“So many people have attacked me about [The Great Gatsby] that I feel bruised,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “but they don’t know. They can’t see that Fitzgerald is a satirist. The fact that he throws a glamour over vice—if it didn’t have it there would be none—prevents them from seeing that he lays a lash upon the vicious.” Perkins realized that Fitzgerald had outgrown his public. “His virtuosity has made a ‘popular novelist’ of one who is above the heads of the multitudes.” Max believed they never looked deeply into This Side of Paradise. “It was a bag full of jewels, some, cheap imitations, some pretty pebbles,” he wrote Elizabeth, “and mixed among them pure and priceless ones.” The Great Gatsby was more like one exquisitely cut gem, with more brilliant facets than anyone in America had seen before.
“Perhaps it’s not perfect!” Max wrote Scott on April 25, 1925. “It is one thing to ride a sleepy cob of a talent to perfection and quite another to master a wild young thoroughbred of a talent.”
By late spring—after all hopes of The Great Gatsby’s success had faded—fine reviews did appear, and Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and T. S. Eliot all sent Fitzgerald personal letters praising the book.
Fitzgerald himself realized how far he had advanced since the beginning of the Jazz Age, and he never failed to express his appreciation to those who helped him. “Max,” he wrote his editor in July, 1925, “it amuses me when praise comes in on the ‘structure’ of the book—because it was you who fixed up the structure, not me. And don’t think I’m not grateful for all that sane and helpful advice about it.”
Along with the somber news of Gatsby’s sales, Fitzgerald heard from Perkins of a rumor circulating about his dissatisfaction with Charles Scribner’s Sons and his plans to transfer to Boni & Liveright for his books. Max hesitantly mailed a longhand letter from New Canaan to Paris requesting the details of the story.
LIVERIGHT RUMOR ABSURD, Scott wired. In fact, Fitzgerald had heard from an editor at Boni & Liveright who asked for Scott’s next book in the event that he was not satisfied with Scribners. Fitzgerald responded at once, affirming that Max Perkins was one of his closest friends and that his relations with Scribners had always been so cordial and pleasant that he could not even think of changing publishers. The rumor was apparently a thirdhand rendition of a misunderstanding, and Fitzgerald became depressed that Perkins should have believed it enough to mention it.
Now Max, [Scott wrote] I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world. If you like I will sign a contract with you immediately for my next three books. The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.
Fitzgerald enumerated four reasons why he could not change publishers, ranging from corporate matters to personal allegiances. One was his strong feeling about having one house’s support from book to book—if only to have uniform bindings on all his works; another was the “curious advantage to a rather radical writer in being published by what is now an ultra-conservative house.” Thirdly, Fitzgerald felt that it would be awkward to sign with another publisher while he had a debt, which was “both actual and a matter of honor,” of several thousand dollars. The foremost reason for Fitzgerald’s loyalty had been swelling within him since their first correspondence. “Tho, as a younger man, I have not always been in sympathy with some of your publishing ideas (which were evolved under the pre-movie, pre-high-literacy-rate condition of twenty to forty years ago),” Scott wrote Max, “the personality of you and of Mr. Scribner, the tremendous squareness, courtesy, generosity, and open-mindedness I have always met there and, if I may say it, the special consideration you have all had for me and my work, much more than make up the difference.”
Maxwell Perkins gave all his authors the feeling that he cared as much for their work as they did themselves. Even Scott Fitzgerald, the keystone of Scribners’ revitalized success, needed that assurance. Max never asked Fitzgerald (or any writer) to sign a permanent contract for “the simple reason that it might be right for you sometime to change publishers, and while this would be a tragedy to me, I should not be so small as to stand in the way on personal grounds.” Indeed, dozens of Perkins’s agreements to publish were oral—and inviolate.
Perkins was still casting his lot with the up-and-coming and challenging those he already published to attempt the untried. In 1944, Malcolm Cowley commented on the effect that this policy had on Perkins’s company. “Scribners, when he went to work there, was a fantastic publishing house, with an atmosphere like Queen Victoria’s parlor,” he said. Because of Perkins and his sweeping changes, that house “took a sudden leap from the age of innocence into the midst of the lost generation.”
VI
Companions
In December, 1924, a package containing a collection of vignettes, published in France under the title in our time, arrived at the New York City customs house. The author was “that Hemingway” of whom Fitzgerald had spoken a few months earlier. It was not until late February that Perkins read the sketches. Several of them chronicled the life of Nick Adams, a young man from Michigan who had fought in the World War. Max reported to Scott that the book “accumulates a fearful effect through a series of brief episodes, presented with economy, strength and vitality. A remarkable, tight, complete expression of the scene, in our time, as it looks to Hemingway.”
Hemingway’s writing had a distinctive sound, the likes of which Perkins had never heard: hard-hammered words that reverberated long after the short, staccato sentences had been read. “I was greatly impressed by the power in the scenes and incidents pictured, and by the effectiveness of their relation to each other,” Max wrote Hemingway, but added:I doubt if we could have seen a way to the publication of this book itself on account of material considerations: it is so small that it would give the booksellers no opportunity for substantial profit if issued at a price which custom would dictate. This is a pity, because your method is obviously one which enables you to express what you have to say in very small compass.
It occurred to Perkins that Hemingway might be writing something that would not raise such practical objections, and so he assured him, “Whatever you are writing, we should be most interested to consider.”
Five days later Perkins followed up his letter to Hemingway with another. He had heard from John Peale Bishop—one of Fitzgerald’s friends from Princeton, who collaborated with Edmund Wilson on a book of verse called The Undertaker’s Garland—that Hemingway had been working on another book. “I hope this is so and that we may see it,” Perkins wrote the author. “We would certainly read it with promptness and sympathetic interest if you gave us the opportunity.”
Seven weeks passed with no response from Hemingway. It was Max’s first exposure to Ernest Hemingway’s habit of vanishing to some remote part of the world. On this occasion it was Schruns, Austria, where he was skiing. Hemingway read Perkins’s letters upon his return to Paris and was excited by his interest. But he had committed himself just days before to another publisher who had connected with him in the Alps and he told Max he did not see how he could talk seriously with him until he had seen the contract for In Our Time (by now Hemingway had capitalized it) being offered by Boni & Liveright. To show Perkins his appreciation and his interest in Scribners, he offered some notions about writing. He said he found the novel “an awfully artificial and worked-out form” and that he hoped someday to write an exhaustive study of the Spanish bullring. Priding himself on such unconventional ideas, Hemingway tried to console Perkins by suggesting he was a bad prospect for a publisher anyway.
“What rotten luck—for me I mean,” Perkins wrote back, sorry that he had not been able to locate Hemingway sooner. He asked him to remember that Scribners had been at least one of the first to try to publish him in America. “It is too bad about Hemingway,” Max wrote Scott Fitzgerald.
The Fitzgeralds rented a fifth-floor walk-up in Paris that spring, and in May, 1925, he and Ernest Hemingway met. H
emingway found Fitzgerald “very good looking in a too pretty way.” Scott was drinking hard that month and got so tight at their first meeting at the Dingo Bar that he started to pass out. Ernest observed that every time Fitzgerald took a drink his face changed, and after four shots the skin was so drawn that it resembled a death’s head. Scott found Hemingway to be “a fine charming fellow” who liked Max’s letters enormously. “If Liveright doesn’t please him,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, “he’ll come to you, and he has a future. He’s 27.”
By summer Scott and Ernest were seeing more and more of each other, occasionally at the home of Gertrude Stein. The walls of her salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus were covered with paintings by young Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse, and other modern artists whom she sponsored before they became famous. Perkins had never met Miss Stein but he admired her novel The Making of Americans. However, he wrote Fitzgerald, he doubted if many readers would have patience with her peculiarly repetitious and impressionistic method, “effective as it does become.” Fitzgerald and Hemingway found her presence at least as commanding as her writing. They enjoyed mixing with the other literary expatriates who dropped in—among them John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, and Robert McAlmon, who had published a slim book of Hemingway’s work called Three Stories and Ten Poems.
Hemingway and Fitzgerald began going on expeditions together, which because of Scott’s childish impracticality always brought untold complications. Hemingway was amused enough by one trip, driving Scott’s car up from Lyons through the Côte-d‘Or, to write Max Perkins about it. The journey started with Fitzgerald’s missing his train from Paris, involved a lot of wine and a few wild-goose chases through the Maconnais region, and ended with Hemingway’s concluding, “Never ... go on trips with anyone you do not love.” Max replied, “My trips are only to Boston, Philadelphia and Washington and my companions then are those of the smoking compartment.”
Ernest’s earliest feelings for Fitzgerald were of great fondness and respect; he thought The Great Gatsby an “absolutely first-rate book.” But from the start he was impatient with Scott’s immaturity and he developed a paternalistic attitude toward him although he was three years Fitzgerald’s junior. By 1960, when Hemingway wrote about the first year of their friendship in A Moveable Feast, his reminiscences of his early days as a writer in Paris, his tone had changed from paternalistic to patronizing. He remembered finishing Fitzgerald’s novel and then feeling that “no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one.”
Hemingway and Fitzgerald each went his own way that summer, 1925. Ernest and his wife Hadley journeyed to Pamplona for the running of the bulls, Scott and Zelda to the south of France. Perkins met Fitzgerald’s repeated requests for money, assuring him on Scribners’ behalf that “if this puts you in a position to go straight ahead with a new novel, we are certainly mighty glad to send it.” Max wanted Scott to give him some idea of what he was writing, even though he knew “it does sometimes dull the edge for the writer to do this.”
Toward the end of summer Fitzgerald began his next book. It would take him five starts and seventeen versions before he could resolve it into his brutally personal work Tender Is the Night. As he wrote, Fitzgerald developed a number of substories, and at times, as Perkins followed Scott’s progress, he could discern what appeared to be three wholly different novels.
Scott’s first bulletin to Perkins about the book, written in August from Antibes, read: “Our Type is about several things, one of which is an intellectual murder on the Leopold-Loeb idea. Incidently it is about Zelda & me & the hysteria of last May and June in Paris. (Confidential).” Another element was a murder that followed the Leopold-Loeb case by several months, that of Dorothy Ellingson, a sixteen-year-old San Francisco girl who murdered her mother during a quarrel about the daughter’s reckless living.
As usual, Fitzgerald was going to people his novel with members of the sparkling society he so admired. Drawing on his recollections of his years in Europe, Fitzgerald found that one figure stood out, a paragon who, as Fitzgerald would later remark, “had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy.” That man was Gerald Murphy, lean and elegant, with a face just this side of overbred. At their Villa America in Antibes, Murphy and his handsome wife, Sara, entertained in a manner that captivated Scott and Zelda. The Fitzgeralds had shared “many fêtes” with the Murphys.
In his first attempt at the novel, Fitzgerald gave an account of a hot-blooded young man named Francis Melarkey who is touring Europe with his dominating mother. Melarkey is taken in by the Seth Rorebacks (the Murphys), pastors of the expatriate flock on the Cote d‘Azur, only to fall in love with Seth’s wife, Dinah. Fitzgerald did not immediately know how he would contrive Francis Melarkey’s murder of his mother, but the love triangle was clear to him. “In a certain sense my plot is not unlike Dreiser’s in the American Tragedy,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins several months later from Paris. “At first this worried me but now it doesn’t for our minds are so different.” By then he was calling the novel The World’s Fair.
Perkins heard little from Scott for the rest of the year except his occasional petitions for funds. “Will I ever be square?” he asked, fretting about his mounting debt to Scribners. Mindful of the steady decline in his sales since Paradise, Fitzgerald worried that his books might never sell again, that his newest anthology, All the Sad Young Men, would not reach 5,000 copies. Perkins thought the nine stories in that collection made a new and strong impression since they bridged commercialism and artistry. Thinking of “The Rich Boy” and “Winter Dreams” especially, he wrote, “They have more breadth ... than those of earlier collections. In fact, it is remarkable that you have been able to make them so entertaining for the crowd when they have so much significance.” Later he assured Scott, “Those who have believed in you can now utter another decisive ‘I told you so.’ ”
At the year’s end Scott fell into another of his “unholy depressions.” Perkins was all but powerless in trying to raise his spirits because Fitzgerald’s despondence was not caused by a feeling of failure as an author. “The [new] book is wonderful,” he wrote Perkins; “I honestly think that when it’s published I shall be the best American novelist (which isn’t saying a lot) but the end seems far away.” What terrified him was the prospect of growing old:I wish I were 22 again with only my dramatic and feverishly enjoyed miseries. You remember I used to say I wanted to die at 30—well, I’m now 29 and the prospect is still welcome. My work is the only thing that makes me happy—except to be a little tight—and for those 2 indulgences I pay a big price in mental and physical hangovers.
Perkins thought Fitzgerald’s melancholy and expatriation were both curiously linked to his desperate attempts to maintain his youth. He observed Scott’s struggles to hold onto it by constant travel and knew he was bound to feel dejected seeing it dimmed by his drinking. The only suggestion the editor made was that the Fitzgeralds should settle in some typical American community for a while, “not for your future as a citizen so much as for that as a writer. You’d see a new surface of life that way,” he wrote Scott.
A few months later Fitzgerald announced that unless all the other Americans were first driven out of France, he would be returning to the United States. “God, how much I’ve learned in these two and a half years in Europe,” Scott wrote Max. “It seems like a decade&Ifeel pretty old but I wouldn’t have missed it, even its most unpleasant & painful aspects. ... I do want to see you, Max.” In Perkins’s stead, Ernest Hemingway had become Scott’s closest friend, the only one who could improve his mood. “He and I are very thick,” Fitzgerald added.
Max wanted to establish a relationship with Hemingway as well. Scribner’s Magazine had just received their first piece from him, “Fifty Grand,” and Perkins found the man’s writing “invigorating as a cold, fresh wind.” To Perkins’s regret the magazine did not accept the story outright but asked Hemingway to shorten it. “I wish with his very first story that we did not have to bring this up,” Max wrote Scott, “[because Hemingway] is one of those whose interest is much more in producing than in publishing, and he may revolt at the idea of being asked to conform to an artificial specification in length.” Hemingway never did cut the story, the equally prestigious Atlantic Monthly subsequently printed it, and Max feared this outcome would keep the author from ever signing any contract with Scribners. Fitzgerald sympathized with Perkins’s position. “I wish Liveright would lose faith in Ernest,” he wrote Max just after Christmas, 1925.
Days later, miraculously, Horace Liveright did. He cabled Hemingway: REJECTING TORRENTS OF SPRING PATIENTLY AWAITING MS SUN ALSO RISES WRITING FULLY. No sooner had the news been flashed than Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, “If he’s free I’m almost sure I can get satire to you first & then if you see your way clear, you can contract for the novel tout ensemble.”
The Torrents of Spring was a 28,000-word satire of Sherwood Anderson and his stylized, sentimental imitators. Fitzgerald loved it but said it would not be popular, and that the editors at Liveright had rejected it because their most recent work by Anderson, Dark Laughter, was in its tenth printing and The Torrents of Spring was “almost a vicious parody on him.” Under the circumstances, Scott thought, Hemingway would send Perkins his other book only on the condition that he publish the satire first. Since Liveright’s telegram, he said, Hemingway had intended to go straight to Scribners, but Fitzgerald thought he was wavering because of the company’s persistently conservative reputation.
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