By the end of 1933 Tom’s mounting tension was manifesting itself in insomnia or guilt-filled nightmares. “He can’t go on like that!” Max said repeatedly to John Hall Wheelock. Max explained later in an article for The Carolina Magazine, “Time, his old enemy, the vastness and toughness of the material, the frequent and not always sympathetic inquiries of people about his progress toward another book, and financial pressure too—all were closing in on him.” Perkins was convinced Wolfe was headed for a breakdown, fearful that he might go insane. One day, while standing in the common area central to the editorial offices, Max shook his head and announced to his colleagues, “I think I’ll have to take the book away from him.”
Wolfe remembered Perkins’s action precisely. “In the middle of December of that year,” he recorded in a short documentary book called The Story of a Novel, “the editor ... who during all this tormented period had kept a quiet watch upon me, called me to his home and calmly informed me that my book was finished.” Wolfe also recalled his own reaction:I could only look at him with stunned surprise, and finally I could only tell him out of the depth of my own hopelessness, that he was mistaken, that the book was not finished, that it could never be complete, that I could write no more. He answered with the same quiet finality that the book was finished whether I knew it or not, and then he told me to go to my room and spend the next week in collecting in its proper order the manuscript which had accumulated during the last two years.
Tom obeyed. For six days he hunkered down in the middle of his apartment floor, encircled by a mountain range of manuscript. On the night of the fourteenth of December, at about half-past eleven, Wolfe arrived customarily late for his appointment with Perkins. He entered Max’s southwest-corner office and unloaded a heavy bundle on his editor’s desk. It was wrapped in brown paper, twice tied with string, and stood two feet high. Perkins opened it and found it packed with typescript—more than 3,000 rough-draft pages, the first part of the novel. The sheets, all different kinds of paper, were not consecutively numbered, since the sections had not been consecutively written. “God knows a lot of it is still fragmentary and broken up,” Tom explained afterward in a letter to his mother, “but at any rate he can now look at it and give me an opinion on it.”
“You have often said that if I ever gave you something that you could get your hands on and weigh in its entirety from beginning to end, you could pitch in and help me to get out of the woods,” Wolfe wrote Perkins the following day. “Well, now here is your chance. I think a very desperate piece of work is ahead for both of us, but if you think it is worth doing and tell me to go ahead, I think there is literally nothing that I cannot accomplish.... I don’t envy you the job before you.”
In spite of all the rhythms and chants—which Perkins called “dithyrambs” —marbled throughout the manuscript, Tom noted, “I think you will find when I get through that there is plenty of narrative—or should I say when you get through—because I must shamefacedly confess that I need your help now more than I ever did.”
Wolfe meant that literally, and Perkins knew it. Years later in his article for The Carolina Magazine, Perkins revealed what really lay at the heart of his task:I, who thought Tom a man of genius, and loved him too, and could not bear to see him fail, was almost as desperate as he, so much there was to do. But the truth is that if I did him a real service—and in this I did—it was in keeping him from losing his belief in himself by believing in him. What he most needed was comradeship and understanding in a long crisis, and those things I could give him then.
Years later Max wrote John Terry: “I swore to myself that I would get it done if it killed me,—as Van Wyck Brooks once said it would when I left dinner early to come to the office to meet Tom.”
Two days before Christmas, 1933, Wolfe delivered the rest of his pages. Max had seen most of them as fragments during the preceding years. For the first time he could peruse them in sequence. Wolfe left Perkins believing, as he acknowledged in The Story of a Novel, that once again Perkins’s intuition had been right—“He had told me the truth when he said that I had finished the book.
It was not finished in any way that was publishable or readable. It was not really a book so much as it was the skeleton of a book, but for the first time in four years, the skeleton was all there. I was like a man who is drowning and who suddenly at the last gasp of his dying efforts feels earth beneath his feet again. My spirit was borne upward by the greatest triumph it had ever known.
In reading the manuscript all together, 1 million words, Perkins discovered that it actually contained two separate cycles, both chronologically and thematically. The first, as Wolfe later came to see and articulate, “was a movement which described the period of wandering and hunger in a man’s youth.” This was the story which grew out of the idea that “every man is searching for his father.” Its hero was Eugene Gant again, finding himself. It was called Of Time and the River. The other “described the period of greater certitude, and was dominated by the unity of a single passion.” This was George “Monkey” Webber’s story, and it still fell under the title The October Fair. The second part was the more finished, but the author agreed with his editor that they ought to publish the other material first, thus continuing Eugene Gant’s odyssey.
Thinking the book could be published in the summer of 1934, Perkins and Wolfe began working at Scribners for two hours every afternoon, Monday through Saturday. Max inspected the material and found it wanting in two ways. Half of Of Time and the River was completed but needed cutting; the other half remained to be written. Each day they argued. Perkins insisted that it was an author’s duty to be selective in his writing. Wolfe asserted that it was an author’s primary task to illuminate a whole way of life for the reader. Once the first few hundreds of shards of manuscript were assembled, Perkins realized that it would take months of labor before it would be ready for the printer. He and Wolfe decided to work nights in the office, six times a week, from 8:30 on.
Sometimes Perkins wrote short directives right on Tom’s detailed breakdown of the book: “Insert section in train” or “Conclude Leopold.” Other instructions were more comprehensive:THINGS TO BE DONE IMMEDIATELY IN FIRST REVISION
1. Make rich man in opening scene older and more middle-aged.
2. Cut out references to previous books and to success.
3. Write out fully and with all the dialogue the jail and arrest scene.
4. Use material from Man on the Wheel and Abraham Jones for first year in the city and University scenes.
5. Tell the story of love affair from beginning to end describing meeting with woman, etc.
6. Intersperse jealousy and madness scenes with more scenes of dialogue with woman.
7. Use description of the trip home and the boom town scenes out of the Man on the Wheel. You can possibly use the trip home and boom town scene to follow on to the station scene. Play up desire to go home, feelings of homesickness and unrest and then develop idea that hometown has become unfamiliar and strange to him and he sees he can no longer live there.
8. Possible ending for book with return to the city, the man in the window scenes and the passages, “some things never change.”
9. On the Night Scene which precedes the station scene, write out fully with all dialogue the episodes of night including the death in the subway scene.
10. Cut out reference to daughter.
11. Complete all scenes wherever possible with dialogue.
12. Fill in memory of childhood scenes much more fully with additional stories and dialogue.
Wolfe and Perkins kept to themselves but rumors of their work swirled around New York. They became the butt of jokes at almost every literary gathering. “The man with a legitimate grievance is Maxwell Perkins, the Scribners editor,” critic John Chamberlain wrote in Books of the Times. “They tell stories about Mr. Perkins wrestling with Thomas Wolfe for three days, catch-as-catch-can, over the attempted excision of a phrase. Trucks are popularly supposed to deliv
er Wolfe’s manuscripts to the Scribners door.” Most of the stories were manufactured; few were completely untrue.
In the spring of 1934 Wolfe had decided to let his newest typist—who could interpret what Tom called “my most indecipherable Chinese” —type up everything of his that was still in manuscript so that Max could “see the whole works so far as possible.” It was a necessary step. Tom admitted to a writer—friend named Robert Raynolds, “I no longer seem to be able to tell what’s what myself.” Of Perkins, he wrote Raynolds further:God knows what I would do without him. I told him the other day that when this book comes out, he could then assert it was the only book he had ever written. I think he has pulled me right out of the swamp just by main strength and serene determination.
Perkins and Wolfe struggled through the spring. “I am cutting it hard now, and reducing it very greatly,” Max wrote Frere-Reeves in London. “Although there will, of course, be an argument later with Tom.” Chapter by chapter—the endings of which Perkins often designated—they examined each paragraph and sentence. “Cutting had always been the most difficult and distasteful part of writing to me,” Wolfe admitted in The Story of a Novel. Perkins supplied the objectivity and perspective toward the material that Wolfe lacked.
Max started with the scene on top of the bundle of Tom’s pages, which picked up where Look Homeward, Angel left off. Eugene Gant, about to go beyond the hills to Harvard, stands on the platform of the railroad station in Altamont saying good-bye to his family. The passage ran over 30,000 words. Perkins told Wolfe it should be shrunk to 10,000. In the Harvard Library Bulletin, he recorded what he told Tom: “When you are waiting for a train to come in, there is suspense. Something is going to happen. You must, it seemed to me, maintain that sense of suspense and you can’t to the extent of 30,000 words.” Perkins marked the material that could go and showed Wolfe, who understood. The author himself wrote Robert Raynolds:I suffer agony over some of the cutting, but I realize it’s got to be done. When something really good goes it’s an awful wrench, but as you probably know, something really can be good and yet have no place in the scheme of a book.
As with Look Homeward, Angel, Perkins said in his article for Harvard, “there never was any cutting that Tom did not agree to. He knew that cutting was necessary. His whole impulse was to utter what he felt, and he had no time to revise and compress.”
It was not just the number of scenes in Wolfe’s book that made it so difficult to condense. Another troublesome aspect of his writing was what he later described as his attempts “to reproduce in its entirety the full flood and fabric of a scene in life itself.” In one section of the book, for example, four people talked to each other for four hours without an intermission. “All were good talkers; often all talked, or tried to talk at the same time,” Wolfe wrote. When he got all their thoughts expressed, he had 80,000 words—200 printed pages for a minor scene in an already enormous book. Perkins made him realize that “good as it was, it was all wrong and had to go.” As usual, Tom argued, then agreed.
Hemingway invited Perkins to Key West in June, but Max would not leave New York. “I am engaged in a kind of life and death struggle with Mr. Thomas Wolfe still,” he explained, “and it is likely to last through the summer.” Max wrote his other author in Florida, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings:If he will go on for six weeks more at the present rate, the book will be virtually done. I could even now, if I dared, send a third of it to the printer. But Tom is always threatening to go back to the early part, and if he does that, I do not know what the result will be. We might have to go through the whole struggle over again. It has become an obsession with me now, one of those things that you get to tell yourself you have got to do even if it costs your life.
Tom and Max now were working on Sunday nights as well. Sometimes Wolfe pulled a chair up to a corner of Max’s desk and feverishly scribbled one of the requested connecting passages right there. Facing him from the other side of the desk, with the bulk of the manuscript before him, Max would read slowly. In his high jagged script he would make his notations. Every time he slashed a page from corner to corner, Perkins could see that Tom’s eye was following his hand. Wolfe winced with pain, as though Max had gouged his skin. Perkins would glance at one of his notes, clear his throat, and speak up. “I think this section should be omitted.”
After a long sulky pause Wolfe would say: “I think it’s good.”
“I think it’s good too, but you have expressed the thing already.”
“Not the same thing.”
It was on one such night that summer when Tom, after arguing over a big deletion, looked fixedly at the rattlesnake skin hanging with Max’s hat and coat and said, “Aha! The portrait of an editor!” After the laughter, Tom and Max quit for the night and went to the Chatham Walk, an open-air extension of the Chatham Hotel’s bar, and talked for another hour under the stars.
Convincing Tom of the necessity of cuts was only one aspect of Perkins’s task. He had allocated space for certain missing material, and now Wolfe was trying to compensate for his earlier losses by jamming verbiage into those lacunae. When they came to the point in the narrative where the hero’s father died, for example, Max said that it must be written about. Because Eugene was away at Harvard at the time, he said, Tom need only record the shock of the news and Eugene’s return for the funeral. Perkins figured it was a matter of 5,000 words. Tom agreed.
The next night Wolfe came in with several thousand words about the life of the doctor who attended old Gant. “This is good, Tom,” Perkins said, “but what has it to do with the book? You are telling the story of Eugene, of what he saw and experienced. We can’t waste time with all this that is so outside it.” Tom accepted that, but the next night he brought in a long passage about Eugene’s sister Helen, her thoughts while shopping in Altamont and then at night in bed when she heard the whistle of a train. “How in God’s name will you get this book done this way, Tom?” Max asked. “You have wasted two days already, and instead of reducing the length and doing what is essential, you are increasing it and adding what doesn’t belong here.”
Tom was penitent. He did not argue back. He promised to write only what was needed. The next night he brought in thousands of words more about Gant’s illness, all extraneous to what Perkins thought was wanted. Max laughed at the whole matter and said, “Really this does not seem to me to be essential to the book and we ought to get forward.” But Perkins also felt that those pages were too good to let go. Gant’s death scene remained in the book. It was one of the finest passages Wolfe ever wrote. During the course of the year, Wolfe estimated that he composed over a half million words of additional manuscript, of which only a small part was finally used.
“A couple of nights ago,” Max wrote Hemingway in June, 1934, “I told Tom that a whole lot of fine stuff he had in simply ought to come out because it resulted in blurring a very important effect. Literally we sat here for an hour thereafter without saying a word, while Tom glowered and pondered, and fidgeted in his chair. Then, he said, ‘Well, then will you take the responsibility?’ And I said, ‘I have got to take the responsibility—And what’s more,’ I said ‘—I will be blamed either way.’ ”
Sometimes Max was at fault for the lengthening. He recalled that wonderful scene that for five years he had regretted deleting from the beginning of Look Homeward, Angel—about young Gant and his brother watching the Confederate troops march by to Gettysburg. He saw how that could be shoehorned into this volume as a part of old Gant’s dying memories, and it was.
One night Max set aside his red pencil and took Wolfe to Lüchow’s restaurant. After a few hours there, Tom wanted to walk off the hearty German food. He insisted that Perkins accompany him to Brooklyn Heights to see the apartment where he had written so much of his manuscript. Absentmindedly, Wolfe led Max to a brownstone he had vacated just a few weeks before. When he found his door locked, he searched for his keys, then growled something about having lost them. He led Max up the fire escape and into
the large furnished railroad flat on the top floor of the building. Tom pointed out the refrigerator on which he had written the book, then offered Max a chair and poured a whiskey from the bottle sitting on the living room table. Several drinks later, the couple who lived in the apartment walked in. Max understood the situation in an instant and sank deeper into the chair.
After the wife ran for the police, Wolfe poured the husband a drink of his own whiskey and was soon slathering on his charm in his honeyed drawl. “That man hadn’t read anything but Dodger box scores in twenty years,” Perkins recounted years later, “but Tom treated him as though he were the editor of the Atlantic Monthly. He asked his advice on how to write short stories and begged for help on his next book.” By the time the police arrived the man was regaling Perkins and Wolfe with stories from his own life. Max and Tom remained another hour. Several days later Tom brought in 35,000 words that he wanted incorporated into Of Time and the River. It was an account of their night in Brooklyn. It was not used.
Into July they worked, now searching for the book’s conclusion. Max thought they might not ever finish because what seemed to him the very hardest part still remained—those pages about Eugene Gant’s association with Esther Jack, the character modeled after Aline Bernstein.
Max and Aline Bernstein had been aware of each other for five years, but Perkins did not meet her until he was working on Of Time and the River. Then a man introduced them in Cherio’s one day. Max was so skittish that little was said. Not long thereafter, however, Mrs. Bernstein called Perkins for an appointment in his office. There she swore that she would do everything in her power to prevent the publication of that book if she was a character in it. Perkins had to represent Tom, and so he could not agree to any concession whatever, but he remained cordial and open-minded. When she was leaving he held out his hand. Aline swung hers behind her back, saying, “I regard you as an enemy.”
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