“You make me still more regret that I did not risk the digression from Richmond,” he wrote, explaining, “I dreaded arriving in the midst of one of those Virginia parties where a block of New England granite would be only an obstacle.” Louise had called Max “a block of New England granite” just nights earlier, because he had not wept over Lillian Gish in The White Sister.
Several times that summer Max went to Great Neck, Long Island, ostensibly to talk to Ring Lardner about his writing. They drank what would ordinarily have been a dangerous number of highballs, but, Perkins said, they felt no serious effects because of the heat.
Lardner was planning to go to Europe and to see the Fitzgeralds there, but he hardly looked well enough to make the trip. He was coughing a great deal, eating almost nothing, and chain-smoking when he did eat. He told Perkins that he was giving up alcohol and cigarettes so he could get enough ahead on a comic strip he wrote with cartoonist Dick Dorgan to go abroad.
With Lardner’s approval, Max again searched through Ring’s syndicated newspaper and magazine articles until he found enough material to fill a book. The collection would be brought out in 1925, and Max was happy to publish it, though he wished Ring would attempt something ambitious. “Ring,” he said, “if it were a matter of money we would be willing to help toward a novel, you know. But I judge the $5,000 or so we’d gladly put up wouldn’t count.” Lardner said it was not at all a question of money. It was rather that his métier was the shorter forms.
By Christmas, 1924, Ring had gone to Europe and returned, and his anthology, What of It?, was set in type. A new article opened the book, a piece called “The Other Side,” about his companions and recent adventures “acrost the old pond” in Europe. In it he wrote, “Mr. Fitzgerald is a novelist and Mrs. Fitzgerald a novelty.”
Never before had Ring been so pleased with his literary work—he had previously been quite cynical about it—and he believed he owed his growing stature as a writer to his relationship with Perkins. How to Write Short Stories had passed the 16,000 mark in sales; and, as Max had predicted, the Scribners republication of his old works in new wrappers gave fresh life to all the other Lardner books on the market. Excellent reviews were being written about the new book everywhere, including one by Mencken.
Ring Lardner, Jr., wrote in his family memoir, The Lardners: “It took the unexpected success of How to Write Short Stories, the extent to which reviewers hailed him as a master of the form, and unremitting pressure from Perkins to bring him back to the work on which his reputation was ultimately to rest.” In December, 1924, Ring wrote Perkins, “I think I am going to be able to sever connections with the daily cartoon. This ought to leave me with plenty of time and it is my intention to write at least ten short stories a year.” Three months later, Perkins read Ring’s story “Haircut,” a small-town barber’s account of how a practical joker was shot to death by the local half-wit. It was darker than most of his earlier tales. “I can’t shake it out of my mind,” Max wrote Ring; “in fact the impression it made has deepened with time. There’s not a man alive who could have done better, that’s certain.” Lardner replied with a formally typed, one-word letter: “Thanks.”
After another Lardner anthology, Scott Fitzgerald wrote Max to express his concern that Ring would stagnate if he kept on writing nothing but stories. “God, I wish he’d write a more or less personal novel,” he told Perkins. “Couldn’t you persuade him?” Fitzgerald’s suggestion was timely. At that moment Max was about to come upon a big idea for Lardner. It all began when Max decided there ought to be a “sort of burlesque on those dictionaries of biography,” satirizing those “most astonishing pieces of bunk, written in all solemnity.” Perkins thought of asking celebrated wits such as Lardner, Robert Benchley, Donald Ogden Stewart, George Ade, and Scott Fitzgerald each to “do a number of fictional biographies which hit off various types of people. And then to illustrate, make and bind the book in imitation of these volumes.” Perkins talked the idea around at the same time that he was urging Ring to compose some long work. Within the week Max found before him the first chapter of Ring Lardner’s “autobiography.”
“For Heaven’s sake,” Perkins pleaded, “keep it up to the length of twenty-five thousand words at least, and the more beyond, the better.” Lardner said there was no chance of stretching it out that long because “it would get to be a terrible strain on both readers and writer,” but Perkins persisted. He said the complete “autobiography” should be published by itself, fattened with illustrations, if necessary, and that it ought to be published quickly, “for ever so many of its hits are of the moment.” Within weeks the installments amassed to 15,000 words, and Lardner called the work The Story of a Wonder Man.
Lardner’s actual life provided only the barest structure for his parody of autobiographies. He recorded such events as: “It was at a petting party in the White House that I first met Jane Austen. The beautiful little Englishwoman had come to our shores in response to an attractive offer from the etro-Goldwyn-Mayer people, one of whose officers had spelled out her novel Pride and Prejudice and considered it good material for a seven-reel comedy.” Perkins selected the installments that he thought should be included in the book and tacked a title onto every chapter. “I am not under any illusions about myself as a humorist,” he told Ring, but he went about writing titles anyway and was teeming with more ideas for Lardner: “Why don’t you write about the boy who believed the ‘ads’ ... read up on all the highbrow stuff and tried it on the gals!” “Some day you ought to take a shot at the ’Clean Desk‘ executive.” “Did you ever discuss hay fever? ... The wretched patient has to pretend he thinks it’s funny too. If you consider the topic, I’ll submit myself, in the interests of science, to scrutiny.” Perkins never stopped urging Ring to write a novel, or at least one long story to lead off a book, but other projects kept catching Lardner’s eye, including a collaboration on a musical with George M. Cohan.
That summer the Perkinses had taken a cottage on the outskirts of New Canaan, Connecticut. “You would hate it,” Max wrote Fitzgerald, “but I like it.” In due course Max and Louise began to think about living in New Canaan permanently. Max had lived in Plainfield all his life, and he believed once a man had put roots down somewhere, he should not dig them up. But he believed Plainfield had sprouted into “a damnable, flat, damp, dull, cheap place.” As for Connecticut, he wrote to novelist Thomas Boyd, “The people thereabouts are the right sort, at least to one of New England descent. In fact, if we could only get rid of that house in Plainfield, we would buy one here in a minute, and if controversies between Louise and me end the way they usually do, we’ll buy one anyway. But I hope not. I know it would be a risky business.”
Louise had given Max a list of reasons for buying a new house, beginning with her hatred of the one they owned in Plainfield. She detested the place because she associated it with the slow death of her mother. It was also costly to keep up. Added to those reasons for moving, Max wrote, “is the charm of New Canaan, a New England village at the end of a single track railroad with almost wild country in three directions, i.e. wild to an Easterner. An ideal place for bringing up children in the way they should go, girls anyhow.”
Louise was already eyeing the home she wanted, and they bought it that season. Max was most impressed with the exterior of the place. It had four fluted wooden columns—“one,” he wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “for each daughter to lean against when the young men drive up in their buggies.”
On January 16, 1925, Louise made what Max called another “gallant attempt to become the mother of a manchild.” “It ended in failure,” he wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “They tell me what strength, what a splendid physique the girl has. That if she had been a boy it would have been a fine boy—quarterback on a Harvard Eleven and leader of an army into Germany perhaps. But as it is, what use is strength?” One New Canaanite asked Max at the train station one day what he was going to name his fifth daughter. “Blaspheme,” he said, but in a more reasonabl
e moment he and Louise chose Nancy Gait Perkins instead. The day the fifth girl “materialized” Perkins again wired his mother just one word: ANOTHER.
The Perkinses enjoyed a more active social life in New Canaan than they had in Plainfield. There were several minor literary celebrities living nearby, and Max took an instant liking to the Colums, intimate friends of James Joyce, both authors and critics in their own right. Mary—Molly to all her friends—was a big, redheaded woman. She was not at all pretty, but Max found her a “wonder, quick as a cat.” Padraic, he wrote Elizabeth, “trails clouds of Irish geniality and comfort, a most charming, amusing, kindly man, who though youngish, has a kind of tolerant wisdom and an air of learning that make him seem like sixty.” William Rose Benét and his wife, the poet Elinor Wylie, also lived in the neighborhood, and Max was especially eager to know her better. He did not find her much of a beauty either—“her features are small and undistinguished of a blunt, squarish sort, and her figure is angular, and I thought awkward,” he wrote Elizabeth —“though Louise was scornful when I said so.” But her personality was alluring: “It is that of a brave sensitive person, wholly herself ... She holds her head back, rather her chin up, and all together says,—but not proudly or aggressively—‘I represent myself.’ ”
“We had many good literary evenings, though it was by no means a literary neighborhood,” Molly Colum recalled in her memoirs, Life and the Dream. The Perkinses, Benéts, and Colums often gathered for dinner, sometimes inviting the Van Wyck Brookses, who were living in Westport, and Hendrik Willem van Loon, an “enormous Dutchman with a kind of ill-natured sneer for almost everything,” who wrote the popular Story of Mankind.
In a short time Perkins recognized Elinor Wylie as the real spark in New Canaan. “The true basis for friendships is a prejudice or two in common,” Max liked to say. With each conversation between them, he grew fonder of Elinor, for she disliked many of the same things he did, including the sort of flashy, glib writing that had become popular. They both found little that was worthy in Michael Arlen’s best-selling The Green Hat, which was the literary rage that year. Max was also aware of Elinor’s vulnerability; when she was reflective she reminded him of a waif. He felt sorry for her at the same time that he admired her. “There’s something tragic in her,” Perkins mused in a letter to Elizabeth Lemmon, “as if she were one who, desiring the opposite, was destined to bring sorrow to those who loved her. An ill-beloved.”
As though it were written into the deed of the new house, the Perkinses promptly joined the New Canaan Country Club, and Max became a regular in the New York, New Haven & Hartford club car. Molly Colum constantly accused him of being “highly conventional and genteel,” but Max said it was just that “in a town like this it’s regarded as a matter of patriotism to join everything joinable.” He admitted, however, that his life in Connecticut had become gayer than he liked. Preferring to spend more time with his adolescent girls, he began turning down dinner invitations. “I only see my children two hours a day at best, and I’m not going to give that little up,” he insisted. That did not stop Louise, who happily went to parties alone. Left in the evenings with his daughters, Max read aloud to them, most often from War and Peace. During crucial battle sequences he laid out matchsticks to show his devoted girls how the Russian and French troops had been arranged. He thought all his daughters should hear that story, “for in it,” he once wrote Peggy, “is the best man that ever was written about, except Hamlet. He is Prince Andrei. I wish each of you, if you must marry, would find a Prince Andrei for a husband,—even if he is a little too scornful and impatient.”
Max corresponded steadily with Elizabeth Lemmon that year. From any of his clubs—which grew to include the Harvard Club, the Century Association, and The Coffee House in New York—he sent newsy letters about his family and town and work. In the spring of 1925, he also sent her several books. One was Lardner’s latest anthology, What of It? Another was Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. Max told her The Great Gatby was better than anything the author had done, “a combination of satire and romance that no one else can give. It comes from the fact that even while he sees things with a critical eye there still hangs over them the glamour of his youthful illusions. This gives the story a kind of wistful quality.”
Perkins had examined Fitzgerald’s revised proofs and then written the author, “I think the book is a wonder and Gatsby is now most appealing, effective and real, and yet altogether original.” All of the editor’s criticisms of several months earlier had been dealt with. He wrote Scott, “Gatsby ought to do much for his creator.”
As publication neared, Fitzgerald lacked Perkins’s confidence. He was shakiest about the title. In early March he wired Max, asking if it was too late to change it to Gold-Hatted Gatsby. Max cabled that such a change would cause not only a harmful delay but also considerable confusion. The author tried to live with The Great Gatrby, but he still believed in his heart that the title would forever stand as his book’s one flaw.
Perkins went right on making the final preparations for The Great Gatsby’s April 10 publication; but on March 19 Fitzgerald could not refrain from sending him an exigent telegram from Capri: CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE. WHAT WOULD DELAY BE? Perkins responded that there would be a delay of several weeks. Besides, he wired, THINK IRONY IS FAR MORE EFFECTIVE UNDER LESS LEADING TITLE. EVERYONE LIKES PRESENT TITLE URGE WE KEEP IT. Three days later Fitzgerald acceded. He wired: YOU’RE RIGHT. But his nervousness mounted.
By publication day Fitzgerald was so overcome with “fears and forebodings” that, in a letter to Max, he turned on The Great Gatsby, calling it a certain disappointment to the public, the reviewers, and himself. “Supposing women didn’t like the book because it has no important female characters in it,” he said, “and the critics didn’t like it because it dealt with the rich.” Worst of all, wrote Fitzgerald, “Suppose it didn’t even wipe out my debt to you—why it will have to sell 20,000 copies even to do that! In fact all my confidence is gone ... I’m sick of the book myself.”
It was an entire week before Perkins had a trend to report, and then it was with great sorrow that he found Fitzgerald’s worries were borne out. He cabled: SALES SITUATION DOUBTFUL EXCELLENT REVIEWS. This was more optimistic than was the case on both counts. Later that day he wrote the qualifying details to Fitzgerald, explaining that “the trade” had been skeptical. One reason seemed to be the small number of pages in the book, only 218. This was an old objection which Perkins had thought the book market had gotten past.
To attempt to explain to them that the way of writing which you have chosen and which is bound to come more and more into practice is one where a vast amount is said by implication, and that therefore the book is as full as it would have been if written to much greater length by another method, is of course utterly futile.
Several major distributors had, in fact, drastically reduced their orders upon receiving the short book.
Knowing how trying this period must be for Scott to bear, Perkins promised to cable any significant developments, especially the appearance of more good reviews. “I like the book so much myself and see so much in it that its recognition and success mean more to me than anything else in sight at the present time,” he told Scott, “—I mean in any department of interest, not only that of literature. But it does seem to me from the comments of many who yet feel its enchantment, that it is over the heads of more people than you would probably suppose.” He assured Scott, “I shall watch [its progress] with the greatest anxiety imaginable in anyone but the author.”
Just a week earlier Fitzgerald had hoped his book would sell over 75,000 copies. Now he wished for but a fraction of that—enough to clear his $6,000 advance from Scribners. If the final sales projection were as low as it threatened to be, Fitzgerald said, he would give himself just one more book to decide whether or not he would continue as a serious writer. “If it will support me with no more intervals of trash I’ll go on as a novelist,” he told Max. “
If not I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living, and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it and so I’ll have to pay the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without this constant worry and interruption.”
Two weeks after publication Perkins still had little basis for optimism. DEVELOPMENTS FAVORABLE REVIEWS EXCELLENT MUST STILL WAIT, he wired, and then wrote to explain: “While most of the reviewers seem rather to fumble with the book, as if they did not fully understand it, they did praise it very highly, and better still, they all show a kind of excitement which they caught from its vitality.” The people who remained to be heard from were those who fully grasped the book, as thus far nobody had done. Perkins remained confident that “when the tumult and shouting of the rabble of reviewers and gossipers dies, The Great Gatsby will stand out as a very extraordinary book.”
To blot out Fitzgerald’s debt to Scribners, Scott offered his collection of stories for the fall, once bullishly entitled Dear Money, now more reflectively called All the Sad Young Men. Max thought the title was excellent, and he was pleased that Fitzgerald had made no further mention of going to Hollywood. He well knew that Scott hated to linger in debt, but he did not want Scott’s debt to prey on his mind. He must not think Scribners was anxious about it. “If we wanted to be utterly hard-boiled we could look upon it as a good investment,” he told him.
Perkins himself took plenty of knocks because of The Great Gatsby. The sales and advertising departments had bet heavily on the book because of Perkins’s previous record, and they made their anger known when the book did not pay off. Several critics he knew personally took shots at the book in their reviews, then told him point-blank that he was foolish to have published such a trivial mystery novel. Ruth Hale, in the Brooklyn Eagle, wrote that she found “not one chemical trace of magic, life, irony, romance or mysticism in all The Great Gatsby.” At a party a few weeks later she told Perkins, “That new book by your enfant terrible is really terrible.”
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