Two weeks later Perkins and Fitzgerald lunched together, just before Scott sailed back to Europe. He had seen his and Zelda’s families, and Max guessed that anticipating those two visits had pained Scott greatly. But this time Perkins found him very much his old self and enjoyed being with him. “And,” he wrote John Peale Bishop, “it made me think he had the resilience to stand almost anything and would come through well in the end.”
“The Jazz Age is over,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins in May, 1931, from Lausanne. “If Mark Sullivan [whose fifth volume of social history for Scribners, called Our Times, had brought him by now from the turn of the century to the end of the World War] is going on you might tell him I claim credit for naming it & that it extended from the suppression of the riots on May Day, 1919, to the crash of the stock market in 1929—almost exactly one decade.”
Perkins knew that Fitzgerald had coined that phrase and found Scott’s remarks worthy of more consideration than a passing reference in a collection of history books. He believed Scott should write at least an article about it, some kind of fresh reminiscence or even an elegy that would remind the public of his influence and, at the same time, fix a point in his mind from which he could begin a new phase of his career. Perkins passed his idea on to Fritz Dashiell at the magazine, who then wrote Fitzgerald, “There is no one more qualified to sound its knell.” Scott could not commit himself to the assignment, but he could not put it out of his mind.
Not until the end of August did he write to Max again. By then, Zelda had taken a turn for the better. After more than a year of psychotherapy in a sanitarium outside Geneva, and of periodic separations from Scott, her sporadic attacks of eczema and asthma, occasional irrationality and hysteria, were subdued. Her case was viewed as a “reaction to her feelings of inferiority primarily toward her husband.” For several weeks, Scott and Zelda were at peace with each other and talked eagerly of going home. She was well enough to leave her Swiss doctor, and Scott wrote Max that she was even writing “some amazing stuff.” Max received the article he had suggested—“Echoes of the Jazz Age”—four weeks before the Aquitania docked.
Fitzgerald’s essay aroused much discussion, not only because of the happy memories it evoked but also because of the author’s candor. That period seemed rosy and romantic to those who were young then, Fitzgerald said, “because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.”
For some months Perkins had been less than satisfied with Erskine Caldwell’s writing, feeling at times that his compact, evocative little stories carbon-copied some of Hemingway’s. But he had not quite written the author off.
Following Perkins’s first acceptance of his stories, Caldwell continued to write short pieces. Each was sent to Scribner’s Magazine via Perkins. The magazine editors did not think his writing was compatible with their readership, and none of the pieces was accepted until it reached the little magazines. After several months without a Scribner’s acceptance, Caldwell filled three suitcases with his unpublished poetry, stories, and sketches, went to a small cabin, and reread them all. The next morning he burned every page, along with his collection of rejection slips, many of which came from Perkins.
A few weeks after the bonfire Caldwell received a different kind of letter from Max Perkins. The editor had a new idea for getting Caldwell’s stories across to the public. He suggested that Caldwell group enough of his strongest stories to fill a book of 300 pages—half with New England settings, the rest with Southern locales—which might be brought out after the first of the year. Once the stories were typed, Caldwell went to New York, feeling bold enough to face Perkins. He took the same rackety elevator up to the fifth floor, but this time he did not retreat. He entered Perkins’s office and handed him the stories that would make up the book, American Earth. Caldwell recalled:Wearing a hat with a turned-up brim, which appeared to be at least a half a size too small for him, he sat down at his desk and slowly turned the pages of the manuscript for a quarter of an hour. No word was spoken while he sat there. At the end of that time, he got up smiling a little and moved stiffly around his office in new bright tan shoes, occasionally looking out his window at the traffic below, while he told of several incidents he recalled about life in Vermont when he was a youth.
After nearly an hour of reminiscing, sometimes seriously and often humorously, Perkins mentioned for the first time the manuscript Caldwell had brought in. All he said was that he would publish it.
American Earth came out in late April, 1931. The notices were mixed; most New York reviewers still approached Caldwell’s baldly told stories as though they smelled a bad odor. The book sold fewer than 1,000 copies. In a third attempt to get Caldwell’s career off the ground, at a time when publishers could ill afford taking such chances, Perkins asked Caldwell how he felt about writing a novel. Unbeknown to Max, the author had already finished a draft of one about Georgia backwoods people, Tobacco Road. By the summer he had revised and submitted it to Perkins.
Scribners published Tobacco Road in February, 1932, and it barely met Caldwell’s minuscule advance against royalties. The reviews were as unenthusiastic as they had been on his first published volume, but the author dug right into another novel. Autumn Hill was about a family living on a back-road farm in Maine. A month after Caldwell submitted it, Perkins wrote him “that we have decided against Autumn Hill, personally disappointing as it is to do.” Perkins was not shedding crocodile tears, as his letter went on to show:I believed in it, I wish to say, and still more in you; and I saw that it was given every kind of consideration. It was read by six people,—including those who necessarily consider more the business side of such questions, who in normal times would not have read it. The sales of American Earth and Tobacco Road were against it. The fact is that this depression compels a scrutiny of manuscript from the practical point of view such as never before required, and it is very hard when confronted by the figures to resist the practical arguments. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.
Perkins felt that he had no right to make suggestions about material he was rejecting, but it was a practice of his that had become habitual. In a postscript he mentioned—with some ambivalence—one or two points in the plot that he wished Caldwell would amend before submitting it to another publisher—all because “I want to see you succeed, as you ought to do.”
Caldwell’s literary agent was Maxim Lieber. Together they went to see Perkins in his office and had a long, friendly talk. Perkins said he hoped Caldwell would not want to find another publisher but would offer Scribners his next book, even though the option clause of their contract was now voided. The author was free to publish wherever he could, but he was willing to agree to show Perkins his next book. Before he had a chance to give his word on it, Lieber got Caldwell to leave the office with him. He liked the new novel, Lieber said; Caldwell liked it, and Max Perkins liked it. That could only mean that it was sure to find a publisher. If Scribners would not take it, they would find some house that would. Caldwell agreed.
“After knowing Max Perkins as long as I had,” Caldwell remembered, “it was disturbing to think that such a decision would mean I would no longer be in a position to call upon him for help and advice.” The next day, as he was walking up Fifth Avenue to the agent’s office, he halted at the corner of Forty-eighth Street and looked up at the fifth-floor windows. “After a while my eyes became blurred,” he recalled, “and when I finally walked away, I was thinking of how I could tell Max Lieber that I had changed my mind and did not wish him to find another publisher.” Upon Caldwell’s arrival at the agent’s office, Lieber told him that there were only a few minutes before their appointment with Harold Guinzburg and Marshall Best at the Viking Press. Caldwell wanted to stay and explain to Lieber his most recent change of heart, but Lieber was excitedly discussing the new prospects. Within the hour Guinzburg and Best were pointing out the advantages of a Viking agreement—this over a sumptuous lunch, which they had encouraged Caldwell to order without regard to c
ost. He could not help silently comparing this luxurious reception with the one and only time Maxwell Perkins had bought him a meal. It was at a lunch counter. Max had ordered for each of them— a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a glass of orange juice. The only comment Caldwell recalled Perkins’s making at the time was to the effect that “in Vermont the lean and hungry countenance of man was held in fearsome respect.”
Caldwell never figured out if it was the memory of the measly peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that turned the trick, but he was persuaded to submit his next three books to the Viking Press. They rejected Autumn Hill as Scribners had, but Caldwell began writing another novel set in the South—God’s Little Acre. According to the newly signed contract, Viking had first chance to read it. By the time it was published, an adaptation of Tobacco Road had been written for the stage, and it began a record-breaking run of more than seven years on Broadway. Caldwell’s career was to go on and on, but Scribners never published him again.
So long as he could keep his authors’ minds on writing, Max Perkins believed, they could all continue their careers and get through the Depression. In a letter to Hemingway, Perkins proposed his own brand of rugged individualism: “Maybe the present discouraging state will end by improving things for those who come through.”
Out in Montana, Hemingway was getting in some good writing on his bullfighting book—until November, 1930. On the evening of November 1 he was driving John Dos Passos back to Billings after ten days of hunting when the lights of an oncoming car sent Hemingway swerving into a ditch. Dos Passos climbed out of the overturned wreck unscathed. Hemingway’s right upper arm was broken in such a way that it had to be slung very close to his body, bandaged tightly to keep it from jostling. Hemingway facetiously suggested to Perkins that Scribners insure him against future accidents and disease, as there would be big money in it. It might even pay better than publishing his books. Since signing with Perkins he had had anthrax, a cut right eyeball, congestion of the kidney, cut index finger, gashed forehead, torn cheek, a branch speared through his leg, and now this broken arm. On the other hand, he noted that he had never once been constipated during that same period.
Ernest made up for his latest inactivity by directing Perkins to several prize authors he might sign up. Ford Madox Ford, a former collaborator of Joseph Conrad, had met Hemingway years before in Paris, when the former edited the transatlantic review. He was dissatisfied with his present publisher and wished Hemingway would suggest to Max Perkins that he wanted to change. “I don’t of course ask you to guarantee my selling powers or the like,” Ford told Hemingway, a generation younger than himself, “but you might just mention it.” Ford, for all his talent and influence, had not had a commercial success in twenty-five books. In forwarding his letter to Perkins, Hemingway enclosed an analysis of Ford’s work, a cycle in which “megalomania” and success “pee-ed away” would inevitably follow his periodic good works. Hemingway estimated that Ford was due for another fine book and thought a good publisher “would hold him steady.”
Perkins did not know what to do about Ford Madox Ford. He had liked the fat bear of a man since a casual meeting years earlier, and he especially liked his war novel, No More Parades. “But,” Max wrote Ernest, “in the first place I dare say he is a man with an eye to a big advance, and it is always difficult too, to take on an older writer who has been all about and has become exacting and who having changed so often will probably change again.” For Perkins, the great interest in publishing was still “to take on an author at the start or reasonably near it, and then to publish not this book and that, but the whole author.” One could then afford to lose on certain books because of the gains on others.
Despite his misgivings, Perkins invited Ford in and learned of his newest plan, a three-volume History of Our Own Time, from 1880 to the present. Perkins thought they might be able to consummate a deal to their mutual advantage, but Ford constantly neglected the history for other projects. Scribners ended instead with only one chapter of his reminiscences, Return to Yesterday, which the magazine published.
With far more enthusiasm, Hemingway sent Perkins a second suggestion later in the year. The poet Archibald MacLeish, whom he had also met in Paris, was unhappy with his present publisher, Houghton Mifflin. Usually Hemingway’s recommendations were out of charity toward the author, but his endorsement of MacLeish was based on great respect for him as a writer. He wrote that MacLeish was the best man Perkins could get as a poet at that time, for he had “come on steadily” while the others had stood still or retrogressed. Perkins had been “damn good” to Hemingway, and recommending MacLeish was the biggest favor he could do in return. Ernest said it would be a tragedy if Max did not sign him. After some correspondence with Perkins, and hearing a good deal more about him from both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, MacLeish said that he would let Scribners have the first refusal rights to his next book, but that it might not be done for a year or two. “I like his poetry immensely,” Max wrote Ernest.
Several months later Perkins read MacLeish’s long-awaited work, Coraquirtador. It was a lengthy narrative poem based on Cortez’s expedition to Mexico and emphasized the love of men for adventure. Perkins thought it was magnificent. But he doubted that Scribners could capture Conquistador because Houghton Mifflin was taking up the gauntlet. Scribners would offer satisfactory terms, but MacLeish found it difficult to accept them on account of his relationship with Robert Linscott, his old editor. Perkins chose not to push his interest in the book or even embarrass the poet about it. Because of MacLeish’s commitment to his editor he forbade Hemingway from intervening on Scribners’ behalf. “I am mighty sorry to see that poem go,” Perkins lamented to Hemingway, “for it is one of the kind of things that make publishing seem really worth being in.” (Years later Perkins took the same honorable position with Robert Frost, who had been published by Holt. Max and Jack Wheelock lunched-two or three times with the New Hampshire poet. When terms of a contract were about to be drawn up, Wheelock remembered, “Frost withdrew for fear of treating Holt shabbily. And Max felt that he could not force the issue.”) Hemingway got the news about MacLeish in Piggott, Arkansas, from the poet himself, who felt bad about acting as he had. Ernest realized how little luck he had had in getting writers for Perkins, but with what he had written on his bullfight book, Death in the Afternoon, he vaunted that there was really “no need to get any more Hemingsteins.” Ernest returned to Florida for the winter and waited for the bones in his writing arm to knit.
The 1930 congressional elections went right in every respect from Perkins’s point of view—especially in regard to Prohibition. It was finally becoming a “wet” legislature, and Max hoped it would get around to repealing the Volstead Act. Among the affiliations he listed in his latest Harvard alumni report was the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment, with himself as Director. But business, he wrote Ernest, “seems to get worse and worse all the time.” Max observed that “ever so many people have become so desperate that they think, or at least say, that the capitalist system is dissolving. But old Stalin thinks we shall get over it this time—and maybe one or two times more. And I hope by that time my daughters will all have married mechanics and engineers.”
After a lapse of more than a year, Max received a letter from Elizabeth Lemmon. Theirs was a relationship unaffected by time. Elizabeth had been too involved with her social life in Baltimore—she had many suitors —to write; Max had his work. But they still thought about each other often. “I had written you several times,” Max wrote her now, explaining, “Last July I carried a letter all addressed and stamped, in my pocket for a week; but then I tore it up.”
The next day he mailed her a newsy letter, mostly about his family. Max said he was not at all upset when his eldest daughter, Bertha, an excellent student at Smith College, flunked her first midyear exam, because he understood the circumstances. She had had two days to study for it but had not put in one minute; she had taken up Look Homeward, Angel instead and ha
d been able to do nothing else until she finished it. According to her, everyone at Smith was reading it, which Max thought was remarkable, because “it’s far more a man’s book.”
In early March Max’s brother-in-law Archibald Cox, to whom he was close, died, leaving seven children. The oldest, Archibald, Jr., was at Harvard considering a legal career; for a later generation he would come to symbolize certain Yankee virtues—artless decency, natural moral clarity, canniness that does not exploit advantage—that Max symbolized for those who knew him.
Max went south later in March, for what had become his annual Gulf Stream excursion. He found Ernest in good shape, except for his arm. Hemingway navigated the boat left-handed through the prow-slapping waters. With some elaborate rigging, he was able to fish, a sure sign to Max that he would be just as good as new. Perkins cruised with Hemingway and The Mob long enough to see the galley cleaned out of Ernest’s supply of Bermuda onions; but he thumbed a ride back to Key West on a passing sloop, leaving for New York before they got storm-bound again.
Back in port Hemingway was soon at work again, with both arms free and a renewed determination to outwrite everyone else in the world. In fact, vying against “living merchants” had become too easy. He wrote Perkins that he preferred to outdo the dead masters. They were really the only ones who provided much competition, though he admitted that William Faulkner was “damned good when good but often unnecessary.” Perkins agreed. For years Faulkner had been writing short stories and trying them on Scribner’s with what he called “unflagging optimism” and little success. “I am quite sure that I have no feeling for short stories; that I shall never be able to write them,” he admitted to the magazine staff. Faulkner seemed “crazy” to Perkins, who had just read his sensational novel Sanctuary and deemed it a “horrible book by a writer of great talent.” Because none of Faulkner’s books had commanded any kind of sale, Perkins thought this would be a good time to annex him to his list, but he did not act. John Hall Wheelock suggested that “Max didn’t follow through on Faulkner just then because he was afraid of arousing Hemingway’s jealousy.” Hemingway had recently expressed his confidence that Thomas Wolfe would write plenty of “swell books” for Perkins, and he still believed in Fitzgerald’s bedrock talent. But, Wheelock said, “in Hemingway’s mind, there was no more room in Max’s life for another power so threatening as William Faulkner. Hemingway’s was a mighty ego, and Max knew it.”
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