In almost the same time it took Max to become an editor at Scribners, he and Louise had produced three children—all daughters. Bertha, born in 1911, was named for Louise’s mother. When the second girl arrived two years later, Max wanted to name her Ascutney, after his beloved mountain in Vermont. Upon Louise’s protest she was named Elisabeth, after Max’s mother, and later nicknamed “Zippy,” the attempt of a younger sister to pronounce her real name. Two years after Zippy came Louise Elvire—called Peggy and a number of variations.
In the summer of 1916, Max volunteered for reserve duty in the United States Cavalry and was sent to the Mexican border with a company composed of men from the Plainfield area. While he was away, Louise’s sister insisted that she and her husband could not afford the large house her father had given them, and she proposed swapping homes with the Perkinses. Shortly after Max returned to New Jersey, the Perkinses packed up and moved the Venus to the front hall at 112 Rockview Avenue. Across the living room mantel Louise painted in blue and gold Gothic script an aphorism her husband had composed: “The more a man is, the less he wants.”
Two years later the Perkinses’ fourth child was born. Max was on the stairs in the house in Plainfield early that August morning when he heard a baby’s cry. He wrote of the event years later: “I said to myself, ‘That’s the cry of a boy baby. God sent me a boy to make up for my not going to war.’ ” When he learned the facts he dispatched a one-word telegram to his mother: GIRL. She was named Jane.
Among his five women, Max enjoyed posing as a hardhearted misogynist. To the repetitious questions about his not having any sons, he replied flintily, “Oh yeah, we had sons, but we always drowned them.” Whenever he heard of a married man dying, he remarked, “She killed him.” It was more the humor of the period than an animosity toward women.
Perkins found his own wife formidable. Louise was a woman of unending energy, every bit as strong-willed and determined as her husband. Their love match, according to Andrew Turnbull, the literary historian, was a little like the “union of a Scotch professor and a midinette.” It was a battle of the sexes made unique by the eccentricities of both their characters. At the start, relatives whispered of their arguments as “getting adjusted,” but soon it was clear that they were more serious than that. The romance in their marriage disappeared. Max’s emotions went behind a stone wall of Yankee reserve, while Louise’s were always on display. She wanted him to respect the acting career she desired, but he believed that women should not be seen on stage. Before their wedding, Max had extracted one simple promise from Louise: She would give up her theatrical aspirations.
There were other injustices Louise had to put up with. While Evartses were often scornful of Perkinses, they looked with absolute disdain upon Louise Saunders. “She was the actress type to us, all made up with cheek rouge—a real scalp-hunter who liked her men,” one of them once said. “She was the last kind of woman we expected Max to marry.” Men liked her, but for years afterward, all the strait-laced women watched Louise’s every move, as though expecting some wicked act.
In fact, Louise was more worldly than any of the Evartses, and considerably more kindhearted. The clan in Windsor interpreted her behavior as haughty. They resented the fact that she had a wealthy father who allowed her to fling money around. Max, like them, had been taught that something earned was worth more than a gift. Louise could be frivolous, and Max had always been a pillar of prudence. But the instant Max’s mother expressed something less than approval of Louise’s domestic abilities, he hastened to insist, “Mamma, I didn’t marry Louise for a house-keeper. I married for companionship.”
Louise cared for their daughters, though she was sometimes a distracted parent. She still had loftier ambitions than merely sitting at home to raise four children. When she was not writing children’s plays, she busied herself directing amateur productions, or redecorating her house. Early in his marriage Max wrote Van Wyck Brooks, “Louise could make a hovel more attractive than a palace.”
No love was stronger than that which Max felt for his daughters, and they clung very close to him. Every evening he read to them, starting with simple poems and working up to more complicated nineteenth-century novels as they grew older. Max instilled romantic values into his eldest daughter Bertha to such an extent that for years she wanted to grow up to become a knight—Max had bought her a toy sword and armor to train for it. When Zippy said she’d love to see a burning house, he took one of the old family dollhouses, stuffed it with paper, and set it afire, delighting her as flames came out of the windows and the roof caved in. In the winter he put on a balaclava helmet, a knitted cap that covered most of his face, and coasted down long, snow-covered hills on the same sled with Peg. “Uncle Max imposed all sorts of strict rules on his girls,” one niece said, “but none of them was ever enforced.”
Whenever he was separated from his family, even when he was no farther than his office, Max felt low and stayed close by writing letters to them. He insisted that his secretary, the dedicated Irma Wyckoff, come to work every Lincoln’s Birthday holiday to type up the elaborate valentines he wrote and illustrated. When the family was away in Windsor he tried writing to at least one daughter every night. Sometimes the letters were splendid works, full of original fairy tales. They were always expressions of his love that any child could understand. He once wrote Zippy: “A daddy can’t have any fun without his children. There is no use his trying. Everywhere he goes he thinks, ‘Yes, this would be fun if only my little girls were here, but what good is it without them.’ He can’t get them out of his head. He may go to see statues of something, but they are not what he really sees;—he sees his little girls, playing, far away. But when he gets their letters, then he is happy.” During summers Perkins joined his vacationing family in Windsor as often as he could. He always returned from Paradise rejuvenated, ready to face the accumulated papers on his untidy desk.
IV
Branching Out
Not long after Maxwell Perkins introduced F. Scott Fitzgerald to Van Wyck Brooks in the summer of 1920, Edmund Wilson, one of Fitzgerald’s Princeton companions, wrote an imaginary conversation for the New Republic between Perkins’s newest friend and his oldest, a meeting of two of the most celebrated literary minds of the day. Wilson supposed Fitzgerald would acknowledge that Brooks was “the greatest writer on the subject [of American literature]” and then tell him: “Of course, there were a lot of people writing before This Side of Paradise—but the Younger Generation never really became self-conscious before then nor did the public at large become conscious of it. I am the man, as they say in the ads, who made America Younger Generation-conscious.” Brooks later remarks, “Scarcely had the first crop of young writers arrived and achieved, like you, some impressive success than a host of publishers, editors and journalists appeared ready to exploit and commercialize them—with the result that there is now more demand for ‘younger’ writers than there are younger writers to supply it.”
Scribners resisted the trend. Old CS had no intention of converting his publishing house into a pulp factory, grinding out trashy fiction that failed to live up to his company’s seventy-five-year reputation for responsible publishing. Maxwell Perkins respected the company’s standards but was inclined to take risks. More actively than any of his colleagues, he scouted the work of new authors from all corners of the country. In what seemed a personal crusade, he gradually replaced the hackneyed works in the Scribners catalog with new books he hoped might be more enduring. Beginning with Fitzgerald and continuing with each new writer he took on, he slowly altered the traditional notion of the editor’s role. He sought out authors who were not just “safe,” conventional in style and bland in content, but who spoke in a new voice about the new values of the postwar world. In this way, as an editor he did more than reflect the standards of his age; he consciously influenced and changed them by the new talents he published.
Of his first year as a published author, Fitzgerald jotted in his Ledger: “R
evelry and Marriage. The rewards of the year before. The happiest year since I was 18.” By August, 1920, his second novel, then called The Flight of the Rocket, was under way. It narrated the life of one Anthony Patch between his twenty-fifth and thirty-third years-1913-1921. “He is one of those many with the tastes and weakness of an artist,” Scott explained to Charles Scribner, “but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story. This sounds sordid but it’s really a most sensational book, and I hope won’t disappoint the critics who liked my first one.”
Six months after the publication of This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald had not yet received any royalties from its sales. He had little patience with Scribners’ payment procedure, normal in the industry, by which a statement was sent to the author every six months and a check four months after that. Scott remembered Perkins’s invitation to ask for money whenever he needed it and requested $1,500, noting that his bride needed a new fur coat. Perkins sent the money promptly, along with the news that This Side of Paradise had sold almost 35,000 copies in its first seven months. Fitzgerald, who had expected his sales to have reached 40,000 copies, spent the money before it arrived. By the end of the year he had received some $5,000 against his earnings. Soon he had lost count of his requests, and the next time he needed money he simply asked, “Can this nth advance be arranged?” He went through his cash and credit so fast that he was to spend the rest of his life trying to catch up. He never succeeded.
On December 31, 1920, Fitzgerald wrote Perkins that his bank had resolved no longer to lend him anything against the security of stock he held. He also had $6,000 worth of bills and owed his literary agent, Paul Reynolds and Company, over $600 more for an advance on a story that he was unable to write. He told Max, “I’ve made half a dozen starts yesterday and today, and I’ll go mad if I have to do another debutante,” which is what they wanted him to write about. Then he asked if there was some way that his editor could arrange a loan as an advance on his new novel. Perkins successfully pleaded Scott’s case for $1,600 before the company bursar. A month later Fitzgerald was able to write the editor, “Working like the deuce.” The launching of The Flight of the Rocket was postponed several times. By February, however, Part One of Fitzgerald’s novel was being typed, Part Two was being read by Edmund Wilson, and Part Three was receiving its final polish by the author. Income taxes brought Fitzgerald up another $1,000 short, but Perkins reminded the “Inevitable Beggar,” as Fitzgerald had signed his latest letter, that he still had a couple of thousand dollars coming to him from This Side of Paradise.
Fitzgerald completed his novel at the end of April, by which time he had changed the title to The Beautiful and Damned. He delivered the book to Perkins in person and announced that he needed $600 to pay for a pair of steamship tickets to Europe. Soon editor and author had put Scott’s account in order. Fitzgerald absentmindedly left behind his copy of the contract, so Perkins put on paper their verbal agreement:The only reason why we are not making you a very handsome advance is that the figure is perhaps a little difficult to fix upon, but chiefly because we thought that in view of our previous association, an arrangement by which you were free to draw against your account here and reasonably in excess of it, would be more convenient and satisfactory.
That policy made Perkins Fitzgerald’s financial overseer for many years to come.
The Fitzgeralds did not especially enjoy their romp across Europe. Zelda was sick most of the time they were abroad. Scott carried Max’s letter of introduction to John Galsworthy (Perkins wrote much of the advertising copy for Galsworthy’s books in America, and thought The Forsyte Saga was “a really astonishing accomplishment in fiction”). Galsworthy received the Fitzgeralds but pontificated about the new writing coming out of the United States, disparaging its practitioners as inexperienced youngsters. Perkins knew nothing of Galsworthy’s snippy remarks. In thanking him for inviting the Fitzgeralds to dinner, Max wrote, “I think it may turn out to have done him a great deal of good, for he needs steering.” Fitzgerald felt privileged to have had an audience with Galsworthy but wrote Shane Leslie afterward, “I was rather disappointed in him. I can’t stand pessimism with neither irony nor bitterness.”
After a few weeks in France and Italy—and several pleas for “gold”—the Fitzgeralds roamed back to Minnesota. There Scott’s drinking soon began to rival that of his novel’s protagonist, Anthony Patch, and he settled in for a long unproductive summer at White Bear Lake. After a “hell of a time” trying to rally his creative forces, he wrote Perkins, “Loafing puts me in this particularly obnoxious and abominable gloom. My 3d novel, if I ever write another, will I am sure be black as death with gloom.” During this first serious depression of their relationship, he revealed to Max:I should like to sit down with ½ dozen chosen companions and drink myself to death but I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature. If it wasn’t for Zelda I think I’d disappear out of sight for three years. Ship as a sailor or something & get hard—I’m sick of the flabby semi-intellectual softness in which I flounder with my generation.
Perkins’s reply burst with optimism in every line, including sunny comments on the positive aspects of St. Paul weather for writing. As for life, liquor, and literature, Perkins wrote, “Everybody that practices the last is at uncertain intervals weary of the first, but that is the very time they are likely to take strongly to the second.” By the end of the summer Fitzgerald was writing again.
In October, 1921, the Fitzgeralds awaited the arrival of their first child and the publication of The Beautiful and Damned. The child—named Frances Scott Fitzgerald and called “Scottie”—came easily, near the end of the month. Perkins sent hearty congratulations, guessing that Zelda would be delighted with a daughter. “But if you are like me,” Max wrote Scott, “you will need some slight consolation and having had great experience with daughters—four of them, I can forecast that you will be satisfied later on.”
By the end of the month Perkins had sent Fitzgerald the first batch of page proofs.2 Scott was correcting the smallest details—he had some technical questions about student life at the Harvard of his hero, which Max easily fielded—and the novel looked “awfully good” to him. At Scribners the feeling about the book was equally high. Even the editors who still did not much approve of Fitzgerald’s writing at least recognized that they had a hot property on their list. “The galleys are demoralizing the stenographers on the fourth floor, I mean as to work,” Perkins wrote the author. “I even saw one taking some proofs out to lunch with her ... because she could not stop reading it. That is the way with all of them who are near enough to get their hands on the proofs—not only the stenographers.”
One editorial problem in Fitzgerald’s text remained unresolved: a passage centering on one of Anthony Patch’s friends, Maury Noble, who made some bold statements about the Bible, calling it the work of ancient skeptics whose primary goal was their own literary immortality. It is safe to assume that no Scribners editor had ever encountered such sacrilege in one of his authors’ manuscripts. Perkins himself was not in the least offended by the substance of the passage. Maury’s drunken oratory seemed consistent with his character. But Max feared that some readers would accuse Fitzgerald of sharing Maury’s point of view and would vehemently object. “I think I know exactly what you mean to express,” Perkins said, “but I don’t think it will go. Even when people are altogether wrong, you cannot but respect those who speak with such passionate sincerity.”
Fitzgerald took the offensive. He said he could not help imagining that remark being made to Galileo or Mencken, Samuel Butler, Anatole France, Voltaire, or Shaw—all Scott’s brethren in reform. “In fact,” he added, “Van Wyke Brooks in The Ordeal criticizes Clemens for allowing many of his statements to be toned down at the request of Wm. Dean Howells.” He asked Perkins, “Don’t you think all changes in the minds of people are brought about by the assertion of things—startling perhaps at
first but later often becoming with the changes of the years, bromidic?” If this particular incident was without any literary merit, Scott said, “I should defer to your judgment without question but that passage belongs beautifully to that scene and is exactly what was needed to make it more than a beautiful setting for ideas that fail to appear.” Fitzgerald stood fast until he heard again from Perkins.
Perkins’s response to Fitzgerald became the watchword by which he edited every writer thereafter: “Don’t ever defer to my judgment. You won’t on any vital point, I know, and I should be ashamed if it were possible to have made you, for a writer of any account must speak solely for himself. I should hate to play (assuming V. W. B.’s position to be sound) the W. D. Howells to your Mark Twain.” Perkins wanted Fitzgerald to realize that his objection was not on literary grounds.
It is here that the question of the public comes in [he wrote]. They will not make allowances for the fact that a character is talking extemporaneously. They will think F. Scott Fitzgerald is writing deliberately. Tolstoi did that even, and Shakespeare. Now you are, through Maury, expressing your views, of course; but you would do so differently if you were deliberately stating them as your views.
He wished Fitzgerald would so revise it “as not to antagonize even the very people who agree with the substance of it.”
Fitzgerald realized that the material had been flippant. He refined Maury’s speech by substituting the word deity for Godalmighty, cutting the word baivdy, and transforming “Oh, Christ” into “Oh, my God.”
While the dust jacket was being printed and the page proofs were at the foundry for the manufacturing of the printing plates, Fitzgerald came up with a new final paragraph for the novel which he thought would “leave the ‘taste’ of the whole book in the reader’s mouth as it didn’t before.” The climax of The Beautiful and Damned comes as the hero and heroine, Anthony and Gloria Patch, win their long struggle to obtain a huge inheritance. But they have also been ravaged by alcohol. To celebrate their new wealth they take a cruise to Europe, and aboard ship Anthony declares that he has come through; he has made it. The ending of the book that Scott was now proposing read:That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of many generations of sparrows doubtless recorded the subtlest verbal inflection made upon such a ship as the Imperator. And unquestionably the allseeing Eyes must have been present at a certain place in Paradise something over a year before—when Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, came back from earth into a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star. The stars greeted her intimately as they went by and the winds made a soft welcoming flurry in her hair. Sighing, she began a conversation with a voice that was in the white wind.
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