Irate reactions to the novel filled the Scribners mailbag almost every week, and they were delivered to Perkins. The Sun Also Rises was banned in Boston, and there were disgusted readers everywhere demanding, if not an apology, then at least an excuse for Scribners’ pandering to the public’s basest tastes. Perkins had become expert at answering hotheaded letters assailing the respectability of the house of Scribner; he was still receiving letters about that “foul-mouthed, vulgar, blustering upstart” F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Publishing is not, of course, dependent on the individual taste of the publisher,” Perkins replied to one reader of Hemingway’s novel. “He is under an obligation to his profession which binds him to bring out a work which in the judgment of the literary world is significant in its literary qualities and is a pertinent criticism of the civilization of the time.” He added:There are two positions commonly taken with regard to books of this kind: one is, that vice ought never to be presented in literature as it actually is, because it is unpleasant, and the other is that the presentation of it as it is, actually, is valuable because it is, actually, repulsive and terrible, and if known to be so will be hated. But if ignored and concealed, it takes on a false glamour which is seductive.
It has not yet been decided which of these positions is the right one.
While Perkins was wrestling with Hemingway’s critics, Hemingway was having his own difficulties, not literary but matrimonial. He and his wife, Hadley, with whom he had had one son, were getting divorced. The situation had started, Hemingway wrote later, as all things truly wicked start, “from an innocence.” In A Moveable Feast he describes the predicament: “An unmarried young woman becomes the temporary best friend of another young woman who is married, goes to live with the husband and wife and then unknowingly, innocently and unrelentingly sets out to marry the husband.” The friend was a chic young woman from Arkansas, a fashion editor for Vogue in Paris, named Pauline Pfeiffer. In July, 1926, Ernest revealed to his wife that he and Pauline were in love. The dedication of The Sun Also Rises and the assignment of all its royalties to Hadley were the last rites of their marriage. Of her one meeting with Max Perkins a short time later, Hadley recalled, “I got an agreeable impression that he was somewhat flabbergasted that Ernest was trading me off for another (however nice) partner.” She also said: “I realized I had become an adjunct to Hem, and he felt he needed something more to stimulate him. Sometimes you get so close you have to part.”
Other marriages stay together because of distance. “Louise and Max were an odd pairing,” Louise’s sister Jean said. “Opposites attract, but they never really got together on anything. Oh, they loved each other, but look at the way Max worked hard in New York all day and couldn’t wait to get home to see his girls. And Louise—she never wanted to be stuck in the house; and once she had her family she did everything she could to get away from them.”
In the mid-1920s Louise was becoming ever more active as a writer of plays and pageants, produced locally, and as an actress. Max still did not approve—of the acting in particular and probably of the theater in general. He decided that she should write stories and books and in 1925, as an encouragement, he took one of her plays for children, The Knave of Hearts, and had Scribners publish it in a large-format volume with lavish illustrations by Maxfield Parrish, a friend of the Perkinses who lived across the Connecticut River from Windsor. Parrish collectors consider The Knave of Hearts among the artist’s most prized works.
In 1926, finally yielding to her husband’s prodding, Louise quit her playwriting and made two attempts at prose—short stories called “Formula” and “Other Joys.” Both sold, the one to Harpers, the other to Scribner‘s—without Max’s influence. He found it remarkable that she should break into print so easily and encouraged her to get right to work on a third story. All their daughters remembered his saying that if she would stick to writing, “Mother could become another Katherine Mansfield.” To Louise that prospect did not hold a candle to an acting career. But she wanted to please her husband.
Louise’s energy came in spurts—sometimes years intervened between stories—but her literary efforts showed a steady improvement in craftsmanship. Published under her maiden name, they became less heavy-handed in their plotting, more subtle in their characterization. Even her very first attempts contained perceptive observations that reflected deep, inner passions. None of her early stories was particularly autobiographical, but they were all about restless women—most often spinsters or widows living in opulent surroundings (which she sharply detailed) but suffocating in their withdrawn existences.
Louise’s new occupation proved to be an expensive luxury. Max explained to Fitzgerald: “Every time she gets a story under way, she feels that she is going to earn some money, and that this entitles her to be a little extravagant—so long before the story is finished, four or five times the amount of money that it could possibly bring in has been spent.”
After a year in New Canaan, Louise and Max were convinced they had done well to move there, if only because of the supply of interesting company. The Perkinses continued to see the Colums as much as they did anyone. One night that year Molly came over with the first four pages of a book she was writing on the principles of literary criticism. Called Wide Eyes and Wings, it reflected her belief, Max told Scott Fitzgerald, “that criticism should be emotional and that literature should not be measured by fixed intellectual standards.” Max added: “I admired her mind already, but I was astonished: there were surely four fresh ideas set forth and with absolute clarity—And I’ve so often argued (like so many others) that woman was incapable of grasping abstractions—But I’d gladly turn feminist with my multitude of girls.” Those opening pages caused Perkins to offer to publish the work.
Max still remained closest to his earliest friend, Van Wyck Brooks. In early 1926 the strength of their bond came under pressure when Brooks stumbled into a pit of depression. He had gone deep into his writing of a life of Emerson and got stuck. Only his intimate friends knew that it was not the Emerson book but his last work of literary criticism, the celebrated Pilgrimage of Henry James, that had driven him to melancholia. John Hall Wheelock said, “Van Wyck was disturbed by the numerous unpardonable things he had written about James, when he knew the man could not defend himself.” Later Brooks himself explained:I was consumed by ... a feeling that my work had all gone wrong and that I was mistaken in all I had said or thought.... I was pursued especially with nightmares in which Henry James turned great luminous menacing eyes upon me. I was half aware, in connection with him, of the division within myself, and with all the bad conscience of a criminal I felt I had viewed him with something of Plato’s “hard little eye of detraction.” In short, in this middle of my life, I was thoroughly bedevilled. ... I could no longer sleep. I scarcely sat down for a year, I lived in a Plutonian psychical twilight.... All my affections and interests fell into abeyance.
Perkins took a long walk with Van Wyck every Sunday, sometimes in the rain and fog. It was a joyless ordeal for Max as Brooks’s depression turned grayer. He believed the cure for Van Wyck was to get him to finish his book on Emerson, but Brooks declared it an irremediable failure. Max read what had been committed to paper and suggested a whole new scheme to give it the structure it lacked, but Van Wyck refused to accept it. Instead, he insisted he must find some new work to do—a part-time job that would leave him time to write. Perkins believed that kind of arrangement would “suck a man under” and said, “What a shame at your age, with a foundation of reputation well laid. Set down the names of ten lesser American writers as titles for articles and I’ll sell them at five hundred apiece, and the result will be a book that will outsell any you’ve done.” Van Wyck said he could not write at command. Max thought he should learn.
The two men got no further. Max continued to walk in circles every Sunday with Van Wyck, who sank deeper into his crise à quarante ans and shrank from most human relations. “My world,” Brooks later confessed, became that “of a house wi
th the shades drawn and a man sitting within, a man who could not hear the knock when life drove up to the door with her merry summons.”
Soon it became apparent to Perkins that something more than Henry James’s countenance was haunting Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks’s condition was complicated by guilt feelings involving Molly Colum. Only the innermost circle in New Canaan knew the story, which Max disclosed to Elizabeth Lemmon. Van Wyck, he wrote, was “shy and sensitive, and he always made friends with women. His wife, Eleanor, a fine, strong, honest woman, was not intellectually congenial. Molly Colum was. They were together a great deal.” John Hall Wheelock later added to these observations: “The Brookses were a highly conventional and respectable couple, though Van Wyck had been highly sexed in college ... and Molly was a most daring woman.”
When Molly Colum first noticed Brooks’s depression, she set out to rescue him: She tried to lure him into a love affair—“for his own good.” Wheelock said: “She wanted to have an affair in the European style. She thought she could tear him away from the conflict between his respectable duty to family and his responsibility as an artist. ‘He’s got so much talent, but it’s all being lost because of his dutiful attitude,’ Molly once shouted. ‘He has everything but the courage to be a real man. He has to go crazy to free himself.’ ”
Max believed Brooks was “utterly incapable of any actual disloyalty and so was Molly.” Brooks’s medical records indicate that physically the extent of his affair with Molly Colum was merely one erotic kiss. “But he did say things about Eleanor which he later felt were disloyal, and it seemed to him that he had done something unforgivable,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “Then he told Eleanor about it. She is what Louise calls possessive and she was jealous anyway of Molly’s mental superiority. Whatever she did or said intensified Van Wyck’s sense of guilt which sunk so deep in him as to become an obsession. It is this which seems to be at the bottom of his troubles now.” The result was what Brooks, thinking of Rimbaud, called “a season in hell.”
Brooks stopped seeing Perkins, and his depression intensified into a kind of insanity. It was somewhat mystifying to Max, but he followed Brooks’s condition as closely as he could. In the late twenties, John Hall Wheelock, the only person Brooks was willing to meet, reported to Max that Brooks had become “frightfully ill,” far beyond the professional insecurity that had throttled him years earlier. Brooks’s mother told Perkins that her son spent his days pacing back and forth mumbling, “I shall never see Max again.” After months in which they had disappeared from each other’s lives, Perkins received a note from Eleanor asking him to take a walk with Brooks again, as he used to. Max was glad to do it, afraid only “that something will be said that will make trouble.”
There was another, unspoken problem. It was the case with Max, as it was and is for so many editors, that writers became friends and friends sometimes became writers—an incestuous jumble that sometimes produced fine books and sometimes horrendous complications. Max’s friendship with Brooks was now jeopardizing certain business dealings with Molly Colum. Max divulged all to Elizabeth Lemmon:Years ago Molly offered me, as publisher, a book of criticism she was doing. We never gave her a contract. The matter was so personal a legal document seemed to me inappropriate. Jonathan Cape, an English publisher, gets an American partner and starts an American house—and the very first move they make is to get Molly under contract for this book. Before signing, she said she must speak to me. We had a funny time. It was like a melodrama burlesque on business. They actually tried to make her break a lunch engagement with me, and they delivered a cheque to her by messenger while I was with her. I argued that we could offer every advantage over them and she granted this. But there was some impediment. I could not imagine what. Finally she told me in tears. She had somehow heard that I was to go to the Brookses. If I was to be a friend of the Brookses how could I be her publisher!
“Now how can a man ever hope to understand women?” Max asked Elizabeth. “Or a woman either. Can you follow that reasoning? She did sign for us in the end; and now I’m pledged to make her write the book. Truth enough ... in fact life grows more incomprehensible every day to me. I hope it does not to you.”
It was usually in the summers, when his family was away and he was alone, that Max’s world-weariness afflicted him most. But his emotions were on another cycle too. Over the years he had observed that his spirits were frailest during the first and last quarters of the moon. In 1926, knowing that Elizabeth Lemmon believed deeply in astrology, he mentioned to her that his saturnine moods seemed to recur at regular intervals, regardless of other facts, and that these intervals followed the moon.
To satisfy her own curiosity, Elizabeth drew Max’s astrological chart, the accuracy of which made believers of several skeptics who knew Perkins. It showed a close conjunction of planets that signified “genius” and as many as four planets in the house of Secrecy. Saturn in the Ninth House kept him from traveling. Elizabeth had once asked Evangeline Adams, the best-known astrologer of the day, what the strongest signs for a book editor would be. She said Virgo, the sign of the critic, and Libra, the lover of beauty. Born September 20, 1884, at 7 A.M., Max was a Virgo with Libra rising.
In early July, 1926, the stars apparently fell into joyful alignment, for when Max went to Windsor he learned from Louise that Elizabeth was coming to visit in two weeks. “I don’t really believe it,” he wrote Elizabeth, “but I like to pretend it’s true.” Elizabeth was not one to leave her part of the country any more than Max was his, but she traveled by train to Vermont and had a wonderful few days with the Perkinses. She especially enjoyed the quiet times with Max, traipsing through the piney dells of Paradise. “Pasture Hill and Mount Max have a different quality now that you have been here,” he wrote to her afterward. “But that is counteracted by the many other places that I see with rage that I did not somehow compel you to see, at whatever cost to my own reputation for maturity.”
Later in the summer Molly Colum visited Windsor and was impressed by its abundance of colorful Yankees. “As a critic,” she told Max, “I can’t get over all this superb literary material going to waste.” “I have always felt that way myself,” Max wrote Elizabeth, “—which I know is a disgusting way for a man to view his own people and place.”
At the end of the season Louise produced another of her plays in a clearing, hidden away in Paradise. It was just for the family—a crowd in itself. Max wrote Elizabeth that the performance was “incredibly beautiful—a most excellent feat of production in acting, scene, and costume; and wholly Louise’s work. At the end, when the audience cried ‘Author! Author!’ the children were all cast down. They thought the cry was ‘Awful! Awful!’ ”
Max applauded all his wife’s artistic ventures, but during periods when she was not writing, he made it clear that he felt she was wasting her talents. As with his authors, Perkins never made demands on Louise: He simply expected her to fulfill herself. By never questioning Max’s standards, by which writers rated higher than actors, Louise became trapped in a lifelong dilemma. She could either attempt an acting career and disobey her husband or she could disappoint herself by turning her back on her greater talent. She chose the latter, and in so doing lost some of his respect as well as her own self-respect. By never challenging her husband’s position on that matter, she failed to show the strength he admired most in her. Each resented the other and this resentment remained throughout their marriage.
Max did not write to Louise as often as before when they were apart; when he did he still addressed her as “My own darling,” repeatedly proclaimed, “I do love you so,” and signed himself, “Your own Max.” When they were together it was difficult just to maintain harmony. Their daughter Zippy once dramatized the kind of marriage it was by ramming her two fists together.
Max Perkins spent most of his life providing others, except for Louise, a warm shoulder and a sympathetic ear. “The most important obligation of friendship,” he explained to Zippy, “is to listen.�
� He confessed his own periodic melancholy only to Elizabeth Lemmon. Max would write her by hand, usually from one of his clubs in New York, trying to make every letter to her perfect and charming. While his letters to Louise were self-assured and hortatory, those to Elizabeth were eager to entertain—he told her of the female art director at Scribners who said to him: “It would do you good to get drunk”—and showed vulnerability. Max would apologize for the slightest discoloration in his stationery, then proceed to write a letter that was sparkling and epigrammatic or simple and sad. He opened himself to her—as much as he dared.
There’s a half long letter to you in New Canaan. I read it to the point at which it stands and found it too much an exposure of ego even for a letter, in which more egoism is admissable than in any other form of writing; and it’s curious and creditable to mankind that in view of this fact, letter writing is so generally unpopular.
Elizabeth delighted in every one of his letters, was always understanding, and asked no questions. “Don’t be curious,” he once wrote her. “But you are not.”
“That wasn’t true at all,” Miss Lemmon said years later. “I was as curious as anybody. I was dying to know more about him. But I never asked. I knew that if I did it would be the last I’d hear from him.”
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