All year, Ernest Hemingway had been aware that Perkins had shifted most of his attention toward Thomas Wolfe. In October, 1934, he told Max outright that he thought Wolfe’s short stories were getting “quite pretensious” and that the subtitle for his novel—A Legend of Man’s Hunger—was just plain bad. Hemingway believed the reason Perkins’s “world geniuses” stalled so long was that they feared their works would be found to be “phoney” instead of being “world masterpieces.” He said it was better to create books one at a time, let the critics jump on what they did not like, and have orgasms about what they did, because the author himself would know which were good.
Hemingway admitted he was getting a little “snooty” because he had just completed the project he started two seasons earlier, and he needed nobody to help him cut or finish it. Smugly he decided it was best not to speak ill any further of his “overassed and underbrained contemporaries”—but there was no feeling, he told Max, like knowing you can do the “old stuff” even though it makes you “fairly insufferable at the time to your publishers.”
Hemingway had finished his “long bitch” of a work about Africa on the morning of November 13. The 70,000-word manuscript, which started as a story and kept spreading, was tentatively entitled The Highlands of Africa. Ernest insisted it was not a novel in form, but more like “Big Two-Hearted River” than anything else. It had a definite beginning and an end and a “hell of a lot” of action in between. Before this, Hemingway said, he had never known a book that made him see and feel Africa as it actually was. He said he had written the book absolutely truly, with no fudging of any kind, and that he was the only “bastard” just then who could do it.
Hemingway felt he had lost a large part of his following after A Farewell to Arms, and he wanted to win his readers back now by giving them what was really literature without being arty, leaving Perkins’s “pompous guys” to blow themselves up like balloons until they burst. He supposed that 70,000 words was long for a story, but he wanted to publish it with something else in the book to give the people a “super-value.” He proposed running it with his recent Esquire articles. Perkins objected. Whether or not Hemingway regarded this as a novel, he pointed out, it was a whole unit and considerably longer than would be necessary to make a full book. Max thought combining the story with other pieces would only distract the critics from the main work. “I hope you will publish it by itself,” he stated.
Hemingway’s, Fitzgerald’s, and Wolfe’s books were practically done, and Perkins felt he could go down to Key West to read Ernest’s manuscript. “I’d like to do it mighty well,” he told him. “I would like to spend an afternoon on the dock looking at those lazy turtles swimming around.”
On the eve of Perkins’s departure for Key West, the second week in January, only two parts of Tom Wolfe’s book remained to be agreed upon. The first was a foreword, which Wolfe had written. Max urged him to drop it. He explained: “A reader is meant to enter into a novel as if it were reality and so to feel it, and a preface tends to break down that illusion, and to make him look at it in a literary way.” The other part of the book to be discussed was the dedication page, which Wolfe had been drafting in the back of his mind since he had first begun the manuscript. In recent weeks John Hall Wheelock had been helping him polish it. Max knew little about it but had suspicions. Now, about to leave for Florida, he decided to speak his mind. “Nothing could give me greater pleasure or greater pride as an editor,” he wrote Tom, “than that the book of the writer whom I have most greatly admired should be dedicated to me if it were sincerely done.
But you cannot, and should not try to change your conviction that I have deformed your book, or at least prevented it from coming to perfection. It is therefore impossible for you sincerely to dedicate it to me and it ought not to be done. I know we are truly friends and have gone through much in company and this matter, for my part, can have nothing to do with that, or ever shall. But this is another matter. I would have said this sooner, but for some fear that you would misinterpret me. But the plain truth is that working on your writing, however it has turned out, for good or bad, has been the greatest pleasure, for all its pain, and the most interesting episode of my editorial life. The way in which we are presenting this book must prove our (and my) belief in it. But what I have done has destroyed your belief in it and you must not act inconsistently with that fact.
Louise accompanied Max to Key West this time, and during their eight fine days in the Gulf Stream, Max caught a whopping sailfish. On a postcard to Scott Fitzgerald from Key West, he wrote: HEMS BOOK IS ABOUT HIS OWN HUNTING IN AFRICA, BUT DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER HUNTING BOOK MAGICAL IN THE LAST THIRD. LOUISE TURNS OUT A GREAT FISHERMAN. MY FACE IS BURNED BLACK. BE BACK MONDAY.
When Perkins returned from his vacation he found that he had succeeded in getting Wolfe to leave out his long foreword, but he had failed to keep Wolfe from dedicating the novel to him. Of Time and the River was entirely in print—including Wolfe’s lavish inscription. “I fought with Tom to keep it at a minimum,” Wheelock said later, “to a level of propriety that would not embarrass Max altogether.” The dedication read:TO MAXWELL EVARTS PERKINS
A great editor and a brave and honest man, who stuck to the writer of this book through times of bitter hopelessness and doubt and would not let him give in to his own despair, a work to be known as “Of Time and the River” is dedicated with the hope that all of it may be in some way worthy of the loyal devotion and the patient care which a dauntless and unshaken friend has given to each part of it, and without which none of it could have been written.
Once Perkins saw it he wrote Wolfe, “Whatever the degree of justice in what it implied, I can think of nothing that could have made me more happy. I won’t go further into what I feel about it: I’m a Yankee and cannot speak what I feel most strongly, well, but I do wish to say that I think it a most generous and noble utterance. Certainly for one who could say that of me I ought to have done all that it says I did do.”
Of Time and the River sprang from the symbiotic union of two artistic forces—Wolfe’s passion and Perkins’s judgment. The two men had been at frequent odds, but together they both had accomplished the greatest work of their careers.
Max wrote Tom on February 8, 1935, “I swear, I believe that in truth the whole episode was a most happy one for me. I like to think we may go through another such war together.”
A torn fragment in Wolfe’s journals, never sent to Perkins, states: “In all my life, until I met you, I never had a friend.”
PART THREE
XIV
Going Home Again
When he returned from Key West in early February, 1935, Maxwell Perkins urged Charles Scribner and Fritz Dashiell of Scribner’s to serialize Hemingway’s new book, now called Green Hills of Africa. It was a narrative expedition into contemporary literature almost as much as into the Serengeti plains. As with Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway, writing in the first person, was the guide. At conveniently located water holes in the safari, he paused to discuss writers and writing; for example, at one point he mused about Thomas Wolfe:Writers are forged in injustice as a sword is forged. I wondered if it would make a writer of him, give him the necessary shock to cut the over-flow of words and give him a sense of proportion, if they sent Tom Wolfe to Siberia or to the Dry Tortugas. Maybe it would and maybe it wouldn’t.
Perkins wired Hemingway of Scribner’s enthusiasm for his book but said they would need to study the manuscript further before confirming the $5,000 proposal Max had mentioned while they were fishing in the Gulf Stream. It was a question of quantity of material, not quality. A week later Perkins wired: WRITING ABOUT PRICE. WISH TO PAY $4500. WILL BEGIN MAY NUMBER. PUBLISH BOOK OCTOBER....
In his letter Perkins added little to his telegram except his chagrin about the price. He knew Hemingway could get at least twice that much from any of the bigger magazines. “It is not a question of what Green Hills is worth intrinsically at all,” Perkins explained, “but of
what we can rightly pay for it and still run the magazine on as nearly sound an economic basis as the present situation allows, which is not a sound one.”
By the time Hemingway received the offer he was “touchy as hell.” He was more anxious about the reception of Green Hills of Africa than of any of his previous works, for in it he vented his aggressions not only against other writers but also against the critics who had tried to put him down in the last few years. Hemingway was laying his career on the line; and he hotheadedly interpreted Perkins’s hard feelings about the money as an invitation to refuse the offer, thereby releasing Scribner’s from purchasing it. So far as Hemingway knew, he told Max, the magazine had never run on a sound economic basis; but then, neither had Hemingway. He maintained that he had never cost a publisher anywhere any money, except Horace Liveright ... by leaving him. Perkins avoided a flap by getting Scribner’s to pay Hemingway the $5,000.
That spring Ernest cruised for the first time to the island of Bimini, a fisherman’s paradise 175 miles northeast of Key West. Perkins withheld his editorial comments on Green Hills of Africa for the galleys, hoping the few months in Bimini might calm Hemingway.
At about this time Fitzgerald went off to a hotel in Hendersonville, North Carolina, for four weeks of rest. After writing for fifteen years, he was less secure than the day he started. He was flat broke and was beginning to realize he was no better a caretaker of his physical resources than of his fiscal ones. “I do not think he is especially sick,” Perkins wrote Hemingway, “but just exhausted from work and alcohol.” Home again in Baltimore, Fitzgerald wrote Max that he had “been on the absolute wagon for a month, not even beer or wine, and feel fine.”
The news pleased Perkins, but he believed that Fitzgerald would soon suffer symptoms of withdrawal—a letdown and then a struggle. He knew Fitzgerald would need the support of all the friends that he could get, but Scott was hard put to find them just then. That year, almost simultaneously, three of his friendships with Perkins’s writers deteriorated.
Months earlier Fitzgerald had openly admitted a kind of literary inferiority to Hemingway. He had written him that his respect for Ernest’s artistic life was absolutely unqualified, “that save for a few of the dead and dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much.” But their personal relationship had become distant, less because of Fitzgerald’s envy than of Hemingway’s arrogance. When Perkins suggested that Ernest find the time and some reason to write Fitzgerald, to brace him for “the crisis he will have to meet after a bit” from giving up liquor, Hemingway said he could not think of a way to write him without hurting Scott’s feelings.
Several months later, however, Hemingway asked Perkins to tell Scott that, strangely, Tender Is the Night kept improving every time he picked it up. Fitzgerald was cheered by Hemingway’s kind words. The book had fallen flat, but the author still believed in it profoundly. “Things happen all the time which make me think that it is not destined to die quite as easily as the boys-in-a-hurry prophesied,” he wrote Max. His friendship with Hemingway, on the other hand, had been one of the “high spots of life,” but, Scott wrote Perkins, “I still believe that such things have a mortality, perhaps in reaction to their very excessive life, and that we will never again see very much of each other.”
Fitzgerald also wanted to avoid Thomas Wolfe for a while, after reading the advance copy of Of Time and the River which Perkins had sent him. He admired Wolfe’s lavish dedication, and wrote Max, “I am sure that nothing Tom has said in his dedication could exaggerate the debt that he owes you—and that stands for all of us who have been privileged to be your authors.” Fitzgerald thought the book went downhill from there, but he asked Max on no account to tell Tom this, “for responding as he does to criticism, I know it would make us life-long enemies and we might do untold needless damage to each other.”
Of Time and the River helped Fitzgerald realize “that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor.” A short story could be written on a bottle, Fitzgerald saw, “but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows as Ernest did in A Farewell to Arms. If a mind is slowed up ever so little it lives in the individual part of a book rather than in a book as a whole; memory is dulled.” Still on the wagon and full of sober regrets, Fitzgerald told Perkins, “I would give anything if I hadn’t had to write Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference.”
The old friendship between Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson had also lapsed. They had gone in opposite directions. Antagonism had mounted because of their respective reputations as scholar and wastrel, and it came to a head in an argument over that very issue. “Bunny [Wilson’s nickname] was the one who quarrelled, not Scott,” Perkins wrote Hemingway years later, “and Bunny behaved, I almost thought, childish.” More than ever, Perkins thought Wilson was a “remarkable chap and a man of natural integrity,” who had done some magnificent writing in his last book for Scribners, American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (1932). But during the next few years, Wilson’s animosity toward Fitzgerald spilled over into his relationship with Perkins. Several times he came to Max for money against the earnings of future books. Once he requested the modest sum of $75; another time he asked Scribners to help him get a bank loan. “You wouldn’t do anything for me on either occasion at a time when you were handing out money to Scott Fitzgerald like a drunken sailor—which he was spending like a drunken sailor,” Wilson wrote Perkins years later. “Naturally you expected him to write you a novel which would make you a great deal more money than my books seemed likely to do. But, even so, the discrepancy seemed to me somewhat excessive.” Wilson did not attribute this to malice. “You’re the only person I ever see around there, and I’ve always felt I was on very good terms with you,” Wilson wrote Perkins. He ascribed it to the “general apathy and moribundity into which Scribners seems to have sunk. You people haven’t shown any signs of life since old man Scribner died—except when you have a paroxysm over some writer —usually very unreliable like Scott or Tom Wolfe—upon whom you squander money and attention like a besotted French king with a new favorite.” Years later Wilson admitted: “I ... was never one of his favorites,” thus explaining why he left Scribners for another house in the mid-thirties. At that point he struck up a profound intellectual affair with Marxism, which threw into bolder relief for him Fitzgerald’s social and historical shallowness. It would be years before Fitzgerald and the man he called his “intellectual conscience” would sit down and talk as friends again.
On several occasions, Scott had seen Elizabeth Lemmon at small parties in Baltimore. (Max envied him that. He had not been with Elizabeth for months. “I know it is my destiny to see you very seldom,” he wrote her, “and I can endure it well enough even if the interval is to be years, when I know it in advance.”) Max felt Elizabeth, in those brief meetings, had done Fitzgerald a lot of good. “Scott is under forty,” he told her, “and if he’s finished with alcohol he might do greater things than he had ever thought of. I know you had not consciously or directly influenced Scott but you were a revelation to him and did unconsciously.” If Fitzgerald could stop drinking for good, Perkins believed, it would be largely because of Elizabeth Lemmon.
On the wagon longer than he had been in ages, Scott found his life “uninspiring,” whereas, he believed, these should be his most productive years. “I’ve simply got to arrange something for the summer that will bring me to life again,” he wrote Perkins, “but what it should be is by no means apparent.”
For lack of a better suggestion, Max urged Scott to continue work on a novel he had begun which was set in medieval Europe—a long way from West Egg. Fitzgerald replied that the 90,000-word book would be called Philippe, Count of Darkness. His hero was a Frankish tough guy in
armor—“It shall be the story of Ernest,” Fitzgerald put down in a notebook. Then he outlined parts of it that he could sell separately to magazines. He said Perkins could have it all by the late spring of 1936. “I wish I had these great masses of mss. stored away like Wolfe and Hemingway,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins, “but this goose is beginning to be pretty thoroughly plucked, I am afraid.”
In May, 1935, Fitzgerald visited Perkins in New York. A bright period in Zelda’s health had proved to be just a flash, and Scott’s mood the evening they were together reflected it. He was scrappy, putting Max on the spot about books Scribners was publishing. He expressed his greatest dissatisfaction over Tom Wolfe. Scott had recently read Wolfe’s story “His Father’s House” in the latest issue of Modern Monthly, published by V. F. Calverton. It embodied all Wolfe’s faults and virtues and made Fitzgerald wish Tom were the sort of person with whom one could discuss his writing.
How he can put side by side such a mess as “With chitterling tricker fast-fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birderies came” and such fine phrases as “tongue-trilling chirrs, plumbellied smoothness, sweet lucidity” I don’t know. He who has such infinite power of suggestion and delicacy has absolutely no right to glut people on whole meals of caviar.
Fitzgerald’s unusual surliness with Perkins was provoked mostly by his own poor health. Just days before, the phantom illness he had so often blamed for his ills had materialized in a spot on his lung. The air in Wolfe country was reputedly therapeutic for tubercular conditions, and so Scott took a room at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville. The move to North Carolina, he said, was an attempt to commute a “death sentence” his doctor had handed down if Scott were to revert to his old ways of living. Fitzgerald’s return address for the next few months was “Gant’s Tomb, Asheville.”
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