When Max was not doing business, he and Louise spent most of their time with her recuperating father. The Perkinses saw no more of Europe than London, except for a night and day in Sussex with John Galsworthy, after visiting his town house, where Max and Galsworthy talked books most of the time. Perkins wanted to enlist his support in widening Scott Fitzgerald’s audience in England, but the cause hardly stirred Galsworthy. In fact, Max found him not at all in sympathy with contemporary literature. He spoke of The Great Gatsby as “a great advance,” but the only books he truly seemed to admire, Max later wrote Fitzgerald, were those “laid out on the old lines ... and not expressive of present thought or feeling.” Galsworthy told Perkins: “These writers who become writers at the start are invariably disappointments. It is much better for a man to have been something else than a writer so that he has viewed the world from a fixed position.”
Mrs. Galsworthy could scarcely have been more rude. While pouring Louise’s tea from the pot she had brewed, Mrs. Galsworthy said, “Of course, I know you’d prefer a teabag.” When lighting the wood in the fireplace, she peered down her nose and remarked, “You are used to gas logs, of course.” Louise ignored the insults, for she was much more upset by Max’s behavior. At one point in the afternoon, Mrs. Galsworthy, admiring his refined manner, sputtered, “Mr. Perkins, you might be English.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said tersely with a stone face, bringing the conversation to dead silence.
“There we were,” Louise told Max’s nephew Ned Thomas years later, “Max and his damn stubborn Evarts contrariness. He ruined the whole luncheon.” Later Galsworthy told a friend that Perkins was the most interesting American he had ever known.
One afternoon Max and Louise toured the House of Commons, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, happened to be on the floor. The Members of Parliament were droning about finance, but Max found Churchill “brilliant with life.” He wrote home to his daughters: “Winston Churchill, whom I someday hope to persuade to write a history of the British Empire, made a speech, and whenever he said anything the members of either party liked, they would say, ‘Hear! Hear!’ ”
Max sent a long, detailed account of his trip to Elizabeth Lemmon. He interrupted his description of the sights for one exceptionally tender remark: “Quite often in London you see girls that are like you, more than any you ever find here. They have hair that, anyhow, reminds one of yours, though I never saw any as lovely.”
Impressed as he was with his week and a half in London—“I never felt so much at home in a city in my life,” he wrote Elizabeth—Max did not quite give in to enjoying himself. Louise could have happily remained all summer, but soon, leaving Mr. Saunders in good health, they headed for Southampton and sailed home.
Once the Perkinses were resettled in America, Louise and the children went to Windsor. Except for occasional visits there, Max spent the summer in his father-in-law’s town house on East Forty-ninth Street where he looked after Mr. Saunders’s pet parrot and monkey. It was an easy walk to Scribners.
Max wrote to Elizabeth several times that year and often sent her books. Elizabeth’s study of astrology had recently got him into trouble at home, he told her, because Louise had consulted an astrologer she had recommended, who had done a chart of Max and observed that he was in a “desperate situation apparently from love.”
“Oh, I know he can’t be, for I see him every night,” Louise said.
“But,” the astrologer had persisted, “you don’t know what he does in the afternoons.” The fortune teller had insisted that Max was undergoing intense “anguish” and that Louise knew nothing about her husband at all.
“How do you account for all that?” Max asked Elizabeth. She flippantly replied that Max had obviously been involved in a love affair that spring. “You must know—though I know you don’t rate me high—” Max wrote her back, “that I am at least incapable of that. There was simply no truth in what that lady said.” The stars notwithstanding, Elizabeth said, she believed him.
The following winter Max wrote three long letters to her, which he crumpled up and never mailed. “I don’t know exactly why,” he tried to explain. “I felt you had transferred your interests to other planets.” Indeed, whenever Elizabeth did write to him, he would stare in disbelief at her letter among his business mail. “I pushed all the others aside and read it,” he told her after one note that September, though “I thought that long ago you’d forgotten us in riotous living, or even in peaceful country life.”
Perkins’s most frequent correspondent that year was his former English professor, Charles T. Copeland. Since 1920, Max and several other publishers had been after Copeland to write a book of reminiscences, but sloth as much as pride had kept him from “memoirizing.” He thought that rendering an account of one’s life was an admission that he’d been sent to pasture. Copey had years of teaching left in him and he was not prepared to relive his past now. He did, however, assemble what he called “a living book.” It was a 1,700-page anthology of his favorite selections, works that he had read to his students during twenty years of teaching, called The Copeland Reader.
“Thus began what became one of the most extraordinary relationships between author and publisher in the history of the trade,” wrote J. Donald Adams, editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of Copey of Harvard. “Perkins in his eagerness to publish the work of a man he so highly regarded, was ready to meet any reasonable demands”; but he did not realize at the outset that in matters of editorial cooperation, Copeland would exact the last pound of flesh. The files on The Copeland Reader (and a companion volume of Copey’s favorite foreign selections called Copeland’s Translations) take up more space in Scribners’ cabinets than those concerning any other two books. As Adams explained,His letters dealing with textual matters, with the choice of selections, with advertising and other promotion, were incessant; his inquiries as to when there would be another printing, and of what size, were repeated and insistent.... No matter how querulous the communications, so often requesting a reply “by return of post,” they were always answered with consideration and dispatch.
One postcard reminded Perkins that the Table of Contents “must be liberally spaced.” Perkins’s compliance with almost every one of Copeland’s wishes went beyond blind obedience; he coddled Copey as he did no other author—certainly no anthologist. At Perkins’s direction, Scribners gathered for him all the texts he needed to make up his book. Contrary to standard procedure, they also assumed the costs of all copyright permissions and undertook all correspondence and negotiations necessary in obtaining the permissions.
“But nothing was more singular in their business relations than Copeland’s attitude in the matter of advances on royalties,” Adams noted. Copey insisted on regarding them as loans, which, strictly speaking, they were. As a result, his biographer noted, “Copeland is probably the only author in publishing history who would accept an advance only with the stipulation that he be charged interest for this accommodation.”
In another respect Copey was like every other author on Perkins’s list. Over the years The Copeland Reader would sell tens of thousands of copies, but when it was introduced to the public, Copey complained that his book was not sufficiently advertised. He rode Max even harder after the editor agreed with him. To the end Max believed advertising was like a man pushing a stationary automobile: “If he can get it to move, the more he pushes the faster it will move and the more easily. But if he cannot get it to move, he can push till he drops dead and it will stand still.”
Although he was busier than ever, Max knew that he and Louise would not be able to refuse forever the Fitzgeralds’ persistent invitations to join them for a weekend at their mansion in Delaware. He told Elizabeth he was dreading it “on account of advertising, cocktails, made-up girls, cigarette smoke, and talk”—all the things he hated and was told a sophisticated New York editor ought to appreciate. But the Perkinses paid Scott and Zelda a visit in October, 19
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Ellerslie Mansion, Max wrote Hemingway, “which is solid and high and yellow, has more quality of its own than almost any house I was ever in.” It was very old (for America) and the trees around it sprawled. It had columns at the front and back, second-story verandahs, and a lawn that rolled right down to the Delaware River. On Sunday, Max rose earlier than the rest and took breakfast alone. An autumn breeze was playing at the curtains, and the sun was coming in. “It was like remembering something pleasant of a long time ago,” he told Eilizabeth Lemmon. “It all belongs to the quiet past and made me feel quiet and happy.”
But the master of the house was not at peace amid all that serenity and tradition. Fitzgerald was in a state of frazzled nerves. He was drinking heavily and talking nervously; his hands trembled. Max feared Scott might have a breakdown at any minute and prescribed clean living—less alcohol, a month of hard exercise, and denicotinized cigarettes called Sanos. Zelda, he was happy to see, was in good health and high spirits. “She’s a girl of character,” Max wrote Elizabeth, “meant for a far better life than she has led.”
Later in the month, Fitzgerald came to New York to see Max. He said his novel was only 5,000 words from completion, but to Max he seemed too high-strung to get them down on paper. Scott worked for an hour in the book-lined sitting room on Scribners’ fifth floor, then was seized by one of his nervous fits. He had to go out for a walk, and he insisted that Perkins join him for a drink. Unsure of the effect it would have on Scott’s condition, Max warily agreed, saying, “Well, I’ll go if it’s just one drink.” Fitzgerald snapped, “You talk to me as if I were Ring Lardner.” In a moment Max was walking with him out of the building and Fitzgerald already seemed calmer. “We had a great talk over the drink,” Max wrote Lardner the next day. “I am sure anyhow, that if he will finish up his novel ... and will then take a real rest and regular exercise, he will be in good shape again.”
For a year or two Fitzgerald’s income had been sweetened by sales of subsidiary rights—a play of The Great Gatsby had a good run in New York and the book was sold to Hollywood. Then he went back to the Saturday Evening Post for their fat checks of $3,500 per story. Most of each month for the rest of the year, he neglected his novel, against which Perkins still sent advances, to write Post stories. On the first day of 1928 Fitzgerald took account of his situation and wrote Perkins: “Patience yet a little while, I beseech thee and thanks eternally for the deposits.” He felt bad about owing so much money but assured Max that it could be written off as a “safe investment and not as a risk” because he had been on the wagon since the middle of October and was still smoking only Sanos.
“I think we ought all to be proud of the way you climbed on the water wagon,” Max wrote back. “It is enormously harder for a man who has no office hours and has control of his own time,—and it is hard enough for anybody.” Max’s real worry about Fitzgerald’s career was the three years that had elapsed since Gatsby failed commercially, leaving few readers who remembered its quality and fewer who were looking forward to his next book. Then Perkins talked to another of his writers, poet and novelist Conrad Aiken, and was considerably heartened. Aiken’s estimation of Gatsby was still as high as the day it was published. Furthermore, Aiken said, the book had grown in critical stature, for “now everybody knows anyhow what it was, and what ‘Gatsby’ means.”
Another event that cheered Max was his publishing a promising new writer named Morley Callaghan, a Canadian. Callaghan had met Hemingway when their careers at the Toronto Star overlapped; then he went to Paris, where he hobnobbed with many other American expatriates, Fitzgerald among them. Max read several of Callaghan’s pieces in the little European reviews and, at first, found him no more than a “hard-boiled,” realistic writer. Later, after they met, Max considered him “highly intelligent and responsive.” Callaghan came to New York to write a novel called Strange Fugitive, the story of a lumberyard foreman who tired of his married life and got drawn into bootlegging. Perkins saw the unfinished manuscript and believed it would turn out well. It was completed within months and Scribners published it that year. Yet Fitzgerald’s book poked along.
In February Scott wired from Delaware: NOVEL NOT FINISHED CHRIST I WISH IT WERE.
Even in spacious Ellerslie, the Fitzgeralds now felt boxed in. In fact, Scott recognized that all the trappings of manor life he had tried to acquire were but “attempts to make up from without for being undernourished now from within. Anything to be liked, to be reassured not that I was a man of little genius, but that I was a great man of the world. At the same time I knew it was nonsense.” And so it was off to Europe again. Through the spring Scott sent Perkins only requests for money. Then he wrote in June that he and his family were settled in Paris on the Rue de Vaugirard, across from the Luxembourg Gardens. He was on the “absolute wagon and working on the novel, the whole novel, and nothing but the novel,” he said. “I’m coming back in August with it or on it.”
Into the fourth July since The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was encouraged when James Joyce came to dinner at his home in Paris. Scott inquired if his next work—Finnegans Wake, already some six years in progress—was coming along. “Yes,” affirmed Joyce, “I expect to finish my novel in three or four years more at the latest.” And, Fitzgerald noted to Perkins, “he works eleven hours a day to my intermittent eight.”
Fitzgerald did not arrive home until October. Max met him at the gangplank and found the author still tipsy from over $200 worth of wine that he had ordered during the crossing. But Scott held on tightly to his briefcase which held the “complete ... but not the finished” manuscript of the novel. He said it was all down on paper, only parts of it had to be worked over.
Fitzgerald went back to Ellerslie, and the following month was ready to submit material. The book was not yet finished, but, Scott wrote to his editor, “I’ve been alone with it too long.” He had a plan for passing it on in relays, by which Max would read two chapters of this final version every month as he finished with them. “It seems fine to be sending you something again,” Scott wrote, mailing Max the first package that November. It was only the first quarter of the book—18,000 words—but it had been three years since Fitzgerald had last sent him manuscript. Now Fitzgerald had to mint another short story, so he could afford to patch up Chapters Three and Four, which he hoped to send at the beginning of December. He asked Perkins to hold onto any criticisms until he had received the entire book “because I want to feel that each part is finished and not worry about it any longer, even though I may change it enormously at the very last minute. All I want to know is if, in general, you like it ... My God its good to see those chapters lying in an envelope!”
“I am mighty glad you have decided on this course,” Perkins wrote Scott. “Now don’t change your mind on this.” One week later Max commented on the newly received material: “I have just finished the two chapters. About the first we fully agree. It is excellent. The second I think contains some of the best writing you have ever done—some lovely scenes and impressions briefly and beautifully conveyed.... I wish it might be possible to get this book out this spring, if only because it promises so much that it makes me impatient to see it completed.”
While Perkins waited for the next installment of Fitzgerald’s novel, he received the next mystery from one of his best-selling authors, Willard Huntington Wright, better known to hundreds of thousands of readers as S. S. Van Dine. Once a struggling art critic and magazine and newspaper editor, Wright transferred his own elegance of manner and cultivated sensibilities to his creation, a detective named Philo Vance. For months Wright had had trouble finding a publisher for his mysteries; then Perkins read several of his plot synopses, admired their intricacy, and signed him. First Max published The Benison Murder Case, then, The “Canary” Murder Case. Now, over the New Year’s holiday of 1928, he stayed up till 3:30 A.M. reading The Greene Murder Case and thought it was magnificent. In a very few years S. S. Van Dine had become the best-known American mystery w
riter since Poe, and much of his success was as a result of Perkins’s meticulous aid in the characterization of Philo Vance. Perkins brought to bear on his mystery writer the same keen intelligence and uncompromising standards that he lavished on Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and his other more clearly literary authors.
During his fifteen years as an editor, Max Perkins had come to be recognized at Scribners as a most valuable employee, and he had been compensated accordingly. In the past decade his salary had been doubled—to $10,000—and he was receiving liberal amounts of private stock. As important to Max, no doubt, was the fact that Charles and Arthur Scribner were letting him gradually work free of his stodgy editorial supervisor, old William Crary Brownell. After forty years at Scribners, Brownell had recently retired. Though seventy-seven, he still reported to his desk almost every day, but his productivity had waned and Perkins’s was at its greatest. Max and his contemporaries now did the main share of the editorial work. One of the most active new editors was Wallace Meyer, who had worked as advertising manager in the early twenties but had left to “see the world” before settling down to a lifelong career. In 1928 Perkins coaxed him back.
That summer, while Perkins was vacationing in Windsor, Brownell died. Max wrote Mr. Scribner, “I felt pretty sick when I read of Brownell’s death. He was as good a man as I ever knew.” A difference in age had separated their tastes in literature, but Perkins had found that his preceptor’s nineteenth-century intellect had not lessened his skill as a literary adviser. Perkins said, “If a young man worked beside [Brownell] for some years and failed to become a passable editor he simply had no capacity for the work.” One of Brownell’s hard and fast principles was that almost as much could be learned about an author’s abilities through an interview as by reading his manuscript, since “water cannot rise above its source.” Another Brownell adage that Perkins subscribed to was that the worst reason for publishing anything was that it resembled something else, that however unconscious, “an imitation is always inferior.” Sometimes a second-rate manuscript was marked by some rare characteristics that made it hard for the staff to surrender it. Brownell would close the debate by saying, “We can’t publish everything. Let someone else make a failure of it.”
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