Through Roger Burlingame and John Biggs, Jr., a friend of Fitzgerald’s, Perkins came to meet a determined young writer from Wilmington, Delaware. John Phillips Marquand had graduated from Harvard in 1915, a classmate of Burlingame. He served on the staff of the Boston Transcript, the New York Times, and the American Expeditionary Force before joining the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. He wrote slogans for several months, then took stock of his economic resources—$400—and decided to make a serious attempt at some of the longer forms of fiction. He moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, and finished a romantic novel that he had been working on only in his spare time. When the novel was completed and his money nearly gone, he went to New York to find either a publisher or another job.
The sole copy of Marquand’s manuscript of The Unspeakable Gentleman then fell victim to circumstances almost as melodramatic as its nineteenth-century hero. The suitcase containing the manuscript fell off the luggage rack of a Manhattan taxicab, and its loss was not discovered for blocks. Marquand had come to believe his manuscript—a tale about a colorful fellow who cavorted about, setting his son as bad an example as possible—was a very important work indeed, “if not the very greatest book in the English language,” he later wrote, “at least the second.” He placed an urgent want ad in the papers and, ten days later, miraculously the manuscript turned up. He immediately riffled through its pages as though inspecting the prose for bruises and discovered that it was not the second-greatest book in the English language or even the third. “In fact,” he wrote, “I hardly believe that it is even fourth on the list.” Marquand finally decided it was a very bad costume novel. Still, he said, “It was fun to write and perhaps it will be fun to read.” His agent, Carl Brandt, submitted a copy of it to the Ladies’ Home Journal and another to Roger Burlingame.
Like the other young editors at Scribners, Burlingame knew the most effective way to get an unpublished novelist on the house’s list: give the manuscript to Perkins. Max took an instant liking to it and became its advocate. The writing was often florid, overdone in a Victorian manner, but its plot full of duels, midnight attacks, complicated intrigues, and escapes on horseback and by sea, all set in Napoleonic times, carried him away. Perkins and Marquand, whom Max once privately described as “an eager young man with the insecure sneer of a poor relation,” met in the spring of 1921. Despite some reservations about the ultimate handling of the overstuffed plot, Max saw to it that Scribners accepted the book, because at the heart of the story, the unspeakable gentleman himself was a winning character. Perkins told Carl Brandt that the story was “promising of the author’s future.”
Even before The Unspeakable Gentleman was published, signs led Perkins to believe that that promising future was not so distant. Marquand sold three short stories and a novelette to the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal, and received as much money and space as their best-known writers. At Perkins’s suggestion, Scribners promptly collected and published them under the title Four of a Kind.
Neither of Marquand’s first two books had enough of a sale to turn a profit, but the author’s name was fast becoming familiar to the vast magazine-reading audience. Burlingame served as his liaison at Scribners, but whenever Marquand had any literary problems or needed serious advice about writing, he shuttled from Boston, where he had decided to make his home, to New York to meet with Max Perkins.
Like most of the other young writers at Scribners, Marquand discovered even at this early stage of Perkins’s career that the “greatest thing about Max was that none of our affairs or difficulties ever seemed small to him. Without being a writer himself, he could speak the language of writers better than any editor or publisher” one would ever meet. Despite this attention from Perkins, Marquand felt insecure. His next novel, another elaborately plotted work called The Black Cargo, had done no better than his first two books. Max still regarded him as a potential big seller and wrote consolingly: “The fact is, the best writers are not the ones who make a great immediate success as a rule.” But Marquand remained apprehensive and became convinced that his arrangement with Scribners was little more than a marriage of convenience. On one of his visits to New York he went to see Earl Balch, part owner of a small publishing house called Minton-Balch. Balch told Marquand that he was looking for books about early Americans. The author got to talking about an eccentric character named Timothy Dexter, a resident of Newburyport over a century earlier who had made several fortunes—by marrying a widow of means, shrewdly investing in continental currency, cornering the whalebone market, and selling secondhand Bibles; he then knighted himself Lord Dexter, America’s first nobleman. Marquand thought a short life of Dexter would be “amusing” to write and once he had returned to Newburyport, he put his mind to the book. In light of his dismal sales record, he went so far as to tell Balch that he did not believe Scribners would be interested in such a “tenuous and doubtful venture.”
But the moment the Scribners editors heard of the Dexter biography, they saw how admirably suited Marquand’s writing was to such material. Furthermore, one of them explained, “Our greatest interest is the development of an author.... We do not, therefore, like many publishers, simply seize upon a single individual book which seems to have selling possibilities while neglecting his others, or letting them go elsewhere.” But Balch had already said he would publish the book and Scribners would not ignore his claim. They released Marquand to do the book, and Burlingame assured him that “however it may turn out, it will not in any way interfere with our publishing of your books in the future and I can assure you that it will have no effect on our relations.”
After Minton-Balch published Marquand’s book, Perkins did his best to shepherd the author back into his fold. To demonstrate Scribners’ interest in his writing other biographies on the order of Timothy Dexter, Max sent Marquand the names of several of his favorite Yankee heroes—Ethan Allan of Vermont was one—and material about them. Marquand liked the suggestions but said he didn’t think there was enough money in that genre. “At any rate it seems to me that the whole field of biography is now over-run by the hack writers,” he wrote Perkins, “and that there isn’t the credit there used to be in it for a bright young man.”
Having strayed from his publishing vows once, Marquand found his next act of infidelity that much easier. When his third novel, Warning Hill, was finished, Scribners’ proposed advance seemed stingy alongside Little, Brown’s offer of $1,000. He left Scribners for good, going on to write his popular Mr. Moto detective series and many other novels, including The Late George Apley, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Through the forties and fifties he had the longest string of best sellers of any writer in America.
In 1923 Scribner’s Magazine received an article on bucking horses, of all things, and it came to the attention of Max Perkins, who admired its authentic American vernacular. Its author was Will James, a bowlegged cowboy with a bony, aquiline face. James had been orphaned at the age of four and been taken in by an old trapper. “The trapper had teached me how to read and write a little and I’d picked up some more on that through some old magazines I’d found at different cow camps,” James recalled years later. Max urged Scribner’s to publish the article and asked James for more. Soon he had James writing books. During the next twenty years James produced twenty books, most of them very successful, including Smoky, winner of the Newbery Medal in 1927 as the best children’s book written by an American, and Lone Cowboy.
On one of James’s visits to New York, Max took a fancy to his ten-gallon hat. James sent one to Perkins, and it fit perfectly. “I happened to be walking in it with a portrait painter,” Max wrote in thanking him, “and he begged me to let him paint me in it, and that never happened before I got this hat.” From that day forward, there was hardly a moment when Perkins did not wear a hat, indoors and out. Eventually he traded off permanently to a soft gray-felt fedora, size seven, which he wore so low that it folded his ears forward.
His habit of hat-wea
ring became Perkins’s most famous eccentricity and the subject of much speculation. “Why the hat?” people kept wondering. The answer seems to be that he found it useful as well as ornamental. It gave the impression to unexpected office visitors that he was on his way out, and this kept them from buttonholing him into idle conversation. The hat also thrust his ears forward, which helped his hearing. Miss Wyckoff suggested that Perkins wore his hat to keep customers in the Scribners bookstore from mistaking him for a clerk as he made his afternoon promenade. Perkins himself revealed something of his attitude on the matter in a column he wrote for the Plainfield newspaper. The slouch hat, he apotheosized, was “the hat of independence and individuality, the American hat.”
Perkins’s attachment to his hat was hardly greater than his attachment to his clothing in general. At first glance he seemed to be an elegantly dressed New Yorker, but under close scrutiny he looked rather ragged. His daughters often pointed out his white shirt peeking through the thinning fabric of his suit-jacket elbows. Louise once tried to shame him into buying a new suit by telling him all his clothes looked secondhand, but that did not bother Max. Only at her sternest insistence would he give in to her demand that he buy a new suit. He would allow her to pick one suit from his closet, take it to the tailor, and have another made exactly like it.
This Yankee penchant for the sparse made Perkins the ideal editor for President Calvin Coolidge. Max published a collection of his speeches; it took months to talk “Silent Cal” down from 160,000 to 98,000 words.
In the early twenties Perkins brought out two first novels that not only sold well but were much acclaimed—Drums, by James Boyd, and Through the Wheat, by Thomas Boyd. (The authors were not related.) Perkins now began to find he no longer had to speak up so loudly to be heard at the monthly board meetings. Many of the better manuscripts that came to the house were now routed directly to him. Even writers who had worked with other editors at Scribners were being drawn to Perkins’s growing reputation.
Arthur Train, a suave criminal lawyer with puffy circles under his eyes and hair parted in the middle, had been writing true stories of crime and mannered escape fiction since 1905. Robert Bridges, who had been at Scribners since the 1880s, received his manuscripts. Shortly after Max Perkins was moved to the editorial department, he and Train were introduced. It turned out that Max had been one of the “genial lot” of journalists Train enjoyed so much when each worked at the New York District Attorney’s office—Max for the Times, Train for the DA. In 1914, when Bridges became editor of Scribner’s Magazine, Train began working more closely with Perkins. The young editor hoped there might be some way to enliven Train’s writing, which stressed atmosphere at the expense of plot and character. Not long after he met Perkins, they chatted about cranky New England lawyers each knew. Thereupon Train created a fictitious lawyer named Ephraim Tutt, an eccentric, dyed-in-the-wool Yankee who had come to New York, where he employed the tricks of the law in the interest of justice. Suddenly, Train freely acknowledged in an interview, “I felt differently about my writing. I felt much more intent about it. It took hold of me very strongly when I was writing about Ephraim Tutt.... I think those were possibly the first stories I had written which made me feel emotion.”
By the fall of 1919 Arthur Train had submitted several stories about Ephraim Tutt (of the firm of Tutt and Tutt) to Perkins. “I have read [them] ... with great enjoyment and considerable laughter,” Max wrote the author. “Certainly there were never any stories nor any other kind of writing ... that gave such a picture of the legal life in and about the criminal courts and the district attorney’s office, and that of the lawyers connected with them.” That first batch, totaling 44,000 words, was serialized by the Saturday Evening Post over several months. Perkins then suggested publishing them all together in a book because combined they were a vivid portrait of the sympathetic Mr. Tutt. At the same time, Perkins could not resist conjuring up new plots for Train. In October, 1919, Perkins wrote,I have two very general ideas that might result in something: the kind of a case Tutt would not handle might furnish a story—a case for which rich clients wanted to retain him and in which, because of the great fee, he became involved up to a certain point, and then stuck upon the question of right and wrong and dropped it.... The other, which would bring out the sympathy and sentiment of Mr. Tutt, might be based on one of those not uncommon incidents where a young man, or girl, comes to the city from the country and gets into ways of crime, or semi-crime, mainly through ignorance and greenness. I do not think you have referred to Tutt’s origin, and it might be that the element of reminiscence—which has been rather overworked, it is true—by which a man’s sympathy is engaged because he recalls his own first contact with the city, could be effectively evoked. In such a story, might not Mr. Tutt ethically free the victim from the technicalities of law because of his conviction that his fault was due not to his nature but to his ignorance?
In time, with Perkins’s encouragement, Train invented an entire history for Tutt. It included his being born but a short buggy ride from Windsor, in Plymouth, Vermont, and a happy boyhood during which he went fishing with his friend Calvin Coolidge. Perkins read each story with an anthology in mind. When the second collection of Tutt stories which he selected appeared, critics appreciated the difference from the first volume. They lauded the emergence of the protagonist as a more developed character. During the next three years, twenty-five Tutt stories appeared in the Post, making him the most popular feature in the magazine. For two decades Ephraim Tutt was a household name and a hero on law school campuses, where his cases were often integrated into the curriculum. Many readers wrote in to Scribners, which continued to publish the stories in book form, insisting they recognized the actual prototype of the character, often guessing that it was the former Senator Evarts of New York. That guess was plausible to Perkins. Mr. Tutt resembled many of his relatives who had become small-town New England attorneys.
Perkins enjoyed the Tutt series but found greater satisfaction working on Train’s other works of fiction. Methodical and intellectually curious, Train seemed the ideal author to sort out a complicated plot Max had concocted. It concerned the discovery by two archaeologists of the long-buried manuscript of an imaginary “Fifth Gospel” in which someone, after having interviewed Jesus as to His economic and political ideas, had committed His actual sayings to papyrus. The scroll might be assumed to contain teachings so revolutionary, or at least antagonistic to present economic and social theories, that its finders would choose to destroy it rather than to plunge civilization into chaos.
The idea fascinated Train and engaged him for two years. When “The Lost Gospel” appeared in the Post it caused such a stir that Scribners republished it alone in a slender blue volume. One reviewer called it “one of the most striking short stories of all time.” Scott Fitzgerald thought it was most “ingeniously worked out” and conceded, “I never could have handled such an intricate plot in a thousand years.”
Other writers wanted to hear Maxwell Perkins’s ideas too. Although he was still a junior staff member at Scribners, he was becoming the company’s center of gravity, gathering power without quite understanding why. “I have been trying to tell a writer and his wife how he should write,” Perkins had recently written his daughter Bertha. “Isn’t that funny when I don’t know how to do it myself? I even told him a story to write that I made up—and he was delighted with it. It’s pretty hard to talk all evening about things you don’t know anything about.”
For Christmas, 1923, Perkins took his family and some manuscripts to Windsor. When he returned he spoke to Charles Scribner about a matter that he had been pondering for some time. The job of the present staff of editors had increased considerably in recent years, he remarked. In manuscript submissions alone, Scribners was averaging 500 more a year than in the period just before the war. Perkins said he needed help. He was being diverted from his main work—seeking out and developing new writers.
There were several oth
er good young people on the staff who looked to Perkins as their leader. Beatrice Kenyon, a poet who worked for the magazine, told Byron Dexter when he arrived at the House of Scribner to become an editor, “We have a genius—Maxwell Perkins.” There was also Roger Burlingame. And there was Max’s closest colleague, John Hall Wheelock, whom Perkins had known since their days together on the Harvard Advocate . In 1913, at a chance meeting at a cheap lunch counter on Twenty-third Street, Max had informed the tall, lean poet with a brushy mustache of a job opening at his company’s bookstore. Wheelock had been hired and subsequently had moved up to the fifth floor. Now Max told Mr. Scribner of a need for additional editors, to spread the work load. “I should be of more value,” said Perkins gamely, “if I were more free.” In due course Scribner complied with Max’s request.
The job of an editor in a publishing house, John Hall Wheelock wrote toward the end of his career at Scribners, is the “dullest, hardest, most exciting, exasperating and rewarding of perhaps any job in the world.” Indeed, literature took on a new vibrancy, a new excitement in the early twenties. Novelist Robert Nathan once said, “It was a flower show of budding authors; and to be an editor, I guess, was to be full of hope and excitement, and that feeling of not having enough hours in the day, because it sometimes seemed that everyone you met had a good book in him.”
V
A New House
By April, 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald had fallen away from his third novel a dozen times. Maxwell Perkins thought he should buckle down and get it finished. But he was tactful. Scribners was preparing its fall list, Max told him, and he wanted Scott’s novel on it. That got the author absorbed in his book once again, a work that he was deliberately undertaking for the enrichment of his craft more than his bank account. It was called Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires . He replied that he had every hope of finishing it by June. But, he told Max, “You know how those things often come out. And even if it takes me 10 times that long I cannot let it go out unless it has the very best I’m capable of in it or even as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of.” Fitzgerald was pleased with much of what he had written the preceding summer, but the book had been interrupted so many times that it was jagged. He smoothed the uneven writing down and cut away whole sections of manuscript—in one case 18,000 words, from which he salvaged a short story, “Absolution.”
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