And so Max remained convinced that Elizabeth Lemmon was the one person to whom he could reveal his insecurities. “Would you be willing to send me a line to say if things are going well or ill with you?” he wrote her in October, 1926. “I had prepared myself to lose all my friends about this time; to have every man’s hand against me. But the wind has now shifted a bit and favorably, which emboldens me to make this enquiry of you.” All he ever really wanted to know from her was that his goddess was in her heaven.
Quietly suffering the kinds of loneliness that his authors so often felt, Max Perkins downed heavy doses of the remedy his Yankee forefathers would have prescribed—work. The results greatly benefited Scribners. Indeed, the list of writers Max had acquired for his company by 1926 was remarkable. They all looked upon Perkins as Fitzgerald had recently described him to the novelist Thomas Boyd, as “a wonder—the brains of Scribners since the old man has moved into another generation.”
In the last several years, old CS had come to respect Perkins’s judgment very much, but he did not always accept it. In 1925 Max read the manuscript of Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows, a Madison Avenue interpretation of the New Testament. Roger Burlingame recalled that Perkins recognized its sales potential and took it up with Charles Scribner. “It treats Christ as a supersalesman,” Max said, “a go-getter, a man with a talent for business. Of course it might sell.” Scribner, with his long background of serious religious publishing, was properly shocked and insisted that it should be declined. Bobbs-Merrill accepted it, and at the start of the second book season of 1926 it was a runaway success. After seeing The Man Nobody Knows leading the best-seller lists month after month, the company patriarch sent for Perkins. “How about this book?” he asked. “Why haven’t we got it?”
“Why, we discussed that, Mr. Scribner,” Perkins replied. “I talked it all over with you a year ago, and we decided to decline it.”
“You discussed it with me? You mean the manuscript came to us?”
Perkins was startled by this example of Charles Scribner’s failing memory. “Why certainly, Mr. Scribner. Don’t you remember that I told you it portrayed Christ as a salesman? And I added that it might sell.”
The head of the company looked at Max a long time without a change of expression. With a faint twinkle in his eye, Scribner leaned forward, wagged his finger and said, “But you didn’t tell me, Mr. Perkins, that it would sell four hundred thousand copies.”
VII
A Man of Character
For months after the successful publication of The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway was distracted from his writing. Wary of rushing from one marriage directly into another, he absented himself from both the women in his life—his wife, Hadley, and Pauline Pfeiffer—and went skiing in Austria. The emotional tempest left him spent.
In February, 1927, Perkins wrote to him in Gstaad, in an attempt to start him working again. Max wanted Hemingway to put together a collection of his short stories and told him, “Your book will be among those most prominently presented by us.”
The assignment took Hemingway’s mind away from his problems. Days later he reported to Max that his head was “going well again.” He was writing some “pretty good” stories and he was choosing the pieces he wanted in the collection, which he thought of calling Men Without Women. Perkins soon found fourteen stories before him to arrange, a process of bookmaking he took more seriously than did any of his authors. His general procedure was to space the strongest pieces at the beginning, middle, and end, varying the rest of the contents by alternating stories of different qualities back to back. He decided to open Men Without Women with Ernest’s long story “The Undefeated,” and to conclude with one of the shorter ones, “Now I Lay Me.”
Despite the auspicious start, during most of 1927 Hemingway’s mind was not on his work. He traveled for several months before and after his April marriage to Pauline. In September he told Perkins that he had started his next novel, but he did not say much more about it than that, because, he said, it seemed to him that the more books were talked about the slower they progressed.
Once back in Paris, Hemingway went on a daily six-hour writing regimen. Within a month he wrote 30,000 words. He then announced that, after four years abroad, he was moving back to the United States. He realized how badly he had “busted up” his life in recent years and was grateful to Perkins for at least keeping his professional life on an even keel. His “whole life and head and everything had a hell of a time for a while,” he said, but he was slowly coming back. He intimated to Perkins how much he yearned to write a single, good novel, however long it took, just for the two of them. He was already thinking of settling in Key West, Florida, where he would make an important decision in that regard. If he could not continue with the novel he had been writing for some time-twenty-two chapters of a “modern Tom Jones” were completed—he would put it aside for another manuscript he had been working on for the last two weeks. The genesis of this second novel could be traced to two of Hemingway’s other works: “A Very Short Story,” which hinted at the love Ernest felt for a nurse in Milan during the war, and “In Another Country,” which told of a major whose wife had just died of pneumonia in that same hospital. Borrowing the most dramatic elements from each, Hemingway had now started to tell that tale of “love and war and the old lucha por la vida” that he had mentioned to Perkins after the publication of The Sun Also Rises. And when he reached Florida he decided to continue with it.
In his eagerness to see Ernest’s novel completed, Max investigated the possibilities of serializing it in the company magazine. He figured the money it could offer would give Hemingway an incentive to get the novel finished. He also had an ulterior motive. “Some of the younger, restive folk in the house,” Roger Burlingame remembered, “seemed to feel that Scribner’s Magazine was ‘in a rut.’ ” Perkins was one of them, and he wanted to improve its literary quality. Hemingway could get much more money from any of the more commercial magazines, but Max said Scribner’s longed to carry a major work by him and would pay the $10,000 that John Galsworthy and Edith Wharton received for such serializations. Hemingway replied that the substantial sum of money was just what he wanted, but that he was afraid that the magazine had not changed enough in the last two years to take a chance on this novel. He explained to Max the fate of his writing, which was to be turned down as “too something or other,” and then after publication to be praised by everyone else, who would insist that they could have printed it. But he agreed to let Scribner’s have first crack at the book.
In the middle of the summer of 1928, Pauline gave birth to their first child, a son named Patrick. Ernest was happy to have a second son but told Max he had hoped for a girl, so that he, like his editor, could be a father to a daughter. As soon as mother and child were strong enough to travel they went to Pauline’s family in Piggott, Arkansas. Ernest went to Wyoming to fish for trout and write the ending of his novel. After reading the finished manuscript he celebrated with a gallon of wine, which halted progress for the next two days. When his hangover had passed, he reported that he never felt stronger in body or mind.
While out west, Hemingway learned from another Scribners editor that his long hours were running Perkins down. Ernest knew he contributed to his editor’s work load as much as anyone and wanted to make things easier. Max represented Scribners to him, and his entire publishing future, so he wrote to urge his editor to take care of himself “for Gods sake, if for no other reason.” Hemingway planned to be back in Key West that fall, and he asked Max to join a crew of fishing companions he was assembling that included John Dos Passos, a painter named Henry Strater, and another artist, Waldo Peirce, who had been a Harvard classmate of Max’s. “I would give anything to do that kind of thing,” Perkins replied, “but I never have done it, and I suppose I never shall now, with five children, etc. I have a vision of taking to the road at the age of sixty. The odds are about a thousand to one against it.”
As Hemingway’s
novel neared completion, Perkins perceived an almost invisible stimulus which had crept into Ernest’s work habits. The same cockiness appeared whenever his writing was going especially well. Scott Fitzgerald had become a rival whom Hemingway would thereafter pit himself against. At first he had admired Fitzgerald’s talents and enjoyed his company; then he saw Scott’s crippling financial troubles and how he was hobbling on with a book that he had talked about too long. There was something in Hemingway that preyed on the weaknesses of others, and for the rest of his career his letters to Max revealed a growing competition with Fitzgerald. Invariably he contrasted his own assiduousness and frugality with Fitzgerald’s profligacy.
It was not only Scott’s need for money that disturbed Hemingway but also the compromises he made in his writing. Hemingway was thinking of Fitzgerald’s stories for the Saturday Evening Post, in particular, which he wrote in a most unorthodox fashion. Scott once told Ernest at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris how he wrote what he thought were good stories and then changed them for submission, knowing exactly how he must make the twists that rendered them salable to the magazines. This kind of trickery shocked Ernest, who declared he thought it was whoring. Scott agreed but explained that he “had to do it as he made his money from the magazines to have money ahead to write decent books.” Hemingway said he did not believe anyone could write any way “except the very best he could write without destroying his talent.” And that was not all; Fitzgerald’s hijinks had also ceased to amuse him. After Hemingway had left Scott behind in Paris, his initial worry over Scott’s wasted talents began to sour into impatience. He never failed to admit that he had had no more loyal friend in those days than Scott when he was sober, but he said he was afraid some of Scott’s ideas about writing might rub off and sully his own pristine ideals.
Early in 1928 Ernest told Max how sorry he felt about Fitzgerald. For his own good, he said, Scott should have had his novel out at least one, preferably two years earlier. He now should just complete the work or throw it away and start a new one. He figured that Fitzgerald had fooled with it so long that he did not believe in it anymore, but dreaded giving it up. So Fitzgerald was writing stories—“slop,” Hemingway called it—and using any excuses to keep from having to “bite on the nail and finish it.” Hemingway said every writer had to give up on some novels to start others, even if it meant not always living up to the demands of the bamboozling critics, who, he said, had ruined every writer that read them.
Perkins held to an aspect of the same theory but viewed Fitzgerald’s situation with more compassion. He believed Scott was mortgaging all his professional resources just to complete this one novel and to maintain his and Zelda’s standards of luxury. Earlier that year Max had confided in a letter to Ernest, “It is true that Zelda, while very good for him, in some ways, is incredibly extravagant.” Now he noted, “Zelda is so able and intelligent and isn’t she also quite a strong person? that I’m surprised she doesn’t face the situation better and show some sense about spending money. Most of their trouble, which may kill Scott in the end, comes from extravagance. All of his friends would have been busted long ago if they’d spent money like Scott and Zelda.”
Hemingway had disliked Zelda since their first meeting in Paris, when he gazed into her “hawk’s eyes” and saw a rapacious spirit. He estimated that 90 percent of Scott’s problems were her fault, and said that almost every “bloody fool thing” his friend had done had been “directly or indirectly Zelda-inspired.” Ernest often wondered if Scott would have been the best writer America ever had or was likely to have if he had not been married to someone who made him “waste” everything.
Perkins, on his part, saw other obstacles in Scott’s career. For one, he guessed, Fitzgerald was attempting the impossible in this novel—in trying to blend the seriousness inherent in a story of matricide with the gloss of his tales of the haut monde—and might have come to feel that impossibility but been unwilling to acknowledge it. “If I could have got any response implying that this was right,” Max wrote Ernest, “I would have advised him to let it go and begin another.” But Scott slogged on. His earliest attempt at the novel had been in the third person. Now he tried the first. Unlike Nick Carraway of The Great Gatsby, the narrator of The Melarkey Case, as the book had come to be called, remained unidentified. The use of first person did not seem to help, and Scott soon gave it up entirely.
There was another problem Scott had been trying to hide behind his generally cheerful facade—his dread of aging. In her memoirs, written almost four decades later, Alice B. Toklas remembered Scott’s saying to her companion Gertrude Stein during a visit in September, 1926: “You know I am thirty years old today and it is tragic. What is to become of me, what am I to do?”
A change of scenery seemed to be a good temporary solution. Weeks later Zelda wrote Max, “We are crazy to get back and longing to seem very changed after our 3 yrs. in centers of culture—though we have intermittently festerred with indignation and been prostrate with the beauty and ease of the Riviera. I think living here has been good for us in some obscure way I can’t define. Anyway, its helped our manners and now we want to get back with French names on all our medicine bottles.”
Home from Europe for the winter holidays, Fitzgerald met with Max and then left for three weeks of work at First National Pictures in Hollywood. It was the first of several trips Fitzgerald would make to California. For Scott, the motion-picture business was a glamorous world at the end of a rainbow, where he always went looking for a pot of gold. “I hope it will be for only three weeks,” Max wrote Scott. “The trouble is that you will be so valuable to the picture people that I am afraid they will offer you almost irresistible bribes. But I have known you to resist a good deal. You always seem to know what you’re about.”
Perkins wanted to believe as much. Partly to distract Scott’s attention from the dazzling salaries flashing before him, he wrote, “I am under great pressure to tell people two things about you:—where you are, and what is to be the name of your novel.” For the past several months Perkins had been considering The World’s Fair; from what Scott told him of the book, he saw how fitting a title it was. Max said he wanted to announce it, thereby establishing “a sort of proprietorship. And I think it would help to arouse curiosity and interest in the novel too.”
What Perkins wanted most for Fitzgerald was for him to return to America for good. Max thought Delaware, with the Du Ponts’ feudalistic control of the area, would fascinate Fitzgerald, and so he house-hunted for him. Early in April, 1927, the Fitzgeralds moved into Ellerslie, a Greek Revival mansion outside Wilmington, which Perkins recommended. The modest rent was welcome, and the grandiose style appealed to them—too much, perhaps. Edmund Wilson, for one, believed it abetted Scott’s lust for showy living. In an essay published years later in The Shores of Light, Wilson suggested that it was Scott’s “invincible compulsion to live like a millionaire” as well as a “psychological ‘block’ ” on the novel that “led him even more than usual to interrupt his serious work and turn out stories for the commercial magazines.” Whatever the causes, Fitzgerald all but abandoned the book. At parties with the Delaware polo set or alone at Ellerslie, he caroused, several times landing in jail for disturbing the peace.
Max was ambivalent about Scott’s taste for life’s luxuries—his travels, his beautiful homes, his elegant clothes, and the wild life among the decadent rich in Europe and America. One part of Max—the Evarts part —could not respond, while the other—the Perkins side—participated in these sensual expressions with an intense vicariousness. Yankee Max would not allow himself the descent into voluptuousness that Scott enjoyed, but his fondness for Fitzgerald suggests that far from disapproving, he relished the free life from his vantage point of the interested, but still innocent, bystander. It was the relationship of a rather stiff but indulgent uncle—Max liked to surprise Scott with small gifts, replacing a favorite walking cane that Scott had lost or having a special leather-bound edition of Gatsb
y made up for him—to a spoiled, dashing, irresistible nephew.
For Fitzgerald, Perkins filled another role. Early in his childhood Scott had lost respect for his parents for not making more of their lives or the dwindling fortune they inherited. In a later autobiographical sketch called “Author’s House,” Fitzgerald recalled his first childish love of himself—“ my belief that I would never die like other people, and that I wasn’t the son of my parents but a son of a king, a king who ruled the whole world.” He had recently written Max, “My father is a moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Between them they haven’t and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge.” Perkins was prepared to act in loco parentis, and he kept sending Fitzgerald back to his novel, whose plot was becoming overworked. In June, 1927, Scott came up with a stark title distinctly different from his others—The Boy Who Killed His Mother—then spent months in silence and isolation trying to untangle the roots of the novel.
In the spring of 1927, Louise Perkins’s seventy-one-year-old father, who had retired to a life of travel and ornithological pursuits, fell ill in London. Fearing the worst, Max and Louise sailed on the S.S. Olympic for England in June. She was going to look after her father, while Max would tend to business at Scribners’ London office. It was the first time he had left American soil. He found the ship a deluxe prison. The meals were interminable and there was nothing to do between them. “The ocean doesn’t even give a sense of immensity,” he wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “because you can clearly see the edge, equally distant in every direction. The ocean is a disc.” A few days out, the ship started to roll, and Max realized for the first time the majesty of the ocean. Listening to the splash of waves outside his open porthole, he wrote his daughter Zippy, “The next time I live, I think I’ll run away to sea.”
Perkins had always imagined London to be a “drab, monotonous place, full of stiff, cold people,” and found to his surprise that he was wrong. (“See what books have done for me!” he wrote Elizabeth.)
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