It seemed of almost mystical significance to Fitzgerald that Perkins envisioned Gatsby as an older man, because in fact the actual model whom Scott had half-consciously used, a man named Edward M. Fuller, was older. Fuller, one of Fitzgerald’s neighbors in Great Neck, and his brokerage firm partner, William F. McGee, had been convicted, after four trials, of pocketing their customers’ order money. One month after receiving Perkins’s list of suggestions, Fitzgerald wrote him, “Anyhow after careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind here) for the Fuller McGee case & after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. My first instinct after your letter was to let him go & have Tom Buchanan dominate the book (I suppose he’s the best character I’ve ever done—I think he and the brother in ‘Salt’ & Hurstwood in ‘Sister Carrie’ are the three best characters in American fiction in the last twenty years, perhaps and perhaps not) but Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for awhile then lost him & now I know I have him again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald is generally regarded as having been his own best editor, as having had the patience and objectivity to read his words over and over again, eliminating flaws and perfecting his prose. Most of the writing in the draft of The Great Gatsby was polished, but it was not until the final revision of the manuscript that it acquired its brilliance.
Fitzgerald did some cutting—he deleted a few scenes that were unimportant to the main story, Gatsby’s love for Daisy—but the bulk of his work was in additions. Not counting Chapter Six, which Fitzgerald junked and completely rewrote in proofs, he spliced in some twenty fresh passages, which together accounted for about 15 percent of the new version. This amplification is evident in the work he did on the first close description of Gatsby. In the draft version, Fitzgerald, speaking through Nick Carraway, the narrator of the novel, had described Gatsby’s face in one sentence: “He was undoubtedly one of the handsomest men I had ever seen—the dark blue eyes opening out into lashes of shiny jet were arresting and unforgettable.” This was merely a rewording of a description Fitzgerald had used before, that of his boy hero in his short story “Absolution.” Now, revising the novel, Fitzgerald returned to the Gatsby portrait and developed it from a simple observation into a perception of character:He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely that impression that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Just at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.
Fitzgerald inserted comments on Gatsby’s smile several more times until it became the dominant feature of his appearance and a mark of his personality.
The author responded creatively to nearly all of Perkins’s suggestions. As Perkins had urged him to, he broke up the block of information on Gatsby’s past and sprinkled the pieces in earlier chapters. Picking up on a comment of Perkins’s, he made Gatsby’s purported career at Oxford University a recurring topic of conversation, so that each time Fitzgerald touched upon Gatsby’s claims, he brought the entire mystery of Gatsby’s origins closer to the truth. Again stimulated by something Perkins had said, Fitzgerald worked a small wonder with a certain habit of Gatsby’s. In the original manuscript Gatsby had called people “old man,” “old fellow,” and a number of other affected appellations. Now Fitzgerald seized upon the one Perkins had liked so much, adding it a dozen times, making it into a leitmotiv. This phrase became so persistent a mannerism that in the Plaza Hotel scene it provoked Tom Buchanan into an outburst: “That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it? All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”
Fitzgerald did major work on a matter Perkins had considered important, the clarification of the sources of Gatsby’s wealth. Three conversations on the subject were added in Chapter Five, and later in the book, after Gatsby’s death, there now was a phone call from a business associate of Gatsby’s named Slagle, about some dealings in bad bonds.
One of the ways Fitzgerald intensified the somewhat limp confrontation scene at the Plaza was to strengthen an accusation Tom Buchanan had made against Gatsby concerning his money. Buchanan had learned, he said, from a private investigation of Gatsby’s affairs, a shocking fact:“I found out what your ‘drugstores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He and this Wolfsheim [a gangster] bought up over a hundred side-street drugstores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counters. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him and I wasn’t far wrong.”
Before Perkins nobody at Scribners had edited so boldly or closely as he did Fitzgerald, and some of the older editors considered the practice questionable. They liked Max and sensed his ability, but they did not always understand him. In small ways as well as large, Max was different. He raised eyebrows, for example, by having a special desk built for himself. It was a high, broad-surfaced lecternlike affair, at which he could work standing up, his theory being that if he could not be outdoors exercising, he could at least avoid sitting down so much. People passing his office door could look in and see him at his peculiar desk, immersed in a manuscript, one leg bent at the knee and resting against the other, like a flamingo.
It took some time for the older editors to appreciate what Max was accomplishing at that desk, or indeed to value the new writers Perkins had brought into their house. Fitzgerald, more than the rest, seemed brash and impetuous, and a few of the more dignified staff members resented his storming of their bastion of conservatism and good taste. It was a memorable occasion, then, when Brownell emerged from his office one day and called to his colleagues: “May I read you something beautiful?” And then, loudly and with savor, he recited two pages from Gatsby.
Fitzgerald himself never doubted the worth of Max’s assistance. For the first time since the failure of The Vegetable, he wrote to his editor, he believed he was “a wonderful writer” ... “& its your wonderful letters that help me go on believing in myself.” Years later he remarked: “I had rewritten Gatrby three times before Max said something to me [that is, before Fitzgerald had submitted the draft to Perkins for criticism]. Then I sat down and wrote something I was proud of.”
He made that admission to a friend of Perkins’s, perhaps the most important friend Max made outside his work, a woman named Elizabeth Lemmon.
They were introduced in the spring of 1922. Elizabeth Lemmon was eight years younger than Max, and unlike any other woman he had met. She was the embodiment of his nineteenth-century romantic vision of womanhood. She was from a large old family rooted in Virginia and Baltimore, the youngest of eight daughters, but she was not effete or spoiled. A hearty laugh enlivened her gentility. She was equally comfortable among Baltimore society or on the family’s country estate, Welbourne, in Middleburg, Virginia. She had always loved to read. As a schoolgirl she had come to know a girl named Wallis Warfield. “Wally always had ‘crushes’ on the older girls and used to follow us as closely as a shadow,” Elizabeth remembered. “That was before she decided to marry a king.” Elizabeth made her debut in Baltimore, where she was known as the “second-best dancer” in the city; studied voice—she had trained for an operatic career, but her mother had allowed her to take lessons on the condition that she never perform in public; taught singing and dance at the fashionable Foxcroft School in Middleburg; and, the year she met Max, managed the Upperville, Virginia, baseball team.
Miss Lemmon went north for six weeks every spring to visit family and friends in Plainfield, New Jersey, and to attend concerts in New York. During her trip in April, 1922, she met Max and Louise Perkins. Before returning south she we
nt to their home one evening to say good-bye.
Max Perkins had always been attracted to blondes, finding them especially womanly. When Elizabeth Lemmon strode confidently through the Perkinses’ front hall that night, her golden hair set off by a gray dress, Max was entranced. Their evening together was full of warm conversation, often about authors Max worked with. She was literate but not literary; engaging but not demanding. Louise believed Max had fallen in love again that night, but not in a way that threatened her at all. Max’s ardor was like that of heroes in ancient mythology or romantic poetry: It was of the spirit, not of the flesh; he wanted to put Elizabeth on a pedestal.
Miss Lemmon left behind an almost empty, cream-colored box of Pera cigarettes, a mild Turkish blend she liked. When Max came across them he sat down to write a letter. “Dear Miss Lemon,” he wrote, misspelling her name:
When I found these cigarettes you had left I thought at first to keep them as a remembrance. But I am far from needing a remembrance. I then recalled that you had said you meant to stop smoking because cigarettes of this brand were no longer made & I thought I must save you from that dreadful heart-broken feeling you have when you don’t smoke, at times, if only for the brief space these two cigarettes would last. If you have stopped, & feel as I have felt, this brief reprieve will make you think of me with extraordinary gratitude.—Maybe that’s too much to hope; but short of that, these cigarettes have given me a chance to say something too trivial to say without an excuse. It is, that I had just the faintest fear you might really think me so pusilanimous as to have been offended that you “could not bear the sight of me.” I guess not though.
Next year, please remember I sent these and thank me. And I now thank you for all the pleasure you gave me—& I suppose, everyone else in the neighborhood—by being here this year.
After closing the letter with his formal, high, angular signature, Perkins added a postscript. He had always, he wrote, greatly liked Virgil’s phrase dea incessu patuit (“and she revealed herself to be a goddess,” as Venus did before Aeneas). “But I never really knew its meaning till I saw you coming toward me through our hall the other night.”
“You can’t in all honesty say Max Perkins fell in love with me,” Elizabeth Lemmon said fifty years later. “We were, after all, Victoria’s children—we met at a time when a smile across a room meant as much as two kids in the back seat of a car today. I think Andrew Turnbull came closest when he said Max and I had a ‘true friendship.’ ” The evaluations of both Miss Lemmon and biographer Turnbull are accurate to a point, but incomplete. Perkins had a deeper feeling—a golden love—that Elizabeth modestly refused to admit. He adored her. She became an oasis of warmth and understanding in an increasingly difficult marriage.
Max’s atavistic yearnings were at odds again, and they led him into a unique love affair—a Yankee editor’s romance. Perkins allowed himself to be drawn to Elizabeth Lemmon, but he felt compelled to make any relationship with her hard on himself. He was never so at peace as when she was near, but he did everything he could to make her unreachable. He restricted their contact largely to the mails.
For the next twenty-five years they wrote privately to each other. It was the longest sustained personal correspondence in his life. In times both of happiness and of tragedy—usually out of loneliness, when he felt unfulfilled—he poured lovely thoughts onto paper, constantly expressing gratitude to Elizabeth for being not merely an inspiration but a divine creature. A year might pass between letters, or three might be bunched in a month, but the continuity was maintained. Elizabeth kept the letters, and they are the only diary he left. Except for a few pages her replies do not exist. “Thank God for that,” Miss Lemmon remarked decades later. “I really had nothing to say worth saving.”
Max neither expected nor required of her anything more than an occasional response to assure him that she was still there, unchanged and constant. When his homelife seemed empty or his work life hectic, writing to Elizabeth remained his outlet, the least complicated, most perfect pleasure in his life. In the entire quarter-century of their friendship, Max visited her in Middleburg only twice.
Within weeks of their meeting in 1922, Miss Lemmon invited the Perkinses for an informal weekend at Welbourne. She wrote of mint juleps, polo, and amateur horse shows. Louise replied that “Max was almost overcome at your invitation, especially as you said that he might wear his sneakers all the time.” She thought her husband was “tempted to give up his position in Scribners to accept it.” But faithful employees worked on Saturdays, and, Louise wrote, Max said he was sorry he could not go.
Louise went by herself. It was still cold in Plainfield on the twentieth of May, but she left for Virginia with suitcases packed with summer clothes, not realizing it was just as cold where she was going. She found the rolling green hills of northern Virginia the most sublime horse country she had ever seen and the Lemmons’ estate glorious. The long serpentine drive up to Welbourne made its way through an untended lawn past big trees up to the same front door that long ago had opened for guests such as Jeb Stuart. On a small scale the house resembled Mount Vernon, with its simple lines and tall pillars in front. Two graceful one-story wings flanked the stocky central box of the mansion. Welbourne was built in 1821 and pre-Revolution family portraits hung in the parlors. An airy verandah looked out onto the overgrown grounds in the back. A Yankee cannonball had gone through one of the windows in the greenhouse, and though the pane was replaced in 1865, it was still referred to as the “new window.”
Louise Perkins, in her light clothing, was cold most of the time, but she felt comfortable with Miss Lemmon and her family in their magnificent house. When Elizabeth’s mother asked her how Mr. Perkins was, she replied, “Very enamored of Elizabeth.” Louise grew especially fond of her hostess. Elizabeth was just developing an interest in the occult, and she recommended a fortune teller for Louise to consult up north.
When Louise returned to Plainfield she filled Max’s ears with stories of Welbourne. He was sorrier than ever that he had not gone, but in another sense he was just as glad. From his wife’s descriptions, Welbourne seemed like a mythical kingdom to him, one better visited in dreams.
In late May, 1924, Louise joined friends for a cruise to the Caribbean. Max was again unable to accompany her because of work, this time with his newest writer, Douglas Southall Freeman. Freeman had a doctorate in history from Johns Hopkins University and was editor of the Richmond NewsLeader . The history of the Confederacy was his passion, and he had edited the wartime correspondence between Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. In 1914 Scribners had commissioned him to write a short biography of Lee, on which he worked under Edward L. Burlingame. Almost a decade later the book still had not appeared. Burlingame had died, and Perkins, with a lifelong interest in the Civil War, was assigned to assist the author. In 1924 Freeman wrote his new editor:The whole trouble about my Lee is that I have been waiting to have a view of the final cache of Lee papers in the Confederate Memorial Institute. I did not think it quite fair, nor in any sense desirable to publish a book on Lee until I was able to examine this material. It seemed quite stupid to go into print when the last remaining collection of Lee matter was almost in one’s hands.
The papers were due to be turned over forthwith, but Freeman projected another long delay before he could meet the demands of his contract. The thought of compacting all the material into 100,000 words, as Scribners expected, was mind-boggling. During his nine years of waiting for the manuscript, Burlingame had always been patient in dealing with Freeman. “I hope a like mantle covers your shoulders,” the author wrote Perkins. Max had more than patience. He had a new plan which would postpone the appearance of Dr. Freeman’s work for another decade but might ensure its place for centuries. Perkins suggested that Freeman undertake a definitive biography of Robert E. Lee, without regard for time or length.
In May, 1924, Max went to Virginia to discuss the project with him. On the way down, he considered the idea of seeing Elizabet
h Lemmon; in Richmond he made inquiries about how he could get to Middleburg. But, just a few hours’ drive away, he could not bring himself to approach her. Max stuck to business instead, staying in Richmond with Freeman and trooping across the city that would be the backdrop for so much of Freeman’s writing. It would be ten more years before Freeman would present Max with a completed manuscript of his monumental work.
A letter Max received from Elizabeth Lemmon after his return to New York made him wish he had seen her when he was in Virginia. She mentioned a haircut that had given her a new look, and said her deepening involvement in astrology had added to the “transformation.” Just the thought that Elizabeth might somehow be different from the first vision he had of her disturbed him. He replied:I can imagine no substitute that would be even “just as good.” Will the new Elizabeth lack that Goddesslike repose which was among the qualities that so distinguished her from all the others—eager, restless, striving women. And if she should I’d almost rather not see her, for to do so would be to impair the image of The Elizabeth who would otherwise, at least survive in my memory.
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