On December 6, 1928, Perkins received a telegram from Ernest Hemingway’s mother, Grace: TRY TO LOCATE ERNEST HEMINGWAY IN NEW YORK ADVISE HIM OF DEATH OF HIS FATHER TODAY ASK HIM TO COMMUNICATE WITH HOME IMMEDIATELY. Within an hour Perkins received another wire, this one from Ernest himself, who was on the Havana Special bound for Florida after a few days in New York. From Trenton he had asked Perkins to wire to the North Philadelphia Station the $100 he needed to go home again. A few days later Hemingway wrote Perkins from Oak Park that his father had shot himself, leaving a wife, six children, and “damned little money.” His father was the parent Hemingway really cared about. From that day forward his relationship with Perkins deepened. Max became the solid, trustworthy older man in Hemingway’s turbulent life, someone to turn to and rely on.
By the end of the year his father’s affairs were put in order, and Ernest returned with one of his younger sisters to Key West, where he worked on his World War novel, revising for six to ten hours every day. By the second week of January, most of the chapters carried the author’s final corrections and were being typed by his sister Sunny. Hemingway planned a short vacation out in the Gulf Stream. He invited Perkins to join him and made the offer impossible to refuse by insisting the only way Max could get hold of his manuscript would be for him to pick it up in person. Max immediately thought it might be a good idea to get Fitzgerald to join the junket, for both their sakes, but Scott stayed behind to work on his novel.
Max met Hemingway in Florida on the first of February and spent the next eight days in Key West, a place he found full of wonders. He and Ernest started out every morning at eight and often did not get back until moonlight bathed the coconut-palmed maritime village. The sun shone every day while he and Ernest fished in the Gulf Stream. There, with the shoal refracting almost every color of the rainbow, Perkins asked, “Why don’t you write about this?” Directly overhead a silly-looking, clumsy bird flapped by. “I might someday but not yet,” Ernest said. “Take that pelican. I don’t know yet what he is in the scheme of things here.” Max had a hunch Hemingway would soon find out, for he had observed that Ernest’s mind was always at work, always absorbing and creating.
Hemingway was determined that Perkins should catch a tarpon, one of the most prized species in the sea; Max, however, after exhausting struggles with barracudas, doubted his ability to land one. At the very last possible moment, on Perkins’s final day in Key West, Hemingway hooked one. He instantly and insistently forced the rod into Max’s hands. After staggering all over the boat for fifty desperate minutes, made more exciting by a sudden storm which sprayed them all the time and added to the tarpon’s chances, Perkins and Hemingway reeled it in.
Max did not forget what he had gone to Florida for. He read Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms, in manuscript between outings and was wild about it. He discussed serialization in Scribner’s, though he doubted they would accept it, begrimed as it was with “dirty” words. He wired Arthur Scribner from Key West, BOOK VERY FINE BUT DIFFICULT IN SPOTS. When he returned to New York he tried to explain in a letter to Charles Scribner that “given the theme and the author, the book is [no] more difficult than was inevitable. It is Hemingway’s principle both in life and literature never to flinch from facts, and it is in that sense only, that the book is difficult. It isn’t at all erotic, although love is represented as having a very large physical element.” Max felt constrained in specifying the troublesome areas in the book because he dictated his letter to Miss Wyckoff. But he thought the publisher’s “familiarity with Hemingway’s way would sufficiently supplement what I have said.”
The conference between Maxwell Perkins and old Charles Scribner, when they met face-to-face, over the unprintable words in Hemingway’s manuscript has become publishing legend. Malcolm Cowley’s rendition of the story is generally regarded as the most reliable, for he got it from Perkins himself. When old CS got to the office, Max told Cowley, Max explained to him that there were probably three unprintable words in the manuscript. “What are they?” Mr. Scribner asked. Perkins, who seldom used a stronger phrase than “My God,” and that only in moments of great distress, found that he simply couldn’t speak them. “Write them, then,” said Mr. Scribner. Perkins spelled out two of them on a memo pad and handed it to him. “What’s the third word?” Mr. Scribner asked. Perkins hesitated. “What’s the third word?” Scribner asked again, giving the pad back to him. Finally, Perkins wrote it, and Mr. Scribner glanced at the pad. “Max,” he said, shaking his head, “what would Hemingway think of you if he heard that you couldn’t even write that word?”
Over the years the incident was recounted in numerous apocryphal renditions. Irma Wyckoff corrected the one that held that the three questionable words were written on Max’s calendar under the heading “Things to Do Today.” She recalled, “Mr. Perkins did leave his desk for lunch, and halfway out the building he returned to his office to hide the list.”
To his surprise, the only opposition to the manuscript that Perkins faced from the magazine staff was over those specific words. Robert Bridges, editor of Scribner’s, thought the book was very well done, even in its portrayal of an explicit love affair between a wounded soldier and a nurse. Bridge’s young heir apparent, Alfred “Fritz” Dashiell, was at least as enthusiastic and regretted that even a word would have to be altered.
At the first possible moment, Perkins informed Hemingway of the magazine’s offer of $16,000, more than Scribner’s had ever paid for first serialization rights. Max discussed the problem of those “certain words” to him in forthright terms, explaining, “I always exaggerate difficulties, partly as a matter of policy on the theory that it is better to begin by facing the worst.” It was true, however, that the magazine was used as collateral reading by many schools which taught mixed classes, and Scribner’s believed the ears of all those schoolgirls were too sensitive for the vulgarisms of Hemingway’s soldiers.
Ernest replied that he did not see how any section of the manuscript could be lifted because the book was so tightly written, with each passage dependent on every other. He told Perkins that emasculation was a minor operation to perform on men, animals, and books, but its effect was great.
Perkins intended to widen Hemingway’s public with A Farewell to Arms. His primary reason for serializing, he wrote Ernest, was “in making you understandable to a great many more people, and generally in helping you to gain complete recognition.” In a letter Max reminded the author that there was a great deal of hostility to The Sun Also Rises: It was routed and driven off the field by the book’s qualities and the adherence which they won. The hostility was very largely that which any new thing in art must meet, simply because it is disturbing. It shows life in a different aspect and people are more comfortable when they have got it all conventionalized and smoothed down, and everything unpleasant hidden. Hostility also partly came from those who actually did not understand the book because its method of expression was a new one ... it was the same failure to be understood that a wholly new painter meets. People simply do not understand because they can only understand what they are accustomed to.
Perkins tried to make Hemingway realize that “if we can bring out this serial without arousing too serious objection, you will have enormously consolidated your position, and will henceforth be further beyond objectionable criticism of a kind which is very bad because it prevents so many people from looking at the thing itself on its merits.”
This issue of words was no mere squabble to Hemingway but a fight for a return to the “full use of the language.” He believed what they might accomplish in that direction could be of more lasting value than anything he would write. Ernest told Max that there had always been first-rate writing, then American writing. He wanted to be the writer who reversed that order. But Perkins’s argument swayed him and he yielded again in blanking out the profanities.
During one of his visits to his publishers, Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, made a point of talking to Perkins about
Hemingway’s use of profanities. He objected that they were completely unnecessary and only aroused prejudice. By then Perkins realized that Hemingway did not use those words simply to exercise his literary rights, but to maintain the integrity of his style. In a letter Max told Hemingway that Wister did not seem to seethat any circumlocutions, etc. would be inconsistent with the way you write. I tried to explain this, but I really never fully grasped how you do write, so I couldn’t very well. But I pointed out as an instance that you almost never even used a simile. It is a different way of writing. I always knew it wasn’t just a simple matter of not using words—that it really did mean a deviation from your style or method or whatever, to avoid them.
In March, 1929, Hemingway prepared to leave for Europe. Before boarding his ship, he dashed off a note to Max pleading with him not to give his French address to Scott Fitzgerald, who Hemingway understood was thinking of leaving for Europe as well. The last time Scott had been in Paris, he got the Hemingways locked out of one apartment and in trouble with the landlord all the time. When Ernest heard their visits were going to overlap again, it filled him with horror. He said he would meet Scott in public places, where he could walk out and leave him at any time, but he would never again let him within striking distance of his home.
The biggest hardship in Fitzgerald’s life remained his unfinished novel, of which Perkins had seen only the inspiriting first quarter. “I’m sneaking away like a thief without leaving the chapters,” he wrote Max early that March from Ellerslie. “There is a week’s work to straighten them out and in the confusion of influenza & leaving I haven’t been able to do it.” Planning to work on the boat and post the manuscript from Genoa, he sent his editor a thousand thanks for his patience. “Just trust me a few months longer, Max,” he pleaded. “It’s been a discouraging time for me too, but I will never forget your kindness and the fact that you’ve never reproached me.”
Perkins worried more about the author than the manuscript. Afraid that Scott was “losing his nerve,” he wrote Hemingway that if Fitzgerald held on to that, “he will come out all right. And in spite of his faith in youth, he will do better in age if he will only keep out of trouble enough.”
All summer, Perkins debated whether Fitzgerald ought to retreat from this present book or whether that surrender would be an irreversible setback in his career. “Do you think he ought to chuck this novel altogether, and begin another?” he asked Hemingway. After several “very bad reports” from mutual friends and but one tight-lipped message from Fitzgerald himself in which he mentioned his book as if he did not like to talk about it, Perkins wrote Scott, asking if there wasn’t anything he could do for him in America. “I do not want to have you write me letters except when there is a reason because your hands are full enough,” Max said.
Fitzgerald did have a reason to write Max, however; he was making progress on the novel again. That year he had written a short story, one of many for the Saturday Evening Post, called “The Rough Crossing.” It told of a successful playwright and his wife who take a voyage to Europe to escape the Broadway crowd. Aboard ship the playwright is attracted to a beautiful brunette with ivory skin—the “pretty girl of the voyage”—and his brief infatuation rocks his marriage just as an Atlantic hurricane tosses the ocean liner. “The Rough Crossing” sent Fitzgerald in a new direction with his novel. He constructed a new love triangle, this one involving a bright young motion-picture director and his wife, Lew and Nicole Kelly. Aboard ship they meet a young woman named Rosemary who wants to break into the movies.
“I am working night and day on the novel from the new angle that I think will solve previous difficulties,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins hopefully. But this Kelly version didn’t work either. Still, it was not without consequence. Many of its elements remained in Fitzgerald’s imagination, where they continued to incubate. Fitzgerald went back to his Melarkey story and made one last attempt at it, then laid it to rest.
Though stymied with Scott, Max got good results with several of Scott’s friends, particularly Ring Lardner, whose reputation he fought to enhance, even though Lardner’s career as a journalist still seemed to deny him a position as a serious writer. While Max was assembling And Other Stories, Lardner’s first collection in two years, the Literary Guild approached him. They wanted Perkins to bring out an omnibus of Lardner’s stories, binding together those in How to Write Short Stories, The Love Nest, and the new ones already in type. More important than their $13,500 payment, which Scribners proposed dividing equally between the author and themselves, Perkins told Ring it was a highly advantageous offer because “it will put a very fine book by you in the hands of some 70,000 people to say nothing of those to whom we can sell copies through the regular trade. And so your public will be very greatly enlarged. It will also lead, we think, to a re-estimation of you as a writer of stories, etc., in all the reviewing papers, which would also be most advantageous.” Perkins even got Scribners to agree to investing their $6,750 from the Literary Guild in advertising. “We have never thought that you have had the sale your books are entitled to,” Max wrote Ring, “and we are going to try to get it now, and to build for the future.”
Perkins dropped And Other Stories, and started thinking about the new omnibus’s title—“one of a collective sort which would emphasize the peculiarly national character of the author, or perhaps that of the people and conditions he writes about.” Max submitted a list of his own suggestions to the Guild, expressing a preference for Round Up. “It is an American word,” Max explained, “and it implies a collection—and although it might at first seem to be especially western, it is now used about almost every sort of gathering together,—even that of crooks.”
During the late winter’s search for a title, Lardner left for the Caribbean, but not as early as Max had thought. To meet their deadlines, Perkins went ahead arranging with the Literary Guild to call the book Round Up without even consulting the author. When the news finally caught up to Lardner he wired Perkins that he preferred his own title, Ensemble. Max was chagrined, but the title pages, covers, and jackets were already printed. “I am sorry this was so,” Max apologized. “We did not want to take a title you did not fully approve, and I was stupid about your visit to Nassau.” But the Literary Guild was enthusiastic about Max’s title and Scribners was printing another 20,000 copies themselves. Round Up reached almost 100,000 readers.
Again Perkins asked Ring if he could not write some long story, perhaps 40,000 words, as they had talked about for years. “Now would be the time for it,” Max urged, “with the great distribution of Round Up as a background.” To Perkins’s regret, Lardner was still stagestruck, so busy writing plays and vaudeville routines that he had not even considered a novelette. “But show business is slow on financial returns,” he wrote his editor, “and maybe I’ll be asking you for some advance soon.”
Another of Perkins’s writers, also a friend of Fitzgerald’s, had been having especially difficult times but had managed to publish, even though he was heading for a breakdown. Edmund Wilson, overcome by disloyal-ties and disaffection, was trying to decide whether to divorce his first wife for another. To compound his depression, he had recently sent the manuscript of a novel, I Thought of Daisy, to Max Perkins and was suffering from the blues that generally follow finishing a book.
“It is the sort of thing that has to come off completely or it is likely to be impossible,” Wilson wrote Perkins.
I mean that, from beginning to end, I have made characters and incidents and situations subordinate to a set of ideas about life and literature, and unless the ideas are really put over, unless they are made interesting enough to compensate the reader for what he is missing in action and emotion, for what he ordinarily gets in a novel, the whole performance will fail.
Wilson had corresponded with Perkins ever since the editor had expressed interest in The Undertaker’s Garland years earlier. Among the indecisions which Max never could help Wilson resolve was what genre he should concentrate on
. I Thought of Daisy was his first long work of fiction, and Leon Edel, the editor of Wilson’s papers and journals, noted, “He was surprised to discover that this could be a quite different enterprise from any other kind of writing.” In the process of revising the manuscript, Wilson began work on a series of long critical essays, which would become Axel’s Castle. He wrote Perkins that they were “easier to do, and in the nature of a relief, from Daisy.” The novel sold only a few thousand copies, but its excellent reviews won him the respect of the literary crowd. Years later, Max’s daughter Zippy asked her father why Wilson’s novels did not have a wider public appeal. He replied, “Wilson is one of the most intellectual Americans writing, but he sounds like a smarty-pants when he writes fiction. Whenever he writes something that isn’t over everybody’s head, it reads as though he’s writing down to the public.” In another, more revealing, moment he said, “Edmund Wilson would give his eyeteeth to have half the reputation as a novelist that Scott Fitzgerald has.”
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