By the beginning of 1933 South Moon Under was out of Mrs. Rawlings’s hands and the mild profanities were still in the book. Max Perkins submitted the novel to the Book-of-the-Month Club, and they accepted it for the spring. “I think, really, you are taking the most beautiful care of me,” she wrote Perkins. “As far as I was concerned, I had washed my hands of South Moon Under. The book doesn’t suit me at all, but I had done the best I could for the moment, and I had the feeling that it was your affliction now, not mine.” When Perkins wrote again to urge her to do a new novel, she replied, “I had the guilty thought that if Scribners lost every cent they had invested in my first book, you’d never want to see me again, to say nothing of talking about another novel.”
Mrs. Rawlings’s forecast of success was not far off the mark. Ironically, South Moon Under’s biggest break hurt its sales. The book club’s scheduling delayed its appearance until that very day in 1933 when President Roosevelt ordered all the banks to close for a holiday. The company sold 10,000 copies of a book that Max felt should have sold 100,000.
In the weeks that followed, Perkins and Rawlings exchanged letters full of ideas for new books. In fact, she had another novel in mind, one in which an Englishman visited the cracker country. Perkins did not especially like the sound of that one. He kept thinking about the boy Lant in South Moon Under and wrote:I was simply going to suggest that you do a book about a child in the scrub, which would be designed for what we have come to call younger readers. You remember your husband spoke of how excellent parts of South Moon Under were for boys. It was true. If you wrote about a child’s life, either a girl or a boy, or both, it would certainly be a fine publication.
Mrs. Rawlings liked the idea but had begun her English novel and was reluctant to leave it. She was also afraid of not being able to surpass South Moon Under. “You do have to do what you want to do in writing,” Perkins wrote her, “but if you could put off the novel (and it would be growing in your consciousness all the time) for a long enough time to do this, I think it would be the better course.” He volunteered to read any fragments of the new work as she might complete them, adding, “You must not let my Yankee reticence ever make you feel that there is any [other] book in which I should be so interested.”
He was in truth more interested in the juvenile, but he admitted that it could incubate in her consciousness just as well as the book about the Englishman. Over the next few years he made periodic suggestions about the book in his letters, as its theme became clearer and clearer in his own mind, and he often urged her to begin it. “A book about a boy and the life of the scrub is the thing we want.... It is those wonderful river trips, and the hunting, and the dogs and the guns, and the companionship of simple people who care about the same things which were included in South Moon Under that we are thinking about. It is all simple, not complicated—don’t let anything make it complicated to you.” Mrs. Rawlings read that particular letter again and again, particularly the part in which he said he already associated the unstarted work with such books as Huckleberry Finn, Kipling’s Kim, David Crockett’s memoirs, Treasure Island, and The Hoosier School Boy: “All of these books are primarily for boys. All of them are read by men, and they are the favorite books of some men. The truth is the best part of a man is a boy.” “Do you realize,” she asked her editor, “how calmly you sit in your office and tell me to write a classic?”
After the better part of a year Perkins received the manuscript for the English novel, called Golden Apples, the book she could not bring herself to abandon. Perkins was not impressed, but he realized she had to finish it before she could properly approach the next book. And so he helped it along to completion and uneventful publication. Marjorie Rawlings was still resisting the happy fate, the colossal success, that Max was pushing her toward.
Ernest Hemingway warned Perkins not to become so engrossed with his women writers that he would fail to see the differences between their books and his. He said Death in the Afternoon would sell plenty too, if it were advertised like hell; but if Perkins got “spooked” the book would naturally flop in such hard times.
The book business was in a worse state than Hemingway knew. Many of the retail bookstores, including the three largest in New York, were on the verge of closing. None would reorder even a single copy of a book without the certainty of selling it.
Death in the Afternoon was published in September, 1932, and sales started off well. The reviews were good from the publishers’ standpoint, but Max knew that there were remarks in them that Ernest would hate. Critic Edward Weeks enjoyed the book, but wrote in the Atlantic Bookshelf, “I dislike the deliberate circumlocution of his style. I am bored as much as amused by his sexual license, and I resent his occasional pose as ‘the hard guy’ in literature.” The Times Literary Supplement reviewer stated: “His prose style is irritating, his supercharged ‘he-mannishness’ is brutal and infuriating.” Few of the reviews were that discriminating in their criticism. Most brushed the book aside as fairly unimportant. Perkins explained to Ernest that in economizing, newspapers were assigning all their reviews to their salaried staff instead of to qualified book reviewers.
Hemingway traveled from Wyoming to Key West, then joined Pauline and his three sons in Arkansas. By then, Death in the Afternoon had frozen at 15,000 copies. Sales began to drop off about two weeks into October, an entire month sooner than the usual seasonal decline. Perkins believed the immediate future was all a question of what happened after Thanksgiving. The presidential election was approaching, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s victory seemed inevitable. “You know it is my opinion that if Roosevelt gets elected we shall have a woman President,” Max wrote V. F. Calverton, the left-wing editor of Modern Monthly and author of several books for Scribners. “I have met Mrs. Roosevelt, and I think poor easy-going Franklin is ridden with both whip and spur.” Perkins voted against Hoover.
In the middle of December, 1932, Hemingway invited Perkins to Arkansas, where they would live for a week on a rented houseboat and shoot ducks. All Max had to put in his duffel bag was some warm clothes. Ernest guessed that Max’s lady writers and gaggle of girls at home would squawk at his leaving, but he thought his editor needed to get away. He promised the sort of shooting their great-grandfathers once had, and that if Perkins did not have the time of his life, he would wheelbarrow him all the way back to New York.
Max met Ernest in Memphis during a cold snap, then traveled five more hours with him, half by train, the rest by car. That first night, on their houseboat, Max stripped down to a pair of longjohns and crawled into bed. Early the next morning, in the pitch dark, Ernest awakened him, and they headed up the ice-caked river and found a blind. All that sunless morning and for five mornings afterward they crouched there in the snow, loading and firing and watching the birds fall. In the afternoons they tracked through forests all silvery with ice. They also went aboard several houseboats to buy corn whiskey and to talk with men who had lived all their lives on that river. One afternoon, at dusk, Max and Ernest heard a terrific racket around the bend. An old-time Mississippi steamboat with large sidewheels and two parallel funnels pouring out wood smoke thrashed toward them. “To Hemingway this was a commonplace,” Max wrote years later to an author, Ann Chidester, “but to a Vermont Yankee it was like going back eighty or ninety years and coming into Mark Twain’s world.”
Together Max and Ernest shot a few dozen ducks, though not nearly so many as Hemingway said they should have. Max was more interested in the company than the game anyway. They talked a lot about what Ernest might work on next. Max said he looked forward to the day when Ernest would write a book about Key West and the fishing there, a work “full of incidents about people and about weather and the way things looked and all that.” In the evenings after dinner the men warmed themselves with highballs, and Max listened while Ernest took shots at some of his other writers.
He professed to be “simply wild” about Thomas Wolfe’s writing and said he wanted to meet the man he called P
erkins’s “world genius,” though he was afraid that their conflicting natures would set them off once they met. Max and Ernest also talked a great deal about the Fitzgeralds. Ernest had picked up Zelda’s novel but found it “completely and absolutely unreadable.” Scott, he believed, had gone in for the cheap “Irish love of defeat, betrayal of himself.” So far as Hemingway could see, only two things could make a writer of Scott Fitzgerald again: Zelda’s death, “which might put a term to things in his mind”; or for his stomach to give out, so that he could never drink again. Despite Hemingway’s tough talk, these nighttime hours alone with him by the fire were for Max the best part of the trip.
Once Max started to enjoy himself, he got anxious to go home. Ernest explained to Charles Scribner years later that Max had that “awful puritanical thing” that made him give up anything as soon as he had fun doing it.
Weeks after Perkins left Arkansas, Hemingway announced that he was coming to New York. Thomas Wolfe was in Brooklyn Heights, and so Max arranged for Scribners’ two mightiest novelists to meet. He knew that no two writers were farther apart in style and method, but he thought Wolfe could benefit from an informal seminar with Ernest. “I brought it about,” Perkins later told Wolfe’s friend John Terry, “because I hoped Hem would be able to influence Tom to overcome his faults in writing, even though they were the defects of his qualities, such as his tendency to repetitions and excessive expression.” Max took them to lunch at Cherio’s on Fifty-third Street. At a large round table he sat between the two of them and said little. For the most part he let Hemingway hold forth on writing, and Tom sat there in rapt attention. One of the helpful tips Ernest passed on was always “to break off work when you ‘are going good.’—Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume.” “[Hemingway] can be blunt,” Perkins wrote John Terry, “but he can also be more gentle in speech than anyone I know. He wanted to help Tom, and everything went well, except I think Tom was not in the least affected.”
Hemingway continued to express admiration for Wolfe, mostly out of respect for Perkins, but he really had no patience for such “literary writers.” When he was told of an author who could not get on with his work until he found the right place in which to create, Hemingway insisted there was only one place for a man to write—in his head. He thought of Tom as something like a born but undisciplined fighter: the “Primo Carnera of writers,” he called him. He told Perkins that Wolfe had that quality endemic to all geniuses—he was like a great child. But such people, he wrote Perkins, were a “hell of a responsibility.” Hemingway believed Wolfe had a magnificent talent and a delicate spirit, but he knew that Perkins was doing a lot of the author’s thinking for him. He cautioned Perkins never to lose Tom’s confidence, for the author’s sake.
The June, 1933, number of the New Republic carried a late review of Death in the A fternoon by Max Eastman, an erstwhile friend of Hemingway and the author of several books for Scribners, including The Enjoyment of Poetry. It was an attack entitled “Bull in the Afternoon.” It taunted Hemingway for “juvenile romantic gushing and sentimentalizing of simple facts.” “Hemingway is a full-sized man,” wrote Eastman, but he “lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man.
Most of us too delicately organized babies who grow up to be artists suffer at times from that small inward doubt. But some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to pour forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity. It must be obvious not only in the swing of the big shoulders and the clothes he puts on, but in the stride of his prose style and the emotions he permits to come to the surface of things.
Eastman charged that Hemingway had slung “an unconscionable quantity of bull” and helped beget a literary style “that was comparable to wearing false hair on the chest.”
Hemingway, enraged, construed the review as impugning his sexual potency. He wrote a hotheaded letter to the New Republic asking them to “have Mr. Max Eastman elaborate his nostalgic speculations on my sexual incapacity.” He let off more steam writing Perkins that if Eastman ever got a solvent publisher to print that “libel” between covers it would cost them plenty of money and Eastman would have to serve time in jail for it. Legal retaliation and financial remuneration were secondary. He swore to his editor that if he ever saw Max Eastman anywhere he would get redress in his own fashion.
Still infuriated, Hemingway admitted to Perkins that he was tempted never to publish another damned thing, because the droves of critical “swine” simply were not worth writing for. He found every phase of that “whole racket” as disgusting as vomit. Ernest insisted that every word he had written about the Spanish fighting bull was absolutely true, the result of careful observation, and he was irate that someone would pay Eastman, who knew nothing about it, to say that Hemingway wrote sentimental nonsense, as though the critic really knew what bulls were like. What they could not get over, he told Perkins, was that Ernest Hemingway was a man, that he could “beat the shit” out of any of them, and, most upsetting, that he could write.
Perkins assured Hemingway that the Eastman article could do no harm. “The reality,” he said, “is in the quality of what you write and cannot be hurt by anybody, or only momentarily.” Before Hemingway departed for Spain, where he and bullfighter Sidney Franklin were producing a motion picture of Death in the Afternoon, Max Eastman apologized in what Hemingway called a “kissass letter” for the misunderstanding between them; he denied any personal slurs in his review. Hemingway was not mollified.
Perhaps the contest between writer and critics inspired his choice of title for his new collection of stories: Winner Take Nothing. Hemingway sent it off to Perkins with a brief parable, whose moral was never to lose confidence in old Papa. If at the end of the first hour the fish was killing him, at the end of two hours Hemingway would always kill the fish. THINK TITLE EXCELLENT, Perkins wired, AND YOU ARE ABSOLUTELY INVULNERABLE TO EASTMAN AND OTHERS.
Another “other” appeared that summer. Gertrude Stein’s memoirs, masquerading as The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, were being serialized in the Atlantic Monthly. In them she got in a few licks at several of her former friends. Like Max Eastman’s, her criticism fused Hemingway the man with his writing. Stein stated that she and Sherwood Anderson had in effect created Hemingway and “were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds.” Then she questioned Ernest’s strength and endurance. Hemingway railed at her public betrayal of him and deplored the loss of “poor old Gertrude Stein‘s” judgment. He told Perkins that he had always been completely loyal to Miss Stein until she practically threw him out of her house. Then she reached menopause, went “gaga,” took up with a “fourth-rate lot of fairies,” and her entire sense of taste went “phtt.” That alleged deterioration made it easier for Ernest to tolerate some of the “fine apocryphal incidents” she invented about him. Now, he said, he only felt sorry for her, because she had written a “damned pitiful book.” He resolved to write good memoirs someday because he was jealous of nobody and had a steel-trap memory.
Perkins had also been reading Gertrude Stein’s articles and thought it was too bad she ever did such a book. He said it “blew her up.” It showed the high priestess to be a “petty character ... and a petty character cannot amount to much. She had this great reputation, and now she exploded it. What’s more, I think there must have been contemptible malice in what she said about you,” Max wrote Ernest. “And mighty female malice too, which is the worst kind. The whole show seemed to me a poor affair.”
Hemingway professed indifference, but “poor old Stein‘s” and Max Eastman’s insults blackened his mood and kindled his wrath. The Hemingways were about to embark on a voyage from Key West. The proofs of Winner Take Nothing had not arrived—but some of Max’s suggestions had. Hemingway was furious. He said this happened to be a time when he would have appreciated a little loyalty, but if Perkins felt that Scribners regretted the few thousand dollars he had been advanced, he would be glad to
return it all and call their publishing arrangement off. He told Max that would be very shortsighted, though, because contrary to what Max Eastman said, Hemingway was not “washed up.” He had a good third of a novel done, better than any of the “poor twirps” that Perkins published would ever come within “100 leagues of doing.”
Perkins regretted that the proofs were not delivered on time but took exception to the rest of Hemingway’s comments. Two weeks later Hemingway apologized for his crabby letter. As a peace offering, he agreed not to spell out the Anglo-Saxonisms in Winner Take Nothing, even though he was still on the warpath against the “genteel tradition.”
After a year at sixes and sevens, which included a false start on a Gulf Stream novel, Hemingway began several months of travels. He went to Cuba and Spain, both of which were in political turmoil, then arrived in Paris. There he received Perkins’s first report of Winner Take Nothing’s progress. The anthology’s initial sale was a sound 9,000 copies, and Scribners was receiving reorders by telegraph for the first time in two years. But Perkins found the reviews “absolutely enraging.”
It had become open season on Ernest Hemingway. Even though the book contained finely crafted stories such as “After the Storm,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” and “A Way You’ll Never Be,” many critics condemned his factual accounts as imaginary; others dismissed the imaginary ones as mere reportage. In November, 1933, Hemingway put all the maddening criticisms behind him. The voyage he had dreamed of for years—and which Perkins had repeatedly suggested wiping from his mind because of the danger—was about to become a reality. Hemingway left for the green hills of Africa.
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