Ernest accepted all of Perkins’s offers but the final one—he was sure he could not work under a salaried contract like that. To seal his pact with Scribners, he asked Perkins to obtain from Boni & Liveright the rights to In Our Time, which they had promised to sell to Scribners when Hemingway left them. When Max approached them, Horace Liveright was irate. The author was a national literary hero and he would not let the book go. “We consider Mr. Hemingway’s name of value on our list,” he wrote Perkins, “and in that we published his first book, we have a sentimental feeling about the matter as well.” After months of Max’s persistence—and the offer of a cash settlement—Scribners wrested the book away. At Hemingway’s suggestion, Perkins got Edmund Wilson to write an introduction for the new Scribners edition, for Ernest believed Wilson was “the one who has understood best” what he was writing.
The book business was turning bleak that fall, and few of the season’s books lasted through December. Because of four or five of Perkins’s novels—including S. S. Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (the latter reached 70,000 copies by the dying days of the twenties)—Scribners enjoyed the palmiest year they had ever had. But Perkins knew better than to think that boded well for the future. The outlook was grim everywhere. So in that flat week between Christmas and the new year, Perkins cheered himsef up by dreaming of an excursion to the Gulf Stream.
Returning from Paris, Hemingway passed through New York in late January, 1930. He called on Perkins and seemed in fine fettle to Max, who swore he would meet him in Florida in March. Business looked so bad in February that it seemed impossible for Perkins to steal away. But, he wrote Ernest, “I have learned that the only thing to do in those cases is just to go.” He arrived in Key West on March 17 and met “The Mob,” a loose fraternity of Ernest’s friends. Hemingway and his crew trolled to the Marquesas Keys. There Perkins hooked a kingfish weighing fifty-eight pounds, one pound heavier than the world’s record. As Max reeled the fish in, the rest of the crew watched in amusement for a suggestion of a grin on his face, almost belying the nickname they had given him—“Deadpan.” Throughout the expedition, Perkins was again impressed with Ernest’s powers of observation, even more than with his physical strength. In recalling Key West years later, Max said: “It must require the intuition of an artist to learn quickly the geography of the ocean bottom and the ways of fish, but Hemingway learned in a year what often takes a decade or a lifetime. It was as though instinctively he projected himself into a fish—knew how a tarpon or a kingfish felt, and thought, and so what he would do.”
The mariners drifted seventy miles from Key West to another group of tiny keys called the Dry Tortugas, and stayed for over two weeks instead of the four days they had planned. Only an act of God could have kept Perkins away from his office for so long a time: A norther had churned up such rough seas that they could not possibly get back to the mainland. Ernest and his Mob slept in a shed and lived off the liquor, canned goods, and supply of Bermuda onions Hemingway stowed on board before every trip, and whatever they caught. All they could do was cast plugs off the pier or venture out in the skiff for bottom fishing during lulls in the winds. They fished every day except two, when they shot at flocks of birds that the norther had driven their way. To match the rest of the marooned band, Perkins raised a beard, shorter and fairer than those of the others. Once the big blow died down and they putted safely back into port, Max glanced in a mirror. “If you’d seen me with a grizzled beard looking as tough as a pirate,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon afterward, “you could imagine me doing nothing unless it was murder. They said I looked like a rebel cavalry captain. I couldn’t get a look at myself for two weeks and when I did I was horrified. I saw myself entirely anew and found it a shock!” He thanked Hemingway for one of the happiest times of his life.
Not long after Max’s visit Hemingway left for a ranch in Montana to work on his newest book, the massive study of the Spanish bullfight that he had mentioned in his earliest correspondence with Perkins. Soon he wrote Max that he was getting no mail, had not looked at a newspaper for weeks, and was in the strongest physical shape he had been in for years. Except for indulgence in cold lager, which threatened to put a few inches on his waistline and take a few hours off his day, his habits were Spartan. He worked six days of every week, and had produced over 40,000 words within a month. And he had six more cases of beer, he told Max, which was enough for another six chapters. When Perkins sent him the proofs of the new Scribners edition of the In Our Time stories along with suggestions for modifications and additional selections, Ernest threw them aside and said he was working too well breaking in this new book to “flay dead horses.”
Thomas Wolfe’s career had been safely launched before the crash, but he felt threatened by the national calamity—all the more so because, as he later wrote of his autobiographical hero in You Can’t Go Home Again, “in addition to the general crisis, he was caught in a personal one as well. For at this very time, he too had come to an end and a beginning. It was an end of love, though not of loving; a beginning of recognition, though not of fame.”
Wolfe wanted to cut all his constricting ties to the past, but he quaked at the thought of it. He had become a pariah in Asheville, and, at last, he yearned to end his relationship with Aline Bernstein. Perkins suggested that Tom apply for a foundation grant, which might give him the security to quit his teaching job at N.Y.U. and live on his own, working abroad for a year. Mrs. Bernstein realized the implications of such independence and misconstrued Perkins’s intentions. She felt that he was urging Wolfe to leave her.
Perkins wrote a letter of recommendation to the Guggenheim Foundation and Tom received a fellowship. Max further arranged a $4,500 advance in monthly installments on his new book. With the incoming royalties from Look Homeward, Mangel, he had some $10,000 and no longer had to rely on the support of Aline Bernstein. Distraught, she tried every way she knew to make him understand her love for him, and for months Wolfe wavered in his feelings. But his love continued to diminish.
On Christmas Eve, 1929, Tom sat at a desk in the Harvard Club of New York and wrote a letter of affection to Max Perkins: “One year ago I had little hope for my work, and I did not know you. What has happened since may seem to be only a modest success to many people; but to me it is touched with strangeness and wonder. It is a miracle.” He went on:I can no longer think of the time I wrote [Look Homemard, Angel, but rather of the time when you first talked to me about it, and when you worked upon it. My mind has always seen people more clearly than events or things—the name “Scribners” naturally makes a warm glow in my heart, but you are chiefly “Scribners” to me: you have done what I had ceased to believe one person could do for another—you have created liberty and hope for me.
Young men sometimes believe in the existence of heroic figures stronger and wiser than themselves, to whom they can turn for an answer to all their vexation and grief.... You are for me such a figure: You are one of the rocks to which my life is anchored.
“I’m mighty glad you feel as you do—except for a sense of not deserving it,” Perkins replied to Wolfe. “I hope anyway that there could be no serious thought of obligation between us but, as a matter of convenience of speech, I would point out that even if you really owed me a great deal, it would be cancelled by what I owe you. The whole episode, from receipt of ms., up to now was for me a most happy, interesting, and exciting one.”
The recent months of contention with Aline Bernstein had pulled Wolfe apart. Some of the distress may have been rooted in a strong provincial anti-Semitism Wolfe had inherited from his mother, a tiny, tightfisted woman with a passion for real estate. Late one night at the end of March he scratched on page 337 of his current notebook, “Went to the Public Library today—the Jews pushing in and out.” He confided further to the ledger, “I find myself at the same depth of fruitless and sterile exhaustion as I had reached two years ago. I am unable to create, unable to concentrate, and I am filled w
ith fever, with bitter and restless anger, against the world: and I am beginning to feel this against Aline. This must be the end! the end! the end!” He concluded that his only hope for survival was to leave Mrs. Bernstein for good. He would start by putting an ocean between them.
On May 10, 1930, he sailed for Europe. While the S.S. Volendam was at sea, Wolfe, throwing a lifeline to the mainland, wrote Perkins: “I feel like a man faced with a great test who is confident of his power to meet it, and yet thinks of it with a pounding heart and with some speculation. I am impatient to get at my book; I know it will be good if I have power to put it on paper as I have thought it out.”
The “lone Wolfe,” as Perkins started calling him, began wandering around France. Max sensed that Wolfe was frightened by the challenge of the second book, and so he tried to strengthen the author for the time when he would be ready to write again. “You are a born writer if there ever was one,” Perkins assured him, “and have no need to worry about whether this new book will be as good as the Angel and that sort of thing. If you simply can get yourself into it, as you can, it will be good.” Shortly after receiving Perkins’s letter, Wolfe was working six to ten hours a day.
At Max’s instigation, Scott Fitzgerald called Wolfe at his hotel while they were both in Paris. Tom took a single day off from his new regimen and went out to Scott’s sumptuous apartment near the Bois for lunch and inordinate amounts of wine, cognac, and whiskey. Then they went to the Ritz Bar. Scott told Wolfe about Zelda’s nervous breakdown and the book he was trying to complete. At first Tom found him friendly and generous, though the two argued about America. Wolfe reported back to Max, “I said we were a homesick people, and belonged to the earth and land we came from as much or more as any country I knew about—he said we were not, that we were not a country, that he had no feeling for the land he came from.” Tom left Scott at the Ritz Bar, holding court before a bunch of drunk, raw Princeton boys who were making snide innuendos about Wolfe’s background. But Wolfe was not put off. “I liked him,” Tom wrote Perkins, “and think he has a great deal of talent, and I hope he gets that book done soon.”
Fitzgerald was even more impressed by Wolfe. Back in Switzerland, where he found his wife in no condition to see him, he read Look Homeward , Angel in twenty consecutive hours. He wired Wolfe that he was “enormously moved and grateful,” and wrote Perkins, “You have a great find in him—what he’ll do is incalculable.”
Wolfe reported to Perkins that he had no idea how long he would rove across Europe; he guessed it would be until he had completed the first part of his book, which he would bring back to America with him. He was almost afraid to tell Perkins that it would be a very thick volume. He did say: “You can’t write the book I want to write in 200 pages.” He had a grand design for a four-part book, which he was calling The October Fair. The book dealt with what he believed to be two of the profoundest impulses in man—“of wandering forever and the earth again.” By that he meant:the everlasting earth, a home, a place for the heart to come to, and earthly mortal love, the love of a woman, who, it seems to me belongs to the earth and is a force that makes men wander, that makes them search, that makes them lonely, and that makes them both hate and love their loneliness.
“I hope I can do a good book for you and for myself and for the whole damn family,” he wrote Perkins, adding, “Please hope and pull for me and write me when you can.”
Wolfe left for Switzerland, to plan the architecture of the book, constantly seeking Perkins’s comments and approval. All summer he sent a stream of scribblings to Max; they amounted to many dozens of pages, practically a book in themselves, and they detailed his ideas of the tone and attitude, the structure and character of his work.
His travels in Switzerland eventually brought him to Montreux, where he took a quiet hotel room overlooking a garden of brilliant flowers and, beyond it, Lake Geneva. He was sitting on the terrace of a casino one night when he saw Scott Fitzgerald. Scott came over for a drink and was soon leading him on a tour of Montreux’s night life. During the evening Scott urged him to visit his friends Dorothy Parker and the Gerald Murphys. When Tom did not perk up at the suggestions, Fitzgerald accused him of avoiding people for fear of them. That was about the only thing Fitzgerald said that night that Wolfe agreed with. Despite his overbearing appearance, Wolfe was by nature shy; for all his grace on paper, he was maladroit in person. “When I am with someone like Scott I feel that I am morose and sullen—and violent in my speech and movement part of the time,” Tom admitted to Perkins. “Later I feel that I have repelled them.”
Now Wolfe was sorry for Fitzgerald. He wondered how long Scott could last by himself with no Ritz Bar or idolatrous Princeton boys. Tom wrote Henry Volkening, a friend who had taught with him at New York University, that Fitzgerald was “sterile and impotent and alcoholic now, and unable to finish his book and I think he wanted to injure my own work.” Wolfe did not consider himself very good company just then. “It would be very easy for me to start swilling liquor at present,” he wrote Perkins, “but I am not going to do it. I am here to get work done, and in the next three months I am going to see whether I am a bum or a man. I shall not try to conceal from you the fact that at times now I have hard sledding.”
Tom found inspiration in two books that summer. One was War and Peace, which Perkins had so often held up as the paragon of literature. “If we are going to worship anything,” Tom wrote him, “let it be something like this.” He noticed especially how the larger story was interwoven with the personal, particularly those episodes that were obviously from Tolstoi’s own life. “This is the way a great writer uses his material, this is the way in which every good work is autobiographical, and I am not ashamed to follow this in my book.” At the book’s core, “much like a kernel from the beginning, but unrevealed until much later,” Wolfe said, would be the idea Perkins had casually mentioned in Central Park the year before: “the idea of man’s quest for his father.”
Wolfe had also rediscovered the Old Testament. He appreciated it for its literary content more than the spiritual. For three days he read Perkins’s favorite section, Ecclesiastes, over and over, then wrote him that it belonged “to the mightiest poetry that was ever written—and the narrative passages in the old testament, stories like the life of King David, Ruth and Boaz, Esther and Ahasueras, etc., make the narrative style of any modern novelist look puny.” For the first part of The October Fair—“The Immortal Earth”—Wolfe had chosen a verse from the book of Ecclesiastes as a title page legend: “One generation passeth away, and another cometh: but the earth abideth forever.” He was sorry that the same verse came just before the one Hemingway cited about the sun also rising. He guessed that people would accuse him of imitation, but it was two entirely different routes that had led them to the same point.
Wolfe was planning to celebrate his revival by catching a train to the neighboring town of Lausanne to see if there were any pretty women. “I am very lusty,” he wrote Perkins; “the air, the mountains, the quiet, and the very dull, very healthy food have filled me with a vitality I was afraid I’d lost. I wish you were here and we could take a walk together.”
Perkins did not address himself to the topic of lust, in his reply, but, responding to Wolfe’s descriptions of his work in progress, spoke of what for Wolfe was a graver affliction—literary elephantiasis. “It sounds like a very Leviathan of a book as you describe it, now lying in the depths of your consciousness,” Perkins wrote, a bit anxiously, “and I believe you are the man who can draw out such a Leviathan. So far as I can judge—by a sort of instinct—all you say of your plan and intention is right and true.” Perkins warned Wolfe to be strict with himself:Your talent seems to me a truly great one, and that sort requires to be disciplined and curbed. Length itself is not so important as with the first book,—though there is a limit to volume. I think you’d gain the compression needed to subscribe to it, by keeping that always in your mind.
Suddenly, everything went haywire for Wo
lfe. Scott Fitzgerald had told a woman in Paris where he was, and she cabled the news to Aline Bernstein in America, who, in turn, began sending Wolfe letters and cables speaking of death and agony, and threatening to sail to Europe to find him. Then Wolfe’s English publisher, who had been sending Wolfe the excellent English reviews of Look Homeward, Aragel, wreaked disaster by also sending him the bad notices. They said things that Wolfe felt he could never forget. Frank Swinnerton in the London Evening News found the book “intolerable in his passages of ecstatic apostrophes,” full of “over-excited verbosity.” Gerald Gould in the Observer went farther to say, “I can see no reason why anybody should abstain from writing like that if he wants to write like that; I can see no reason why anybody should read the result.” Wolfe found the remarks “dirty, distorted, and full of mockery.” The book continued to sell, but he now considered the English edition a catastrophe.
“There is no life in this world worth living, there is no air worth breathing, there is nothing but agony and the drawing of the breath in nausea and labor, until I get the best of this tumult and sadness inside me,” Wolfe wrote John Hall Wheelock. Acting as though the disapproving second wave of critics had hardened him, he said that all he wanted from the book now was money—“enough to keep me until I get things straight again.”
Enraged, Wolfe could only see that Look Homeward, Angel had caused hate in his hometown, renewed malice among “literary tricksters in New York,” and mockery and abuse in Europe. “I hoped that that book, with all its imperfections would mark a beginning,” he wrote Wheelock; “instead it has marked an ending. Life is not worth the pounding I have taken both from public and private sources these last two years. But if there is some other life—and I am sure there is—I am going to have it.” Thomas Clayton Wolfe, not yet thirty, announced to Scribners: “I have stopped writing and do not want ever to write again.”
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