Religious overtones darken this story of a poor young Midwestern boy who, confused by his first sexual stirrings and romantic desires, finds solace in an imaginary alter ego. Perkins read it in the American Mercury and wrote Fitzgerald, “It showed a more steady and complete mastery, it seemed to me. Greater maturity might be the word. At any rate, it gave me a more distinct sense of what you could do.” Scott was glad Max liked the story because it set the scene for his new novel. In fact at one time, he said, it was to have been the prologue to the book, but now it interfered with the schema he was following.
Like young Rudolph Miller in “Absolution,” Scott Fitzgerald had been mulling over his own Catholic roots. Within days of Easter, he talked with Perkins, after which he haltingly confessed in a letter, “It is only in the last 4 months that I’ve realized how much I‘ve—well, almost deteriorated in the 3 years since I finished The Beautiful and Damned.” He admitted to the meagerness of his output in the last two years: one play, a half-dozen short stories, and three or four articles—an overall average of 100 words a day. “If I’d spent this time reading or travelling or doing anything—even staying healthy—” he told Perkins, “it’d be different but I spent it uselessly —neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally. If I had written the B & D at the rate of one hundred words a day, it would have taken me 4 years. So you can imagine the moral effect the whole chasm has had on me. I’ll have to ask you to have patience about the book and trust me that at last or at least for the first time in years I’m doing the best I can.”
Fitzgerald realized that he had acquired numerous bad habits:1. Laziness
2. Referring everything to Zelda—a terrible habit, nothing ought to be referred to anyone until it is finished
3. Word consciousness—self doubt ect. ect. ect. ect.
and was trying to get rid of them all.
Scott’s new self-understanding buoyed him up. He wrote Max, “I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I‘v ever had in a way but it works so fitfully and with so many bogeys because I’ve talked so much and not lived enough within myself to develop the necessary self reliance. Also I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal experience as I have at 27.” Neither did Perkins.
“If I ever win the right to any leisure again,” Scott vowed, “I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted the past time.... So in my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work—not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere and yet radiant world. So I tread slowly and carefully & at times in considerable distress. This book will be a consciously artistic achievement & must depend on that as the 1st books did not.”
“I understand exactly what you have to do,” Perkins replied, “and I know that all these superficial matters of exploitation and so on are not of the slightest consequence alongside of the importance of your doing the very best work the way you want to do it, that is according to the demands of the situations.” So far as Scribners was concerned, he assured Fitzgerald, “you are to go ahead at just your own pace and if you should finish the book when you think you will, you will have performed a very considerable feat, even in the matter of time, it seems to me.”
Perkins told Fitzgerald that he did not like the title Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires and that if he had another, Scribners could prepare a jacket and hold it in readiness, thereby gaining several weeks if the book should be written in time for the fall. “I do like the idea you have tried to express,” Perkins explained. “The weakness is in the words ‘Ash Heap’ which do not seem to me to be a sufficiently definite and concrete expression of that part of the idea.” Perkins had only the vaguest knowledge of the book and its protagonist, but one title Fitzgerald had thrown out some months earlier stuck with him. He told Scott, “I always thought that The Great Gatsby was a suggestive and effective title.”
As had Fitzgerald’s own life, the scene of his novel shifted from the Midwest at the turn of the century to what he called that “slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York.” Fictionalizing his glamorous neighbors’ lives was not coming easily, however, and his remedy was typical of him. “I would take the Long Island atmosphere that I had familiarly breathed,” Fitzgerald wrote years later in his essay “My Lost City,” “and materialize it beneath unfamiliar skies.” The Fitzgeralds sailed to France.
Perkins sent a copy of War and Peace to meet Scott there, with instructions not to feel compelled to read it. Max presented copies of Tolstoi’s novel in the same spirit that Gideons dispense Bibles. He gave one to almost every friend and author, and there was always a copy close to him at work and at home which he read time and again from start to finish. “Every time I read it,” Max once wrote Galsworthy, “its dimensions seem to grow larger and its details to have more meaning. I have always tried to get other people to read it, but they, most of them, trip on the crowd of characters with unrememberable names, at the beginning.”
Between his reading and writing that summer Scott was so preoccupied that he hardly noticed his wife’s involvement with a French aviator named Edouard Jozan. Shortly after their affair was discovered, the Fitzgeralds were reconciled and he sent his editor a sixteen-point checklist of the season’s labor. Item six was an emphatic plea not to let any other book have the early dust jacket sketch that Max had casually shown him months earlier. It featured two gigantic eyes—supposedly those of the heroine, Daisy Fay Buchanan—brooding over New York City. That illustration had inspired Fitzgerald to create an image for the book—the billboard of an oculist named Dr. T. J. Eckelburg; the sign had two enormous eyes on it, which would stare from above onto the novel’s proceedings. The other highlights of Fitzgerald’s letter were:1.The novel will be done next week. That doesn’t mean however that it’ll reach America before October 1st as Zelda and I are contemplating a careful revision after a weeks complete rest.
7.I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written. It is rough stuff in places, runs only to about 50,000 words&Ihope you won’t shy at it.
8.It’s been a fair summer. I’ve been unhappy but my work hasn’t suffered from it. I am grown at last.
In closing, after filling several pages with the names of books and authors that interested him that year, Scott wrote Max, “I miss seeing you like the devil.”
In his position as a leader among young writers, Fitzgerald continued to recommend promising talents to Perkins. Max appreciated Scott’s concern for the unpublished, but few of his prospects in the last few years had panned out. In early October, 1924, Scott sent Perkins still another name, that of a young American living in France who wrote for the transatlantic review. Scott said he “has a brilliant future. Ezra Pound published a collection of his short pieces in Paris at some place like the Egotist Press. I havent it hear [sic] now but its remarkable and I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.” Fitzgerald gave his name as “Ernest Hemming-way” —a misspelling he would not learn to correct for years. Grateful for the tip, Perkins sent to Paris for copies of his books.
It would take months for Hemingway’s stories to arrive, but within three weeks Perkins received another package from France—Fitzgerald’s third novel, The Great Gatsby. “I think that at last I’ve done something really my own,” his covering letter read, “but how good ‘my own’ is remains to be seen.” The book was only a little over 50,000 words long, but he believed that Whitney Darrow, Scribners’ sales director, had the wrong psychology about prices and about what class constituted the book-buying public now that “the lowbrows” were queuing up at motion-picture theaters for their entertainment. Fitzgerald still wanted to charge the standard two dollars for his novel and publish it as a full-sized book. He did not want any signed blurbs on the jacket eulogizing his past. “I’m tired of being the author of This Side of Paradise,” he told Max, “and I want to start over.”
Almost simultaneously Perkins received another letter announcing th
e author’s decision to stick to the title he had placed on the book at the last minute: Trimalchio in West Egg. He had several others that he was considering as well. Furthermore, he was not completely satisfied with the manuscript, especially the middle of the book, but he felt he had been with it alone long enough. “Naturally I won’t get a night’s sleep until I hear from you,” he wrote Max, “but do tell me the absolute truth, your first impressions of the book, & tell me anything that bothers you in it.”
Perkins tore into the novel and read it in one sitting. Immediately he cabled, THINK NOVEL SPLENDID. He meant much more than that and wrote Fitzgerald the next day:I think the novel is a wonder. I’m taking it home to read again and shall then write my impressions in full; but it has vitality to an extraordinary degree and glamour, and a great deal of underlying thought of unusual quality. It has a kind of mystic atmosphere at times that you infused into parts of Paradise and have not since used. It is a marvelous fusion, into a unity of presentation, of the extraordinary incongruities of life today. And as for sheer writing, it is astonishing.
Nobody at Scribners liked Trimalchio at West Egg as a title except Max, he reported to Scott. “The strange incongruity of the words in it sound the note of the book. But the objectors are more practical men than I.” He thought book buyers would not know that West Egg in the title referred to the locale of the novel, a community somewhat like Great Neck, or that Trimalchio referred to the ostentatious multimillionaire in Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, who was famous for his colossal and extravagant banquets. “Consider as quickly as you can a change,” Max wrote, urging him to “judge the value of the title when it stands alone.”
The book was a tragic romance about a bourgeois Midwesterner named James Gatz, who had made a fortune in shady business dealings, changed his name to Jay Gatsby, and moved to Long Island to be near the woman he had long pined for—Daisy Fay, now married to Tom Buchanan. After another few days with the typescript, Perkins wrote Fitzgerald, “I think you have every kind of right to be proud of this book. It is an extraordinary book, suggestive of all sorts of thoughts and moods.” He praised it at length but said he had several points of criticism, all of which stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the character of Gatsby himself.
Perkins pointed out “that among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.” To correct that, Perkins suggested:Couldn’t he be physically described as distinctly as the others, and couldn’t you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase “old sport,” not verbal, but physical ones, perhaps. I think that for some reason or other a reader—this was true of Mr. Scribner and of Louise—gets an idea that Gatsby is a much older man than he is, although you have the writer say that he is a little older than himself. But this would be avoided if on his first appearance he was seen as vividly as Daisy and Tom are, for instance; —and I do not think your scheme would be impaired if you made him so.
Perkins knew that Gatsby’s career must also remain mysterious but he did not want Fitzgerald to shortchange the reader. “Now almost all readers numerically are going to be puzzled by his having all this wealth and are going to feel entitled to an explanation,” he wrote Scott. “To give a distinct and definite one would be, of course, utterly absurd.” Max went on:You might here and there interpolate some phrases, and possibly incidents, little touches of various kinds, that would suggest that he was in some active way mysteriously engaged. You do have him called on the telephone, but couldn’t he be seen once or twice consulting at his parties with people of some sort of mysterious significance, from the political, the gambling, the sporting world, or whatever it may be. I know I am floundering, but that fact may help you to see what I mean. The total lack of an explanation through so large a part of the story does seem to me a defect;—or not of an explanation, but of the suggestion of an explanation. I wish you were here so I could talk about it to you for then I know I could at least make you understand what I mean. What Gatsby did ought never be definitely imparted, even if it could be. Whether he was an innocent tool in the hands of somebody else, or to what degree he was this, ought not be explained. But if some sort of business activity of his were simply adumbrated, it would lend probability to that part of the story.
The feeble explanation Fitzgerald had offered caused the sagging which both editor and author detected in Chapters Six and Seven. In those scenes Gatsby’s love for Daisy is revealed, the principal characters meet, and they all drive to the Plaza Hotel. Their confrontation in New York is the novel’s fulcrum, on which the lives of all the characters teeter. Tom Buchanan’s crucial dialogue in which he calls Gatsby’s bluff never was as effective as it should have been because Buchanan was fighting an always shadowy opponent. “I don’t know how to suggest a remedy,” Perkins wrote the author. “I hardly doubt that you will find one and I am only writing to say that I think it does need something to hold up to the pace set, and ensuing.”
Perkins’s final criticism of the book concerned the way Fitzgerald conveyed those bits of Gatsby’s past that he did divulge: He lumped them. “In giving deliberately Gatsby’s biography when he gives it to the narrator,” Max wrote Scott, “you do depart from the method of the narrative in some degree, for otherwise almost everything is told, and beautifully told, in the regular flow of it,—in the succession of events in accompaniment with time.” Max acknowledged that Scott would be obliged to recite a certain amount of Gatsby’s background, but he suggested a subtler way to deal with some of it:I thought you might find ways to let the truth of some of his claims like “Oxford” and his army career come out bit by bit in the course of actual narrative. I mention the point anyway for consideration in this interval before I send the proofs.
Having done his duty as a critic, Perkins hastened to assuage his author. “The general brilliant quality of the book makes me ashamed to make even these criticisms,” he wrote.
The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry, are most extraordinary. The manuscript is full of phrases which make a scene blaze with life. If one enjoyed a rapid railroad journey I would compare the number and vividness of pictures your living words suggest to the living scenes disclosed in that way. It seems in reading a much shorter book than it is, but it carries the mind through a series of experiences that one would think would require a book of three times its length.... The presentation of Tom, his place, Daisy and Jordan, and the unfolding of their characters is unequalled so far as I know. The description of the valley of ashes adjacent to the lovely country, the conversation and the action in Myrtle’s apartment, the marvelous catalogue of those who came to Gatsby’s house—these are such things as make a man famous. And all these things, the whole pathetic episode, you have given a place in time and space, for with the help of T. J. Eckleberg [sic] and by an occasional glance at the sky, or the sea, or the city, you have imparted a sort of sense of eternity.
Perkins could not help recalling Fitzgerald’s once telling him he was not a “natural writer.” “My God!” Max now exclaimed. “You have plainly mastered the craft, of course, but you needed far more than craftsmanship for this.”
“Your wire and your letters made me feel like a million dollars,” Scott replied from Rome. Fitzgerald said that he would rather have Max like his book than anyone he knew; and he thought that all the editor’s criticisms were valid.
He began his revisions with the very first page, the title page. He now thought that maybe the book should be called Trimalchio. Or just Gatsby. Within weeks, however, Fitzgerald had brought the title back to the one Perkins first liked, The Great Gatsby.
Along with this news, Scott tendered a request: He w
ondered if Perkins could deposit several hundred dollars more into his account, making his advance on the book an even $5,000. Perkins agreed, but he confessed he was somewhat puzzled about another request of Fitzgerald’s: The author had asked for royalty percentages on this book that were lower than those on his previous books. Scott explained that this was his way of paying Scribners interest on all the money he had been advanced over the last two years. Max made a counterproposal and they dickered in reverse until they struck a compromise—15 percent of the retail price (two dollars) on the first 40,000 copies and 20 percent thereafter. For the moment, money seemed secondary to Fitzgerald. He and Zelda moved into a small, unfashionable, but comfortable hotel in Rome, planning to stay there until he had finished revising the novel.
“With the aid you’ve given me,” Scott wrote Max, “I can make ‘Gatsby’ perfect.” But he excepted the crucial scene at the Plaza Hotel. He told Max he feared that it would “never quite be up to mark—I’ve worried about it too long and I can’t quite place Daisy’s reaction. But I can improve it a lot. It isn’t imaginative energy that’s lacking—its because I’m automatically prevented from thinking it over again.” He had driven his characters along the road from Long Island to New York and up to the plot’s climax so many times, he said, that there was “no chance of bringing the freshness to it that a free conception sometimes gives. The rest,” Scott wrote Max, “is easy and I see my way so clear that I even see the mental quirks that queered it before.” Perkins’s letter of editorial comments made him realize he had played the reader false. He admitted to Max:I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in & you felt it. If I’d known & kept it from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know now—and as a penalty for not having known first, in other words to make sure[,] I’m going to tell more.
Max Perkins Page 9