of questions like that. But I certainly recall his peering at me with a sort of thin-lipped, supercilious scrutiny, as though he were trying to decide what made me tick. His questions irritated Sara a good deal. Usually, she would give him some ridiculous answer just to shut him up, but eventually the whole business became intolerable. In the middle of a dinner party one night, Sara had all she could take. “Scott,” she said, “you think if you just ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like but you won’t. You don’t really know anything at all about people.” Scott practically turned green. He got up from the table and pointed his finger at her and said that nobody had ever dared say that to him, whereupon Sara asked if he would like her to repeat it, and she did.
The most disconcerting stories about Fitzgerald were about his marriage. Madeleine Boyd had recently visited the Fitzgeralds in Paris and told Perkins that Zelda was no longer herself and that she and Scott were constantly at each other’s throats. Zelda’s behavior, formerly glossed over as madcap, now struck people as weird. Its most aberrant manifestation was in her study of ballet, which she was pursuing with frenetic zeal. The hours of practice wore her down. She was underweight; her face was drawn and waxy; she was so excitable that her shrieks of anger and laughter could not always be distinguished. As Hemingway suggested in A Moveable Feast, she resented all the time that her husband devoted to his writing; Scott, on his part, now felt neglected because of her dancing. For Fitzgerald, after years of plummeting confidence, that was the ultimate rejection. In a letter he later addressed but never sent to Zelda, he recalled their last year together:
You were gone now—I scarcely remember you that summer. You were simply one of all the people who disliked me or were indifferent to me. I didn’t like to think of you.... You were going crazy and calling it genius—and I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand. And I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentations of ourselves guessed at your almost megalomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink. Toward the end nothing much mattered. The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you [thought] I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine but now whatever you said aroused a sort of detached pity for you.... I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.
The Fitzgeralds made stabs at economizing that year by living in cheaper hotels, but Scott’s fiscal policy remained the same. Before the new decade was two weeks old, he asked Perkins to deposit $500 to cover his Christmas bills. His short stories had brought in $27,000 the preceding year, but his books earned only $31.77. Almost five years had passed since the publication of The Great Gatsby, and Scott had been advanced almost $8,000 on his next book. In response to Perkins’s subtle inquiries as to when his novel would be done, Scott replied: “To begin with, because I don’t mention my novel isn’t because it isn’t finishing up or that I’m neglecting it—but only that I’m weary of setting dates for it till the moment when it is in the Post Office Box.”
His professional pride was about the only thing on which Fitzgerald kept a firm grip. “I wrote young & I wrote a lot & the pot takes longer to fill up now,” he told Perkins, “but the novel, my novel, is a different matter than if I’d hurriedly finished it up a year and a half ago.”
“The only thing that has ever worried me about you,” Max wrote him that spring, “was the question of health. I know you have everything else, but I have often been afraid on that account, perhaps because I myself can stand so little in the way of late hours, and all that goes with them.”
In the early spring of 1930 illness did step in the way. Zelda, in the frenzy of her balletomania, broke down from overwork. Fitzgerald felt incapable of writing even a letter for twenty-one days. Only after several more weeks of requests for money did he tell Max his troubles. “Zelda has been desperately ill in a sanitarium here in Switzerland with a nervous collapse,” he explained. That kept Scott from his work for still more time.
While Zelda remained, in Scott’s words, “sick as hell,” he grew “harrassed and anxious about life.” The psychiatrist who devoted almost his entire time to Zelda had become a major expense. Max inferred from Scott’s letters that Zelda was on the edge of insanity if not beyond it. By summer her condition was diagnosed as schizophrenia. Because drinking was one of the images that haunted Zelda in her delirium, the doctors insisted that Scott abstain from liquor for a year; she, forever. They never actually stated that Fitzgerald’s own instability and alcoholism had contributed to his wife’s collapse, but Perkins had his own opinion. “Scott is blamable I know for what has come to Zelda in a sense,” Max wrote Thomas Wolfe. “But he’s a brave man to face the trouble as he does, always facing it squarely—no self-deceptions.” In his journal Scott summarized the year: “The Crash! Zelda & America.”
Even in his despair, Fitzgerald still mailed Perkins—“my most loyal and confident encourager and friend”—monthly literary reports. Since he could not claim progress on his book, he stocked his letters with publishing suggestions. He sent Max the names and works of several new authors—members of a “really new generation”—whose work he had come across in an issue of American Caravan. The most noteworthy, Fitzgerald said, was Erskine Caldwell, despite the “usual derivations from Hemingway and even [Morley] Callaghan.” Perkins wrote to him.
Caldwell was a twenty-six-year-old Georgian who, after a short college career, had worked as cotton picker, book reviewer, professional football player, lumber mill hand, and aspiring writer. He was living in Mount Vernon, Maine when Perkins asked him to submit manuscripts for consideration. It was the first such request Caldwell had ever received. He later recalled, “The letter touched off a three-month orgy of writing, the intensity of which had never before been reached and which I never equalled afterward.”
At first Caldwell sent Max Perkins one short story every day for a week. Each was promptly declined by return mail. But Caldwell was in no mood to accept defeat. He shifted gears and each week sent two more carefully drafted stories. He had now become determined to break down the editorial resistance of Scribner’s Magazine, but he considered Maxwell Perkins as the company’s major power and sent his stories through him. As fast as each was rejected—generally for being too “anecdotal”—it was sent to one of the “little magazines”—This Quarter, Pagany, Hound and Horn, or Clay, to name a few—where it was accepted. After a month, Caldwell detected a softening in Perkins’s letters of rejection. By spring Max had decided to accept one of his pieces, though he had not chosen which one. According to a chart Caldwell kept which traced the journeys of each of his stories, Perkins had five on hand from which to select.
“My immediate fear,” Caldwell wrote in his memoirs, Call It Experience, “was that he might change his mind—that the already tottering economic structure of the nation might crumble—that anything could happen before he actually printed one of my stories in the magazine.” Caldwell went to work at dusk the very evening of the day he had had the good news from Perkins, and set out to supply the editor with more material to consider. Thirty-six hours later he had three new stories. These, together with three additional ones which he plucked from the stack on his table, made a total of eleven for Perkins. Instead of posting them, however, Caldwell decided to take them to New York in person. There was, after all, “the possibility of a train being wrecked, causing a serious delay in the delivery of the mail.”
On the overnight bus from Portland, Maine to New York, forebodings kept Caldwell awake. “I had never seen Maxwell Perkins,” he wrote, “... and by daybreak I was beginning to visualize him as a fearsome person who would angrily resent the intrusion and become prejudiced against my work.” From eight in the morning until ten Caldwell paced the sidewalk across from the Scribner Building, trying to think of a reasonable excuse for presenting himself without appointment. Nothing convincing came to mind, but, realizing that what little courage that remained was rapidly fading, he crossed the street and entered the building, clutching his envelope of manuscripts. By the time the elevator had taken him to the editorial offices, he was so unnerved that he just gave his stories to the receptionist. He left Perkins a note that said he would be at the Manger Hotel for the next two days.
Caldwell confined himself to his hotel room all that afternoon, leaving only to grab a sandwich and some newspapers. He lay awake until past midnight, trying to summon up enough confidence to phone Scribners if Perkins failed to call before he left town. At midmorning the phone rang. The sound startled him at first, but it was so pleasing to hear, he let it ring twice before answering. “I got your new manuscripts yesterday, the ones you left at the office,” Perkins said after he and Caldwell had introduced themselves to each other. “I wish you had asked for me when you were here.” Caldwell recalled the rest of the conversation this way:
PERKINS: By the way, I’ve read all your stories on hand now, including the new ones you brought yesterday, and I don’t think I need to see any more for a while.
CALDWELL: (Silence)
PERKINS: I think I wrote you some time ago that we want to publish one of your stories in Scribner’s Magazine.
CALDWELL: I received the letter. You haven’t changed your mind, have you? I mean about taking a story?
PERKINS: Changed my mind? No. Not at all. The fact is, we’re all in agreement here at the office about things. I guess so much so that we’ve decided now to take two stories, instead of one, and run them both in the magazine at the same time. We’d like to schedule them for the June issue. One of them is called “The Mating of Marjorie” and the other one is “A Very Late Spring.” They’re both good northern New England stories. There’s a good feeling about them. It’s something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work. I think that’s important.
CALDWELL: I’m sure glad you like them—both of them.
PERKINS: Now about these two stories. As I said, we want to buy them both. How much do you want for the two together? We always have to talk about money sooner or later. There’s no way of getting around that, is there?
CALDWELL: Well, I don’t know exactly. I mean about the money. I haven’t thought much about it.
PERKINS: Would two-fifty be all right? For both of them....
CALDWELL: Two-fifty? I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d receive a little more than that.
PERKINS: You did? Well, what would you say to three-fifty then. That’s about as much as we can pay, for both of them. In these times magazine circulation is not climbing the way it was, and we have to watch our costs. I don’t think times will get any better soon, and maybe worse yet. Economic life isn’t very healthy now. That’s why we have to figure our costs so closely at a time like this.
CALDWELL: I guess that’ll be all right. I’d thought I’d get a little more than three dollars and a half, though, for both of them.
PERKINS: Three dollars and fifty cents? Oh, no! I must have given you the wrong impression, Caldwell. Not three dollars and a half. No, I meant three hundred and fifty dollars.
CALDWELL: You did! Well, that’s sure different. It sure is. Three hundred and fifty dollars is just fine.
In no time Caldwell had formulated new ambitions. The first was to get 100 short stories published.
On April 19, 1930, at the age of seventy-six, Charles Scribner died. Few of the house’s authors who were flourishing when Perkins began working there were still being published. John Fox, Jr., Richard Harding Davis, and Henry James had been buried more than a decade before; John Galsworthy and Edith Wharton continued to write, but their latest novels smacked of the nineteenth century. Old CS’s presence, however, lingered in the family business. His son Charles kept the name alive and his brother Arthur managed the firm. Maxwell E. Perkins was designated a company officer and was on his way toward becoming editorial director. “After Scribner’s death,” Wallace Meyer observed, “Max really didn’t have to defend his decisions any longer.”
That year Perkins’s most successful author—winning more prestige than old CS had ever dreamed he would—was Ernest Hemingway. Despite the Depression, A Farewell to Arms became a robust best seller, eventually reaching Number 1 on the list. Max wrote Hemingway that the Depression was “more likely to affect the general line of books—that it surely will affect—than so outstanding a book as A Farewell.”
As a new celebrity, Hemingway became the subject of literary gossip. The most unusual stories came from the writer Robert McAlmon, whom Ernest had recommended to Perkins. At dinner Max sat dumbfounded as McAlmon slandered the man who had brought them together. He started by making nasty remarks about Hemingway’s writing. Soon he was voicing the canard that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were homosexuals.
Through Fitzgerald, Hemingway himself got wind of still another story—that he was dissatisfied with his publishers and was considering others. Ernest wrote Max he did not know how to scotch these latest lies, but he assured him that he had absolutely no intention of leaving Scribners. He hoped that, if his own luck and kidneys held out long enough, Max might publish Hemingway’s collected works someday. He offered to write letters proclaiming his loyalty to Perkins.
Max treasured Hemingway’s letter. He confessed to him that the story had unsettled him. “One night in a nervous moment,” he explained, “when the rumors were flying thick and fast, I wrote you by hand asking you if you would be willing to write a letter saying they were foundless. But then in the end, I tore up my letter because I thought it was only part of the game that we should take our own medicine.” After helping put together the author’s tax statement—an annual function that came easily to the former economics major—and devising a trust fund for his family, Max got Scribners to hike the author’s royalty percentage on A Farewell to Arms, at the cost of several hundred dollars to the company, just “because we think the value of publishing for you is a great one in itself.” Perkins ultimately recommended that Hemingway consider an arrangement under which Scribners would pay him a minimum annual sum on which he could absolutely count.
Ernest accepted all of Perkins’s offers but the final one—he was sure he could not work under a salaried contract like that. To seal his pact with Scribners, he asked Perkins to obtain from Boni & Liveright the rights to In Our Time, which they had promised to sell to Scribners when Hemingway left them. When Max approached them, Horace Liveright was irate. The author was a national literary hero and he would not let the book go. “We consider Mr. Hemingway’s name of value on our list,” he wrote Perkins, “and in that we published his first book, we have a sentimental feeling about the matter as well.” After months of Max’s persistence—and the offer of a cash settlement—Scribners wrested the book away. At Hemingway’s suggestion, Perkins got Edmund Wilson to write an introduction for the new Scribners edition, for Ernest believed Wilson was “the one who has understood best” what he was writing.
The book business was turning bleak that fall, and few of the season’s books lasted through December. Because of four or five of Perkins’s novels—including S. S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (the latter reached 70,000 copies by the dying days of the twenties)—Scribners enjoyed the palmiest year they had ever had. But Perkins knew better than to think that boded well for the future. The outlook was grim everywhere. So in that flat week between Christmas and the new year, Perkins cheered himsef up by dreaming of an excursion to the Gulf Stream.
Returning from Paris, Hemingway passed through New York in late January, 1930. He called on Perkins and seemed in fine fettle to Max, who swore he would meet him in Florida in March. Business looked so bad in February that it seemed impossible for Perkins to steal away. But, he wrote Ernest, “I have learned that the only thing to do in those cases is just to go.” He arrived in Key West on March 17 and met “The Mob,” a loose fraternity of Ernest’s friends. Hemingway and his crew trolled to the Marquesas Keys. There Perkins hooked a kingfish weighing fifty-eight pounds, one pound heavier than the world’s record. As Max reeled the fish in, the rest of the crew watched in amusement for a suggestion of a grin on his face, almost belying the nickname they had given him—“Deadpan.” Throughout the expedition, Perkins was again impressed with Ernest’s powers of observation, even more than with his physical strength. In recalling Key West years later, Max said: “It must require the intuition of an artist to learn quickly the geography of the ocean bottom and the ways of fish, but Hemingway learned in a year what often takes a decade or a lifetime. It was as though instinctively he projected himself into a fish—knew how a tarpon or a kingfish felt, and thought, and so what he would do.”
The mariners drifted seventy miles from Key West to another group of tiny keys called the Dry Tortugas, and stayed for over two weeks instead of the four days they had planned. Only an act of God could have kept Perkins away from his office for so long a time: A norther had churned up such rough seas that they could not possibly get back to the mainland. Ernest and his Mob slept in a shed and lived off the liquor, canned goods, and supply of Bermuda onions Hemingway stowed on board before every trip, and whatever they caught. All they could do was cast plugs off the pier or venture out in the skiff for bottom fishing during lulls in the winds. They fished every day except two, when they shot at flocks of birds that the norther had driven their way. To match the rest of the marooned band, Perkins raised a beard, shorter and fairer than those of the others. Once the big blow died down and they putted safely back into port, Max glanced in a mirror. “If you’d seen me with a grizzled beard looking as tough as a pirate,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon afterward, “you could imagine me doing nothing unless it was murder. They said I looked like a rebel cavalry captain. I couldn’t get a look at myself for two weeks and when I did I was horrified. I saw myself entirely anew and found it a shock!” He thanked Hemingway for one of the happiest times of his life.
Not long after Max’s visit Hemingway left for a ranch in Montana to work on his newest book, the massive study of the Spanish bullfight that he had mentioned in his earliest correspondence with Perkins. Soon he wrote Max that he was getting no mail, had not looked at a newspaper for weeks, and was in the strongest physical shape he had been in for years. Except for indulgence in cold lager, which threatened to put a few inches on his waistline and take a few hours off his day, his habits were Spartan. He worked six days of every week, and had produced over 40,000 words within a month. And he had six more cases of beer, he told Max, which was enough for another six chapters. When Perkins sent him the proofs of the new Scribners edition of the In Our Time stories along with suggestions for modifications and additional selections, Ernest threw them aside and said he was working too well breaking in this new book to “flay dead horses.”
Thomas Wolfe’s career had been safely launched before the crash, but he felt threatened by the national calamity—all the more so because, as he later wrote of his autobiographical hero in You Can’t Go Home Again, “in addition to the general crisis, he was caught in a personal one as well. For at this very time, he too had come to an end and a beginning. It was an end of love, though not of loving; a beginning of recognition, though not of fame.”
Wolfe wanted to cut all his constricting ties to the past, but he quaked at the thought of it. He had become a pariah in Asheville, and, at last, he yearned to end his relationship with Aline Bernstein. Perkins suggested that Tom apply for a foundation grant, which might give him the security to quit his teaching job at N.Y.U. and live on his own, working abroad for a year. Mrs. Bernstein realized the implications of such independence and misconstrued Perkins’s intentions. She felt that he was urging Wolfe to leave her.
Perkins wrote a letter of recommendation to the Guggenheim Foundation and Tom received a fellowship. Max further arranged a $4,500 advance in monthly installments on his new book. With the incoming royalties from Look Homeward, Mangel, he had some $10,000 and no longer had to rely on the support of Aline Bernstein. Distraught, she tried every way she knew to make him understand her love for him, and for months Wolfe wavered in his feelings. But his love continued to diminish.
On Christmas Eve, 1929, Tom sat at a desk in the Harvard Club of New York and wrote a letter of affection to Max Perkins: “One year ago I had little hope for my work, and I did not know you. What has happened since may seem to be only a modest success to many people; but to me it is touched with strangeness and wonder. It is a miracle.” He went on:
I can no longer think of the time I wrote [Look Homemard, Angel, but rather of the time when you first talked to me about it, and when you worked upon it. My mind has always seen people more clearly than events or things—the name “Scribners” naturally makes a warm glow in my heart, but you are chiefly “Scribners” to me: you have done what I had ceased to believe one person could do for another—you have created liberty and hope for me.
Young men sometimes believe in the existence of heroic figures stronger and wiser than themselves, to whom they can turn for an answer to all their vexation and grief.... You are for me such a figure: You are one of the rocks to which my life is anchored.
“I’m mighty glad you feel as you do—except for a sense of not deserving it,” Perkins replied to Wolfe. “I hope anyway that there could be no serious thought of obligation between us but, as a matter of convenience of speech, I would point out that even if you really owed me a great deal, it would be cancelled by what I owe you. The whole episode, from receipt of ms., up to now was for me a most happy, interesting, and exciting one.”
The recent months of contention with Aline Bernstein had pulled Wolfe apart. Some of the distress may have been rooted in a strong provincial anti-Semitism Wolfe had inherited from his mother, a tiny, tightfisted woman with a passion for real estate. Late one night at the end of March he scratched on page 337 of his current notebook, “Went to the Public Library today—the Jews pushing in and out.” He confided further to the ledger, “I find myself at the same depth of fruitless and sterile exhaustion as I had reached two years ago. I am unable to create, unable to concentrate, and I am filled with fever, with bitter and restless anger, against the world: and I am beginning to feel this against Aline. This must be the end! the end! the end!” He concluded that his only hope for survival was to leave Mrs. Bernstein for good. He would start by putting an ocean between them.
On May 10, 1930, he sailed for Europe. While the S.S. Volendam was at sea, Wolfe, throwing a lifeline to the mainland, wrote Perkins: “I feel like a man faced with a great test who is confident of his power to meet it, and yet thinks of it with a pounding heart and with some speculation. I am impatient to get at my book; I know it will be good if I have power to put it on paper as I have thought it out.”
The “lone Wolfe,” as Perkins started calling him, began wandering around France. Max sensed that Wolfe was frightened by the challenge of the second book, and so he tried to strengthen the author for the time when he would be ready to write again. “You are a born writer if there ever was one,” Perkins assured him, “and have no need to worry about whether this new book will be as good as the Angel and that sort of thing. If you simply can get yourself into it, as you can, it will be good.” Shortly after receiving Perkins’s letter, Wolfe was working six to ten hours a day.
At Max’s instigation, Scott Fitzgerald called Wolfe at his hotel while they were both in Paris. Tom took a single day off from his new regimen and went out to Scott’s sumptuous apartment near the Bois for lunch and inordinate amounts of wine, cognac, and whiskey. Then they went to the Ritz Bar. Scott told Wolfe about Zelda’s nervous breakdown and the book he was trying to complete. At first Tom found him friendly and generous, though the two argued about America. Wolfe reported back to Max, “I said we were a homesick people, and belonged to the earth and land we came from as much or more as any country I knew about—he said we were not, that we were not a country, that he had no feeling for the land he came from.” Tom left Scott at the Ritz Bar, holding court before a bunch of drunk, raw Princeton boys who were making snide innuendos about Wolfe’s background. But Wolfe was not put off. “I liked him,” Tom wrote Perkins, “and think he has a great deal of talent, and I hope he gets that book done soon.”
Fitzgerald was even more impressed by Wolfe. Back in Switzerland, where he found his wife in no condition to see him, he read Look Homeward , Angel in twenty consecutive hours. He wired Wolfe that he was “enormously moved and grateful,” and wrote Perkins, “You have a great find in him—what he’ll do is incalculable.”
Wolfe reported to Perkins that he had no idea how long he would rove across Europe; he guessed it would be until he had completed the first part of his book, which he would bring back to America with him. He was almost afraid to tell Perkins that it would be a very thick volume. He did say: “You can’t write the book I want to write in 200 pages.” He had a grand design for a four-part book, which he was calling The October Fair. The book dealt with what he believed to be two of the profoundest impulses in man—“of wandering forever and the earth again.” By that he meant:
the everlasting earth, a home, a place for the heart to come to, and earthly mortal love, the love of a woman, who, it seems to me belongs to the earth and is a force that makes men wander, that makes them search, that makes them lonely, and that makes them both hate and love their loneliness.
“I hope I can do a good book for you and for myself and for the whole damn family,” he wrote Perkins, adding, “Please hope and pull for me and write me when you can.”
Wolfe left for Switzerland, to plan the architecture of the book, constantly seeking Perkins’s comments and approval. All summer he sent a stream of scribblings to Max; they amounted to many dozens of pages, practically a book in themselves, and they detailed his ideas of the tone and attitude, the structure and character of his work.
His travels in Switzerland eventually brought him to Montreux, where he took a quiet hotel room overlooking a garden of brilliant flowers and, beyond it, Lake Geneva. He was sitting on the terrace of a casino one night when he saw Scott Fitzgerald. Scott came over for a drink and was soon leading him on a tour of Montreux’s night life. During the evening Scott urged him to visit his friends Dorothy Parker and the Gerald Murphys. When Tom did not perk up at the suggestions, Fitzgerald accused him of avoiding people for fear of them. That was about the only thing Fitzgerald said that night that Wolfe agreed with. Despite his overbearing appearance, Wolfe was by nature shy; for all his grace on paper, he was maladroit in person. “When I am with someone like Scott I feel that I am morose and sullen—and violent in my speech and movement part of the time,” Tom admitted to Perkins. “Later I feel that I have repelled them.”
Now Wolfe was sorry for Fitzgerald. He wondered how long Scott could last by himself with no Ritz Bar or idolatrous Princeton boys. Tom wrote Henry Volkening, a friend who had taught with him at New York University, that Fitzgerald was “sterile and impotent and alcoholic now, and unable to finish his book and I think he wanted to injure my own work.” Wolfe did not consider himself very good company just then. “It would be very easy for me to start swilling liquor at present,” he wrote Perkins, “but I am notgoing to do it. I am here to get work done, and in the next three months I am going to see whether I am a bum or a man. I shall not try to conceal from you the fact that at times now I have hard sledding.”
Tom found inspiration in two books that summer. One was War and Peace, which Perkins had so often held up as the paragon of literature. “If we are going to worship anything,” Tom wrote him, “let it be something like this.” He noticed especially how the larger story was interwoven with the personal, particularly those episodes that were obviously from Tolstoi’s own life. “This is the way a great writer uses his material, this is the way in which every good work is autobiographical, and I am not ashamed to follow this in my book.” At the book’s core, “much like a kernel from the beginning, but unrevealed until much later,” Wolfe said, would be the idea Perkins had casually mentioned in Central Park the year before: “the idea of man’s quest for his father.”
Wolfe had also rediscovered the Old Testament. He appreciated it for its literary content more than the spiritual. For three days he read Perkins’s favorite section, Ecclesiastes, over and over, then wrote him that it belonged “to the mightiest poetry that was ever written—and the narrative passages in the old testament, stories like the life of King David, Ruth and Boaz, Esther and Ahasueras, etc., make the narrative style of any modern novelist look puny.” For the first part of The October Fair—“The Immortal Earth”—Wolfe had chosen a verse from the book of Ecclesiastes as a title page legend: “One generation passeth away, and another cometh: but the earth abideth forever.” He was sorry that the same verse came just before the one Hemingway cited about the sun also rising. He guessed that people would accuse him of imitation, but it was two entirely different routes that had led them to the same point.
Wolfe was planning to celebrate his revival by catching a train to the neighboring town of Lausanne to see if there were any pretty women. “I am very lusty,” he wrote Perkins; “the air, the mountains, the quiet, and the very dull, very healthy food have filled me with a vitality I was afraid I’d lost. I wish you were here and we could take a walk together.”
Perkins did not address himself to the topic of lust, in his reply, but, responding to Wolfe’s descriptions of his work in progress, spoke of what for Wolfe was a graver affliction—literary elephantiasis. “It sounds like a very Leviathan of a book as you describe it, now lying in the depths of your consciousness,” Perkins wrote, a bit anxiously, “and I believe you are the man who can draw out such a Leviathan. So far as I can judge—by a sort of instinct—all you say of your plan and intention is right and true.” Perkins warned Wolfe to be strict with himself:
Your talent seems to me a truly great one, and that sort requires to be disciplined and curbed. Length itself is not so important as with the first book,—though there is a limit to volume. I think you’d gain the compression needed to subscribe to it, by keeping that always in your mind.
Suddenly, everything went haywire for Wolfe. Scott Fitzgerald had told a woman in Paris where he was, and she cabled the news to Aline Bernstein in America, who, in turn, began sending Wolfe letters and cables speaking of death and agony, and threatening to sail to Europe to find him. Then Wolfe’s English publisher, who had been sending Wolfe the excellent English reviews of Look Homeward, Aragel, wreaked disaster by also sending him the bad notices. They said things that Wolfe felt he could never forget. Frank Swinnerton in the London Evening News found the book “intolerable in his passages of ecstatic apostrophes,” full of “over-excited verbosity.” Gerald Gould in the Observer went farther to say, “I can see no reason why anybody should abstain from writing like that if he wants to write like that; I can see no reason why anybody should read the result.” Wolfe found the remarks “dirty, distorted, and full of mockery.” The book continued to sell, but he now considered the English edition a catastrophe.
“There is no life in this world worth living, there is no air worth breathing, there is nothing but agony and the drawing of the breath in nausea and labor, until I get the best of this tumult and sadness inside me,” Wolfe wrote John Hall Wheelock. Acting as though the disapproving second wave of critics had hardened him, he said that all he wanted from the book now was money—“enough to keep me until I get things straight again.”
Enraged, Wolfe could only see that Look Homeward, Angel had caused hate in his hometown, renewed malice among “literary tricksters in New York,” and mockery and abuse in Europe. “I hoped that that book, with all its imperfections would mark a beginning,” he wrote Wheelock; “instead it has marked an ending. Life is not worth the pounding I have taken both from public and private sources these last two years. But if there is some other life—and I am sure there is—I am going to have it.” Thomas Clayton Wolfe, not yet thirty, announced to Scribners: “I have stopped writing and do not want ever to write again.”
After Wolfe made his proclamation to Scribners, he started to compose a personal message to Maxwell Perkins: “We create the figure of our father, and we create the figure of our enemy,” he wrote in a letter that he never finished. Without asking him directly, he prayed for Perkins’s support against this mysterious opposition, for at least a clear statement of his position. “Send me your friendship or send me your final disbelief,” Tom wrote, then stashed it away with hundreds of other pages that would not be read until after his death.
Wolfe decided to remain completely alone for some time to come. Contrary to his deepest desires, he believed he had to end the relationship with his editor. He sent Perkins from Geneva a formal note in which he asked for a financial statement and said, “I shall not write any more books and since I must begin to make other plans for the future, I should like to know how much money I will have. I want to thank you and Scribners for your kindness to me, and I shall hope someday to resume and continue a friendship which has meant a great deal to me.”
“If I really believed you would be able to stand by your decision, your letter would be a great blow to me,” Perkins responded on August 28, 1930. “If anyone were ever destined to write, that one is you.” Notwithstanding, Perkins tallied Wolfe’s royalty statement as requested and sent it. He tried to put the few negative comments from the critics in perspective, then added, “For Heaven’s sake, write me again.” He was unwilling to accept Wolfe’s decision to quit writing; he found it impossible to believe. But as time passed without a change of heart from Wolfe, Perkins grew fearful that Wolfe had really meant what he said. Seeing ten free days before the fall book season, he went to Windsor to calm his unrest over Wolfe’s silence.
Max returned from Vermont no less anxious about Thomas Wolfe than when he left. There was still no word from him. “I could not clearly make out why you had come to your decision,” Perkins wrote in a second letter, “and surely you will have to change it;—but certainly there never was a man who had made more of an impression on the best judges with a single book, and at so early an age. Certainly you ought not to be affected by a few unfavorable reviews—even apart from the overwhelming number of extremely and excitedly enthusiastic reviews.”
Wolfe’s silence continued, but Perkins persisted, hoping that one of his letters might move him. “You know,” he wrote, “it has been said before that one has to pay somehow for everything one has or gets, and I can see that among your penalties are attacks of despair, as they have been among the penalties great writers have generally had to pay for their talent.” Max added, “if you do not write me some good news soon, I shall have to start out on a spying expedition myself.” After four weeks of concern, Perkins received a radiogram from Freiburg, Germany: WORKING AGAIN. EXCUSE LETTER. WRITING YOU.
Two more weeks passed in silence. Waiting for the reassuring follow-up letter, Perkins wrote Wolfe again. When none came, he worried as before. “For Heaven’s sake send us some word,” Perkins implored. He wished Tom would come home to America but was willing to settle for a postcard. Another cabled plea from Perkins elicited no response.
On October 14, 1930, two months after he had quit as a writer, Thomas Wolfe wired Perkins from London: ESTABLISHED SMALL FLAT HERE ALONE IN HOUSE OLD WOMAN LOOKING AFTER ME SEEING NO ONE BELIEVE BOOK FINALLY COMING EXCITED TOO EARLY TO SAY LETTER FOLLOWS FAITHFULLY.