Yours Ever

by Thomas Mallon

  Letter writing was one more thing that came to him with difficulty. From Rome, in October 1903, he apologizes to Kappus for the delay in answering his last communication: “Forgive this dilatoriness—but I do not like writing letters while traveling, because I need more for letter-writing than the most necessary implements: some quiet and solitude and a not too incidental hour.” (There is also, he pleads, the state of Italian mail delivery to consider.) Even when in the mood to address Kappus’s tribulations, he will demur that he “can say almost nothing that is helpful, hardly anything useful.” As he’s told him before: “for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.” What he really has in mind here is the advice he requires, not dispenses. His great lessons about work are still coming from the man he sometimes serves as a private secretary, Auguste Rodin, and few things can upset him more than a break in the sculptor’s letters.

  IF RILKE HAS an erotic and self-confident opposite, it is probably Henry Miller, whose letters to New Directions publisher James Laughlin are so bumptious and bullying that there’s frequent confusion in a reader’s mind as to who’s working for whom. In 1936, before they begin the business association that Ezra Pound has been urging, Miller writes: “I am thinking, Laughlin, me boy, that you’re the guy I must count on over there. I was thinking about it all night. Shit, you’re a Gentile, which counts tremendously, in the first place, and you’re dogged (I can see that from your mug), and you don’t give a shit, and well, a lot of things combined.”

  Laughlin is a boy—a Harvard alumnus not yet twenty-five—and Miller makes no bones about his own pissed-off, middle-aged poverty, or his unwillingness to stop writing dirty, if literary, books. Nearly two years after their negotiation begins, Miller finally decides that the whole thing won’t work:

  I don’t think I’ll be sending you any script after all. What I’d like to see published you either can’t or won’t take—so what’s the use? …

  You’re thinking now about your public, your buyers, your family etcetera etcetera. And I think only of what I want done. Deadlock … Why should I compromise? To please America? Or to please you? I don’t see it. I’m playing my hand for all it’s worth. Winner takes all—that’s always been my motto.

  When Laughlin offers some unexpectedly good terms, the author sends back a hymn of thanks (“You are the Jesus Christ of the publishing world!”), but Miller takes care not to sing it too long. He’s soon warning the young publisher that Laughlin will be the one, not the printers, to catch Miller’s ire if there’s any bowdlerization of Tropic of Capricorn; and Laughlin must “never ask … if I am in need—I am and will be for a long time.” After Laughlin turns down the author’s Greek travel book (The Colossus of Maroussi), the only letter he’ll get from Miller for the next three years is an open one in The New Republic, attacking him for timidity in the face of censors.

  After they’ve reconciled, Miller insists, for the next few decades, that Laughlin do more to stimulate American demand for his books. He sounds rude even when he’s trying to be polite: “You don’t need to feel obliged to bring the book out. I’m writing to you first because you are entitled to first choice.” For his part in this up-and-down correspondence, Laughlin gently keeps Miller aware of practicalities—the need, for example, to have a new book from him now that backlist sales are slowing down, and the importance of distinguishing “the literary crowd” from “the non-academic reader.” But Laughlin himself—for a while the fiancé of that other literary sounding-board, Maria Britneva (St. Just)—can’t quite make up his mind about where Miller belongs: “I have never thought of you as a highbrow writer,” he declares in 1951. “To my mind, you belong in the great popular tradition of Cervantes, Rabelais and Balzac.” Seven years later he’s pronouncing his volatile correspondent “an important thinker as well as a brilliant writer of fiction.”

  Laughlin realizes that his own moodiness allows him to understand and put up with Miller’s, but over the course of thirty years his letters—so many of them written in the teeth of Miller’s temper and presumption—never lose a feeling of distance, even formality. “All in all,” he writes in 1961, “it sounds as though you are having a marvelous time over there, and exerting a very stimulating effect on the European literary scene.” His signature “JL” or “J” can sometimes freeze back into “With best wishes, as ever, James Laughlin.”

  The fluctuation was probably deliberate. When you have a reader who is likely to blow up over any letter’s content, formality can be an instrument of peacekeeping. Miller would have been impossible with e-mail, which has made the telegram’s instant high dudgeon affordable to all. One imagines him hitting the “Send” key three or four times a day, retracting and re-releasing sentiments with the same dosage of overstatement used in their initial dispatch. In the low-tech event, there was probably more than one occasion when he cooled down while rummaging for a stamp.

  Maxwell Perkins, that earlier Harvard graduate come to Publishers’ Row, usually dealt with a more mainstream, though often no less high-maintenance, run of author than Laughlin had in Henry Miller. If Perkins were alive in today’s publishing culture, his colleagues would probably be approaching him to do a book on management style, given the deftness of his letters not only to the writers on his list but also to the occasionally ruffled purchasers of Scribner books.

  He was a master of the passive-aggressive. “I detest argument,” Perkins assures Scott Fitzgerald in 1926, and it’s no wonder. He knows how to win one before it gets started. His general epistolary strategy toward authors is common enough—start off with some praise and then get to the problems—but Perkins has a knack for making his essential demands seem incidental to everything else. At times he comes off more Southern than Yankee, layers of sub-junction and subordination ballooning up like petticoats: “I don’t like to say … But I do think … Just the same … And I am inclined to think … But I should say”—all these phrases occur in one paragraph of a letter that advises its recipient to “trust your own instinct,” while making clear that this author should abandon his current subject and start another book entirely. The warmth with which Perkins declines an unsolicited manuscript matches the tact with which he rejects a commissioned one. The diffident pose, so elaborate and constant (“I don’t advance this view with much confidence”), always distracts from the cocking of the gun. He pretends to cede the whole field while securing the only square foot of it that counts.

  His most famous challenge was the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who needed praise and reassurance and, above all, cutting. Perkins wrote by hand, his own posthumous editor informs us, “where the situation was delicate.” With Wolfe it often was. “It seems rather futile to write this letter,” Perkins admits on September 10, 1930, “in view of your having stopped all communications.” Wolfe is in despair over reviews of Look Homeward, Angel—a “few unfavorable” ones, Perkins reminds him, as opposed to “the overwhelming number of extremely and excitedly enthusiastic” ones. A few years later, in a letter to Hemingway, one finds Perkins outlining his and Wolfe’s continuing efforts on Of Time and the River:

  We have got a good system now. We work every evening from 8:30 (or as near as Tom can come to it) until 10:30 or 11:00, and Tom does actual writing at times, and does it well, where pieces have to be joined up … but his impulse is all away from the hard detailed revision. He is mighty ingenious at times, when it comes to the organization of material. The scheme is pretty clear in his own head, but he shrinks from the sacrifices, which are really cruel often.

  When they were through, Wolfe would offer Perkins the novel’s dedication; Perkins would refuse; and Wolfe would insist, thus commemorating what Perkins called “the most interesting episode of my editorial life”—one that didn’t end with the book’s publication. Perhaps inevitably, Wolfe went on to pour out long, private complaints to Perkins, biting the hand that had blue-pencilled him
toward finishing a book he would otherwise never have completed. Perkins’s replies display a patience that sometimes seems more paternal, even psychiatric, than editorial:

  I don’t see why you should have hesitated to write me as you did, or rather to send the letter. There was mighty little of it that I did not wholly accept, and what I did not, I perfectly well understood. There were places in it that made me angry, but it was a fine letter.

  Perkins’s epistolary manners took years to develop. A letter on the general subject of competition, written to Van Wyck Brooks in 1914, when Perkins was still in the Scribner’s advertising department, is by his own admission verbose (“I have not been able to say it fully or well, and now my pencil is used up entirely”), a far cry from the plain, perfect reassurances he would eventually learn to offer writers like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (“It is all simple, not complicated—don’t let anything make it complicated to you”) and James Jones: “Let me know occasionally how things go.”

  In 1921, Perkins wrote to John Galsworthy about a young American novelist who “needs steering.” The editor had begun the effort to direct Scott Fitzgerald’s talents two years earlier, when Scribner’s acquired This Side of Paradise and Perkins outlined publishing’s seasonal rhythms to the young author, explaining why “it would damage your book exceedingly to try to rush it out before Christmas.” When it comes time to help Fitzgerald revise The Beautiful and Damned, Perkins has very specific ideas about one of the novel’s crucial speeches, but opens his critique, typically, with some advice against advice: “Don’t ever defer to my judgment.” He claims no desire to control Fitzgerald the way William Dean Howells controlled Mark Twain.

  Perkins recognizes The Great Gatsby as a novel of such near-perfection that in his editorial comments of November 20, 1924, he’s “ashamed” to make even the few suggestions he has about the best way for Fitzgerald to acquaint the reader with Gatsby’s past. In this letter, praise is not strategic prologue but the main agenda; Perkins is only too pleased to enumerate “such things [in the book] as make a man famous … You once told me you were not a natural writer—my God!”

  Sixteen years later, only seven months before Fitzgerald’s death, Perkins would be writing to the novelist in Hollywood, invoking his great long-ago success in an effort to hoist him up from his current low point. “I never see an editor or writer, hardly, but they ask about you. It shows what you did, for think of all the writers who were thought to be notable, and whose output has been much larger, who have simply vanished without a trace. But we know the ‘Gatsby’ was a truly great book … You know that you are in almost all the school anthologies.” Three paragraphs later, at the close of the letter, Perkins seems to realize that this sort of praise might make a man of forty-three feel more depressed than encouraged, and so he decides, with lovely matter-of-fact courtesy, to sign off by looking not toward the golden past but to the active, if uncertain, future: “At the ‘sales conference’ about the fall books, the salesmen were all anxious to know what you were doing.”

  FITZGERALD WAS more naturally a taker of advice than its giver, but he had to assume the second role when his daughter reached adolescence. Deprived of her mother (by then in a sanatorium) and of her “golden childhood,” Scottie Fitzgerald watched her father become a stern parent whose hard written admonitions could melt like ice cubes in the swirl of his own alcoholic behavior. At Christmastime in 1936, for instance, Fitzgerald insists on a hurdy-gurdy instead of a swing orchestra for the tea dance he’s giving his daughter, and he specifies exactly how the invitations to her friends should be written. On the day of the dance he winds up getting drunk in front of them all.

  Many of his letters are mailed from Hollywood, where he is trying to earn money, to Scottie’s boarding school or college. He tells his “Dearest Pie” to stay away from fluff (“What purpose is served in teaching that second-rate Noel Coward at Vassar?”) and to concentrate on the Romantic poets who helped lyricize and sometimes even title his own novels: “For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.” He is honest about her own literary possibilities (“I do not believe that so far you are a ‘natural’ “) and confident of his artistic marching orders: “the above is really good advice, Pie, in a line where I know my stuff.” He proposes for her a regimen not unlike the young Gatsby’s self-improving daily schedule: “If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the hardest thing first at the exact moment that you feel yourself fit for doing anything in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration.”

  He lectures Scottie on self-confidence; cautions her against whining (in a letter where he whines a bit about the loneliness of writing); and tells her he “never believe[s] much in happiness.” He urges the tragic view of life instead, though the stratagems he recommends for achieving it are often the eternal tricks of comedy: “A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.” Such maxims read like the sayings in his notebooks, where he stored observations and overheard remarks for eventual use in his fiction. His view of Scottie’s life is actually more aesthetic than tragic. In the fall of ‘38, he goes so far as to offer, in a long, cruel paragraph, a sort of predictive plotline: “Knowing your character, here’s about the way things will go in the next month …”

  He presents himself and her mother as negative examples (“Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe”) and regulates the letters through which Zelda now must relate to them both. He urges Scottie to write her but not to spend much vacation time in her presence: “I think the pull of an afflicted person upon a normal one is at all times downward, depressing and eventually somewhat paralyzing.” Zelda’s letters are “tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance,” while his own, he knows, reveal too much of the latter. A postscript to Scottie just months before his death in 1940 tells her to “Be careful about showing my letters—I mean to your mother for instance. I write very freely.”

  It seems that Scottie will survive only with constant dire warnings. Fitzgerald speaks of “dreamy people like you and me,” whose “danger is imagining that we have resources—material and moral—which we haven’t got.” Incessant red flags against early drinking and early sex and failure to study read less like advice from a father to a daughter than loud slaps to the face of a drunk one is walking to keep awake. Fitzgerald claims to dislike the role of scolding parent, but he plays it to the girl’s most vulnerable spots, splashing contempt upon her first love and declaring that Vassar shouldn’t even admit her. “Don’t answer this, justifying yourself,” he shouts: “of course I know you’re doing the best you ‘can.’” He can only “wish to God I wasn’t so right usually about you.”

  In a postscript whose sarcasm was surely lost on a teenager, Fitzgerald reminds her that “At the Saturday Evening Post rate this letter is worth $4000. Since it is for you only and there are so many points, won’t you read it twice?” He is, in fact, constantly setting his advice against his own published work and vanished world (“The Bachelors’ Cotillion simply doesn’t mean what it did twenty years ago—or even ten”) and, above all, his own killing mistakes: “This is the most completely experienced advice I’ve ever given you.” Scottie Fitzgerald points out how Malcolm Cowley went so far as to say that her father “wasn’t writing those letters to his daughter at Vassar; he was writing them to himself at Princeton.” Fitzgerald himself knew, in one of the letters’ most shrewdly loving moments, that Scottie’s world wouldn’t bother to distinguish between the two: “people will be quick to deck you out with my sins … would like to be able to say, and would say on the slightest provocation: ‘There she goes—just like her papa and mama.’”

  Actually, he’s sending many of these letters neither to Princeton nor to Vassar, but to the Hollywood hotel room in which the
y’re being written. Fitzgerald is trying to keep himself, one final time, on the straight and narrow—“You don’t realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better”—and if he can’t keep doing it, he will be finished for good. “If I hear of you taking a drink before you’re twenty,” he writes Scottie, “I shall feel entitled to begin my last and greatest non-stop binge.”

  Scottie later recalled being too rebellious and self-protective to bear this onslaught, with its clear evidence of her father’s pain. When “these gorgeous letters, these absolute pearls of wisdom and literary style” arrived in her mailbox, she’d “simply examine them for checks and news, then stick them in [her] lower right-hand drawer.” In at least one of them, her father mentioned that he was keeping a carbon, so he’d be able to check whether or not her reply touches “on every point” he has made. But the copy’s real job was to keep those points, especially the last one—“Please work—work with your best hours”—faceup and available to the man still struggling in the Garden of Allah Hotel.