Max managed to retreat for a month that summer to Windsor, where he had a splendid, practically rainless vacation. He was startled several times that August by his two oldest daughters maturing so rapidly. Bertha had once been a grave little girl behind horn-rimmed glasses; Max used to brag about her ability “to see the justice of a thing even when it was against her wishes.” Zippy, the one Perkins girl who could always charm extra movie privileges out of her father, was becoming a traffic-stopping beauty. Together now the teen-agers went to dances in Windsor, Cornish, and Woodstock and stayed out until two in the morning. Max thought it insulting to wait up for them.
In the past Perkins had often left Windsor for New York to watch the impact of a particular new book he had had his hand in. This year he returned in time to preside over the publication of several. Look Homeward, Angel and A Farewell to Arms came out in September, 1929. The reaction to each work, by critics and readers, was overwhelmingly favorable.
Hemingway told Perkins to keep right on printing his novel; this was their “big shot.” With the impact it was making, he guessed, they would go through 100,000 copies. Within just a few weeks A Farewell to Arums had sold one third that much. Ernest already had plans for the royalties from the book. He was going to establish a trust fund for his family with the earnings from the first 70,000 copies; everything beyond that was going toward the purchase of a boat.
As for Thomas Wolfe, Eugene Gant’s childhood dreams of fame were coming true for his creator. Wolfe was praised as a new writer of the first rank, and he reveled in what he understood to be “the best reviews of any first novel in years.” The only bad reaction to speak of was in Wolfe’s hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. When the townspeople realized that they had been transformed into the citizenry of the fictional Altamont, with all their failings revealed to the nation at large, they were up in arms. One of them threatened to drag Wolfe’s “big overgroan karkus” across Asheville’s Pack Square. But in North Carolina, as elsewhere, the book was being bought. Scribners quickly sold some 15,000 copies.
It was a happy time for Perkins. Even the skies smiled. As October drew to a close New York basked in an Indian summer—not a hint of winter in the air. Nor was there a sign in that golden autumn of the imminent Depression and the strenuous years that lay ahead.
PART TWO
IX
Crises of Confidence
On Thursday, October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed. “What effect that will have nobody can tell,” Max Perkins wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald at the end of the month. “It may have a very bad effect on all retail business, including that of books.”
When the stocks on Wall Street started nose-diving, Fitzgerald was in France, writing his novel. The stories about him all intimated that his friendships, career, and marriage were on the skids. Perkins heard one about his miskeeping the time in a boxing match between Morley Callaghan and Hemingway, which resulted in severe blows to Ernest’s jaw and Scott’s pride. His self-esteem dropped even further as he became aware that Hemingway was reluctant to tell Scott his whereabouts. Hemingway and Fitzgerald still exchanged letters, but they were not always friendly. In one of them Ernest called Scott a “damned fool,”, then exhorted him “for Christ sake” to “go on and write the novel.” He warned Perkins never to trust Scott with a single word in confidence as he was absolutely incapable of keeping secrets when sober and “no more responsible than an insane man” when he was drunk.
Scott’s relationships with other friends were becoming strained as well. The Murphys, for example, had wearied of his studying them for his novel. Gerald said:He kept asking things like what our income really was, and how I had got into Skull and Bones [a senior society at Yale], and whether Sara and I had lived together before we were married. I just couldn’t take seriously the idea that he was going to write about us—somehow I couldn’t believe that anything would come of questions like that. But I certainly recall his peering at me with a sort of thin-lipped, supercilious scrutiny, as though he were trying to decide what made me tick. His questions irritated Sara a good deal. Usually, she would give him some ridiculous answer just to shut him up, but eventually the whole business became intolerable. In the middle of a dinner party one night, Sara had all she could take. “Scott,” she said, “you think if you just ask enough questions you’ll get to know what people are like but you won’t. You don’t really know anything at all about people.” Scott practically turned green. He got up from the table and pointed his finger at her and said that nobody had ever dared say that to him, whereupon Sara asked if he would like her to repeat it, and she did.
The most disconcerting stories about Fitzgerald were about his marriage. Madeleine Boyd had recently visited the Fitzgeralds in Paris and told Perkins that Zelda was no longer herself and that she and Scott were constantly at each other’s throats. Zelda’s behavior, formerly glossed over as madcap, now struck people as weird. Its most aberrant manifestation was in her study of ballet, which she was pursuing with frenetic zeal. The hours of practice wore her down. She was underweight; her face was drawn and waxy; she was so excitable that her shrieks of anger and laughter could not always be distinguished. As Hemingway suggested in A Moveable Feast, she resented all the time that her husband devoted to his writing; Scott, on his part, now felt neglected because of her dancing. For Fitzgerald, after years of plummeting confidence, that was the ultimate rejection. In a letter he later addressed but never sent to Zelda, he recalled their last year together:You were gone now—I scarcely remember you that summer. You were simply one of all the people who disliked me or were indifferent to me. I didn’t like to think of you.... You were going crazy and calling it genius—and I was going to ruin and calling it anything that came to hand. And I think everyone far enough away to see us outside of our glib presentations of ourselves guessed at your almost megalomaniacal selfishness and my insane indulgence in drink. Toward the end nothing much mattered. The nearest I ever came to leaving you was when you told me you [thought] I was a fairy in the Rue Palatine but now whatever you said aroused a sort of detached pity for you.... I wish the Beautiful and Damned had been a maturely written book because it was all true. We ruined ourselves—I have never honestly thought that we ruined each other.
The Fitzgeralds made stabs at economizing that year by living in cheaper hotels, but Scott’s fiscal policy remained the same. Before the new decade was two weeks old, he asked Perkins to deposit $500 to cover his Christmas bills. His short stories had brought in $27,000 the preceding year, but his books earned only $31.77. Almost five years had passed since the publication of The Great Gatsby, and Scott had been advanced almost $8,000 on his next book. In response to Perkins’s subtle inquiries as to when his novel would be done, Scott replied: “To begin with, because I don’t mention my novel isn’t because it isn’t finishing up or that I’m neglecting it—but only that I’m weary of setting dates for it till the moment when it is in the Post Office Box.”
His professional pride was about the only thing on which Fitzgerald kept a firm grip. “I wrote young & I wrote a lot & the pot takes longer to fill up now,” he told Perkins, “but the novel, my novel, is a different matter than if I’d hurriedly finished it up a year and a half ago.”
“The only thing that has ever worried me about you,” Max wrote him that spring, “was the question of health. I know you have everything else, but I have often been afraid on that account, perhaps because I myself can stand so little in the way of late hours, and all that goes with them.”
In the early spring of 1930 illness did step in the way. Zelda, in the frenzy of her balletomania, broke down from overwork. Fitzgerald felt incapable of writing even a letter for twenty-one days. Only after several more weeks of requests for money did he tell Max his troubles. “Zelda has been desperately ill in a sanitarium here in Switzerland with a nervous collapse,” he explained. That kept Scott from his work for still more time.
While Zelda remained, in Scott’s words, “sick as hell,” he
grew “harrassed and anxious about life.” The psychiatrist who devoted almost his entire time to Zelda had become a major expense. Max inferred from Scott’s letters that Zelda was on the edge of insanity if not beyond it. By summer her condition was diagnosed as schizophrenia. Because drinking was one of the images that haunted Zelda in her delirium, the doctors insisted that Scott abstain from liquor for a year; she, forever. They never actually stated that Fitzgerald’s own instability and alcoholism had contributed to his wife’s collapse, but Perkins had his own opinion. “Scott is blamable I know for what has come to Zelda in a sense,” Max wrote Thomas Wolfe. “But he’s a brave man to face the trouble as he does, always facing it squarely—no self-deceptions.” In his journal Scott summarized the year: “The Crash! Zelda & America.”
Even in his despair, Fitzgerald still mailed Perkins—“my most loyal and confident encourager and friend”—monthly literary reports. Since he could not claim progress on his book, he stocked his letters with publishing suggestions. He sent Max the names and works of several new authors—members of a “really new generation”—whose work he had come across in an issue of American Caravan. The most noteworthy, Fitzgerald said, was Erskine Caldwell, despite the “usual derivations from Hemingway and even [Morley] Callaghan.” Perkins wrote to him.
Caldwell was a twenty-six-year-old Georgian who, after a short college career, had worked as cotton picker, book reviewer, professional football player, lumber mill hand, and aspiring writer. He was living in Mount Vernon, Maine when Perkins asked him to submit manuscripts for consideration. It was the first such request Caldwell had ever received. He later recalled, “The letter touched off a three-month orgy of writing, the intensity of which had never before been reached and which I never equalled afterward.”
At first Caldwell sent Max Perkins one short story every day for a week. Each was promptly declined by return mail. But Caldwell was in no mood to accept defeat. He shifted gears and each week sent two more carefully drafted stories. He had now become determined to break down the editorial resistance of Scribner’s Magazine, but he considered Maxwell Perkins as the company’s major power and sent his stories through him. As fast as each was rejected—generally for being too “anecdotal”—it was sent to one of the “little magazines”—This Quarter, Pagany, Hound and Horn, or Clay, to name a few—where it was accepted. After a month, Caldwell detected a softening in Perkins’s letters of rejection. By spring Max had decided to accept one of his pieces, though he had not chosen which one. According to a chart Caldwell kept which traced the journeys of each of his stories, Perkins had five on hand from which to select.
“My immediate fear,” Caldwell wrote in his memoirs, Call It Experience, “was that he might change his mind—that the already tottering economic structure of the nation might crumble—that anything could happen before he actually printed one of my stories in the magazine.” Caldwell went to work at dusk the very evening of the day he had had the good news from Perkins, and set out to supply the editor with more material to consider. Thirty-six hours later he had three new stories. These, together with three additional ones which he plucked from the stack on his table, made a total of eleven for Perkins. Instead of posting them, however, Caldwell decided to take them to New York in person. There was, after all, “the possibility of a train being wrecked, causing a serious delay in the delivery of the mail.”
On the overnight bus from Portland, Maine to New York, forebodings kept Caldwell awake. “I had never seen Maxwell Perkins,” he wrote, “... and by daybreak I was beginning to visualize him as a fearsome person who would angrily resent the intrusion and become prejudiced against my work.” From eight in the morning until ten Caldwell paced the sidewalk across from the Scribner Building, trying to think of a reasonable excuse for presenting himself without appointment. Nothing convincing came to mind, but, realizing that what little courage that remained was rapidly fading, he crossed the street and entered the building, clutching his envelope of manuscripts. By the time the elevator had taken him to the editorial offices, he was so unnerved that he just gave his stories to the receptionist. He left Perkins a note that said he would be at the Manger Hotel for the next two days.
Caldwell confined himself to his hotel room all that afternoon, leaving only to grab a sandwich and some newspapers. He lay awake until past midnight, trying to summon up enough confidence to phone Scribners if Perkins failed to call before he left town. At midmorning the phone rang. The sound startled him at first, but it was so pleasing to hear, he let it ring twice before answering. “I got your new manuscripts yesterday, the ones you left at the office,” Perkins said after he and Caldwell had introduced themselves to each other. “I wish you had asked for me when you were here.” Caldwell recalled the rest of the conversation this way:
PERKINS: By the way, I’ve read all your stories on hand now, including the new ones you brought yesterday, and I don’t think I need to see any more for a while.
CALDWELL: (Silence)
PERKINS: I think I wrote you some time ago that we want to publish one of your stories in Scribner’s Magazine.
CALDWELL: I received the letter. You haven’t changed your mind, have you? I mean about taking a story?
PERKINS: Changed my mind? No. Not at all. The fact is, we’re all in agreement here at the office about things. I guess so much so that we’ve decided now to take two stories, instead of one, and run them both in the magazine at the same time. We’d like to schedule them for the June issue. One of them is called “The Mating of Marjorie” and the other one is “A Very Late Spring.” They’re both good northern New England stories. There’s a good feeling about them. It’s something I like to find in fiction. So many writers master form and technique, but get so little feeling into their work. I think that’s important.
CALDWELL: I’m sure glad you like them—both of them.
PERKINS: Now about these two stories. As I said, we want to buy them both. How much do you want for the two together? We always have to talk about money sooner or later. There’s no way of getting around that, is there?
CALDWELL: Well, I don’t know exactly. I mean about the money. I haven’t thought much about it.
PERKINS: Would two-fifty be all right? For both of them....
CALDWELL: Two-fifty? I don’t know. I thought maybe I’d receive a little more than that.
PERKINS: You did? Well, what would you say to three-fifty then. That’s about as much as we can pay, for both of them. In these times magazine circulation is not climbing the way it was, and we have to watch our costs. I don’t think times will get any better soon, and maybe worse yet. Economic life isn’t very healthy now. That’s why we have to figure our costs so closely at a time like this.
CALDWELL: I guess that’ll be all right. I’d thought I’d get a little more than three dollars and a half, though, for both of them.
PERKINS: Three dollars and fifty cents? Oh, no! I must have given you the wrong impression, Caldwell. Not three dollars and a half. No, I meant three hundred and fifty dollars.
CALDWELL: You did! Well, that’s sure different. It sure is. Three hundred and fifty dollars is just fine.
In no time Caldwell had formulated new ambitions. The first was to get 100 short stories published.
On April 19, 1930, at the age of seventy-six, Charles Scribner died. Few of the house’s authors who were flourishing when Perkins began working there were still being published. John Fox, Jr., Richard Harding Davis, and Henry James had been buried more than a decade before; John Galsworthy and Edith Wharton continued to write, but their latest novels smacked of the nineteenth century. Old CS’s presence, however, lingered in the family business. His son Charles kept the name alive and his brother Arthur managed the firm. Maxwell E. Perkins was designated a company officer and was on his way toward becoming editorial director. “After Scribner’s death,” Wallace Meyer observed, “Max really didn’t have to defend his decisions any longer.”
That year Perkins’s most successful a
uthor—winning more prestige than old CS had ever dreamed he would—was Ernest Hemingway. Despite the Depression, A Farewell to Arms became a robust best seller, eventually reaching Number 1 on the list. Max wrote Hemingway that the Depression was “more likely to affect the general line of books—that it surely will affect—than so outstanding a book as A Farewell.”
As a new celebrity, Hemingway became the subject of literary gossip. The most unusual stories came from the writer Robert McAlmon, whom Ernest had recommended to Perkins. At dinner Max sat dumbfounded as McAlmon slandered the man who had brought them together. He started by making nasty remarks about Hemingway’s writing. Soon he was voicing the canard that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were homosexuals.
Through Fitzgerald, Hemingway himself got wind of still another story—that he was dissatisfied with his publishers and was considering others. Ernest wrote Max he did not know how to scotch these latest lies, but he assured him that he had absolutely no intention of leaving Scribners. He hoped that, if his own luck and kidneys held out long enough, Max might publish Hemingway’s collected works someday. He offered to write letters proclaiming his loyalty to Perkins.
Max treasured Hemingway’s letter. He confessed to him that the story had unsettled him. “One night in a nervous moment,” he explained, “when the rumors were flying thick and fast, I wrote you by hand asking you if you would be willing to write a letter saying they were foundless. But then in the end, I tore up my letter because I thought it was only part of the game that we should take our own medicine.” After helping put together the author’s tax statement—an annual function that came easily to the former economics major—and devising a trust fund for his family, Max got Scribners to hike the author’s royalty percentage on A Farewell to Arms, at the cost of several hundred dollars to the company, just “because we think the value of publishing for you is a great one in itself.” Perkins ultimately recommended that Hemingway consider an arrangement under which Scribners would pay him a minimum annual sum on which he could absolutely count.
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