Max had sleepless nights worrying about Louise’s inheritance, more money than he knew what to do with. But there is, at least, one story that indicates that the task of fiscal management didn’t inevitably spoil his mood. “One day,” Irma Wyckoff recalled, “Mr. and Mrs. Perkins had to go downtown to a bank for some business involving her father’s estate. When he returned to the office he looked at me as if he were in a dream and said, ‘Miss Wyckoff, you should have seen Louise today. She bloomed like a rose in the concrete jungle of Wall Street.’ ”
Louise’s was not the only bloom that attracted Max. He enjoyed looking at beautiful women. The Perkinses had a maid who was very pretty, and he liked to follow her with his eyes as she went around the table serving, staring straight up at her when she came near him—only to burlesque her reaction later to amuse his girls. Women, in turn, were often attracted to Max. “Mademoiselle,” the governess, was forever flirting with him, to the disgust of his daughters, and there were always women at Scribners trying to get close to him ostensibly in the hope of advancing themselves. One secretary even offered to work for him for no pay, just to be near him. Struthers Burt confirmed that Max was very attractive to women, “although he behaved as if totally unaware of this and gave them no leeway.”
Max cared little for the nonliterary arts—there was something almost effeminate about them, a delicacy that was at odds with his Evarts upbringing. He did appreciate classical sculpture, and he said every young boy should have a picture of the masculine Thinker by Michelangelo from the Medici tombs. (Even though he had only daughters, he saw to it that there was always one in the Perkins home.) No doubt because of his bad hearing and a ringing in his ears, he showed almost no interest in music. On the few occasions when he was coerced into attending a concert, he instructed his daughters not to applaud too much, for “they might start in again.” The tunes he liked most were such old favorites as “Sweet Afton” and “There Are Eyes of Blue.” He saw Victor Herbert’s Babes in Toyland over and over. John Hall Wheelock remembered how embarrassed Max was when, having let himself be dragged to a nightclub, he saw a chorus line of male dancers starting to perform; he had to shield his eyes with his hand until the men two-stepped away. No performance could delight him more than those occasions when one of his daughters sat at the Perkinses’ out-of-tune piano to accompany herself as she sang:I ain’t got no use for the women,
Not ladies nor gals of the town.
They will use a man for his money
And laugh in his face when he’s down.
That was the outward Max. To Elizabeth Lemmon, whom he allowed passage partway into his soul, he confided his deeper, unsuspected feelings on the subject of the sexes. “Girls don’t get an equal chance in this world, not by many miles,” he wrote her on the question of rearing daughters. “If we are ruled by a just Deity, men will have to be women once and go through with that,—or else will have to have been women, which is what I pray.”
XIII
Triumphs over Time
In the fall of 1933 Scott Fitzgerald, though still not quite finished with his novel, was already laying out its advertising campaign. Just before sending off the first installment for the magazine serialization he and Perkins had agreed upon, he wrote Max, “I should say to be careful in saying it’s my first book in seven years not to imply that it contains seven years work. People would expect too much in bulk & scope.... This novel, my 4th, completes my story of the boom years. It might be wise to accentuate the fact that it does not deal with the depression. Don’t accentuate that it deals with Americans abroad—there’s been too much trash under that banner.... No exclamatory ‘At last, the long awaited, ect.’ That merely creates the ‘Oh yeah’ mood in people.”
Fitzgerald took the title Tender Is the Night from Keats’s Ode to a Nightingale. The story, Perkins told James Gray of the St. Paul Dispatch, concerned “the brilliant surface of life on the Riviera and among wealthy and futile people, through the eyes of a simple, raw, and young person.” That person was Rosemary Hoyt, a young actress enamored of the attractive psychiatrist hero, Richard Diver. Fitzgerald flashed back to the beginning of Dr. Diver’s relationship with his wife and former patient, Nicole, moving forward to the conflict of their lives in the Midi. “The book is truly very fine as a whole,” Perkins wrote Hemingway. “It has a very tight plot.... It is the sort of story you can imagine Henry James writing, but of course it is written like Fitzgerald, and not James.” Max said it came from deeper inside Scott than had his earlier works and that “Scott could never have written it unless he had come into contact with sanitariums, psychiatrists, etc. etc. on account of Zelda’s illness.” It was so complex a work, Perkins believed, that it really ought not to be chopped up and serialized. But “authors must eat and magazines must live.” Perkins felt that it was his suggestion to serialize that had compelled Fitzgerald to finish the book: “He had to do it once that was agreed upon.”
Scott had raced to produce the magazine excerpts in time. Now Max was anxious for him to ready the whole manuscript for publication in book form. He suggested that Fitzgerald send him pages in batches, as he finished polishing them, so that they could be set in type while he worked on the rest. The suggestion proved wise, because Scott was proceeding slowly. He was still his own most punctilious editor. He checked every sentence not just for literary perfection but for medical accuracy. When it looked as if weeks would pass before he would be satisfied, he wrote his editor, “After all, Max, I am a plodder.” He rewrote the entire novel by the spring of 1934.
Once he got the complete manuscript, Perkins gave it a consecutive reading. He felt there was a lag in the beginning of the book, largely because of a sequence at the train station that was peripheral to the main story; he asked Fitzgerald to consider cutting it because “as soon as people get to Dick Diver their interest in the book, and their perception of its importance increases some thirty to forty percent.”
Fitzgerald valued Perkins’s advice as much as ever, but he could not see deleting the trainside incident. He maintained:I like the slow approach, which I think has a psychological significance affecting not only the work in question, but also having a bearing on my career in general. Is that too damn egotistical an association?
When the book went into galleys, Fitzgerald kept picking at it until the proofs were almost illegible. Scribners had another set run off, and then another. “This is an awful mess,” Fitzgerald concluded, returning one set, but he could not stop. At the same time he sent Max instructions about getting review copies to the right people, suggested advertising copy, and even complained that the dust jacket, with its reds and yellows, evoked the Italian Riviera more than the Cote d‘Azur’s white and blue sparkle. “Oh God, it’s hell to bother you with all this,” Scott said, “but of course the book is my whole life now and I cannot help this perfectionist attitude.” Later he said:I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds (and my God, that I should have to be pretentious about my work), it is an absolute fact—so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.
Fitzgerald naturally needed money, but the well of advances against this book’s royalties had dried up. Perkins divined a new source: He had a check drawn for $2,000 as a loan from Scribners at 5 percent, to be repaid upon the sale of the motion-picture rights to the novel.
The circulation of Scribner’s had increased with each installment of Tender Is the Night. That was encouraging. But there was little direct response. The only personal acknowledgments Fitzgerald received were from a few writers and motion-picture people. “Alas,” he wrote to Perkins, “I may again have written a novel for novelists with little chance of its lining anybody’s pockets with gold.”
Max’s hopes were higher. “Unless for some reason the book is above the general public’s head—for
some reason I cannot see, in view of its fascination, —” he wrote back, “it ought to be more than a sucess d‘estime.”
When Fitzgerald at last decided to dedicate his novel to Gerald and Sara Murphy, his models for Dick and Nicole Diver at times during the book, he wrote Perkins, “My only regret is that the dedication isn’t to you, as it should be, because Christ knows you’ve stuck with me on the thing through thick and thin, and it was pretty thin going for a while.” By mid-March the first printing of Tender Is the Night was being stitched and glued.
Zelda was now spending hours each day painting and reading Scott’s book. To her dismay she found it contained almost verbatim transcriptions of her own letters and her own case history posing as fiction. The effect on her was visible: The lines in her face deepened and her mouth began twitching. She had agreed to let an art dealer named Cary Ross exhibit her paintings at his Manhattan gallery, but she could not cope with the preparations. She relapsed and returned to Phipps Clinic. After she had gone a month without improvement, Scott placed her in a luxurious rest home called Craig House, two hours up the Hudson River from New York.
Scott and his daughter came to New York at the end of March for the opening of Zelda’s show. Scottie stayed at the Perkins’s. Zelda was released one afternoon for her exhibit and lunched with Max and Scott. Perkins did not find her well at all. Her eyes were sunken and swimming; her hair, once golden against her Riviera-bronzed skin, looked mousy. Her show was only moderately successful. Scott, curiously, was better than Max had seen him for years. Perkins wrote Hemingway:I believe that Scott will be completely reinstated, if not more, by his Tender Is the Night. He has improved it immensely by his revision—it was chaotic almost when I read it—and he has made it into a really most extraordinary piece of work.... Domestically things are still bad with him but about himself he feels like a new man, I could see. He has all kinds of plans now for writing—wants to begin another novel immediately.
Louise threw a dinner party that week for Scott Fitzgerald. Allen Campbell and Dorothy Parker were there, recently married after living together during the preceding year, and so was Elizabeth Lemmon. It was an odd assortment. Scott got drunk and boisterous, and Dorothy Parker became acerbic and stung everyone at the table with her sharp words. Louise tried hard to find fun in it all. Max sat stiff as a board all evening. Elizabeth looked lovely in a pale-gray Empire-style dress with a huge velvet rose in front—apart from that, he found nothing to enjoy about the evening. “He felt uncomfortable with the Allen Campbells around,” Elizabeth said, “because he thought they were still living in sin.” At the end of the evening Cary Ross, who had tried to outdrink Scott and had passed out, was lying on the sofa groaning. “I’m sure if we had known him under different circumstances, we’d like him,” Louise commented charitably. “Oh, Louise,” Dorothy Parker interjected, “you talk as if God were always listening.” In the confusion of leaving New York, Fitzgerald forgot to pay the bill for his room at the Algonquin. Max took care of that.
In mid-April, 1934, Tender Is the Night was published. Fitzgerald was anxious for a selling trend to develop. “The Great Gatsby had against it its length and its purely masculine interest,” he wrote to Perkins, “while this book ... is a woman’s book. I think given a decent chance, it will make its own way in so far as fiction is selling under present conditions.” The reviews were prominent and some were favorable. Kind personal letters from James Branch Cabell, Carl Van Vechten, Shane Leslie, John O‘Hara, and various members of The New Yorker crowd fell like flower petals before Fitzgerald. Morley Callaghan, to whom Perkins had sent a copy, wrote his editor: “It’s a fascinating book, an absolutely unrelenting book.... Scott is about the only American, at least the only one I know, who has that French classic quality of being able to note a point of character and then make a general observation with some wit, and yet make it a part of the fabric of the prose.” Scott appreciated all the kind words, but waited most eagerly for the opinion of Ernest Hemingway, who had not yet rendered his verdict.
After seven months abroad, one third of which was spent in Africa, Hemingway was back in Key West. He told Perkins he hoped Tender Is the Night was getting good reviews, though after reading it himself, he had some opinions of his own. He thought it had the same brilliance and most of the same defects as all Fitzgerald’s writing. There were the splendid cascades of prose, but there seemed to be something wrong beneath the surface, behind “the worn Christmas ornaments that are Scott’s idea of literature.” Ernest believed the characters suffered from juvenile, even silly, romantic notions Scott had about them as well as about himself, and so it appeared that their creator knew nothing about them emotionally. Hemingway saw that Fitzgerald had fictionalized Gerald and Sara Murphy, for example, and got the “accent of their voices, their home, their looks marvellously.” But then he transmuted them into romantic figurines, not understanding what they were really about. He cast Sara into a psychopathic case, then into Zelda, back into Sara, and “finally into nothing.” Similarly, Dick Diver was made to do things that happened to Scott but never could have befallen Gerald Murphy.
Perkins agreed with Hemingway’s observation about Fitzgerald’s fight to hang onto his youthful dreams, but believed “a great deal of the good writing he has done has come from the very fact of a sort of adolescent romanticism.” Max had just seen Scott in Baltimore and discussed that very point. He explained to Hemingway:There are certain fundamental things about which he has the strangest, most unreal ideas. It has always been so of him. But about one of these delusions I think I made an impression. Here he is, only about 35 or 6 years old, with immense ability in writing and in a state of hopelessness. But it is useless to try to talk directly to him about it.—The only way one could make an impression would be by some oblique method, and that takes a cleverer person than I am.
Tender Is the Night became the best seller in New York for a short time, but nationally sales barely exceeded 10,000 copies, nothing near as good as those of several other novels. Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, for example, sold over 1 million copies between 1933 and 1934. Fitzgerald was even outdone by a lesser-known Perkins writer. Stark Young, after a string of unsuccessful books, produced a novel of the old South, under Max’s guidance, called So Red the Rose. It became one of the most talked-about books of the year.
Fitzgerald’s descent into debt resumed. He got Zelda “out of hock at the exorbitant clinic” in New York, and entered her into the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital outside Baltimore. She was virtually catatonic. To cover Fitzgerald’s immediate needs, Perkins squeezed $600 more from Scribners as an advance on Scott’s next anthology of stories. Preparing that book for publication proved more arduous than either Perkins or Fitzgerald had anticipated. Many of the stories in the new collection had been written during the final siege of his novel, and Scott had “stripped” and “bled” their strongest passages to build up anemic sections in Tender Is the Night. Because the novel had gone through so many revisions, Fitzgerald could not remember what was finally retained and what was not. Now he had to thumb through the novel to see which phrases had already been used. When Perkins said he saw no reason why an author could not repeat himself occasionally, as Hemingway had done, Scott accused his editor of “specious reasoning.”
Each of us has his virtues and one of mine happens to be a great sense of exactitude about my work. He might be able to afford a lapse in that line where I wouldn’t be and after all I’ve got to be the final judge of what is appropriate in these cases. Max, to repeat for the third time, this is in no way a question of laziness. It is a question absolutely of self-preservation.
Four months later, when he was still putting in days combing the novel for sentences he had cribbed from himself, Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, “Certain people I know read my books over and over again and I can’t think of anything that would more annoy or disillusion a reader than to find an author using a phrase over and over, as if his imagination were starving.”
; To pay off his debts, Fitzgerald went back to moonlighting for the Saturday Evening Post, but after a few weeks of it he collapsed and took to his bed. In his Ledger he noted: “Hard times begin for me.” While he was recovering, Thomas Wolfe sent him a warm note about Tender Is the Night. “Thanks a hell of a lot for your letter which came at a rather sunken moment and was the more welcome,” Fitzgerald replied. “I am glad to hear from our common parent, Max, that you are about to publish.” As in the case of putting together Fitzgerald’s anthology, that was easier said than done.
Wolfe’s new agent, Elizabeth Nowell, said, “In publishing, a novel by an unknown writer is a very difficult thing to sell. The only thing more difficult is a novel by a writer who had some slight success and then, through failure to produce, has become a has-been.” Since Look Homeward, Angel, Max Perkins’s foremost interest had been Wolfe’s career. But Perkins was powerless to further it until that second book reached print. For months Tom had been spinning events of his life into fiction so frantically that Perkins feared he was approaching exhaustion. Max also worried that if Wolfe continued writing, his book could never be contained within two covers. It was already four times as long as the uncut manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel, over ten times the length of most novels. And Wolfe was adding 50,000 words a month. For the author’s welfare, Perkins was considering drastic action.
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