After Wolfe made his proclamation to Scribners, he started to compose a personal message to Maxwell Perkins: “We create the figure of our father, and we create the figure of our enemy,” he wrote in a letter that he never finished. Without asking him directly, he prayed for Perkins’s support against this mysterious opposition, for at least a clear statement of his position. “Send me your friendship or send me your final disbelief,” Tom wrote, then stashed it away with hundreds of other pages that would not be read until after his death.
Wolfe decided to remain completely alone for some time to come. Contrary to his deepest desires, he believed he had to end the relationship with his editor. He sent Perkins from Geneva a formal note in which he asked for a financial statement and said, “I shall not write any more books and since I must begin to make other plans for the future, I should like to know how much money I will have. I want to thank you and Scribners for your kindness to me, and I shall hope someday to resume and continue a friendship which has meant a great deal to me.”
“If I really believed you would be able to stand by your decision, your letter would be a great blow to me,” Perkins responded on August 28, 1930. “If anyone were ever destined to write, that one is you.” Notwithstanding, Perkins tallied Wolfe’s royalty statement as requested and sent it. He tried to put the few negative comments from the critics in perspective, then added, “For Heaven’s sake, write me again.” He was unwilling to accept Wolfe’s decision to quit writing; he found it impossible to believe. But as time passed without a change of heart from Wolfe, Perkins grew fearful that Wolfe had really meant what he said. Seeing ten free days before the fall book season, he went to Windsor to calm his unrest over Wolfe’s silence.
Max returned from Vermont no less anxious about Thomas Wolfe than when he left. There was still no word from him. “I could not clearly make out why you had come to your decision,” Perkins wrote in a second letter, “and surely you will have to change it;—but certainly there never was a man who had made more of an impression on the best judges with a single book, and at so early an age. Certainly you ought not to be affected by a few unfavorable reviews—even apart from the overwhelming number of extremely and excitedly enthusiastic reviews.”
Wolfe’s silence continued, but Perkins persisted, hoping that one of his letters might move him. “You know,” he wrote, “it has been said before that one has to pay somehow for everything one has or gets, and I can see that among your penalties are attacks of despair, as they have been among the penalties great writers have generally had to pay for their talent.” Max added, “if you do not write me some good news soon, I shall have to start out on a spying expedition myself.” After four weeks of concern, Perkins received a radiogram from Freiburg, Germany: WORKING AGAIN. EXCUSE LETTER. WRITING YOU.
Two more weeks passed in silence. Waiting for the reassuring follow-up letter, Perkins wrote Wolfe again. When none came, he worried as before. “For Heaven’s sake send us some word,” Perkins implored. He wished Tom would come home to America but was willing to settle for a postcard. Another cabled plea from Perkins elicited no response.
On October 14, 1930, two months after he had quit as a writer, Thomas Wolfe wired Perkins from London: ESTABLISHED SMALL FLAT HERE ALONE IN HOUSE OLD WOMAN LOOKING AFTER ME SEEING NO ONE BELIEVE BOOK FINALLY COMING EXCITED TOO EARLY TO SAY LETTER FOLLOWS FAITHFULLY.
X
Mentor
Exhausted after working on his book for two solid months, Thomas Wolfe left England to ring out 1930 in Paris. He refreshed himself by gorging on food and drink, but he had not crossed the Channel to socialize. For a few days he remained alone, trying to catch up on sleep and correspondence. In an unsent draft of a letter to Perkins (a briefer version of which he mailed later) he considered the turn his writing was taking. He pondered the fact that “no one has ever written a book about America,” and he came up with the intention to write one that might contain all the things every American felt but never said. “It may be grandiose and pompous for me to think I can [write it],” Wolfe said, “but for God’s sake let me try.”
For over a year Wolfe had been carrying in his head Perkins’s idea for a book. He did not want Max to think he was giving up anything that he wanted to do, but as Wolfe explained, “I had this vast amount of material, and what you said began to give shape to it.” At the same time Wolfe recalled the myth of Antaeus, the gigantic wrestler whose strength was invincible so long as he touched the earth. In a long letter which he wrote through the night back in London and did mail to Perkins, Wolfe announced that his book had a new title which was both “good and beautiful”—The October Fair or Time and the River: A Vision.
Wolfe sent Perkins a record of the book’s growth, showing how the editor’s passing comment in Central Park had snowballed in the author’s mind to encompass not only the valley of Asheville but also the heights of Olympus. “Thank God, I have begun to create in the way I want to,” he wrote Perkins, “it is more autobiographic than anything I ever thought of ... but it is also completely fictitious.” Wolfe said, “The idea that hangs over the book from first to last is that every man is searching for his father.”
Already the book was immensely long, as it was bound to be, because Wolfe’s mind never failed to visualize the cosmic implications of everyday occurrences. “My conviction is that a native has the whole consciousness of his people and nation in him: that he knows everything about it, every sight sound and memory of the people,” he declared to Perkins. “I know now past any denial, that that is what being an American or being anything means:It is not a government, or the Revolutionary War, or the Monroe Doctrine, it is the ten million seconds and moments of your life—the shapes you see, the sounds you hear, the food you eat, the colour and texture of the earth you live in—I tell you this is what it is, and this is what homesickness is, and by God I’m the world’s champion authority on the subject at present.
Wolfe crammed one of his letters that December with names that told the story of America in themselves—American states, American Indian tribes, American railways, American millionaires, American hoboes, American rivers. Tom felt that he had told Perkins too much and yet too little. But Max should not worry: “It’s not anarchy, it’s a perfectly unified but enormous plan,” he said. “I want to come home when I know I have this thing by the well-known balls.” Until then, he asked Perkins to write him if he thought all this was a good idea, without saying anything about it to anyone else. “If I’ve talked foolishness,” he wrote, “I’d rather keep it between us.”
In wishing Perkins a joyful Christmas, Wolfe said, “My own is not as happy as last year’s, but by God, I believe I thrive on adversity, I am not going to be beaten because I won’t be beaten—Now is the time to see what is in me.” Even though Wolfe’s letters did not sound happy, Perkins was delighted to receive them. There was much that he did not understand, but, he told Tom, “Every time you write about the book, I get as excited as I did when I began ‘The Angel.’ I wish to thunder you would come back with the ms.”
By early January, 1931, Wolfe was “simply living with the book.” He was determined to work on it abroad until he could write no more, which he figured would be in another six weeks; then he would return to America. “When I get back I want to see you and go to that speak-easy again,” he wrote Max, “—but I’m not going to see anyone else: I mean this; otherwise, I’m done for—no parties, no going out, no literary people —nothing but obscurity and work. I shall never be a damned literary-party monkey again. I’m a poor dumb simple bloke—but I will not fail you!” In his flat at Number 15 Ebury Street, Wolfe thought often of Perkins. When he was feeling loneliest, he recalled when he and Max used to go to “Louis and Armand‘s” and have a few drinks of the strong gin they served, then ravenously tear into their thick steaks. Later they would tramp all over New York or ride the ferry to Staten Island. “To me,” Tom wrote Max, “that is joy; you are a little older and more restrained but I think you had a good time,
too.”
Tom now had an increasing need to involve Maxwell Perkins in his life as well as his work. The two men could no longer be separated, nor did they wish to be. More and more Wolfe was becoming the son Perkins never had.
For months Wolfe had been haunted by hallucinations, until he verged on physical and mental illness. “I hear strange sounds and noises from my youth, and from America. I hear the million strange and secret sands of time,” he wrote Perkins. At last Tom recognized that he needed help, and he asked Max for it. First, he wanted him to find him a quiet place near Manhattan where he could live and work in almost complete isolation for at least three months. During that period he wanted to talk to Perkins whenever Max had the time for it. Finally, Wolfe asked Perkins’s help in easing one of the great agonies of his life.
I am not asking you to cure me of my sickness, because you can’t do that. I must do it myself, but I am very earnestly asking you to help me to do certain things that will make my cure easier and less painful.
For the first time, Tom described his torment over Aline Bernstein to Perkins, in almost clinical detail:When I was 24 years old I met a woman who was almost forty and I fell in love with her. I cannot tell you here the long and complicated story of my relations with this woman—they extended over a period of five years ... at first I was a young fellow who had got an elegant and fashionable woman for a mistress; and I was pleased about it; then without knowing how, when, or why, I was desperately in love with the woman, then the thought of her began to possess and dominate every moment of my life. I wanted to own, possess, and devour her; I became instantly jealous; I began to get horribly sick inside, and then all physical love and desire ended completely—but I still loved the woman. I could not endure her loving anyone else or having physical relations with anyone else, and my madness and jealousy ate at me like a poison—like all horrible sterility and barrenness.
Wolfe said he had not wanted to make this trip to Europe but had yielded to what friends wanted for her. He wrote her from the boat that took him from her, but he had not communicated with her since. During the first five months of their separation she had sent a string of messages. Snatches of them read:DEAREST LOVE
HELP ME TOM
WHY HAVE YOU DESERTED YOUR FRIEND PAIN I BEAR TOO GREAT IMPOSSIBLE TO CONTINUE LIFE COMPLETELY PARTED FROM YOU
HEART HEAVY NO WORD FROM YOU LOVE ALINE
Her letters tormented Wolfe, for she sometimes signed them in her blood. Then Wolfe received another cable which read: LIFE IMPOSSIBLE NO WORD FROM YOU ARE YOU WILLING TO ACCEPT CONSEQUENCES DESPERATE. For a few days he thought he would go mad, but he neither wrote nor cabled. “Each day I would go for mail in the most horrible state of nerves, wondering if I should see some cable which carried the dreaded news,” he wrote Perkins. “I longed for NO news, and I hoped for some news—but nothing came, and that was almost worse than ever.” He imagined that she had killed herself and that her embittered, grief-stricken loved ones were saying nothing to him. He combed the obituaries in the American newspapers until one day he found her name—not among the death notices but on the theatrical page. He read an account of a great artistic success Aline Bernstein had scored. Later, Wolfe met a man who asked if he knew her and said that he had seen her looking radiant at a party in New York only a short time earlier.
In the final weeks of 1930 her pleas began again. There had been two months of silence during her theatrical triumph, but once her success had worn off, her pain was reborn, and again Wolfe was the cause. She wrote in despondency, “Hold out your hand to me in my hour of need. Impossible to face New Year. I stood by you in bad years, why have you destroyed me? I love you and am faithful until death, pain I bear too great to endure.” Eight or ten times she signaled in distress. Wolfe cabled back, asking if it was fair to send such messages when he was alone in a foreign land trying to write.
“You may wonder why I come to you with this,” Wolfe wrote Perkins; “my answer is that if I cannot come to you with it, there is no one in the world I can come to.” He tried to destroy the pain by detailing it: the pain in the pit of his stomach from the moment he awoke, the feelings of nausea and horror that he carried all day long, until he vomited from physical sickness at night. For the past three months Tom had remained in the same place and had written over 100,000 words of his book. “I am a brave man, and I like myself for what I did here,” he wrote Perkins from London, “and I hope you like me too, for I honor and respect you, and believe you can help me to save myself.” But Tom wanted to save more than that: His “utter and absolute belief in love and human excellence” was also at stake. “No matter what breach of faith, truth, or honesty this woman may be guilty of,” Wolfe said, “I want to come out of this thing with a feeling of love and belief in her ... [because] there is the most enormous beauty and loveliness in her yet.”
“I must not die. But I need help—such help as a man may hope to receive from a friend,” he wrote Perkins. “I turn to you because I feel health and sanity and fortitude in you.... [If] you understand my trouble,” he wrote, “say simply that you do, and that you will try to help me.” Max had once remarked that Wolfe’s letters from Europe sounded “unhappy.” Wolfe hoped he had at last made the reason plain.
“I’ll do anything you ask of me,” Perkins replied, “and any reluctance will come only from lack of confidence to do good. But I should be glad that you did feel you wanted to ask me.” Perkins already looked forward to Wolfe’s return and hoped he would be in New York in the summer because, he admitted, “I’m generally horribly lonely. There are people enough, but none I care really to see. I’ll count on some of your company, anyway....
“I had gathered that things were bad in some such way, but not that they were so bad as they are,” Perkins continued, addressing himself to the heart of Wolfe’s problem. “Heaven knows how it would go with me in such a situation, but may you get strength somewhere to stick it out.... I wish I’d been through the like of it. Then I could preach.” He was certain that Tom had taken the best course in going away.
As for me, I can only feel angry with her [he wrote of Aline Bernstein]. She may be really fine, but there is an egotism in women beyond any known in men, and they infuriate me. But I know I am prejudiced against them. Did any one of them ever admit she was in the wrong about anything ? I know you’ve been in hell. I’m no good at suffering myself and so it’s hard to encourage others to it. But I’m dead sure you’ve done right and you must stand it for the sake of everything if you can.
The only consolation Perkins could offer Wolfe was in listening to his grief; his only succor was bromidic advice about sticking to his work. Beyond that he could do little more than write, “My great hope is someday to see you walk in with a ms. two or three feet thick.” At the end of February, 1931, Wolfe cabled Perkins: SAILING EUROPA THURSDAY NEED NO HELP NOW CAN HELP MYSELF MUST WORK SIX MONTHS ALONE BEST WISHES.
Aline Bernstein had been flirting with suicide. After reading in the newspaper of Wolfe’s return on the S. S. Europa, she swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and had to be rushed to the hospital. “Apparently to love you as I do is an insanity,” she wrote Tom; “—I am having a great fight in myself. The way I love you will never stop, but I know now that you will no longer have me nor hold me near.” Temporarily withdrawing but not surrendering, Aline said she had one favor to ask. She wanted to see Wolfe’s new book before it was published. Mrs. Bernstein understood his method and realized that he was about to write of the years when she entered his life. She wanted at least a voice in what went into print. If Wolfe was reluctant to comply, she suggested allowing his Mr. Perkins to mediate.
Wolfe was busy settling into 40 Verandah Place in Brooklyn and preparing his material to show Perkins. I MUST COME THROUGH NOW OR EVERYTHING IS LOST, he wired Aline; HELP ME BY BEING HEALTHY AND HAPPY AND MY DEAR FRIEND. LOVE.
Perkins saw Wolfe only a few times upon his return, and then they talked more about his personal life than about his writing
. Wolfe was desperate. Mrs. Bernstein was doing everything in her power to persuade Tom to come back to her. “We live in a crazy world, here it is a sin, in the eyes of ninety-nine people out of a hundred, that I love you,” she wrote him. “But money grabbing is not such a sin.” After visiting Tom’s apartment one day, she threw a $100 bill over the Brooklyn Bridge, thinking, “If they cannot understand how I love you, here is something to appease the Gods your people worship.” Max, never having had any trouble of the sort Wolfe was in, did not think he was doing him much good, but he listened patiently. Only with Elizabeth Lemmon did he even suggest the matter, obliquely at that. “I cannot bear to hear any more troubles,” he wrote her. “Everyone seems to be in trouble. Nothing and no one seems any longer to be sane and healthy.”
Within weeks of Wolfe’s voyage home, Scott Fitzgerald’s father died. Scott too, like Wolfe, had been in trouble all year, trying to find time to complete his novel, which he was calling “the encyclopedia,” and to pay off his “national debt” of $10,000 to Scribners. When word of the death came he was in Gstaad trying to recover from a “shaky” time of big-money writing for the Post. Now he rushed back, heading for Baltimore. Perkins saw him in New York for fifteen minutes and got terribly depressed. “He is very greatly changed,” Max reported to Hemingway. “He looks older, but it is more that he has lost, at least temporarily, all of the elan that was so characteristic. But he may be all the better for it because you feel at bottom he is a very real person now.” Zelda was still in “mighty bad shape.”
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