The entire section that Wolfe had written about Aline Bernstein had never rung true to Perkins. He thought it was “too fresh to be written of objectively,” and he dreaded the struggle he knew they would have over it. Then it occurred to him that they might just end this large volume with Eugene’s first meeting Esther Jack on his return trip from Europe to America—and nothing more. By putting their story off into another book, Max knew he would not be eliminating the problem, but he could at least postpone it. Of Time and the River had its dramatic conclusion at last.
Until this time, Perkins’s office life and homelife had been two separate zones. He and Louise socialized with a few of his authors, but she saw to it that business seldom mixed with pleasure. Thomas Wolfe was the only author in Max’s life to pass freely from one sector to the other. Once the Perkinses had moved to New York, Wolfe took frequent advantage of his editor’s hospitality. Even the Perkins girls, who were afraid of him, came to realize that Tom was by nature extremely gentle, though he could be ranting at the top of his lungs in an instant. They all found Wolfe terrifying to sit close to at the dinner table. In the end, the youngest proved her valor. One night, Nancy recalled, “I was sitting on Daddy’s left at dinner and Wolfe was on his right. Tom was at his most horrid, cursing and raving at Daddy as though nobody else was in the room.” His words hurt her so that she burst into tears and yelled at Wolfe not to talk to her father that way. Max smiled gently and calmed her with a low voice. “It’s all right, Duck,” he said. “Never mind. Honestly, it’s all right.” Perkins never apologized for Wolfe, but he did try to explain his behavior, as he did once to Wolfe himself. “Tom,” he said, “you have in you ten thousand devils and an archangel.”
The weather in New York turned torrid but Perkins and Wolfe kept at their work. On the seventh of July, Tom lunched with Max and Scott Fitzgerald, who had come to town from Baltimore. Fitzgerald tried to console Wolfe about the truncating of his manuscript by saying, “You never cut anything out of a book that you regret later.” The next day Tom wrote Robert Raynolds, “I wonder if this is true. Anyway, I shall do all I can in what time is left to me, and then I suppose I will have to leave the matter on the lap of the gods and Maxwell Perkins.” Three days after that, the arguments between them grew so intense that Perkins packed up part of the manuscript and, without further discussion, sent it to the press.
Tom panicked and protested. When he came to his senses he wrote to his friend Catherine Brett, “I suppose I have got attached to it, as one might get attached to some great monstrous child, and I was a little terrified when I had to give it up.
It means that the proof will start coming back within a few weeks now, and it also means that all I expect or want, or hope to get done must be done within a little more than two months. After that the die is cast. I think Mr. Perkins is right in feeling that I ought to submit to this necessity, and that with a book which is as long as this and which has taken as much time, it is possible to get a kind of obsession, so that one can perfectly well work on it forever in an effort to perfect it and to get in everything he wants to get in, but I believe it is more important to get this one done now and to go on to other work.
Perkins had never spent so little time with his family as during the last year. That summer, his women scattered in all directions. Louise took a cruise, Bert was married and living in Boston, Zippy and Peggy traveled to Struthers Burt’s ranch in Wyoming, and the youngest girls, Jane and Nancy, went to New Canaan. Zippy and Peggy came back from the West saying they would never marry, Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “because cowboys couldn’t support them and all Eastern men are as nothing beside them.” Max understood their reaction entirely:I never was so flattered as when a man pointed me out as Will James—and Bill gave a very wan smile when I told him of it. It’s one reason we have wars: a man who wends his life with his knees crooked under a desk is not more than half a man, and we all know it. And Dr. Johnson said, when they were running down the military, “If a general walked into this room now we’d all be ashamed.” And if a good workman, a mechanic, walked into a boardroom at a directors meeting, the directors would all feel ashamed. And if old Zimmerman, foreman at our press, a man like Adam Bede, in a striped apron, walked into our directors meeting we’d all feel ashamed. And that is true and must mean something, but what, I don’t know.
On September 8, 1934, Max’s first grandchild, Edward Perkins Frothingham, was born to Bertha and her husband. Perkins referred to the baby with feminine pronouns for months, insisting that it was from force of habit.
Somehow Max had found time in the last few months—usually in the hours when Wolfe was overdue for his appointments—to dispatch several bulletins of his progress with Tom to Elizabeth Lemmon. A few days before he was scheduled to visit Dr. Bordley in Baltimore, he wrote her again to report that he was coming and to say he hoped she’d meet him there. “I’ll pretend to myself you’re not anyhow,” he said, “to avoid as much disappointment as I can.” On the eve of Max’s departure, Elizabeth thought of making a small party of the trip by asking Tom Wolfe to accompany Perkins. She correctly guessed where Max and Tom would be that night, and paged Wolfe at the Chatham Walk. She invited them both to Welbourne. Tom gave his regrets. There was still a great deal that he wanted to do to his manuscript and time was running out. Instead, he said, he wished Elizabeth could lure Max from Baltimore to Virginia for a while. “I think he is very tired, and know that a vacation would do him a lot of good,” Tom wrote the next day, adding, “He has sweated and labored and lavished untold care and patience upon this huge ms. of mine. There is no adequate way in which I can ever express my gratefulness, but I can only hope the book may have something in it which will in some measure justify his patience and care.”
After his ear treatment at Johns Hopkins, Perkins visited Scott in Baltimore, and then the two of them went by train to Washington. Elizabeth met them with her car in Georgetown and drove them on to Middleburg. Max had known Elizabeth for more than a decade, but this was his first visit to Welbourne. It seemed at first exactly as he had envisioned it. But he was on edge after a few minutes. He did not want to examine the place too closely for fear that its reality might mar his idealized image. (“The haze of glamour vanishes under the sun of fact,” he had written her ten years before.) He felt like a trespasser in forbidden land, and so he suggested taking in some Civil War monuments. Elizabeth agreed to drive them to Appomattox. After touring the site, Max insisted on returning to New York. Elizabeth, a little surprised she had gotten him to stay so long as he did, drove him to the Washington station. Before putting him aboard an air-cooled train, she extended an open invitation for a longer visit to him and Fitzgerald, as well as to Thomas Wolfe. “I only wanted to thank you for your great kindness in taking us to Welbourne,” he wrote Elizabeth the following week. “It’s as if I had drunk the milk of Paradise once and seen an enchanted place.”
Thomas Wolfe wrote Miss Lemmon that Max had “talked about the place a hundred times since he was there. He says it is the finest place he ever saw. I think you almost made a Rebel out of him, and I didn’t think that was possible.” Fitzgerald thanked Perkins for taking him into that “novel and stimulating atmosphere” for he had been in a “hell of a rut.” Even so, Max did not think his authors should avail themselves so readily of Welbourne’s splendors. It was not jealousy that made him say that. He tried to explain to Elizabeth that it was professional concern, but he found it hard to get his point across because of “the ancient trouble of a woman not understanding how things are with men.”
“You want to have Tom Wolfe and Scott play, and I want to have them work,” he reproved Elizabeth, going on to say,It’s enormously more for their own sake than for Scribners that I want them to do it. If the time I’ve given, and the neglect of other things on account of it were reckoned, it would be inconceivable that Scribners could be repaid by what Tom’s book might do. But for his sake he must finish it. It’s a desperate matter for him.... As for Scott
: he’s easily beguiled from work to drink.... There is no one I so dislike to displease as you. ... But Elizabeth, you must forgive me about Scott and Tom. I truly know more about that than you do.
Besides, Max once told her, if she continued to invite them, she would find herself a character in their fiction. “Scott will disguise you,” he said, “but Tom will write you exactly as you are.”
Fitzgerald was disappointed that the sales of Tender Is the Night had stopped at 15,000 copies. He was selling stories regularly since its publication, but his heart was not in them. Whenever his working spirit took leave, he turned south to Virginia. He went to Middleburg, to mingle among the wealthy gentry and play to the hilt the part of the gentleman novelist. But Elizabeth knew that the water pitcher Fitzgerald emptied during the course of the afternoon was filled with straight gin. He brought along the galleys of his short-story collection, now titled Taps at Reveille, but would not even look at them. When Elizabeth pointed out that he had given one character two different names, he threw the galleys at her and said, “Here, you correct them.”
On Perkins’s next visit to Baltimore he met again with both Scott and Elizabeth. Fitzgerald was still going through a period of despair and he discussed his state of mind. “I am ashamed and felt very yellow about it afterwards,” he admitted to Perkins. “But to deny that such moods come increasingly would be futile.” What weighed heaviest on Max was his inability to help him. “I can’t seem to,” he wrote Elizabeth, “perhaps because I never had trouble comparable to what he has had. And so I can’t feel what he does. Then too he and I are really friends, but he doesn’t think I know much.”
Years later Elizabeth wrote Louise that “Scott sobered up and tried to put on a show when Max came to Baltimore, and to this day I don’t know if Max actually saw through him, but those efforts kept Scott going and Max accepted them as though they were genuine—perhaps they were, perhaps Max reached the truth in him as he did in everyone.” Still later she realized that Max had been wise to Scott all along. Perkins did know how annoying Scott Fitzgerald could be, but he preferred to ignore it. One night at a display of modern Pullmans in the middle of Washington’s Union Station, Scott drunkenly hurled himself onto a bed and cried with outstretched arms, “Louise, come to me!” Max looked the other way. Once while having “tea” at the Plaza, Scott, intoxicated again, poked Zippy Perkins in the arm and said, “I could take you upstairs anytime.” She remembered, “Daddy gave me a look that meant we should feel sorry for Fitzgerald, but then pretended that he didn’t hear what he said.” Elizabeth Lemmon recalled another occasion when Perkins was not present. “Scott introduced me to Archibald MacLeish, saying, ‘This used to be Max Perkins’s girl,’ implying that I was now his girl,” Elizabeth said. “But my God, after knowing Max Perkins, how could anyone be Scott’s mistress!”
Fitzgerald thought “Beth” Lemmon was “charming” and wondered “why the hell she never married.” Perkins was pleased that Scott liked Elizabeth. (“Don’t call her Beth,” he told Fitzgerald; “the name does not suit her at all, and I have always refused to use it.”) On the train home Max wrote a letter to her, which he destroyed because it seemed to make little sense. He explained later, “The trouble is that after seeing you I stay for about four days in a kind of bemused state resembling that of the knight-at-arms Keats wrote about.”
In November, 1934, Fitzgerald’s story “Her Last Case” appeared in the Post. Welbourne provided the background. Without the $3,000 the Post paid him for it, Scott could hardly have gotten through the year, because Charles Scribner’s Sons was run differently than it had been. The house now had a half-dozen different departments, and the heads of all of them had a say in the business policy of the firm. Perkins was more sympathetic to Fitzgerald’s financial situation than ever before; but, he wrote, “It is impossible to make such a one, for instance, as the head of the educational department (which by the way, does better than we do in the depression) understand it. He would think we were just crazy, having all but cleared up your indebtedness by the way we arranged for Tender Is the Night, to let it all pile up again. I wish to Heaven—and I know you do too—that we could work out some way. But you have had a run of mighty bad luck and have struggled against it very valiantly, and it still is true, as the feller says, that the only sure thing about luck is that it will change.”
In October, 1934, Tom Wolfe grew so weary of words that he left town for a few days to visit the World’s Fair in Chicago. It was his first extensive vacation after a year of work. While he was gone, Max had his whole manuscript set in type: 450,000 words in 250 galleys would appear as 900 pages of book. When Wolfe returned to New York, he learned that his editor had made an even more arbitrary decision during his absence. He was going to send the galleys back to the typesetters without waiting for the author to look at them. Perkins had seen Wolfe pore over the galleys of the first section of the book for weeks in the Scribners library without correcting them. Without an ultimatum he might hold onto them forever. Perkins told him he was going to send out twenty galleys a day, proofread by Wheelock, to be set into pages.
“You can’t do it,” Tom protested. “The book is not yet finished. I must have six months more on it.” Perkins answered that the book was indeed finished; further, that if Wolfe took an additional six months, he would then demand another six months and six months more beyond that. He would become so obsessed with this one work that he would never get it published. Wolfe recorded the rest of Perkins’s argument in The Story of a Novel:I was not, he said, a Flaubert kind of writer. I was not a perfectionist. I had twenty, thirty, almost any number of books in me, and the important thing was to get them produced and not to spend the rest of my life perfecting one book.
In his piece for the Harvard Library Bulletin Perkins wrote, “It is said that Tolstoi never willingly parted with the manuscript of War and Peace. One could imagine him working on it all through his life.” So it was with Wolfe and Of Time and the River.
“I think I’m peculiarly cursed in almost always knowing what I ought to do,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “If you don’t know it’s all right enough; but if you do know and don’t do it, that’s bad.” As a result, he confided, “I’ve taken awful risks about that book, but I had to do it. It had to be done, and because of the peculiar circumstances of the case I almost know that no one else could have done it as well and finished it. You may hear me damned for it some day but I reckoned that in from the start. I’m mentally prepared for it but whether emotionally I don’t know.”
Late that fall, Wolfe resisted Elizabeth Lemmon’s invitations no longer. After Max had spoken so much about each of them to the other, they met in Middleburg. Elizabeth adored Tom. She said, “He was a much more natural person than Fitzgerald. Scott’s inferiority complex made him always the show-off. Tom had a more basic kind of dignity. He was completely honest.” Because of Wolfe’s genuine warmth and interest in everyone around, she was inclined to overlook his occasional vituperation. She showed him around Middleburg one day, and one woman with whom they started talking about literature thoughtlessly dropped the comment that she never remembered the name of the author of any book. Elizabeth remembered that “Tom sulked the rest of the time we were there; but when we left he blew up. ‘W-W-Why did she h-h-have me over if she w-w-wanted to insult me?’ he bellowed.”
After leaving Welbourne, he wrote Elizabeth:Your America is not my America and for that reason I have always loved it even more—there is an enormous age and sadness in Virginia—a grand kind of death ... I’ve got to find my America somehow here in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in all the fog and the swelter of the city, in subways and railway stations, on trains and in the Chicago Stock Yards. I’m so glad you let me see your wonderful place and see a little of the country and the kind of life you have down there.
That October, out of the clear blue, Aline Bernstein contacted Perkins. The passing of time and the acceptance of the truth had diluted her earlier antagonism to him but left her w
orn down. She knew that Of Time and the River was approaching publication and that the character of Esther Jack was now limited to the final scene. Now she told Perkins that years earlier, when Tom went abroad on his Guggenheim Fellowship, he had presented her with the manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel. Recently, she said, she had been hospitalized and unable to work. She was going to California to rest and was eager to give up her house in Armonk, New York. Before leaving she wanted that manuscript, like its author, out of her life. “I want to give you the manuscript, if you care to have it,” she wrote Perkins, “on the condition that you will never under any circumstances return it to Tom. If you do not want it, I will destroy it before I leave, as I do not care to have it fall into other hands than yours or mine.”
Perkins offered to keep the manuscript safely at Scribners, but said, “I could never regard it as anything but yours since I know the circumstances in which it was given to you.”
Aline appreciated Perkins’s generosity toward both herself and Tom. Later she wrote Max, “My wound is as fresh today as the day [Tom] found it necessary to turn away from me.” But she added, “I have always believed Tom to be the greatest artist writing today, and I think it is wonderful that you have been at his side all this time.” She accepted Max’s proposal but insisted the manuscript eventually go to the editor, “for you have done all the good things for Tom that I had hoped to do.”
There was, in fact, still more that Perkins wished he had been able to do to Wolfe’s new manuscript, but he realized that an editor too must eventually give up a book. He wrote Elizabeth Nowell: “The book will contain many too many adjectives, and much repetition of a sort, and too much loud pedalling. Those are faults that Tom won’t dispense with as yet.” Still, he maintained, it would make a great impression and be a success, and he thought the criticism on such points would drive Wolfe to sterner discipline.
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