While leisurely correcting his galleys, Hemingway took a sunny room at the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana. Again he urged Perkins to visit him: Max could carry back the proofs and the pictures complete with captions, after the two of them had discussed any problems in the book. Max said he wished he could come down but felt it would be impossible until July. “I am more tied down though now than ever,” he wrote Hemingway, “but also with better prospects for ultimate release.”
The day before Hemingway checked out of the Ambos Mundos, he got bathed in sweat while marlin fishing, then was showered by a sudden cold downpour. By the time he shipped out of Cuba he had a touch of bronchial pneumonia, which he still had not recognized. He steered across the Florida Straits with a temperature of 102 degrees. Once at home, he took to his bed to correct his proofs. The galleys got his blood boiling. It was standard procedure to headline each proof sheet with the author’s last name and the title’s first word. A page would be headed, accordingly, “4 Gal 80 .. 3404 Hemingway’s Death 11½—14 Scotch.” Hemingway asked Perkins if it seemed funny to him to print at the top of every sheet “Hemingway’s Death.” The author did not see any humor in it. He swore that Max should have known that he was superstitious and it was a “hell of a damn dirty business” staring at the caption over and over again.
Perkins had not seen that line of type on the proofs. “If I had I would have known what to do with it,” he assured Hemingway, “because you cannot tell me anything about omens. I can see more than any man on the face of the earth, and once when things were bad and I was alone in the car and a black cat crossed the road I actually shot around the corner. When any of my family are in the car and that happens, I tell them not to be foolish.”
For months Perkins believed his life was cursed. Several authors and colleagues suggested that he had practically sleepwalked through his work that year, preoccupied as he was over his daughter’s health. Perkins had been too glum even to write Elizabeth Lemmon. That June he again explained that there were times when he started letters to her but never finished them.
The way things have been this year I could only write gloomily and I was ashamed to do that—that I couldn’t face a run of bad luck without being gloomy and cowardly about it. So I always gave up before I finished a letter.
Max’s trouble was that Bertha’s illness so depressed him that he could not speak cheerfully of anything that year. “At other times a number of things have always been going wrong but you could always look upon something that was going right,” he wrote Elizabeth. “But lately, everywhere I have looked, ruin threatened.” If his daughter could just recover, Max believed, that would offset every other misfortune. After more than a year of infirmity, she was showing some improvement. “Her illness filled me with cold terror,” he told Elizabeth. “Then Louise was in a dreadful state, not being well anyway. And with business etc. as it was, it was a mighty bad year.”
That summer Arthur H. Scribner died of a heart attack, two years after assuming the presidency of the firm. His nephew Charles succeeded him, and Maxwell Perkins was named editor-in-chief and vice-president of the company. Now there were managerial responsibilities piling on top of his regular editorial concerns—that Hemingway would do something dangerous, that Fitzgerald would not write his book, that Thomas Wolfe would require increasing expenditures of energy and emotion, or that Ring Lardner’s tuberculosis and sleeplessness, caused by worry over his poverty, would worsen. “What of it?” Max asked Elizabeth Lemmon. “What is life but taking a licking?” In another letter he said:You know that about counting your blessings doesn’t do any good to one from New England. It makes it worse. The New Englander thinks his blessings are the very things that prove he is in for a bad time because justice demands that the score shall be evened up. Some days after my father died my mother said, “I knew something was going to happen,” and when I asked why she said, “Everything was going too well.”—and though I was only seventeen I understood perfectly.“
Max wanted to believe the world would become a better place for his five children, if it could escape a real crash. “But,” he wondered, “can it settle in time for these girls? What can they live by—by nothing that ‘the former people’ did.”
Louise visited Elizabeth at Welbourne for a few days of rest and asked if she would “take care of Max” when he came down later in the summer for what became regular appointments with his otologist at Johns Hopkins. He knew no one in Baltimore and used to wander around Druid Hill Park alone.
Max Perkins suffered from otosclerosis, specifically, the growth of new bone around the footplate of the stapes in the middle ear. Noises often rang in his left ear, sounding like the chirping of birds. Today that tiny bone can be replaced with a synthetic one, but every three months Perkins had to have his Eustachian tube dilated by the insertion of a medicated wire so that the vibrations within his ear were more distinct. In July, 1932, Max showed up for his appointment with Dr. James Bordley. It was too hot for him to consider asking Elizabeth to meet him afterward, but she just appeared on Saturday at the Hotel Belvedere. That afternoon, she drove him out to Gettysburg. “It was the hottest day I’ve ever felt in my life,” Elizabeth recalled forty years later, “but he climbed every monument and looked at every stone wall on the battlefield. I waited for him in the car. When we finally got back to the city our tongues were hanging out. Max was dying for a drink, but it was tough to find one and he said, ‘This is the driest city I’ve ever seen.’ ” Later he wrote her: “They were two of the best days I ever had ... and I shall always be grateful to you for them. I believe a month’s vacation couldn’t have done me more good. You make everything seem right and happy.... Thanks ever so much Elizabeth for being so good to me. I’ll never forget it.”
The next day Perkins telephoned Scott, who motored into Baltimore and drove him out to La Paix. Max found it “really a fine sort of melancholy place,” that made him want to saunter around and look at the trees. But Scott thought they ought to settle down to gin rickeys. They drew up chairs on a small piazza and waited for a breeze to whish through the rich foliage. Zelda drifted outside to join them, looking well—not so pretty as she had been, but calmer than he had ever seen her. Max found more “reality” in her talk. But he worried about them both. Under the white light of the summer sun, Max thought, Scott’s face looked weary and tight, skull-like. Zelda brought out some grotesque sketches she had drawn. After lunch with the Fitzgeralds, Max drove back into town with Zelda, who had to return to the Phipps Clinic, then hopped a plane back to New York.
“Poor old Scott,” Hemingway lamented after Perkins wrote him of the battle-fatigued figures he had seen at La Paix. Ernest still thought the situation was Zelda’s fault. He said Fitzgerald should have swapped her when she was “at her craziest but still salable” some five or six years back, before she was diagnosed as “nutty.” He also did not think Zelda’s becoming a writer was the way to bring either of them back to life. Hemingway warned Perkins that if he ever published a book by any of his wives, “I’ll bloody well shoot you.” Because of Zelda, he said, F. Scott Fitzgerald had become the “great tragedy of talent in our bloody generation.”
“If we could only fix Scott up for a clear six months we might turn that tragedy into something else,” Max wrote Ernest. “And there isn’t a bad chance that Zelda might not turn out to be a writer of popular books. She has some mighty bad tricks of writing, but she is now getting over the worst of them.” In fact, he hoped Zelda might prove to be Scott’s ace in the hole, which he needed desperately. Perkins confided to Hemingway that Scribners had advanced Scott so much money on his novel that it was impossible to see how he could pay off his debt to Scribners even if it were a great success. As it was, they arranged for half of Zelda’s royalties to be applied against Scott’s debt until $5,000 had been paid back.
Max had never been concerned for Fitzgerald so much as after this last visit. “If a man gets tired and has a good alabi—and Scott has in Zeida—he’s like
ly to accept defeat,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “They’ve all lost faith in him too, even Ernest. I wish it could be fixed so he could show them!”
Save Me the Waltz was published in October, 1932. Its sales never got moving, and only a handful of reviewers praised or even constructively criticized the book. In some respects, Perkins was responsible for the book’s failure on all counts. In his distraction that year, he did not give Zelda a very strong send-off. “It is not only that her publishers have not seen fit to curb an almost ludicrous lushness of writing but they have not given the book the elementary services of a literate proofreader,” said the New York Times.
For another year, the Saturday Evening Post was the Fitzgeralds’ prime benefactor. It published three of Scott’s stories that summer; in August he sent them a fourth. The stories contributed little to his literary reputation, but after months of inaction on his serious work, he now had enough money to proceed. “The novel now plotted and planned,” he entered in his Ledger, “never more to be permanently interrupted.”
In a letter to Perkins, Zelda confirmed, “Scott’s novel is nearing completion. He’s been working like a streak and people who have read it say it’s wonderful.” She had no firsthand opinion, because in protecting their material from the other’s poaching, she wrote, “We wait now till each other’s stuff is copyrighted since I try to more or less absorb his technique and the range of our experience might coincide.”
In January, 1933, Scott came to New York for a three-day binge. “I was about to call you up when I completely collapsed and laid in bed for 24 hours groaning,” he wrote Perkins afterward. “Without a doubt the boy is getting too old for such tricks.... I send you this, less to write you a Rousseau’s Confession than to let you know why I came to town without calling you, thus violating a custom of many years standing.” Back at La Paix, he vowed to go on the water wagon from the first of February until the first of April. He insisted Perkins keep that from Hemingway “because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic, due to the fact that we almost always meet at parties. I am his alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him, though even Post stories must be done in a state of sobriety.” Max wrote back telling him, tactfully, that Scott had in fact called him.
Because Fitzgerald was devoting more time to his novel than before, his income that year was half what it had been in the first few years of the Depression—less than $16,000. Even after moving out of La Paix into a smaller, less expensive place in town, Scott found himself having to scrimp. He asked Perkins if Zelda had any money due on her book. “She is shy about asking,” Scott wrote Max, “but she could use it to contribute to her winter outfit.”
The royalties would barely clothe her. Save Me the Waltz sold 1,380 copies, which translated into $408.30 in earnings. After subtracting for the cost of excess corrections on the proofs, as was standard, Perkins sent Zelda her check for $120.73, noting, “The result won’t be encouraging to you, and I have not liked to ask whether you were writing any more because of that fact, but I do think the last part of that book, in particular, was very fine; and if we had not been in the depths of a depression, the result would have been quite different.” The only Scribners books that got any show that year were by authors who had had an earlier success —as with Galsworthy’s One More River or James Truslow Adams’s March of Democracy—or whose authors were celebrities, like Clarence Darrow’s autobiography.
Of the sales figures on Save Me the Waltz, Perkins wrote Fitzgerald, “That is way above the average for a first novel in that bad year, but you are used to such big numbers that it will seem mighty bad to you.” Fitzgerald took the news understandingly, especially after learning that John Dos Passos’s latest book, 1919, had sold only 9,000 copies. Scott did not see how his own book was going to cover his debt to Scribners, as Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy had kept him alive in American letters better than Fitzgerald’s Post stories had done for him. Max wrote Fitzgerald that he did not find Dos Passos’s books enthralling.
His whole theory is that books should be sociological documents, or something approaching that. I know I never have taken one of them up without feeling that I was in for three or four hours of agony only relieved by admiration of his ability. They are fascinating but they do make you suffer like the deuce, and people cannot want to do that.
“If only this world will settle down on some kind of stable basis so that a man can attend to his own affairs,” Max wrote Fitzgerald, “I think that you will soon begin to do steady and consistent work. Let the basis be anything so long as it is a basis—a relatively fixed point from which a man can view things.”
Eight years had passed since The Great Gatsby. And yet, Max wrote Scott, “Whenever any of these new writers come up who are brilliant, I always realize that you have more talent and more skill than any of them; but circumstances have prevented you from realizing upon the fact for a long time.” That summer, Max contrived a plan to get Fitzgerald out of his heavy debt to Scribners by tying in serialization of his novel in the magazine.
In late September, 1933, Fitzgerald promised a complete draft of that work by the end of October. “I will appear in person carrying the manuscript and wearing a spiked helmet,” he wrote Perkins. “Please do not have a band as I do not care for music.” Right on schedule he appeared, and a startled Perkins received the first section of what was to become Tender Is the Night. He immediately pronounced it “wonderfully good and new.” Max timed his next visit to Dr. Bordley so that he could spend the following weekend with Fitzgerald reading the rest of the novel.
Scott kept Perkins for two solid days. Max tried to read the manuscript straight through but found it still unfinished and chaotic. Every time he got involved in a section, he found that Scott was handing him a Tom Collins, as if he were trying to make the writing go down easier. Then Scott would grab a bunch of pages to read aloud to Max. There was more work to be done, but Perkins had heard enough to tell that the book would work. When he got back to his office, he put the terms of their agreement in writing—that Scribner’s agreed to serialize the new novel in four numbers beginning with the January number which appears about the 20th of December, for ten thousand dollars—six of which will be applied to reduce your indebtedness to us, and four thousand of which will be paid in cash, preferably at the rate of one thousand dollars a month as each installment is delivered.
In his Ledger, Scott marked the happiest event in years: “Max accepts book in 1st draft.”
Ring Lardner was now able to work at least a few hours a day, but insomnia was getting the best of him and his income still was not enough to meet expenses. In August, 1932, Perkins sent him a royalty payment that was not due until December. It was only $222.73, but Ring said it would be a “life saver; or rather a life insurance saver.” That proved worth holding onto, because in a few months he was borrowing against it.
To help Lardner scrape together a few more dollars, Perkins schemed several quick and easy ways for him to get published. Ring had written a new baseball series in the form of letters, a throwback to his You Know Me Al, and a new radio column in The New Yorker. Max suggested binding them into books. That winter Lardner’s doctor ordered him to go to the desert for his health, and Lardner was obliged to borrow money he had not yet earned to pay for such a trip. “Someday I will probably realize that there is a depression,” he wrote Perkins. Max sent advances in $100 increments, noting that Scribners would be willing to pay royalties almost concurrent with sales, even though a large part of their business was now done on a heavy consignment basis.
Lardner went to La Quinta, California, leaving his latest story, “Poodle,” in the hands of some “poor author’s agent” to peddle. It was the first story Lardner ever wrote that was not accepted by one of the first two publications to which it was offered. Within months he was back in East Hampton, critically ill and receiving no visitors. Perkins hated even to inquire.
On September 25, 1933, Ring Lardne
r died at forty-eight, after seven years of tuberculosis, sleeplessness, fatigue, and alcoholism. Mark Twain’s sentiment in “The Two Testaments”—that “when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free”—seemed tragically apropos.
Perkins wrote to Hemingway, who in his youth had admired Lardner:Ring was not, strictly speaking, a great writer. He always thought of himself as a newspaperman, anyhow. He had a sort of provincial scorn of literary people. If he had written much more, he would have been a great writer perhaps, but whatever it was that prevented him from writing more was the thing that prevented him from being a great writer. But he was a great man, and one of immense latent talent.
As a final tribute to that talent, Perkins wanted to publish a volume of Ring’s material, a selection from his writing by somebody qualified to choose the most representative examples. He asked Fitzgerald whom he would suggest, barely concealing his hope that Scott himself might undertake the job. Fitzgerald said it was simply impossible for him to accept such an assignment with his own novel so near completion. He nominated Gilbert Seldes, who was both a journalist and a critic.
Within two weeks Seldes was on the project. He was particularly eager to get hold of Lardner’s early material and fugitive newspaper pieces written before he got to New York. After six weeks of digging through Midwestern newspaper morgues, Seldes had the book prepared. He called it First and Last. Seldes’s guiding principle was that “every item should be ‘good Lardner.’ ” While the book did not include the first piece Lardner ever wrote, it did contain the last. There would be nothing more of his for his readers to enjoy, because, as Seldes pointed out, Lardner “had been ill for years and left no manuscripts. For his own fame, he did not need to.”
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