In February, 1933, Max made a visit to Bertha in Boston and found to his great relief that she was responding to psychiatric treatment. At about the same time the doctors put Louise on a new high-protein diet that miraculously restored her health, ending a year-long worry for Max. Soon he was working again with his old vigor.
XII
The Sexes
Don’t you really think, taking everything into consideration,“ Max Perkins once slyly asked his friend and author Struthers Burt, ”that women are responsible for three fourths of the trouble in the world?“
“Far from being a misogynist,” Burt said later, “Max so admired the potentialities of women that he despised what most of them did with the talents entrusted to them. He thought that as a sex they were poor stewards, that given freedom they preferred slavery, and that entirely able to fight on equal terms with candor and intellect, they fell back on easier weapons of intrigue, evasion, and sex. It was not that he hated women; he liked and admired too much the vision of what they might be.” More than one aspiring female author wrote him asking if it were true that he disliked women. Max dumped all such queries into Irma Wyckoff’s lap to answer in his name. “Yes, I don’t like women—but I love them too,” she once responded for him. When Perkins read that, he told her, “That sounds more like me than I do.”
During the thirties, many women brought their books and ideas to Perkins. He always maintained his distance. “I have seen more men ruined by charm than anything else,” he once told his daughter Peggy. The pretty ones unnerved him most. “I am always scared,” he confided to his author James Boyd, “when confronted by a charming young woman.” Whatever his trepidations, they did not repel. Women writers generally found him magnetic. They perceived his sensitivity for the kinds of stories they wanted to tell; and the fact that he was an attractive but not sexually aggressive man put them at ease. Most wrote to please him, as an expression of a “safe” affection.
Marcia Davenport, daughter of the diva Alma Gluck, worked on the staff of The New Yorker. In 1930, at the age of twenty-seven, she began to think about writing a biography of Mozart. Anxious for a publisher’s opinion, she described the book she had in mind to Eugene Saxton of Harper & Brothers, who was as close to a rival as Max Perkins had. He said that he would look at the manuscript, if she wrote it, but could not guarantee that Harpers would publish it.
Mrs. Davenport was discouraged until a friend, the poet Phelps Putnam, said he liked the idea. “The year before, Scribners had published Putnam’s first book of poetry,” Marcia Davenport wrote in her memoirs, Too Strong for Fantasy, “and Put had become one of the writers who worshipped Maxwell Perkins. He asked Max to see me and next day I found myself in the famous cluttered, dusty office sitting beside the shabby oak desk with the slithering piles of books and the rough-rider ashtray on it; and behind it the reserved, laconic man with the sensitive face and the extraordinary eyes. Max said little. His essential quality was always to say little, but by powerful empathy for writers and for books to draw out of them what they had it in them to say and to write.” No editor in New York could have had less interest in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart than Maxwell Perkins. But he sat through Mrs. Davenport’s recital of reasons for wanting to do such a book, watching her as much as he listened, then said, “Go ahead and write it. We will publish it.” Perkins suggested she compose a few pages for his immediate inspection. From them, he wrote critic Alice Dixon Bond years later, “we saw ... that she had skill, and from what we saw of her that she was unconquerable and would do what she undertook.” Marcia Davenport noted in her autobiography that that was “the most editorial ‘we’ ever used.”
After a year and a half of work Marcia Davenport submitted a manuscript to Perkins. In handing it over she noticed for the first time his peculiar habit of flipping directly to the last page. “I am sure he did not know in the beginning what this meant to me,” Mrs. Davenport wrote in her memoirs, “but the fact is that when I am ready to write a book, I write the ending first.” This was an extension of some childhood advice her mother had given her in practicing the piano: “Finish with a bang.” Several days later Perkins sent for Mrs. Davenport. She spent nearly two hours circling the block before she found the courage to enter the building. She was sure Perkins was going to tell her pityingly that the book was not fit to publish. It took little more than a few minutes for Max to persuade her of his great enthusiasm for it. “Of course the book may fail, it may not sell,” she wrote him afterward, “—but your sympathetic attitude is the one I hoped to find (and did not dare believe I would).”
Mozart was an artistic and financial success, and it was not long before Mrs. Davenport was writing a new book, a novel.
In 1928, Max Perkins had met Nancy Hale, the bright and beautiful granddaughter of Edward Everett Hale, the author of “The Man Without a Country.” Only twenty years old, she was writing for Vogue when a friend at the magazine asked if she wanted to be introduced to Max Perkins. They met and in May, 1931, Max saw the first quarter of a novel she was writing. By the end of the summer The Young Die Good was complete. Perkins suggested only minor alterations, and Scribners published it the following spring. The book had a brief life. A few years later Nancy Hale won the O. Henry Prize for one of her short stories.
A second novel made no more of a splash than her first. “I thought she could write before she had written,” Perkins told Elizabeth Lemmon, who knew her, “—like you Virginians think a colt could run when he could barely stand. So I watched her and got us to publish her when she couldn’t sell. Now she has a great name in the magazines, but she hasn’t yet sold for us. So I want to be vindicated. I’m always in that position.”
Then came a third novel. By the time the editor had seen two thirds of it, he felt it to be that vindication. And then, Max wrote Elizabeth in woe, she “began having a baby.”
Through letters he tried to keep Nancy Hale—then Mrs. Charles Wertenbaker—from worrying about her work:Writing a novel is a very hard thing to do because it covers so long a space of time, and if you get discouraged it is not a bad sign, but a good one. If you think you are not doing it well, you are thinking the way real novelists do. I never knew one who did not feel greatly discouraged at times, and some get desperate, and I have always found that to be a good symptom.
He realized it would be several more years before she would finish her book, but he willingly waited for her.
Among the writers Max Perkins respected most was Caroline Gordon. She was the wife of Allen Tate, one of the “Agrarians,” who took a stand favoring a return to the artistic heritage of the old South. Minton, Balch, and Company, later absorbed by G. P. Putnam’s, had already issued Tate’s biographies of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, as well as his first major book of verse, Mr. Pope and Other Poems. When Tate switched to Scribners in 1932, they printed books of his poetry and essays. “From then on Max and I became very good friends,” Tate said, “and he was willing to publish me even though my books didn’t make any money.”
In 1931, Scribners brought forth Penhally, Caroline Gordon’s first novel. It spanned three generations on a Kentucky plantation, and Perkins thought it a beautiful piece of work, without a “false note in the whole length of it.” It required little editorial attention. “Any writer worth his salt didn’t get much advice from Max Perkins,” she said later.
It was heartbreaking for Perkins to publish good books such as Penhally at a time when so few customers could be lured into a bookstore. Scribners’ profits had shrunk drastically. In 1929, their big year, their net earnings had been $289,309; in 1932 they netted only $40,661. He had to inform not just Caroline Gordon but all his authors that Scribners now had to be more frugal in their advances. Throughout the Depression, Max often worked himself into dramatic soliloquies about the nation’s disastrous economic conditions. Malcolm Cowley told of one writer who was especially insistent on getting an advance; Max talked to her so plaintively that as he spoke she had sad visions of standi
ng beside him in the breadline. Afterward he invited her to the Ritz for a drink. As they went past the uniformed doorman, she laid her hand on his arm and said, “Mr. Perkins, are you sure you can afford this?”
Alice Longworth was the eldest of Theodore Roosevelt’s six children. From the time she was six years old she had been surrounded by politics, and she became famous for her spontaneous and unconventional reactions to Washington life. After her father had succeeded to the White House in 1901, Miss Roosevelt’s sparkling wit and impromptu pranks had made her the darling of the American public. When it was revealed that her favorite color was a particular shade of gray-blue, “Alice blue” became the last word in fashion. In 1905, when the President’s pretty daughter with the pert nose and big smile accompanied her father’s Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, on an inspection tour of the Orient, she was received as royalty. Also making that voyage was Nicholas Longworth, a Republican congressman from Ohio. She was fifteen years younger, but American newspapers suggested a “tropical romance” between them. The next year TR gave her away at her wedding in the East Room of the White House. As both a President’s daughter and, beginning in 1915, the wife of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mrs. Longworth became a leader in Washington’s social life. Her cluttered salon on Massachusetts Avenue, at one end of Embassy Row, was the center of Washington gossip and rumor. A pillow rested on one of her sofas with her watchword boldly needlepointed: IF YOU DON’T HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY ABOUT ANYBODY, COME SIT BESIDE ME.
After her husband died in 1931, Alice Longworth found herself afflicted with debts. The Ladies’ Home Journal offered to pay Mrs. Longworth for the serialization rights to a book of reminiscences, if she could put one together. “At first I considered the proposition as nothing less than a great disaster,” she recalled. “I had never written anything in my life longer than a postcard.” Scribners heard about the prospective book and offered to publish it sight unseen, largely because of the bond between Scribners and Theodore Roosevelt, which dated back to the 1880s when they began publishing his accounts of the Wild West and his African safaris.
Mrs. Longworth and Perkins first met in New York City at the old Ritz-Carlton Hotel. “I felt in an instant that he was a man throttled by women,” she remembered. “And in all the time we worked together, I noticed that the unique Maxwell Perkins never once looked directly at me. Instead, he talked out of the side of his mouth, like this,” she said, screwing her lips to the left side of her face, “as though looking at one more woman head-on would have been too painful.”
Perkins found Mrs. Longworth to be an engaging conversationalist but too reticent on paper. “I felt truly sorry for poor Max,” she said, “as he tried to draw things out of me. I wasn’t trying to act contrary. It was just that I regarded the writing of this book as a horrible incursion into revealing things.” Perkins thought Scribners had a gold mine in her if he could get her to write candidly. During their first meeting he made enough suggestions to get her through the initial work. “Try writing it as you would talk it,” he urged.
Within days, Alice Longworth was so involved in her memoirs that she was composing at the typewriter. A self-proclaimed eager beaver, she soon had produced hundreds of pages of reminiscences, which she called Crowded Hours, and easily met her Ladies‘ Home Journal deadlines. On paper, Mrs. Longworth’s words varied from stiff attempts at being literary to pointless chatter—often in the same paragraph. She had no sense of which observations were sharp and apt and which were not. After reading the first few installments in the Journal, Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “I was really cold with panic.”
Perkins met with Mrs. Longworth several times more, hoping he could get her to be more relaxed and revealing. “Over and over,” she recollected, “he said to me, ‘Can’t you say anything more interesting than Mr. Taft was there?’ ” Perkins examined each sentence and made suggestions for almost every scene in the first chapter of Crowded Hours. He cautioned her to slow down and avoid the humdrum. “Make every person a character and make every action an event,” he said. Occasionally Mrs. Longworth reached a significant episode she could not remember much about. Perkins advised her not to apologize for her poor memory: “Don’t tell us what you don’t know; tell us what you do know.” Time and again he asked her to describe people and tell how she felt about them personally. As she wrote, she imagined Perkins standing over her shoulder, asking her questions.
Within five or six months, Mrs. Longworth’s writing had improved. “All those ‘Maxims’ finally sank in,” she said. What began as a bloodless work of disconnected memories took on definition and shape and even got somewhat tart. Of Coolidge she wrote, “I do wish he did not look as if he had been weaned on a pickle.” After several pages on Harding and the scandals that surrounded him, she said: “Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.”
In late October, Perkins could honestly write Elizabeth Lemmon that “we made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear with Alice Longworth’s book—or she did.... Now it’s a good book. It might have been a splendid one. But we had to build up from worse than nothing.” For weeks Crowded Hours was the best nonfiction seller everywhere. Once its success was established, Max admitted that working with the author had been interesting, though an “almighty hard job.”
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a pretty, moonfaced newspaper-woman with dark brows arched high over penetrating blue eyes. She was living with her husband, Charles, in Rochester, New York, where they were both active journalists. She described her experience as a Hearst “sob sister” as a “rough school, but I wouldn’t have missed it.... You learn a lot when you must put down what people said and how they acted in great crises in their lives. And it teaches you objectivity.” But she said it was “scrappy” and she was “always in a hurry and I hate hurry.” Her marriage was no more satisfying than her career. In 1928 she and her husband abandoned journalism and went off to try saving their marriage by leading a simpler life. They bought a seventy-two-acre orange grove at Cross Creek outside Hawthorn, Florida, in the heart of the scrub country, and lived there and worked 4,000 trees.
“When I came to the Creek, and knew the old grove and farmhouse at once as home,” she wrote years later in her book Cross Creek, “there was some terror, such as one feels in the first recognition of a human love, for the joining of person to place, as of person to person, is a commitment to shared sorrow, even as to shared joy.”
For the first several years she tried her hand both at farming and at writing fiction. In 1931 she sent several vignettes about the Florida hammock to Scribner’s, telling herself if they were not accepted she would give up writing altogether. Perkins read them, and on his recommendation Scribner’s published them as “Cracker Chidlings.” They took several more stories in the following months, and Max then encouraged her to plan some major piece of writing.
That fall, Mrs. Rawlings went deep into the scrub and lived for several weeks with an old woman and her moonshiner son. She came back with zestful stories about the hand-to-mouth existence just beyond the borders of civilization. “I have voluminous notes of the intimate type, for which the most prolific imagination is no substitute,” she wrote Perkins upon her return. Her mind was reeling with the thousands of mental images she had absorbed. In sorting them out she saw that moonshining would necessarily become the connecting thread of her book. She later wrote:These people are lawless by an anomaly. They are living an entirely natural, and very hard life, disturbing no one. Civilization has no concern with them, except to buy their excellent corn liquor and to hunt, in season, across their territory with an alarming abandon. Yet almost everything they do is illegal. And everything they do is necessary to sustain life in that place. The old clearings have been farmed out and will not “make” good crops any more. The big timber is gone. The trapping is poor. They ‘shine because ’shining is the only business they know that can be carried on in the country they know, and would be unwilling to leave.
The next ye
ar Marjorie Rawlings presented her editor with the manuscript of a true-to-life novel entitled South Moon Under, The title was a local expression for the time of year when the people “felt” the moon under the earth.
“Marjorie had a heart as big as the Big Scrub she wrote about,” Marcia Davenport said in Too Strong for Fantasy. “She was intensely American in the rooted, regional earthy sense that I am not. She had a rowdy, bellowing love of laughter, a passionate tenderness for animals, illimitable hospitality, she was a superb cook, and she loved to eat and drink.” Max felt easy with her and always enjoyed her newsy and opinionated hand-written letters.
Like Hemingway, Mrs. Rawlings peppered her writing with off-color language. She told Perkins that her husband had read the manuscript of South Moon Under and suggested that all the “four-letter words” be cut, so that it might become a boys’ book as well as a regular trade novel. Perkins concurred: “There is no doubt that Hemingway has sacrificed thousands in his sales by the use of what we have come to call the ‘four letter words’ and I do not think he need have done it. The truth is that words that are objected to have a suggestive power for the reader which is quite other than that which they have to those who use them; and therefore they are not right artistically. They should have exactly that meaning and implication which they have when uttered. But they have an altogether different one when they strike unaccustomed ears and eyes.”
Max Perkins Page 27