Max Perkins

by A. Scott Berg

  Word among bookmen traveled fast. Within days William Aspinwall Bradley, at Alfred Knopf, and Louis Bromfield on behalf of his publisher, Alfred Harcourt, expressed interest in Hemingway’s manuscripts. Fitzgerald urged Max to act quickly. But Hemingway had no idea of double-crossing Perkins, to whom he had given his word months earlier.

  By first sending the manuscript to Perkins, Hemingway told Scott, he felt he would be turning down a “sure thing” for a delay and a chance. But he was willing to take the risk because of the impression he had formed of Perkins through his letters and what Fitzgerald had told him. “Also confidence in Scribners and would like to be lined up with you,” he wrote. The instant Harcourt offered an advance, Fitzgerald notified Perkins that he could get Hemingway’s novel if he would promptly write without qualifications that they would publish both the novel and the “unpromising” satire. Perkins was eager to obey Fitzgerald’s direction precisely, but had to adhere to company policy on taste. He cabled Scott, PUBLISH NOVEL AT 15% AND ADVANCE IF DESIRED ALSO SATIRE UNLESS OBJECTIONABLE OTHER THAN FINANCIALLY HEMINGWAYS STORIES SPLENDID.

  Max could do no better. “[There] was a fear that this satire ... might be suppressible,” he explained to Scott in a letter. “In fact, we could tell nothing about it of course in these respects and it is not the policy obviously of Scribners to publish books of certain types. For instance, if it were even Rabelaisian to any extreme degree, it might be objected to.”

  Max was afraid the qualification in his cable had been fatal and was ready to accept the news that he had lost Hemingway. He conceded to Scott that Harcourt was an admirable publisher, but he insisted that Hemingway would be better off in Scribners’ hands “because we are absolutely true to our authors and support them loyally in the face of losses for a long time when we believe in their qualities and in them. It is that kind of a publisher that Hemingway probably needs,” Perkins said, “because I hardly think he could come into a large public immediately. He ought to be published by one who believes in him and is prepared to lose money for a period in enlarging his market. Although he would certainly, even without much support, get recognition through his own powers.”

  After several lean years of free-lancing, Hemingway saw this as the time to strike. He decided to go to New York, where he could make arrangements immediately, without weeks elapsing between each offer and counterproposal. He could personally place The Torrents of Spring and his novel with a new publisher and then justify his action to Horace Liveright, if the publisher chose to fight. “To hear [Hemingway] talk you’d think Liveright had broken up his home and robbed him of millions,” Scott wrote Max, “—but that’s because he knows nothing of publishing, except in the cucoo [sic] magazines, is very young and feels helpless so far away. You won’t be able to help liking him—he’s one of the nicest fellows I know.” Fitzgerald’s last word on the subject was an emphatic reminder to get a signed contract for The Sun Also Rises.

  Hemingway arrived in New York on February 9, 1926. After an amicable parting with Horace Liveright and a sleepless night of indecision, he went to see Max Perkins, who offered a $1,500 advance for the first refusal rights of The Torrents of Spring and the unseen novel. Hemingway shook hands on it.

  Perkins was extremely grateful to Fitzgerald for all his help in landing the author. “He is a most interesting chap about his bullfights and boxing,” Max wrote Scott.

  Scott was just as pleased that Scribners had got Hemingway. “I saw him for a day in Paris on his return,” he replied, “& he thought you were great.”

  Hemingway returned to Austria, where by the end of March he finished work on the proofs of The Torrents of Spring and the draft of The Sun Also Rises. Then he returned to Paris and made plans to do some “fooling around with bullfighting” in the early summer. “Don’t get yourself killed with all this flying and bullfighting,” Max cautioned his newest author. Hemingway answered that he had no intention of letting The Sun Also Rises be a posthumous work.

  One month later Ernest sent Max the novel and what he called a “long drooling letter.” The manuscript still needed further working over, Hemingway said, but he figured Perkins would be anxious to see the pig he had bought in a poke. Hemingway supposed the editor would be so engrossed “reading the pig” that he would not be much interested in the rest of his letter, but Max was concerned with all his news, especially that about Scott Fitzgerald, with whom Hemingway’s relationship had mellowed. Scott had relaxed from the eager posture he assumed when he wanted to make a new friend; Ernest, who still respected Fitzgerald’s writing, no longer considered him the irrefutable elder statesman of the younger generation. In fact, Ernest was now feeling especially fatherly. He was touched by Fitzgerald’s constant concern about money and had decided to alleviate it. His own meager income from European literary magazines had been supplemented in the past few years by income from the trust fund of his wife Hadley. Now he had still more money, the large sum from Scribners, and momentarily considered making some grand gestures. He spoke to Max of giving all his royalties to Fitzgerald, and even wrote Fitzgerald that he had just called in his attorney to make Scott his heir. If Fitzgerald found this tactless as well as facetious, there is no record of it.

  Once Hemingway signed with Scribners, Max Perkins thereupon became the moderator in the literary friendship between Ernest and Scott. Until Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, Max’s office would be the clearinghouse for much of the emotion going back and forth between the two men, particularly when they wanted to communicate without risking a confrontation.

  At the time Hemingway’s novel reached Max, Scott was staying on the Riviera, at Juan-les-Pins, with “every prospect of a marvellous summer.” Ernest was in Paris; after three weeks of continuous rain, he had had no exercise and consequently was suffering insomnia. Perkins’s next letter was just the right tonic:The Sun Also Rises seems to me a most extraordinary performance. No one could conceive a book with more life in it. All the scenes, and particularly those when they cross the Pyrennees [sic] and come into Spain, and when they fish in that cold river, and when the bulls are sent in with the steers, and when they are fought in the arena, are of such a quality as to be like actual experience.

  As a work of art the book seemed to Perkins “astonishing and the more so because it involved such an extraordinary range of experience and emotion, all brought together in the most skillful manner—the subtle ways of which are beautifully concealed—to form a complete design. I could not express my admiration too strongly.”

  In New York publishing circles the rumor began to circulate that Max’s enthusiasm was not shared by all his colleagues. Max would not find it easy, said Charles A. Madison, an editorial executive at Henry Holt and Company, “to persuade [old Charles] Scribner to publish a book containing four-letter words and dialogue that crackled with obscenity.” It was one thing to call a female dog a bitch (though the elderly man in charge of the Scribner stock room had been aghast to find exactly such a reference in The Great Gatsby), but it was quite another to refer to a woman—in this case, the heroine, Lady Brett Ashley—as one. Worried, Max brought the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises home and discussed it with Louise. He explained that not only certain words but often Hemingway’s subject matter was shocking. Louise instinctively grasped the situation, clenched a fist, and told her husband, “You’ve got to stand up and fight for it, Max.”

  A few days later Scribners’ board of editors convened for their monthly discussion of newly received manuscripts. Charles Scribner was seventy-two then, but his roar was as forceful as ever. Printing obscenities was to him unthinkable; keeping “dirty books” from sullying his imprint was a matter of great importance. He had been stunned by Hemingway’s book. He had, however, kept his wits and, before the editorial meeting, had sought the advice of a friend, Judge Robert Grant of Boston, a successful novelist then in his seventies. The judge had been properly appalled by Hemingway’s seamy language, but he had admired most of the novel. “You must publish the b
ook, Charles,” he had ruled. “But I hope the young man will live to regret it.”

  John Hall Wheelock remembered walking into the board meeting with this thought in his mind: that Judge Grant’s decision notwithstanding, “Charles Scribner would no sooner allow profanity in one of his books than he would invite friends to use his parlor as a toilet room.”

  When the debate over The Sun Also Rises flared up, Max Perkins argued that the question went beyond this single book. He later wrote young Charles Scribner, who had not been present at the meeting, that he had asserted that it was “a crucial one in respect to younger writers—that we suffered by being called ‘ultra-conservative’ (even if unjustly and with malice) and that this would become our reputation for the present when our declination of this book should, as it would, get about.”

  Charles Scribner listened patiently to Perkins’s determined presentation, which of course reminded him of the way Max had argued for Fitzgerald in 1919, and as he listened he slowly shook his head from side to side. Byron Dexter, a junior editor who was privy to the office gossip, later told Malcolm Cowley in confidence: “Perkins was the new idea and the younger people in the place were terrifically for him. I remember the moment of crisis.... Old Charles Scribner, Jr. ran the place then with a very firm hand—and no two ways about it. We knew that Perkins had to go to bat for Hemingway, and it was reported with hushed voices one evening that Charles Scribner, Jr. had turned down the book and Perkins was going to resign.”

  It never came to that. After the vote, Perkins walked back to his office and wrote young Scribner, “We took it—with misgivings.” He admitted that his own view of the matter in regard to the house’s reputation “influenced our decision largely ... I simply thought in the end that the balance was slightly in favour of acceptance for all the worry and general misery involved.”

  The Torrents of Spring, the satire, was published on May 28, 1926. Max wrote Fitzgerald that it received some “praise but not always comprehension.” Max himself saw as much real humor in the book as biting wit, which saved it from being “devastating.” Even so, Max said, his deepest interest was in getting to The Sun Also Rises, the publication of which he impatiently anticipated. “That,” he wrote Scott, “showed more ‘genius’ than I had inferred from Torrents of Spring, which I did not rate so very high.”

  That The Sun Also Rises differed in style and subject from any book Maxwell Perkins had ever edited—or even read—made him unusually hesitant to offer advice. From France, Scott Fitzgerald wrote to suggest that Max ask for only the absolute minimum of changes, because Hemingway was already “so discouraged about the previous reception of his work by publishers and magazine editors.”

  In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway says he did not let Fitzgerald see The Sun Also Rises until after the revised manuscript had been sent to Scribners. In fact, Fitzgerald did read the manuscript that spring and he sent a critique of the work to the author. The novel was “damn good,” he said, once the reader got past the first fifteen pages. These pages were mostly introductory material about Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn. Fitzgerald felt they were too loosely written. They displayed, he said, a “tendency to envelope [sic] or (and as it usually turns out) to embalm in mere wordiness an anecdote that casually appealed to you.”

  Days later, Hemingway suggested to Max that they lop off altogether those first fifteen pages. This threw Perkins into a quandary. He agreed with Hemingway that the information revealed in this opening section was also conveyed in the body of the book and therefore, from that aspect, unnecessary. But the material, he said, “is well said here ... and a reader to whom your way of writing will be new and in many cases strange, would be helped by this beginning.” Perkins yielded the decision to the author, noting, “You write like yourself only, and I shall not attempt criticism. I couldn’t with confidence.”

  On other points, however, Max was less hesitant. The problems of The Sun Also Rises, he felt, had less to do with entire sections than with individual words and phrases—profanities and unacceptable characterizations which Perkins knew could result in the book’s suppression and in libel suits. As for language, he wrote the author, the “majority of people are more affected by words than things. I’d even say that those most obtuse toward things are most sensitive to a sort of word. I think some words should be avoided so that we shall not divert people from the qualities of this book to the discussion of an utterly unpertinent and extrinsic matter.” Max thought there were a dozen different passages in The Sun Also Rises that would offend most readers’ sensibilities. “It would be a pretty thing,” he said, “if the very significance of so original a book should be disregarded because of the howls of a lot of cheap, prurient, moronic yappers.”

  You probably don’t appreciate this disgusting possibility [he continued] because you’ve been too long abroad, and out of that atmosphere. Those who breathe its stagnant vapors now attack a book, not only on grounds of eroticism, which could not hold here, but upon that of “decency,” which means words.

  “I am as sure of your artistic integrity as anything,” Max insisted, but he urged Hemingway to reduce the obscenities so far as he rightly could.

  Hemingway replied that he imagined that he and Perkins were on the same side regarding the use of language. He said he never used a word without first considering whether or not it was replaceable. He spent the next month making the final corrections on the proof, cutting every word he felt he could. By the end of August, 1926, he had dealt with all the hot spots Perkins had cited: Henry James, in a “historical” reference to his impotence, was identified only as Henry; direct references to such living writers as Joseph Hergesheimer and Hilaire Belloc were eliminated or changed; dashes were substituted for the letters in obscene words; and the Spanish fighting bulls were depicted without their “embarrassing appendages.” The word bitch remained in reference to Lady Brett because Hemingway insisted he never used that word “ornamentally,” only when necessary. If The Sun Also Rises was a profane book, Ernest said, well, he and Max would have to live with that and the hope that his next effort would be more “sacred.” He was already thinking about the many stories he wanted to write, about war and love and the old “lucha por la vida.”

  Another editorial discussion concerned the book’s epigraph. Hemingway wanted one that would set a theme which was already important to him, the struggles of his contemporaries for their identities during the upheaval and rootlessness after the war. In A Moveable Feast Hemingway tells how he came upon his epigraph. Gertrude Stein, he wrote, was having “some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove, and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the last year of the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not broken the priority of other vehicles, in repairing Miss Stein’s Ford. Anyway he had not been sérieux and had been corrected severely by the patron of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The patron had said to him, ‘You are all a génération perdue.’ ” Later to Hemingway she remarked, “That’s what you all are. All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”

  Hemingway saw how applicable that last phrase was to his characters in The Sun Also Rises. He wrote Perkins that in composing the book’s epigraph, he wanted to juxtapose Miss Stein’s remark with a passage from Ecclesiastes, the one that begins:Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher.... One generation passeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and resteth to the place where he arose.

  The epigraph made good sense to Perkins. Ecclesiastes was his favorite book of the Old Testament—he once told his daughter Peg that it “contained all the wisdom of the ancient world”—and he found the quotation perfectly apt. He readily agreed.

  Even after The Sun Also Rises was published, in the fall of 1926, Hemingway kept mulling over the epigraph. He asked Perkins if the words “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher” might be cut. The deletion, he felt, would emphasize his “real poi
nt” in the book, which was that the “earth abideth forever.” Perkins again agreed. That relationship between the earth and its people was the strongest theme in The Sun Also Rises, he wrote Hemingway. “It has not been remarked upon by most reviewers,” he said, “but I often doubt if the emotion itself ... is felt by ... people of the book-reading class. I believe it is felt by simpler people.”

  Max’s daughter Bertha remembered the relief with which both her parents read the reviews in the Sunday book sections, especially Conrad Aiken’s in the Herald Tribune:If there is better dialogue being written today I do not know where to find it. It is alive with the rhythms and idioms, and pauses and suspension and innuendoes and shorthands of living speech.

  Max’s colleague Roger Burlingame recorded years later that The Sun Also Rises “convinced editors like Maxwell Perkins that another generation, ‘lost’ though it might be, had found an understanding of the writing craft of which most of their elders had little enough.” Referring to the increase in the novel’s sales from 8,000 to 12,000 and beyond, Max wrote Ernest, “The Sun has risen ... and is rising steadily.”

  The following spring Donald Friede, one of the partners of Boni & Liveright, visited Hemingway in Paris and offered him lavish advances, trying to tempt him back to their firm. Ernest told him flatly that he could not even discuss the matter as he was absolutely satisfied in Scribners’ hands. He knew they had advertised The Sun Also Rises vigorously before it began to sell, when many publishers would have dropped it. Hemingway believed it was that advertising which eventually pushed its sale up to 20,000 copies. He did not, however, realize the extent of the support Perkins himself had given the book.