By January, 1934, he had reached Tanganyika. After years in Europe, the Gulf Stream, and the remotest corners of America, Ernest felt he had seen a lot of the world, but this, he wrote Perkins almost upon arrival, was the most spectacular country he had ever set foot in. Africa was full of so many actual wonders that he talked of settling there.
During a hunting expedition, he came down with amebic dysentery. He would not let it keep him from the big game, so he staggered around with it for two weeks, hunting every day but two. A few days later, after passing several pints of blood, he was carried by stretcher to a bush plane and flown to Nairobi. It was a bumpy trip of 700 miles, but the snow-capped dome of Kilimanjaro reigning mightily in the distance, looking vast enough to shoulder the heavens, was an unforgettable sight. Within days Ernest rejoined his safari at the Ngorongoro Crater to hunt rhinoceros, sable antelope, and the elusive kudu. He trekked across Africa for several more weeks, in utter awe, already wondering how to get it down on paper.
In January, 1933, after Hemingway had left Perkins and Wolfe at their lunch together, Max suggested that Tom accompany him to Baltimore when he went to visit the ear doctor. Wolfe agreed to come. On the way back he told Perkins about a story he had written. It made Perkins realize that Wolfe had a whole ragbag of manuscripts at home, dozens of remnants. Max said, “For Heaven’s sake bring it in, and let us publish it.” There followed the usual series of procrastinations, but eventually Wolfe did turn up with about 60,000 words of his very best sort of writing. It was extremely “dithyrambic,” with little dialogue and direct narrative, but the whole thing was definitely a unit.
Then Perkins had another, even more startling perception. He thought back on the other fragments he had already read from Wolfe’s library of manuscripts, and he saw how they dovetailed; he realized that they could be made to complete the gigantic manuscript Wolfe was working on. After assembling the pieces in his mind, Perkins called Wolfe and said, “All you have to do is close your hand, and you have your novel.”
They spent hours talking about it. Tom kept breaking loose into excursions from the main idea, but Perkins got him to promise that he would put the book together on the lines he suggested. Wolfe delivered the pages as scheduled and Perkins did not even wait for the weekend. “I have always enjoyed reading what you have done, and working in connection with it,” he explained to Wolfe before tearing into the pages. “It is a thing that does not happen to publishers often.”
Perkins was dead set upon getting Thomas Wolfe’s book out that fall. He knew it would mean an immense amount of work through the first half of the summer, but as an Evarts, that was what he prided himself on doing.
But the flow had hardly begun. In mid-April, 1933, Wolfe appeared and dropped onto his editor’s desk some 300,000 words of manuscript, considerable sections of which Max had seen before. The editor already had in hand some 150,000 words, but Perkins accepted the new pages with open arms, still believing the final version of the book was practically a reality. He was delighted to find that this new book had half a dozen chapters in it that were beyond anything in Look Homeward, Angel. While the manuscript was still mushrooming but getting no nearer to completion, Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “I’m meditating a plot to get it and him off into the country for a month with me. It will be an agonizing month though.” But the month never happened.
Max knew he had to get his hands on all of Wolfe’s pages. He first tried to persuade Tom, who needed money, that certain portions of his material were suitable for magazine publication as long short stories, but Wolfe hesitated. Sending some of the manuscript to the printer implied finality. With John Hall Wheelock’s assistance, Max made Wolfe understand that the only way he could be regarded as an author was to have material put before the public. In February, 1933, when Tom had “just $7.00 left in all the world,” he pulled “No Door” out of his raw manuscript, and it appeared as a neatly spun short story in the July Scribner’s.
Perkins had another persuasive argument. He said that he could not do a proper job on the book without seeing its largest sections beforehand. Wolfe still had, for example, a major section entitled “The Hills Beyond Pentland.” Max begged:Why don’t you give me the section ... and let me read it, and so get familiar with that? Because when we begin to get the book ready for the printer, you will probably want me also to understand it fully all around. And it is a big book, and not easy to grasp. I wish you would give me that section and let me read it and say nothing about it.
Wolfe began to submit to Max’s pressure. There was a great deal more writing to be done, but days later, Wolfe moved “The Hills Beyond Pentland” into Max’s office.
A. S. Frere-Reeves of William Heinemann, Ltd., in London, Wolfe’s British publisher, was hounding Perkins regularly by mail for another book by Wolfe. He reminded Max, “We did so well with Look Homeward, Angel, but marching time draws on, and the public memory is painfully short.” Six months later he added, “I am very anxious indeed to keep Thomas Wolfe going as a property over here,” and he suggested getting together a volume of Wolfe’s stories, especially those which had been appearing in Scribner’s. In the fifteen months since the spring of 1932, five had been printed, amounting to over 100,000 words. (Scribner’s awarded one of them, “A Portrait of Bascom Hawke,” $2,500 as co-winner of their short novel contest in 1932.) Max thought another, “The Web of Earth,” had “perfect form for all its intricacy,” despite the popular critical objection that Wolfe was incapable of giving his writing a framework. Perkins had said to him, “Not one word of this should be changed.”
Perkins was sorry he had not arranged to publish a book of stories earlier, but both Tom and the Scribners sales department had opposed it. For various reasons, Perkins did not think one could be prepared now. There was nothing to do but wait for the author to finish writing the book. “The trouble with Tom,” Perkins explained to Frere-Reeves, “is not that he does not work, for he does, like a dog. It is that everything grows and grows under his hands, and he cannot seem to control that.”
Perkins told Elizabeth Lemmon that it was the completion of Scott Fitzgerald’s book and the success of Alice Longworth’s which fortified him enough to fight it out with Tom. He arranged his appointments so that the two of them could meet alone daily and review the material. Of late, Perkins was having to wait for more than just pages; he often had to wait for the author. Perkins knew that Tom drank heavily only when he was brooding. Aline Bernstein’s continued attempts to cling to Tom and Wolfe’s failure to let go of her were driving him to gin. While Max had once wished for punctuality, now he hoped that Wolfe had not gotten drunk before their meeting and that he would remember to show up ... and if he did, that he would be sober enough to talk coherently about his writing.
On Wolfe’s birthday, October 3, 1933, he wrote furiously in his notebook: “I am 33 years old and I have nothing left, but I can begin again.” In that new life, he resolved, there was no place for Mrs. Bernstein. “Aline, the time for your helping me is past,” he put down in the middle of an unsent letter. “There is nothing you have now that I want.” Without receiving the page on which he spelled it out, she already knew she had been thoroughly replaced, in Wolfe’s mind, by the man she had grown to resent during the last five years. Tom had written: “There is just one person in the world today who believes I will ever come to anything. That person is Maxwell Perkins, but that man’s belief means more to me now than anything on earth, and the knowledge that I have it far outweighs the disbelief of everyone else.” Wolfe would allow himself to be possessed by Aline no longer. More resolutely than ever he wanted to possess Maxwell Perkins.
In the early summer of 1933 Bertha Perkins, who had just finished her third year at Smith College, told her father she was bringing home her fiance, a second-year Harvard medical student named John Frothingham. Max was happy for his daughter but grouched whenever he talked about her engagement. “Here Bert was, really getting good in philosophy and history!” he wrote Eliz
abeth Lemmon. On the morning of the wedding Max went into his daughter’s room and told her, “You don’t have to go through with this, Duck. It’s still not too late.” Just a few hours later, he gave her away in the living room of the New Canaan house.
Soon another upheaval changed Perkins’s life. Louise, who longed for the gaiety of the city, had persuaded her husband that they should move into her father’s former home in Turtle Bay, at 246 East Forty-ninth Street. Max agreed to relocate chiefly for his daughters’ education, because he realized that they were not getting first-rate instruction in the New Canaan schools. After all, he wrote Elizabeth, “we want to give these girls an education—so they can cook etc. for medical student husbands etc.” Max had expected he would not be living in Manhattan until the winter, but Louise began the moving just a few weeks later. His new home was only a short walk to Scribners. He no longer had to make the long commutation on the 8:02 out of New Canaan (which he always caught with just seconds to spare), but he did not alter the time of his arrival at the office. It had always been nine-thirty, and nine-thirty it remained.
Max began his business day by removing his coat, but not his hat, and sitting at his desk to read correspondence, dictate letters to Miss Wyckoff, and receive callers. Upon taking his chair he instinctively dropped his right hand into his coat pocket, fished around, and withdrew one cigarette from a pack of “Lucky Strikes.” (As the years passed he switched to “Camels” and eventually was smoking two packs a day.) The morning concluded with informal editorial conferences, the most important of them with Charles Scribner. Max’s contemporary, Scribner was a reserved man, with neatly parted flaxen hair, who was much more aggressive when dressed in his hunting pinks in Far Hills, New Jersey, where he rode to hounds, than in the office. He ran his business with courtly kindness, in close relation to his editor-in-chief. Scribner’s secretary, Betty Youngstrom, observed, “There was a mystical kind of telepathy between him and Mr. Perkins. They had an understanding that went beyond business or friendship. Neither of them had to say much and yet they always completely understood each other.” At some point in the morning, one would go into the other’s office, and Perkins would start describing some book being considered by the company. “Scribner was not especially literary, but he did have a feeling for what could sell,” said John Hall Wheelock. “He would sit with his elbows braced into his knees, bend his head down as he listened —always looking as though he expected to be bored. No matter what Max said, Scribner nodded. If the report had been favorable, Scribner would say, ‘Go ahead with the book.’ ”
Sometime after 12:30, usually closer to 1:00, Perkins would leave his office, walk north four and a half blocks to Fifty-third Street, and march east until he reached his favorite restaurant, Cherio’s, at Number 46. Once inside the door, he would greet the proprietor, Romolo Cherio, a small, dark, and slight Italian, then descend one flight to the downstairs dining room, where to the immediate left was a round table for six. A “Reserved” sign and a special mill of cayenne pepper never left the tabletop. No one sat there except at the invitation of Maxwell Perkins. It was seldom filled, but there was always a writer or agent or daughter there to join him. The novelist Struthers Burt, who was one of Max’s authors, wrote:He was not given to explanations. One of the most curious things I ever saw him do, and I saw him do a good many—was on a day when we had gone as usual to Cherio’s for luncheon. To my surprise as we entered the downstairs dining room I saw two comely young women sitting at the forbidden table. Without a word Max brushed past and went straight to the bar, where we had the two cocktails with which we always celebrated our reunions. “There are people at my table,” Max murmured out of the corner of his mouth. Then he led me back to the table and introduced me to the two trespassers. They were his oldest and next oldest daughters, two of the five Misses Perkins.
After Prohibition, Perkins always sipped a martini at lunch, sometimes two. His menu was nearly invariable. When he found a dish that pleased him, he ordered it one day after the next, until the waiters knew to bring it without having to be told. Creamed chicken was one longtime favorite, until he tasted the roast breast of guinea hen. Perkins deviated from the guinea hen only on the occasions when Cherio himself sent another entree to the table. If Max had not started eating the new dish by the time the waiter had made his rounds, it was swept away and replaced with the guinea hen.
After leaving Cherio’s, Max would buy an afternoon newspaper at the corner, glance at the headlines, and tuck it under his arm as he proceeded down Madison Avenue. By two-thirty he was back in his office, reading manuscripts or seeing visitors, until sometime between four-thirty and five, when, in the days when he still commuted, he left for his last and longest conference of the day. This was “tea,” usually held at the Ritz Bar, en route to Grand Central Terminal. The location allowed him to catch the 6:02 back to New Canaan, again with seconds to spare. Other commuters tended to suspect that they held the train for Perkins, but it was not true. The gateman, however, was known to look up and down the station if Perkins had not left his conference on time, and he would often wait as long as the crucial half-minute before closing the gate.
Robert Ryan, who was a newspaperman before becoming a successful actor, used to ride the same train. He recalled, “After several weeks I was intrigued by this guy. I think he always sat in the same corner seat of the train. He never took his hat off, you know. This will sound crazy, but one night I went all the way to Connecticut without taking my eyes off him. It was fascinating. The rest of the world was just a blur to him. He plopped down without even looking around, then reached into his briefcase. For the next hour he just read. I noticed that he moved his lips when he read. He always looked a little lost. I guess he was just living vicariously through some writer’s work. And there I was almost doing the same thing, just watching him. I never approached the man. God, I never dared speak to him. Nobody did. Everybody noticed him, though he didn’t notice us; but nobody wanted to bother him. You were afraid you might throw some poor writer’s career in jeopardy.”
After more than twenty years of marriage, Louise figured if living in New York could not arouse Max, it would at least provide enough cultural activity to satisfy her. And she was closer to the theater. She still dabbled with the notion of acting: She rehearsed roles and went out to audition. A producer came to the house one day to discuss a role for a woman as young as Louise looked. When he saw several nearly grown girls about, she told him, “Oh, these are my husband’s children from his first marriage.” Elizabeth Lemmon remembered that another producer, who had seen Louise in an amateur theatrical, had held up his production of Rain for six months, hoping to persuade her to play Miss Sadie Thompson. Louise could have used her husband’s tacit disapproval as a reason to bow out, but instead said it was because of her daughters—“Nancy likes me to read to her at night.” Afterward, Louise wailed to Elizabeth, “Oh, if the Lord had only given me one inch of backbone, I’d take the part,” a remark that suggested that her own lack of confidence, more than Max, kept her from an acting career. “God,” Elizabeth Lemmon said many years later, “she could have taken the part if she really wanted it. Max wouldn’t have divorced her.”
One evening Max, finally settled in but not happy about living in New York, was looking down to the end of the dining room from his place at the head of the table, gazing at the statue that he and Louise had bought just after their marriage.
“The old Venus looks fine,” he said.
“Thank you, Max!” Louise came back, right on cue.
They quarreled often. They were each strong-willed and independent. Several times a week, she would quibble with something he had said. It would go on from there, and eventually Max, no longer listening, would flop into his armchair and start his reading for the evening.
Louise occasionally came by his office during the day. Once she found him standing at his desk-lectern, wearing his hat as he read. “Why are you wearing your hat in the office, Max?” she asked, kn
owing that he would not offer her the standard explanation he used on unwelcome visitors—that he was on his way out.
“Just for fun,” he said sheepishly.
“If wearing an old fedora is all the fun there is around this place,” she replied, “I’m sorry for you.”
Max still had considerable respect for Louise’s judgment in artistic matters. He seldom showed manuscripts to anyone outside the office, but he readily entrusted them to Louise. When Fitzgerald sent his new novel in, Perkins rushed home with it for Louise’s opinion, hoping she would share his enthusiasm.
“Louise sometimes seems surprisingly wise,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “but about the way the world is, she knows nothing.” Elizabeth saw Louise throughout the Thirties and believed as much. She said, “Louise was the vaguest human being in the world. And when it came to money, she had absolutely no understanding. One day she had no money in her purse—not a cent—only a check for $1,500.” Another time, they were on a crowded train and she said, “Elizabeth, don’t you just hate bonds? Daddy gave me a stock that would pay an extra dividend of $4,000. And Max is so extravagant. He spent it all on bonds. Bonds! They’re just pieces of paper with railroads on it.”
Louise’s father had died in 1931 in the Canary Islands. Although he had left Louise and her sister a large inheritance, the Perkinses continued to live on Max’s salary. Any money he did not earn he did not consider his. He said it belonged to his children’s future. Max loathed managing the Saunders estate, but he toiled hard at it. Herman Scheying, who handled the Saunders-Perkins account, thought Max’s philosophy toward investing was that of a hardscrabble farmer who had experienced a cold winter: “Max believed if he didn’t store something away he would not have it later. He took few chances. He was shrewd.” He didn’t believe in buying for rises. (“I think it’s immoral,” he once wrote Elizabeth of the practice. “I think you ought to lose by it.”) He never touched the principal, sold losing stocks early, and reinvested two thirds of his profits instead of spending them. To the amazement of Wall Streeters he knew, Max Perkins made substantial gains in the stock market during the worst months of the Depression.
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