“I was a good deal dismayed & probably jealous so forget all I said that night,” Fitzgerald wrote Perkins after he had returned to Baltimore. “You know I’ve always thought there was plenty room in America for more than one good writer, & you’ll admit it wasn’t like me.”
Perkins thought everything Fitzgerald said about Wolfe was as true as truth can be, but there was little anyone—even Perkins—could do about it. “Even if one had an utterly free hand, instead of being subject to constant abuse ([with accusations of] God damned Harvard English, grovelling at the feet of Henry James, etc.),” Perkins explained to Fitzgerald, “it would be a matter of editing inside sentences even, and that would be a dangerous business.” Max thought criticism and age might make an impression and that Wolfe’s writing would mature on its own. For the present, he said, “It is not that he thinks he is better than anyone else. He just does not think about the other people at all. When he reads them he is quite keen about them for a while, but [they do not seem important to him] because what he is doing seems to him momentous.”
The appearance of Of Time and the River was the most fervently anticipated literary event of the spring season of 1935. The book had been talked about for months before the March 8 publication date. Max sent first editions to most of his friends and authors, even though he was sure some of them would never trudge through the 912-page volume. Van Wyck Brooks saw the sweat of Perkins’s brow on every page, unable as he was to forget the hundreds of hours Max labored “through jungle-like nights in the middle of summer,” slowly going under as he tried “to hang onto the fin of a plunging whale.” Ernest Hemingway said the book was “something over 60% shit.”
Wolfe believed the best way to avoid the same kind of public hysteria and private confusion that had accompanied his first book would be to leave America. He later gave his thoughts on exile in You Can’t Go Home Again, through his character George Webber:When his first book had come out, wild horses could not have dragged him from New York: he had wanted to be on hand so he could be sure not to miss anything. He had waited around, and read all the reviews, and almost camped out in [his editor‘s] office, and had expected from day to day some impossible fulfillment that never came.... So now he was gun-shy of publication dates, and he made up his mind to go away this time—as far as possible. Although he did not believe there would be an exact repetition of those earlier experiences, just the same he was prepared for the worst, and when it happened he was determined not to be there.
Wolfe booked passage on the Ile de France, and crated for storage everything he owned. His itinerary was as vague as his plans upon returning. On the night of March 1, the eve of Wolfe’s departure, a cab pulled up to 246 East Forty-ninth Street. A man leapt out and pounded on the Perkinses’ door. Max came down, not surprised to find Wolfe standing there, but astonished that he had brought a wooden packing case, five feet by two feet by a foot and a half. It contained every page of his manuscript, including the bundle of sheets they had worked over during the last five years. Tom and Max and the driver hauled it from the taxi and set it down inside the house. Then Tom asked the cabby his name. He said, “Lucky.” “Lucky!” whooped Tom, pumping the man’s hand. It seemed a good omen. The three had just completed a great effort together. They all stood there, smiling at one another for a moment, then they all shook hands. “Lucky” drove off, and the large packing case blocked the Perkinses’ hall for days.
After Wolfe sailed, a letter from Aline Bernstein arrived for him at Scribners. Perkins wrote her back that he could do no more than hold it, because Tom had expressly forbidden him to forward any mail. He had left with the idea of taking a complete vacation for a couple of months, to be disturbed by neither personal mail nor even reviews.
As it happened, Tom himself had written Aline Bernstein a twenty-page message which he had mailed from Sandy Hook before the Ile de France reached the high seas. In it he told her about a copy of his book that he had left for her in Perkins’s care. Then he wrote “how wonderful and great a person” Max was. Aline realized that provoking Max’s hostility would kill any hope of her ever reaching Tom again. Ironically, getting through to Perkins was her last resort. In a friendly tone she now wrote Perkins a long letter, this one from Hollywood, where she was working for RKO Pictures. She really was not well enough to take the job, she wrote—“all these years of pain and sorrow about Tom have finally worn me out”—but she wanted to help her family, who had tried to help her mend the heartbreak of the last several years. Mrs. Bernstein asked Max to send her copy of Tom’s book to California. “I cannot read it now,” she explained, as “I am too deeply moved by anything concerning Tom, even his name in a newspaper sends a dart of pain through me. I cannot understand his complete betrayal of me, but I have reached a place in life where all is a mystery. Forgive me, that I write you this way, but ... I think that you and I have been closer to Tom than any other beings. I still live all my life with him, as I did the many years we were together, and now I want life no more without his friendship.”
At Mrs. Bernstein’s request Max returned those of her letters that were sitting at Scribners and sent her her copy of Tom’s book.
It was because of her family that Aline wrote to Perkins once again. She knew about Of Time and the River’s conclusion, in which Eugene Gant coming home from a European journey beheld a rosy-cheeked Jewish woman older than himself. Aline realized that Wolfe was soon to write about their relationship. The next book, she feared, would expose their love affair for all the world to see. She wrote Perkins:I have already lived the great part of my life. But some time ago, he read [me] certain portions which he had written about my sister and my children, that must never be published ... they have all stood by me when Tom almost wrecked my bright soul and loving heart. I will not have them traduced, no matter what means I take to prevent it. This concerns not only me, but yourself in your editorial capacity.
Tom has often told me that you hate women, no doubt you think I am behaving like one. Well, I am. I consider it a curse to be a woman, a double curse to be a woman and an artist, but I cannot help it any more than I can help the color of my eyes. When Tom and I were first lovers, I told him it was the only time I was glad to be a woman, to complete him. I am still proud of my relation to him, in all its horror and beauty.
Wolfe had sworn that he would show Aline Bernstein The October Fair before any of it went to Perkins for editing. That was a long while ago, when it was to be his second book. “He has broken his word of honor to me so many times that I cannot trust him in this,” she wrote Perkins. “So I appeal to you.” She begged him to understand that “He cannot, he must not, I will not allow him again to betray me.”
Perkins replied:From your earlier letter I judge that you suppose that Tom had given me reason to think of you as a “monster,”—this is the reverse of the truth, but I now begin to suspect that he must have given you to suppose that I was one. You are enough of a psychologist to know that the men who are thought to hate women are the ones who are affected just the other way, so that they had to set up a “defense mechanism.” I think women are extremely annoying, but that is because a man sees them in perspective. At any rate, nobody could fully understand that part of your letter in which you address me as an editor, but October Fair will not be published anyway for a year, and perhaps not as soon as that, and I cannot tell much about it until Tom returns.
On publication day of Of Time and the River, Perkins violated his vow of silence to Wolfe, but not in regard to Aline Bernstein. He sent a cable to the American Express office in Paris about the book: MAGNIFICENT REVIEWS SOMEWHAT CRITICAL IN WAYS EXPECTED FULL OF GREATEST PRAISE. Expecting no mail but checking for some, Wolfe received the message, then rambled along the boulevards of Paris in a reverie. Later he could remember almost nothing of the next six days. But Perkins’s words were only a tantalizing morsel of the glory for which he hungered. Wolfe wired back: YOU ARE THE BEST FRIEND I HAVE. I CAN FACE BLUNT FACT BETTER THAN DAMNABLE INCERTIT
UDE. GIVE ME THE STRAIGHT PLAIN TRUTH. Perkins’s second telegram poured it on even thicker than the first: GRAND EXCITED RECEPTION IN REVIEWS. TALKED OF EVERYWHERE AS TRULY GREAT BOOK. ALL COMPARISONS WITH GREATEST WRITERS. ENJOY YOURSELF WITH LIGHT HEART.
That same day Perkins wrote further, “Everybody outside of this house, outside the business, was amazed by the reception of Of Time and the River.” Most of the reviews drew parallels with the venerated writers, from Dostoevski to Sinclair Lewis. “Honestly, unless you expected no degree of adverse criticism at all, because of course there was that about too great length and the sort of thing we all talked of,” Perkins wrote him, “I cannot imagine why you should have any restraints upon your happiness in this vacation. If any man could rest on laurels for a bit, the man is you.”
The economy in the spring of 1935 continued to worsen, the book business along with it. But Scribners soon had printed five editions of Wolfe’s book, totaling 30,000 copies. Within weeks they had sold most of them, putting Of Time and the River in the top three on every bestseller list. By the end of the year, another 10,000 copies were printed.
The Times, Tribune, and Saturday Review gave Wolfe full front pages, and his picture was everywhere. Those who went out on Sunday afternoon to tea, as Louise did, found that even where there were no publishing people the book was excitedly talked about. Even Perkins’s seventy-seven-year-old mother, who spoke of literature as “mental candy,” was reading it, though her reaction was atypical. For five or six days she sat with it, emoting as much as a wooden Indian, until someone asked how she was getting on. As though she had waited a week for the question, she dropped the closed book to her lap, lifted her face and declared, “I’ve never read such language in my life.” To one of her granddaughters she called, “Molly, go upstairs and get me a volume of Jane Austen so I can purge my mind!”
For weeks Wolfe traveled incommunicado. He had been completely worn out upon landing in Europe and in a state of nervousness over Of Time and the River that made even letter-writing impossible. That book, which had induced this state, now snapped him out of it. “Max, Max,” Wolfe wrote his editor, “perhaps you think I hate all forms of criticism, but the sad truth is how much more critical am I, who am supposed to be utterly lacking in the critical faculty, than most of these critics are.” The bulk of Wolfe’s first letter home was his own reaction to Of Time and the River. He carried a copy of the book under his arm wherever he went but found it torture to read, save for a page or two at a time. Even then he found “at every point the deficiency of my performance compared with the whole of my intent, stares me in the face.” The prickliest nettles were the countless mistakes in wording and proofreading, and the textual discrepancies. He absorbed the blame for all of them. During the first two months after publication, the staff at Scribners discovered some 200 errors, including the mysterious reappearance of Mr. Wang. Wang is the round-faced Chinese student from whom Eugene Gant borrows fifty dollars in his midnight race to old Gant’s deathbed. Eugene arranges to mail the money to Wang. Wolfe wrote: “The boy never saw him again.” Sixty-five pages later, however, Eugene raps on Wang’s door and asks the Chinaman if a friend can spend the night on his couch.
“I fell down on that final job,” Tom admitted. “The book was written and typed and rushed in to you in such frantic haste day after day that I did not even catch the errors in wording the typist made in an effort to decipher my handwriting—there are thousands of them.” He listed some:Battersea Lodge should have read Battersea Bridge
the character of my brain—the diameter of my brain
African beings—African kings
shaking his beard—shaking his head
“Max, Max, I cannot go on,” Tom wrote after listing a fraction of the corrections that had to be made. He said, “We should have waited six months longer—the book, like Caesar, was from its mother’s womb untimely ripped—like King Richard, brought into the world ‘scarce half made up.’ ”
Wolfe worked at a four-part letter to Perkins for over a week. After registering his own criticism of the book, Wolfe reviewed his critics, interpreting every complaint as an attack on him personally. In response to Mark Van Doren’s remark, a year before, that “The public is justified in asking Mr. Wolfe whether he can keep himself out of the picture in books to come,” Tom now reminded Perkins, “You yourself told me you took one of your daughters through the Grand Central Station and showed her twenty people who might have stepped right out of the pages of Dickens, all just as true to life, but worthy of fiction.” Because Burton Rascoe said that Wolfe had no evident sense of humor, Tom listed the scenes he considered comical. Reacting to Clifton Fadiman, who said it was debatable “whether he is a master of language or language a master of him,” Wolfe ranted for paragraphs.
He closed Section 1 of his letter with the hope “that we have had a genuine and great success and that when I come back I will find my position enormously enhanced. If that much is true—if it is true that we have successfully surmounted the terrible, soul-shaking, heart-rending barrier of the accursed second book—I believe I can come back to work with the calm, the concentration, the collected force of my full power which I was unable to achieve in these frenzied, tormented, and soul-doubting last five years.”
That spring Louise Perkins decided to tour Europe with her daughters Zippy and Peggy. When Wolfe learned of the plans in the making, he asked her to persuade Max to take a short vacation as well. “The one thing I have observed in Max in the last few years which worried me and which seemed wrong,” Wolfe wrote Louise, “was a growing tenacity in the way he stuck to business—what seemed to me sometimes an unreasonable solicitude and preoccupation with affairs which might be handled by proxy or in less exhausting ways.” He thought it was surely a sort of vanity, even in so modest a man as Max, to feel that a business could not run itself in his absence for a few weeks. Tom believed Max was at the “summit of his powers,” that his best work was still before him. “[It] would be a tragedy,” Wolfe wrote Louise, “if he in any way blunted or impaired his great faculties at this time simply because he failed to take advantage of a chance to recuperate and replenish his energies.”
Perkins gave no indication that he had considered leaving his office even for a day. He wrote Elizabeth Lemmon that very month, “I’m in for a horrible summer alone here, but in a way I look forward to it. There won’t be much I want to do, but still I won’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. Or maybe I’m fooling myself about that.” He certainly would not have to go out to parties, as he and Louise had been doing many nights since moving to New York.
Before her trip, Louise Perkins had one of her paroxysms of spring cleaning. To burn off some of her energy, she weeded the bookshelves. She filled barrels with several hundred volumes, then paid a dealer $5 to haul them away. Weeks later, David Randall, the Scribners rare book authority, was walking down Second Avenue, window-shopping at the used book stores, when one display practically jumped out at him. There were dozens of books inscribed to Maxwell Perkins by Galsworthy and other eminent authors. When Max learned the facts, Randall went to buy them back, and was told the collection would cost $500. “We settled on $25,” Randall recalled years later, “when I said it wasn’t Mrs. Perkins, but the crazy maid who sold all the books to him. I said we’d meet him in court if he charged anything more.” Max, Randall remembered, “laughed that quiet laugh of his, shaking his head back and forth, as if only his wife could have done such a thing.”
Perkins’s summer proved to be as horrible as he had anticipated. “You don’t know how lonely it is here at night,” he wrote Elizabeth Lemmon on June 28, 1935. “I forget about it in the day and when people ask me to do things at night I say I can’t and then regret it. But I’d regret the other way too and get less work done. It’s as bad here as in Baltimore when you’re not there. It’s worse, because there I always did have the hope that some miracle would bring you.” With a Spartan spirit, Max told the maid who was supposed to look aft
er him that all he wanted for dinner one night was cream cheese and bread. She fixed her eyes on his, then rolled them heavenward as if he had gone mad, which perversely made him request the same thing the next night. Each evening she hovered in puzzlement to watch him eat his meager meal. Stubbornly, Max ordered the entree for nights on end. “So now it’s got to be bread to eternity,” he wrote Elizabeth. In fact, however, he would occasionally duck out to the dining room at the Hotel Barclay, where he dined alone but had some good food.
The appearance that season of an old friend broke Perkins’s loneliness. Van Wyck Brooks dropped in unannounced and seemed just as good as ever. Until recently, he had still been in the grasp of his long-lived depression. Perkins was convinced that Brooks never could have recovered if his wife, Eleanor, had not stood by him—patiently raising the family and running the house until he was back on his feet. “It was one of the best things I know of anyone’s doing,” Max told Elizabeth Lemmon, “and I don’t believe there’s a man would have been equal to the equivalent of it.”
Brooks’s only other stroke of good fortune in the last five years was in his professional life, and that had been the result of Perkins’s devotion. For years Max had regarded Brooks’s Life of Emerson as the log that was jamming his career. With Perkins’s patient encouragement, Brooks had completed the biography in 1931. But this did not free him of his psychological torment.
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