In May, Ernest went to Spain, where the newly organized Spanish Republic replaced the Carlist monarchy. Hemingway remained aloof from the political scene, working on the final chapters of his bullfight book.
That same month Douglas Southall Freeman invited the Perkinses to Richmond. This visit promised to be more social than Max’s last trip there because Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee was steadily advancing. He followed a strategy that Perkins had mapped especially for him, though it was sound advice for anyone writing in that category:You are not writing a study of Robert E. Lee, or a personal interpretation of him, but the first complete and perhaps the definitive, biography: a great feature of it is that it contains all the information pertinent, and that a great deal of this is new. This fact which is indisputable, must govern the character of the book.—It prevents you from any such freedom of imaginative interpretation, for instance, as Strachey allows himself. And it governs you in the matter of selecting, for you must put in everything, and not simply select what is valuable from some purely artistic or literary standpoint.
Perkins often pinpointed worthwhile themes for Freeman to develop, aspects of Lee’s life which, retold, would keep the work from being strictly archival. To make the book more than a lifeless commemorative monument, Perkins reminded Freeman,any personal incidents or anecdotes which showed him in action, or which showed him in contrast to others, and tended to explain how he came to be so admirable and controlled, would come as a relief to the prevailing tone of the narrative.
Two more years of the most methodical writing followed, and on January 19, 1933, Freeman wired Perkins, I AM VAIN ENOUGH TO BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL REJOICE WITH ME WHEN I TELL YOU I YESTERDAY COMPLETED THE TEXT OF THE LEE. ONLY LITERARY REVISION REMAINS. After twenty years on the project, Freeman’s four-volume biography was published. It had the extraordinary distinction of being praised by the critics, winning the Pulitzer Prize for biography, and becoming a best seller. The book had taken almost two years of editing, and in December, 1934, Freeman expressed his gratitude to Perkins: “This book would never have been finished but for the encouragement I received at your hands. Many a time, when composition was lagging, a word from you prodded me on.”
Freeman was already considering subjects to which he might devote the next ten years of his life. Perkins thought he could do a brilliant biography of Washington.
It is that in his case too, you would be writing largely a military life, and whatever else may be said about the Lee, the accounts of the campaigns, and battles, are I believe, excelled by no other writer on military matters. I thought this when I first read the ms., and now we know that authorities think it. The clarity and intensity with which these campaigns are described makes most fascinating reading, and most enlightening. Of course in Washington’s case, the military strategy would be much less complicated, but I do not think that the Revolutionary campaigns are even as well understood as the Civil War ones, and I think you would handle them magnificently, and that all your study of war for the Lee and previous to that, would be of great advantage to you.
Upon making his recommendation, Perkins turned Freeman over to Wallace Meyer, who had played a major role in editing the Lee. Freeman went on to write Lee’s Lieutenants before getting to his seven-volume life of Washington, the final installment of which he did not live to complete.
Geographically, at this time, nothing more than the East River separated Max from Tom Wolfe, but they communicated mainly through the mail and saw each other only when Wolfe’s work schedule permitted. In August, 1931, Perkins thought they should get together, at least to discuss the possible publication date of Wolfe’s novel. Perkins wrote to him in Brooklyn, “You ought to make every conceivable effort to have your manuscript completely finished by the end of September. I meant to speak of this when we were last together. I hope you will come in soon and tell me what you think you can do.”
“I know you are not joking and that you mean this September, and not September four, five, or fifteen years from now,” Wolfe replied. “Well, there is no remote or possible chance that I will have a completed manuscript of anything that resembles a book this September, and whether I have anything that I would be willing to show anyone next September, or any succeeding one for the next 150 years, is at present a matter of the extremest and most painful doubt to me.”
Tom said he regretted destroying Perkins’s belief in him almost as much as he feared failing himself. But Wolfe said he did not “care one good Goddamn of a drunken sailor’s curse whether I have disappointed the world of bilge-and-hogwash writers or any of the other literary rubbish of sniffers, whiffers, and puny, poisonous apes.” The only thing Wolfe cared about now was whether he had enough faith and power left that would justify his going on. He wrote to Perkins that “no one can take anything from me now that I value, they can have their cheap, nauseous, seven-day notoriety back to give to other fools, but I am perfectly content to return to the obscurity in which I passed almost thirty years of my life without any great difficulty.” He had no desire to cling to his “stinking remnant of a rotten fish” of a manuscript; but, he wrote Perkins, if anyone wanted to know when he would have a new book out, he would answer without apology, “When I have finished writing one and found someone who wants to publish it.”
Wolfe’s most fluent channel of expression was the written word. (In fact, he stammered when he was excited.) And so, at great length, he wrote Perkins exactly what was on his mind more intimately than he could by talking to him in person. Wolfe wanted to tell Perkins finally that he was in doubt about his book but not despair. “I felt if my life and strength kept up, if my vitality moved in every page, if I followed it through to the end,” he wrote Perkins, “it would be a wonderful book—but I doubted then that life was long enough, it seemed to me it would take ten books, that it would be the longest ever written. Then, instead of paucity, I had abundance—such abundance that my hand was palsied, my brain weary—and in addition, as I go on, I want to write about everything and say all that can be said about each particular. The vast freightage of my years of hunger, my prodigies of reading, my infinite store of memories, my hundreds of books of notes, return to drown me—sometimes I feel as if I shall compass and devour them, again be devoured by them. I had an immense book, and I wanted to say it all at once: it can’t be done.
Wolfe was putting his story down like a mosaic, tile by tile. He hoped each piece would be a complete story while it made up the whole plan. The newest section had become a big book in itself and was for the first time straight in his head to the minutest detail. He wrote Perkins, “It is a part of my whole scheme of books as a small river flows into a big one.”
In getting them all published, Wolfe said he understood that he was not bound to Scribners by any sort of contract. None was offered him, nor had he taken money that was not his own. The only bond Wolfe was conscious of was one of friendship and loyalty to Max Perkins’s house. He wanted to remain both Perkins’s friend and author, but he believed those were honors he had to earn. He still felt so beholden to Perkins for his contribution to Look Homeward, Angel that he did not want to accept anything more from him until he had reimbursed him for that much. And so he said the best way to leave things between them was with the “coast clear”—without debits or entanglements. “If I ever write anything else that I think worth printing, or that your house might be interested in,” he wrote Perkins, “I will bring it to you, and you can read it, accept it or reject it with the same freedom as with the first book. I ask no more from anyone.”
Wolfe saw what happened to so many writers in what they were already calling “the twenties.” He wanted to have nothing to do with those “nasty, ginny, drunken, jealous, fake-Bohemian little lives.” He saw how the literary establishment kicked these men out, after tainting and corrupting them, and brought in another set which they called “the younger writers,” among whose names Tom had seen his own included. Wolfe would not be billed like some prizefighter, he said.
“The only standard I will compete against now is in me: if I can’t reach it, I’ll quit.”
I’m out of the game—and it is a game, a racket [Wolfe wrote Perkins]. What I do now must be for myself. I don’t care who “gets ahead” of me—that game isn’t worth a good goddamn: I only care if I have disappointed you, but it’s very much my own funeral, too.
When Tom Wolfe was a boy, he said, he used to call someone he looked up to a “high-class gentleman.” “That’s the way I feel about you,” he wrote Perkins. “I don’t think I am one—not the way you are, by birth, by gentleness, by natural and delicate kindness. But if I have understood some of the things you have said to me, I believe you think the most living and beautiful thing on this earth is art, and that the finest and most valuable life is that of the artist. I think so, too: I don’t know whether I have it in me to live that life, but if I have, then I think I would have something that would be worth your friendship.”
XI
Lamentations
The most recent addition to Maxwell Perkins’s list of desperate friends was Ring Lardner. At the beginning of 1931 he was laid up with what appeared to be the effects of excessive overworking, smoking, and drinking. “I guess I am paying for my past,” Ring wrote Max in a short letter that was devoid of the usual wisecracks, “and I’m not averaging more than four short stories a year. None of the recent ones has been anything to boast of and I’m afraid there won’t be enough decent ones to print by fall.” Perkins believed Lardner had followed the “will o‘ the wisp of the theatre” at the expense of his real writing, though he never accused him of that. He did tell him that he wished he would take a year off from the Broadway high life to live quietly and write a novel. “Spring is not so far off now,” Max wrote him, “and that always, I find, brings a man up a good many notches.”
Spring came and went, and Lardner weakened. By fall, Perkins finally perceived that a recurrence of the tuberculosis that had attacked Ring years earlier was sapping his strength. For a while Ring picked up some money writing a “daily wire” for several newspapers, but it was not enough. His royalties had dwindled—Round Up had soared to 100,000 copies, but sales now had dropped—and his overall income had declined alarmingly. His wife, Ellis, summed up their situation for Perkins: “Ring has not been able to do any work for five months and the Lardners are pretty hard up.” As the new financial administrator of the family, she asked Scribners for the $208.93 in royalties that would be due in December. Perkins had the check sent immediately, knowing it would salve the difficulties, not solve them. Apparently the only cure for Ring’s condition was rest. Max knew it was hard to rest when money was such a worry. Discouraged by Ring’s lack of improvement and also by what she had heard of the Fitzgeralds in recent years, Ellis Lardner asked Perkins, “Do you suppose there is anyone left in the world who is well physically, mentally, and financially?”
Six years had passed since The Great Gatsby was published. In the last two years Fitzgerald had hardly put pencil to paper. Certainly the major factor in his lack of progress during that time had been his wife’s illness. By the fall of 1931 they had bought a Stutz car and settled into an oversized house in Montgomery, Alabama, to pick up the pieces of their lives. Scott wrote Perkins that there was, in fact, no talk of Depression in Montgomery; it seemed to have passed the city by, just as the boom did before it. After a while, however, Fitzgerald found the city’s slow pace killing. The thought of each passing day dimming his fame kept him awake nights.
In November Scott packed his bags and left abruptly for Hollywood. He was gone eight weeks, working on a film treatment at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In his absence, Zelda became absorbed in writing her own fiction. Scott came back to his wife and child in Alabama $6,000 ahead and full of material to write about for years to come. “At last,” he wrote Perkins, “for the first time in two years and ½ I am going to spend five consecutive months on my novel.” His new plan called for taking what was good in what he had already written and adding 41,000 words to it. “Don’t tell Ernest or anyone,” he requested of his editor; “—let them think what they want—you’re the only one whose ever consistently felt faith in me anyhow.”
For months Fitzgerald drafted chronological charts, lists, outlines, and character studies for the book—then called The Drunkard’s Holiday— thinking out every detail beforehand so that this time he would not trip up once he started writing. “The novel should do this,” Fitzgerald wrote at the top of his master “General Plan”:Show a man who is a natural idealist, a spoiled priest going in for various causes to the ideas of the haute Burgoise [sic], and in his rise to the top of the social world losing his idealism, his talent and turning to drink and dissipation. Background one in which the liesure class is at their truly most brilliant & glamorous such as Murphys.
The hero, named Dick, is a psychiatrist who falls in love with one of his patients, Nicole, most of whose case history was lifted from Zelda’s hospital folders. In time the story would shed the political-economic notions Fitzgerald had in mind and take on spiritual and psychological aspects. The young doctor would expend all his vitality until he would be left emotionally bankrupt, an “homme épuisé”; thus the novel would reflect all the inner torment Fitzgerald felt had been draining him for most of the last decade.
Shortly after Scott’s arrival in Montgomery, where he began marshaling this new version of the book, Zelda’s asthma and her telltale blotches of eczema reappeared. Within days her behavior retrogressed to what it had been in Switzerland. In February, 1932, Scott brought Zelda to the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Her mood improved once he went back to Alabama—to the point where she was able to take a major step. Ever since her ballet career had ended, writing fiction had become an effective therapy for Zelda; she felt a sense of accomplishment every time she finished a story on her own. Max knew this, but he was nevertheless surprised to receive a letter from her in March which announced: “Under separate cover, as I believe is the professional phraseology, I have mailed you my first novel.” It was a full-length work entitled Save Me the Waltz. Zelda had written it in six weeks while at Phipps. “Scott being absorbed in his own has not seen it,” she wrote Perkins, “so I am completely in the dark as to its possible merits, but naturally terribly anxious that you should like it.... If the thing is too wild for your purposes, might I ask what you suggest? Presuming, I realize, on your friendship to an unwarranted extent.”
Perkins was perplexed. From the beginning, the manuscript had a slightly deranged quality which gave him the impression that the author had had difficulty in separating fiction from reality. Highly charged images, often with little connection to one another, crowded the prose. The plot seemed to reflect, often in a distorted fun-house-mirror style of exaggeration, Scott’s early writing about their life together. Save Me the Waltz was the story of Alabama Beggs, a Montgomery judge’s daughter who married a handsome, promising artist she met during the war; through his early triumphs, she found herself unhappy and unfulfilled and started up a ballet career. Zelda had named the artist Amory Blaine, the protagonist of This Side of Paradise.
Within the week Zelda wired Perkins: ACTING ON SCOTTS ADVICE WILL YOU RETURN MANUSCRIPT PHIPPS CLINIC JOHNS HOPKINS WITH MANY THANKS REGRETS AND REGARDS. Fitzgerald had at last heard about the manuscript and wanted to read it himself before Max did. Perkins complied, writing: HAD READ ABOUT 60 PAGES WITH GREAT INTEREST VERY LIVE AND MOVING HOPE YOU WILL RETURN IT.
Perkins wrote Hemingway about the novel. “It looked as if there were a great deal that was good in it,” he said, “but it seemed rather as though it somewhat dated back to the days of The Beautiful and Damned. And of course it would not do at all the way it was, with Amory Blaine. It would have been mighty rough on Scott.... I think the novel will be quite a good one when she finishes it.”
Scott interrupted his own novel to confer with Zelda, then wrote Max that the entire middle section of her book would have to be
“radically rewritten.” The name of the artist, he said, would of course be changed. But Scott’s objections, in truth, went beyond the qualities of the manuscript itself. He was furious with Zelda. It was not just that she had sent the manuscript to Perkins before showing it to him, as if going behind his back. It was also that he soon realized how much use she had made of incidents from their life together—the rich material he had been too busy to use in the last few years because he had had to write cheaper stories to pay Zelda’s doctor bills.
In trying to placate Scott, Zelda all but threw herself at his feet. In a breast-beating letter she wrote, “Scott, I love you more than anything on earth and if you were offended I am miserable.” She knew what she had done: “I was ... afraid we might have touched the same material.” But she explained: “Purposely I didn’t [send my book to you before I mailed it to Max]—knowing that you were working on your own and honestly feeling that I had no right to interrupt you to ask for a serious opinion. Also, I know Max will not want it and I prefer to do the corrections after having his opinion.... So, Dear, My Own, please realize that it was not from any sense of not turning first to you—but time and other ill-regulated elements that made me so bombastic about Max.”
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