Fitzgerald had left Alabama on March 30 to be near his wife in Baltimore. In May he reported to Max, “Zelda’s novel is now good. Improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it.... I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think.” In the middle of the month, when he mailed the manuscript to Perkins for a second reading, he noted that it had the faults and virtues of any first novel.
It is more the expression of a powerful personality, like Look Homeward, Angel, than the work of a finished artist like Ernest Hemingway. It should interest the many thousands in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell.
At first, when Scott had feared that unrestrained congratulations might encourage the incipient egomania Zelda’s doctors had observed, he had written Perkins:If she has a success coming she must associate it with work done in a workmanlike manner for its own sake, & part of it done fatigued and uninspired, part of it done when even to remember the original inspiration and impetus is a psychological trick. She is not twenty-one and she is not strong, and she must not try to follow the pattern of my trail which is of course blazed distinctly on her mind.
Now he felt she deserved whatever praise Max cared to give her. She had put all her effort into the book. After first refusing to revise at all, she had reworked it completely, “changing what was a rather flashy and self-justifying ‘true confessions’ that wasn’t worthy of her into an honest piece of work.”
Perkins stashed the manuscript into his scuffed briefcase for the weekend. HAD A GRAND SUNDAY READING YOUR NOVEL THINK IT VERY UNUSUAL AND AT TIMES DEEPLY MOVING PARTICULARLY DANCING PART DELIGHTED TO PUBLISH, he wired on Monday. Later that day he wrote the author of her book, “It is alive from beginning to end.” Max hoped Zelda would consider some timid suggestions, mostly stylistic matters. As in her earlier short stories, she often ran astray chasing down metaphors:Many of them are brilliant [Perkins wrote her], but I almost think ... that they would be more effective if less numerous. And sometimes they seem to me to be too bold and interesting because then they have the effect of concentrating attention upon them for their own sake instead of for the illumination of the things they are meant to reveal.
Zelda was thrilled. “To catalogue my various excitements and satisfaction that you liked my book would be an old story to you,” she wrote Perkins. “It seems so amazing to me that you are going to actually publish it that I feel I should warn you that it’s probably a very mediocre affair that will soon be as out of date as a Nineteen Four Spalding prospectus for Lawn Tennis. My God, the ink will fade, maybe you’ll discover that it doesn’t make sense. It couldn’t be possible that I was an author.” She agreed to change any “questionable parts,” but Perkins found Save Me the Waltz, strangely enough, virtually beyond editing. The entire manuscript was honeycombed with some of the most flowery language he had ever seen. Her similes flowed naturally if not always sensibly, sometimes dozens of them on a single page. In describing the boatloads of Americans who wandered around France in the late twenties, for example, Zelda wrote:They ordered Veronese pastry on lawns like lace curtains at Versailles and chicken and hazlenuts at Fountainebleau where the woods wore powdered wigs. Discs of umbrellas poured over surburban terraces with the smooth round ebullience of a Chopin waltz. They sat in the distance under the lugubrious dripping elms, elms like maps of Europe, elms frayed at the end like bits of chartreuse wool, elms heavy and bunchy as sour grapes. They ordered the weather with a continental appetite, and listened to the centaur complain about the price of hoofs.
Hardly a character, emotion, or scene was not adorned with her grandiloquence. But that was the very quality that distinguished her writing, just as it enlivened her speech. For the most part, Perkins benignly neglected the problem and chose to let it appear in public as it was, to live or die on its own.
Under her husband’s eye, Zelda revised the galley proofs considerably. The book was shortened, mostly by filing down the accounts of their marital jags. During the next few months proofs were shuttled around so hectically from Perkins to the author to the typesetter, to Perkins, back to the author, and back to the typesetter—that it seemed at last that everyone, exhausted, had just quit, as if to avoid another mailing. Max thought of warning the Fitzgeralds they would have to pay for the excessive corrections, but he knew they wanted the book the way they thought it should be, regardless of cost. Ultimately, countless misspellings, unclear passages, and most of the rococo language found their way into print. Impressed with the bulk of her book once it was bound, Zelda wrote Max, “I only hope it will be as satisfactory to you as it is to me.”
The Fitzgeralds’ marriage worked like a seesaw. In the spring of 1932, while Zelda was high with expectations for her book, Scott was feeling low. He was torn from his past but unattached to any future. “I don’t know exactly what I shall do,” he wrote Perkins de profundis. “Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone.” In his relentless search for a home that might make him feel part of a permanent and grand life, the Fitzgeralds settled into La Paix, a stolidly Victorian house on some Maryland acreage belonging to a family named Turnbull. “We have a soft shady place here that’s like a paintless playhouse abandoned when the family grew up,” Zelda wrote Perkins. Max hoped the peaceful surroundings would compel the Fitzgeralds to live quietly. And, he wrote Hemingway, “if Zelda can only begin to make money, and she might well do it, they ought to get into a good position where Scott can write.”
That year, while Scott was still down, there was a most unusual switching of roles between editor and author, the first and last in their entire correspondence. Fitzgerald had sensed that Perkins was not quite himself, almost lethargic, heavily overburdened. “For God’s sake take your vacation this winter,” Scott urged. “Nobody could quite ruin the house in your absence, or would dare to take any important steps. Give them a chance to see how much they depend on you & when you come back cut off an empty head or two.”
Unknown to almost everyone outside the Perkins house, Max had been greatly worried about the mysterious illness of one of his daughters, Bertha. She had been in a car accident and walked away unharmed physically, but she had then blacked out for the next eighteen hours. Max was absolutely desperate about his daughter’s undiagnosed condition, which induced periodic convulsions. He disclosed the situation to Scott, who time and again volunteered to discuss the case, for he had, he said, become “such a blend of the scientific and the layman’s attitude on such subjects that I could be more help than anyone you could think of.” Zelda was equally solicitous. She had always been drawn toward the sickest patients in the asylums she stayed in.
“I have still got a few purgatories to get through,” Max wrote Zelda that June. “But a month from now I ought to be out of some of the thickest of the woods that I have been in.”
Thomas Wolfe was aware of the change in Perkins too. He believed his editor “would give his life to keep or increase virtue—to save the savable, to grow the growable, to cure the curable, to keep the good. But for the thing unsavable, for life ungrowable, for the ill incurable, he had no care. Things lost in nature hold no interest for him.” If his daughter could not be cured, Wolfe believed, Perkins would not have worried much; but circumstances being what they were, Tom observed Max growing haggard-eyed and thinner, overworking himself at the office to distract himself from grimness at home. Wolfe himself provided Perkins with more than enough to keep his mind on editorial problems.
Wolfe had kept very much to himself for most of the last few months. He had left his apartment on Verandah Place, where he had produced a tremendous volume of work, for another cycle of writing at 111 Columbia Heights, also in Brooklyn. The tools of his trade remained the same wherever he worked: pencils, paper, floor space—and a refrigerator. Max once told a student of Wolfe’s writing how all four elements were basic to his composition:Mr. Wolfe writes with a p
encil, in a very large hand. He once said that he could write the best advertisement imaginable for the Frigidaire people since he found it exactly the right height to write on when standing and with enough space for him to handle his ms. on the top. He writes mostly standing in that way, and frequently strides about the room when unable to find the right way of expressing himself.
After Wolfe’s daily stint, he gathered the papers from the floor and had them typed. Seldom did he let anyone but the typist look at them. Perkins told Hemingway that winter that what little he had seen of Wolfe’s latest work was “as good as it could be.” Unfortunately, Tom had recurring attacks of self-doubt so wracking that he could not write. “He keeps getting all upset, and he is so now,” Max wrote Ernest at the beginning of 1932, “and I am to have an evening with him and try to make him think he is some good again. He is good all right.”
At the end of a whiny session on January 26, 1932, Tom followed Max to Grand Central Station and was still yammering as they boarded the Connecticut-bound train. Wolfe needed further convincing of his abilities, so Max had encouraged him to spend the night at his house. But as the railroad cars lurched out of their berth, Wolfe had one of his sudden changes of heart. He had to go back to Brooklyn, to be alone, to write. He galloped down the aisle toward an exit door and, as the platform pulled away from him, he broad-jumped to the concrete deck. The conductor yanked the emergency brake and Perkins rushed to aid Tom, who lay by the track with blood streaming from his left elbow. Max accompanied him to the Grand Central emergency hospital and waited while the arm was X-rayed and stitched. “I thank God it was my left arm rather than my right,” Tom wrote his sister Mabel, “since my whole chance of living at present depends more or less on my right hand.”
That same month, Perkins had to minister to Wolfe’s needs again, this time as peacemaker. A communique from the German publishers of Look Homeward, Angel came into Perkins’s hands, which showed that Madeleine Boyd had withheld a royalty payment from Wolfe. Tom, rightfully, was furious at this and demanded his agent meet with him and Perkins at Scribners. Before their afternoon conference, Wolfe and his editor lunched, and Tom discussed strategy. He insisted that Max be present during the showdown and that he be “unrelenting.” The meeting did not, however, proceed according to plan. Several years later, Max sent an account of the afternoon to Tom’s friend John Terry:When we reached this office, Mrs. Boyd was sitting in the little library here, turning over some papers. I went in immediately, but Tom for some reason did not. She immediately began to weep. It was at the very depth of the depression, and she was hard put to it to keep going. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, and unfortunately at the moment when Tom entered, I was patting her on the back, and saying, “Don’t cry, Madeleine, everyone is in trouble today.” I suddenly became aware of Tom’s presence. He was towering above us, and gave me a look of utter scorn. Mrs. Boyd then tried to explain that the failure to pay over the money was due to some confusion in bank accounts which was too complicated for either Tom or myself to understand. (She has since told me that story humorously in retrospect, and I suppose it may well be true.) But anyhow Tom was through with her. And she acknowledged the fault, if not the dishonesty, and when he said, “Don’t you see, Madeleine, that this must be the end,” she agreed to it.
During the meeting Tom upbraided her so bitingly that Max felt compelled to restrain him.
In all their recent times together, Perkins had tried to restore Wolfe’s faith in himself, while Tom’s personal and editorial needs kept Max from his family worries. That season Wolfe wrote Aline Bernstein, who was still reaching out to him, “I’ve got my self-confidence back ... which I had lost completely—and I have never worked so hard in all my life. I have been pretty close to complete ruination, but I may pull out yet.” With three months of concentrated effort, Tom predicted, he could give Scribners a book of 200,000 to 300,000 words which they could publish in the fall. “But if I don’t finish the book this year,” he wrote Aline in an effort to keep her at arm’s distance, “I’m done forever—I’ll never be able to work again.”
In his less sanguine moments, Perkins himself feared that just might happen to Wolfe. Maintaining every expectation of publishing Wolfe’s novel that autumn, he told Wolfe as an incentive that if he had enough gumption to stick with the job and deliver the goods, Perkins would take a sabbatical half-year from his desk to motor cross-country with him in a Ford. Wolfe returned to his Frigidaire with renewed determination, eager to finish his book as much for Perkins as for himself. “He is ... terribly tired and has had a bad year,” Tom wrote Aline; “—his daughter has been having fainting spells with convulsions and no one can find out what’s wrong with her. Max is a grand man, the best I ever knew, and as complete an individual as ever lived.”
In anguish while the finest doctors probed for cures for Bertha’s illness, Perkins wrote Hemingway about his bullfight book. “I wish that manuscript would come ... I expect to get a lot out of it that will act as a counterbalance for things that one sees on all sides.” It would be another month of labor.
Hemingway, by his own admission, had “never gone better than lately.” He returned from Spain in the fall of 1931 with only the “swell last chapter” and a translation of the Spanish government’s Reglamento, the rules governing bullfighting, remaining to be done. That, he said, would conclude “one hell of a fine book.” He and Pauline settled in Kansas City and awaited the arrival of their second child. In mid-November, he announced the birth of his third son, Gregory. Max wired succinct congratulations: ENVIOUS. Hemingway wrote back that he would give out his secret for producing sons if Perkins would divulge his trick for siring daughters.
By the first of February, 1932, Max had received the manuscript of Death in the Afternoon. Ernest had kept his “nose to book grindstone” for a long time and so he was especially anxious to hear Perkins’s reactions. “It’s silly just to write you that it’s a grand book—but it did do me great good just to read it,” Max wrote Hemingway. “I went to bed happy for it in spite of innumerable troubles (not so bad really, I guess). The book piles upon you wonderfully, and becomes to one reading it—who at first thinks bullfighting only a small matter—immensely important.” Three days later, in discussing serialization in Scribner’s, Max noted, “It gives the impression of having grown rather than of having been planned.— And that is the characteristic of a great book.” The editorial questions Perkins foresaw were those of format. He wanted the book to be big enough in size and shape to give the illustrations a real show, but he did not want to put too high a price on it. A second problem dealt with which portions of the manuscript should be excerpted for the magazine. “It’s a mean business, picking articles out of a book like this,” Perkins wrote Hemingway. “But from the commercial standpoint, as we call it, it will help it.”
Hemingway thought they could easily handle these matters at sea. He invited Perkins to the Tortugas, telling him “To hell with signing any goddamned contracts” unless he came. This year Hemingway’s ultimatum did not work. Perkins pleaded insufficient funds and time, but it was mostly a lack of spirit. “I’ve got more problems on my hands now than those of all the rest of my life should add up to,” he explained. His daughter was sent to Boston where he heard “they have bigger and better neurologists.” Her condition remained baffling. It now was taking its toll on Louise. She collapsed trying to keep up with the girl’s illness and was hospitalized herself for several weeks. “Having a hard time escaping an obsession that the Gods are sniping at me personally,” he wrote Ernest. “I have a weakness for obsessions, as you’ve guessed.... But it’s best to get bad luck in bunches if you can stand it.” He wrapped himself in work, hating even to think about missing Key West.
That spring, after Hemingway returned from the Tortugas, Perkins talked him down from 200 illustrations to sixty-four and argued about what had come to be known as “four-letter words.” Ernest agreed to comply with most state statutes by blanking out two of
the letters which, Max said, “certainly does make the law what Shakespeare said it was—a fool.” Hemingway was upset that the book would not be the deluxe photograph album he had imagined, but John Dos Passos raised his spirits with his remarks about Death in the Afternoon. It was, he said, the best writing about Spain he had ever read. At Dos Passos’s suggestion, Hemingway cut several pages of philosophizing. Perkins never suggested any deletions of his own; if he had, he might have improved the book further by reducing Hemingway’s literary pretentiousness.
With Death in the Afternoon the words cojones and macho entered the Hemingway glossary and the cult of hypermasculinity had found its spokesman. Indeed, he had become self-obsessed, and the writing lacked its former control. Perkins saw through a lot of Hemingway’s posturing, but he wanted to believe that beneath it pounded the heart of a truly brave man. He admired the manliness of Hemingway’s life and his prose. Zippy Perkins remembered her father’s once explaining, “Hemingway loves to write for those of us who will never come face to face with danger.” Just as Perkins related to Fitzgerald as uncle to a pleasure-seeking but adored nephew, his relationship to Hemingway evoked another familial tie. For Perkins, Hemingway was the daredevil “kid brother,” forever getting into dangerous scrapes, forever being advised and cautioned by his “big brother.” There was a rough-and-ready quality to Hemingway that reminded Perkins of his happy boyhood, and there was an insistent virility that Perkins could not, being a “gentleman,” always express in his own life, but of which he was jealous. Again, as with Fitzgerald, Perkins experienced Hemingway’s style, so different from his own, in a vicarious sense. He identified with Hemingway’s machismo, but could not live it.
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