“Back again,” the voice whispered.
“Yes.”
“After fifteen years.”
“Yes.”
The voice hesitated.
“How remote you are,” it said. “Unstirred ... you seem to have no heart. How about the little girl? The glory of her eyes is gone—”
But beauty had forgotten long ago.
Zelda Fitzgerald detested this lyrical coda, and she denounced it so strongly that the author cabled Perkins for an objective opinion: ZELDA THINKS BOOK SHOULD END WITH ANTHONY’S LAST SPEECH ON SHIP—SHE THINKS NEW ENDING IS A PIECE OF MORALITY. LET ME KNOW YOUR ADVICE IF YOU AGREE LAST WORD OF BOOK SHOULD BE I HAVE COME THROUGH OR DO YOU PREFER PRESENT ENDING I AM UNDECIDED JACKET IS EXCELLENT.
Perkins did not balk. I AGREE WITH ZELDA, he wired Scott. Then he wrote him: “I think she is dead right about that. Anthony’s final reflection is exactly the right note to end upon.”
Fitzgerald’s writing in The Beautiful and Damned—the smart dialogue, plot twists, and action by implication—still did not conform to stylistic conventions of the novel. And so Max thought for a while that it might be good for the ending to point out a moral. The satire, he told Scott, “will not of itself be understood by the great simple-minded public without a little help. For instance, in talking to one man about the book I received the comment that Anthony was unscathed; that he came through with his millions, and thinking well of himself. This man completely missed the extraordinarily effective irony of the last few paragraphs.” Still Max did not think the advantages of making the meaning more explicit were such as to overcome the artistic losses. He put aside Scott’s new half-page and revised the copy for the dust jacket so that it would insure the understanding of Fitzgerald’s irony.
Perkins believed the general reading public had been entertained by Fitzgerald’s writings but had not accorded them their due literary significance, mainly because of the frivolity of his characters. Max was greatly impressed with the depths Fitzgerald plumbed in this second novel. “There is especially in this country a rootless class of society,” he wrote Scott, “into which Gloria and Anthony drifted—a large class and one which has an important effect on society in general. It is certainly worth presenting in a novel. I know that you did not deliberately undertake to do this, but I think The Beautiful and Damned has in effect done this; and that this makes it a valuable as well as brilliant commentary upon American society.”
The Beautiful and Damned—dedicated to Shane Leslie, George Jean Nathan, and Maxwell Perkins “in appreciation of much literary help and encouragement”—was published on March 3, 1922. Six weeks after publication, Perkins reported to Fitzgerald that Scribners was not getting reorders on the book as large as he would like, though it had run through its third edition of 10,000 copies by mid-April. (The same week Scribners printed the thirteenth edition of This Side of Paradise.) His hopes of its being an overwhelming success were deflated, but, Max wrote, he was sorry Fitzgerald’s letters already spoke of its being a disappointment. “Of course I wanted it to sell a hundred thousand or more,” Perkins said, “and I hoped that the extraordinary exhilaration of your style from paragraph to paragraph might make it do so in spite of the fact that it was a tragedy and necessarily unpleasant because of its nature, so that its principal elements were not of such a kind as in themselves to recommend it to the very great mass of readers who read purely for entertainment and nothing else. Now, at least this book is going to have a pretty large sale. The trade 3 are going to get rid of it easily. It has made a stir among the discriminating and has therefore been all to the good except from the most purely commercial viewpoints. I know that that is an important viewpoint to you as well as to us; but for our part we are backing you for a long race and are more than ever convinced that you will win it.”
Perkins was already thinking of the next project in Fitzgerald’s career. He thought it should be a collection of short stories. He liked to follow a novel with a collection, for he found the sales of one generally stimulated the other. Fitzgerald picked a dozen magazine pieces and offered a title for the anthology: Tales of the Jazz Age. After the next meeting of the Scribners salesmen, Max reported back: “There were loud and precipitous criticisms of the title.... They feel there is an intense reaction against all jazz, and that the word whatever implication it actually has, will itself injure the book.”
Scott polled his wife, two booksellers, and several friends, all of whom liked his title. He would not budge. “It will be bought by my own personal public,” he wrote Max, “that is, by the countless flappers and college kids who think I am a sort of oracle.” Scott offered to sacrifice Jazz Age only if Perkins himself were dead set against it and would blazon another, more arresting title over half the cover. Perkins did not spell out his own objections to the title, and so it stuck.
But for several months Perkins had been attempting to influence Fitzgerald on a more important matter. With The Beautiful and Damned, he believed, Fitzgerald had taken the character of the flapper its full distance. (“Don’t you ever be one,” he warned his nine-year-old daughter Zippy that summer. “They’re so silly.”) Scott’s short-skirted, bob-haired heroines were attractive, but, as Perkins told him when they discussed advertising the novel, “We ought to ... get away altogether from the flapper idea.” Scott was unsure about giving up what he did best. He could not forget how good those jazz babies had been to him. Upon Max’s suggestion, however, he entered a new phase in his short stories: His characters began growing up. Most of his pieces in the next few years were not about finding love so much as losing romance. Money, formerly an object of awe, became an instrument of power. Fantasies were abandoned for unfulfilled dreams.
When Max asked Scott in May, 1922, if he had thought any more about a new novel, Fitzgerald had not yet developed a story in the rounded way Perkins had hoped, but he was at least on the right track. Scott replied, “Its locale will be the middle west and New York of 1885 I think. It will concern less superlative beauties than I run to usually & will be centered on a small period of time. It will have a catholic element. I’m not quite sure whether I’m ready to start it quite yet or not.” Perkins hoped the idea of the novel would grow on Scott until he would feel compelled to write it, but for months Fitzgerald bounced between projects, ultimately deciding to complete a play that he had started early in the year.
Gabriel‘r Trombone was a romantic farce about a henpecked post-man, Jerry Frost, who dreamed of becoming President of the United States. Scott announced that the work was “the best American comedy to date, and undoubtedly the best thing I have ever written.” By Christmas, 1922, Max had a copy of the play before him.
Editing drama was not exactly Perkins’s métier, but after reading Scott’s work of absurdist theater, he was convinced that the play failed to lift the audience onto its wacky plane, and wrote a 1,000-word critique. Perkins spotlighted the play’s trouble and set down suggestions he thought would keep it from pratfalling into burlesque nonsense. Each part of the second act, he said, should do three things: “add to the quality of a fantastic dream, satirize Jerry and his family as representing a large class of Americans, and satirize the government or army or whatever institution is at the moment in use.” Perkins told Fitzgerald, “Satirize as much as you can ... but keep one eye always on your chief motive. Throughout the entire wild second act there should still be a kind of ‘wild logic.’ ”
While Scott had been writing Gabriel’s Trombone, he and Zelda had moved to Long Island, where they rented a magnificent house in the newly incorporated village of Great Neck. He was again drinking too much. Later he wrote in his Ledger that 1923 was a “comfortable but dangerous and deteriorating year.” A few stories, a motion-picture option, and various advances brought him almost $30,000 in 1923, $5,000 more than he had earned the year before. But after months of careless living, Fitzgerald admitted to Max Perkins that he had spent himself into a “terrible mess.” He had brought the play, now called The V
egetable, to the point where it could be put on—he found a producer—but at considerable cost to his main career. He rewrote it from top to bottom four times—without doing much to meet Max’s criticisms—and then he lost many weeks attending rehearsals in the city every day and doctoring the script every night. “I’m at the end of my rope,” he wrote Perkins in late 1923. Even after deducting his earnings from The Beautiful and Damned, he owed Scribners several thousand dollars. He anxiously asked if he could assign them the first royalty payments of his play, which all the people backstage assured him would be a great hit, to be paid until the full amount was cleared up. “If I don’t in some way get $650 in the bank by Wednesday morning, I’ll have to pawn the furniture,” he told Perkins in horror. “I don’t even dare come up there personally but for God’s sake try to fix it.” Max got the money deposited without the assignment that Fitzgerald had proposed.
Nineteen twenty-three was one of Broadway’s brightest years. John Barrymore played Hamlet just a few blocks away from where his sister Ethel was appearing in Romeo and Juliet. Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author also opened. Most critics cited Galsworthy’s Loyalties as the best play of the season. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Vegetable never got into town. In fact, a good number of people who saw the curtain raised in Atlantic City didn’t stay in the theater long enought to see it drop.
“Did you hear that Scott’s play fell absolutely flat?” Perkins wrote Charles Scribner. “The second act seemed altogether to bewilder the audience. And Scott was a great sport. The moment he got back he called me up and described the failure in the most uncompromising way. He said, ‘I said to Zelda, here we are after all these books with nothing. Not a cent to show. We’ll have to begin all over.’ ”
The successful editor is one who is constantly finding new writers, nurturing their talents, and publishing them with critical and financial success. The thrill of developing fresh writing makes the search worthwhile, even when the waiting and working becomes months, sometimes years, of drudgery and frequent disappointment. William C. Brownell once heard that Roger Burlingame, one of Max’s young colleagues, was discouraged by the labor. He went to him and suggested that 90 percent of the time editors perform duties any office boy could do as well. “But once a month, or once every six months,” said Brownell, “there comes a moment which no one but you could cope with. Into that single moment of work goes all your education, all your background, all the thinking of your life.”
In the summer of 1923 Scott Fitzgerald drew Perkins’s attention to his Long Island neighbor and friend Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, the popular sportswriter and humorous newspaper columnist. Lardner and Fitzgerald were different in several ways. At thirty-eight Lardner was tall and dark, with deep moody eyes; he worked steadily at his writing and never considered it especially indelible. Fitzgerald was short and fair and fresh; he was sporadic in his work habits and wrote for posterity. But the two men had one strong thing in common: Both loved to revel and could drink from dusk until the sun rose over Long Island Sound.
Lardner had published several volumes of first-person sketches with other houses, but they had never been given any serious critical attention. One of them, You Know Me Al, was a collection of short stories in the form of letters written by a semiliterate baseball rookie. His other heroes included Tin Pan Alley songwriters, chorus girls, and stenographers, whose slangy speech identified him with the less sophisticated segments of the population. Reading Lardner’s long story “The Golden Honeymoon,” Perkins thought of collecting several of his pieces into one volume. “I am therefore writing to tell you how very much interested we should be to consider this possibility,” Perkins suggested that July. “I would hardly have ventured to do this if Scott had not spoken of the possibility because your position in the literary world is such that you must be besieged by publishers, and to people in that situation their letters of interest are rather a nuisance.”
Perkins and Lardner met that summer in Great Neck. Fitzgerald joined them for dinner at René Durand’s restaurant and speakeasy. Ring mentioned a number of his stories he thought would interest the editor, and Scott babbled about all his friends—“the good eggs,” he called them. As the evening got less sober, Ring went home and Scott insisted on driving Max around Long Island. They got to the car without incident, but not much farther. “There was no reason on this occasion why [Fitzgerald] should not have turned the car to the right as most people did and as the publicity man comfortably expected,” The New Yorker wrote of the subsequent mishap, mistaking Perkins’s position, “but having had perhaps a cocktail or two, it seemed more amusing to turn to the left off the road.” In the dark, Scott drove Max down a steep hill into a lily pond. The next weekend Perkins went to Windsor and told Louise, “Scott Fitzgerald was saying what a good egg I was, and what a good egg Ring was, and what a good egg he was, and then, without thinking, as though it was something one good egg did to another good egg, he just drove me into the damned lake.” Perkins laughed about it for years, and the body of water got larger with each retelling of the story.
With Fitzgerald’s help Max set about gathering the stories Lardner had spoken of that early summer evening. It was no small task, because Ring thought so little of them he did not even keep copies for himself. Once a story was written, he was finished with it. For the most part Max had to rely on Lardner’s faulty memory to discover where his efforts had been published. Even when he remembered, they had to search library vaults and magazine morgues, and it was not until December that Perkins found them all. By then he was so enthusiastic about the collection, called How to Write Short Stories, that he steamrollered its acceptance past his dissenting older colleagues and onto the spring list. The procedure was most irregular because the author had never gotten around to giving the enterprise his official sanction.
Ring Lardner, Jr., commented that his father might never have written another short story after “The Golden Honeymoon” if it had not been for Scott Fitzgerald and Max Perkins. “The publication of How to Write Short Stories made him feel for the first time that he existed in the literary world, that he was more than a newspaperman. That support didn’t affect how he wrote, but what he wrote,” young Lardner said. Ring sent Max his apologies for the months of trouble involved in “gathering the stuff” and extended an invitation to visit Great Neck again. “It’s safer now,” he assured Perkins, thinking of Scott, “as Durand’s pond is frozen over.”
While Perkins arranged the contents of the book, Lardner left for Nassau. Reading the stories over for the fourth and fifth times, Perkins felt there was a problem in the title How to Write Short Stories—it promised instruction the book did not supply. Max suggested that Lardner could easily solve the problem by writing a brief comment for each story, a satirical foreword affecting to present it as an illustration of short story writing. Lardner liked the idea, and Perkins had the captions for each story from him within days. The swiftness of delivery surprised him. “I had pictured you as chiefly occupied with golf or Mah Jongg,” he told Ring, “from what Scott said.”
Several of the introductions in How to Write Short Stories display the derisive attitude toward his fiction that Lardner never quite got over. He knew his work was funny but did not take it very seriously. Edmund Wilson wrote in his journals about one party at the Fitzgeralds’ around that time.
Lardner and I started talking about the oil scandal, and Fitz fell asleep in his chair.... When we were talking about his own work, Lardner said that the trouble was he couldn’t write straight English. I asked him what he meant, and he said: “I can’t write a sentence like ‘We were sitting in the Fitzgeralds’ house, and the fire was burning brightly.’ ”
Lardner had approached with vigor the assignment of writing the forewords, though he always resorted to a self-deprecating joke. Introducing “The Facts” he wrote:A sample story of life in the Kentucky mountains. An English girl leaves her husband, an Omaha policeman, but n
eglects to obtain a divorce. She later meets the man she loves, a garbage inspector from Bordeaux, and goes with him “without the benefit of clergy.” This story was written on top of a Fifth Avenue bus, and some of the sheets blew away, which may account for the apparent scarcity of interesting situations.
By the end of the book he seemed to have petered out and was writing one-liners. His introduction to “Champion”:An example of the mystery story. The mystery is how it came to get printed.
How to Write Short Stories (with Samples) enjoyed every kind of success. Its sales were brisk, and the reviews were excellent, almost all referring to the clever introductions and treating the veteran writer as though he were an up-and-coming new talent. The stories amused even old Charles Scribner.
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