Brooks still maintained he was hopeless as a writer, that nothing of his could possibly be worth printing. Perkins and Jack Wheelock both read the manuscript and repeatedly insisted that it was “quite good” and that they were eager for Scribners to print it. When Brooks explained his commitments to E. P. Dutton and Company, Max persuaded Van Wyck to let go of the manuscript, then carried it by hand to Dutton’s publisher, John Macrae. At the same time, Perkins contacted Carl Van Doren at the Literary Guild and urged him to get the Guild to adopt the book as one of its selections. Dutton and the Guild both accepted The Life of Emerson, but Brooks refused to let it be typeset. In the spring of 1931 Max delegated Wheelock, whom he considered Van Wyck’s most trusted friend, to go to Four Winds, a small, private sanitarium in Katonah, New York, and talk some sense into him.
“The boys have gone berrying,” the attendant at Four Winds told Wheelock upon his arrival. Wheelock walked into the woods and found Van Wyck with an empty pail in his hand. He was all but mute and utterly remote. He stared at Wheelock as though looking right through him, but Brooks knew exactly why he had come. They walked among the brambles in silence until Wheelock pleaded, “Won’t you let the Guild publish it?”
“No,” Brooks snarled.
Wheelock assured him that they would not want the book if it were less than first-rate.
“Bad! Bad! Bad!” Brooks exclaimed, and Wheelock left.
Perkins himself saw Brooks during the next several months and insisted he agree to the offers. Van Wyck slowly came around and eventually asked Max to be his publisher—only if “the thing can be managed without hurting the feelings of Mr. Macrae who has been so decent to me.” Perkins saw no way of managing it. In 1932 Dutton published the book. It became a critical success and solved Brooks’s financial crisis. Van Wyck realized that he could earn a good living as a writer, and he recovered enough to write steadily for the next thirty years of his life. When he visited Max in the summer of 1935 he was in the middle of writing The Flowering of New England, his masterwork. Two years later it won the Pulitzer Prize—and was dedicated to Maxwell Evarts Perkins.
Despite the enormous success of Of Time and the River, Tom Wolfe experienced the same unrest that afflicted him after his first book. When he could stand the distress no longer, he suddenly thought of Germany with intense yearning. As for George Webber, in You Can’t Go Home Again, Germany was for Wolfe the countryafter America, which he liked the best, and in which he felt most at home, and with whose people he had the most natural, instant, and instinctive sympathy and understanding.... And now, after the years of labor and exhaustion, the very thought of Germany meant peace to his soul, and release, and happiness, and the old magic again.
Besides Wolfe’s passion for Germany, there was Germany’s for him. Look Homeward, Angel had been translated and published there in 1933, and though Tom was not aware of it, the Germans were awaiting his return with great eagerness.
“I have heard it said that Lord Byron awoke one morning at twenty-four to find himself famous,” Thomas Wolfe wrote Max Perkins on May 23, 1935. “Well, I arrived in Berlin one night, when I was thirty-four, and got up the next morning and went to the American Express and for the last two weeks at least I have been famous in Berlin.” He found letters, telephone messages, and telegrams from all sorts of people—German journalists and publishers and various diplomats. For two weeks Wolfe met throngs of admirers, attended parties, and gave interviews.
But Wolfe told Max he had some “disturbing things” to tell him about Germany. Wolfe had heard the sounds of booted feet and rolling army trucks clashing with the sounds of singing, dancing, and laughter in the peaceful villages. The discord frightened him, but the nationalistic fervor got him thinking about America. It renewed a sense of pride and faith in his own country and himself. Once again in Berlin he wrote Perkins, “I feel myself welling up with energy and life again and if it is really true that I have had some luck and success at home I know I can come back now and beat all hollow anything I have ever done before, and certainly I can surprise the critics and the public who may think they have taken my measure by this time—and I think I may even have a surprise or two in store for you.”
Wolfe begged Perkins not to proceed too far on the book of short stories Max had wanted to bring out, and for which Max had requested a title. “There are things I can do that will make them much better,” he assured Max, “and if you will only wait on me I will do them and we will have a fine book of stories and unlike any I know of.” But as Wolfe had got sidetracked in the past, now he was already living for another book about his characters the Pentlands. It was swelling and gathering in him like a thunderstorm, he told Perkins; “and I feel if there is any chance of my doing anything good before I am forty it will be this book.” Tom resolved to become more withdrawn in his life than ever before. As he plunged into this new work, he also wanted to intensify his relationship with Max. “I will go down deeper in myself than I ever have before,” he vowed to Perkins, insisting, “You must try to help me in every way to do this.”
In the midst of his planning Wolfe received a letter from one Henry Weinberger, counselor-at-law. He represented Madeleine Boyd, who was claiming full agent’s commissions for royalties on Of Time and the River as well as on Wolfe’s future books. The action struck Wolfe like a bombshell. “This was the thing you said could not ‘happen,’ the thing she ‘would not dare to do’ because she knew she was ruined by her dishonesty,” Tom wrote Perkins, remembering the scene in Perkins’s office just two years earlier. “Well, she has done it, as I told you she would—because we were foolish, benevolent, soft-hearted, weak—call it what you like.” Wolfe believed they should have made “the thief sign the confession of her theft when she was weeping, sobbing, crying in abject fear at the discovery and possible consequences of her crime.”
While the legal business hung in abeyance until Wolfe’s return, Perkins forwarded him an invitation to be the visiting novelist at the Colorado Writers’ Conference in July. The symposium offered to pay Wolfe $250 for ten days of round-table discussions and conferences with student-authors. Hopeful that this might lure him home to complete his anthology of stories, Max asked Wolfe to cable his reply and a probable date of return. Three days later Wolfe wired: ACCEPT COLORADO OFFER RETURN EARLY JUNE, NO TITLE STORIES YET ... WAIT FOR ME.
Max could not wait much longer. A half-year had passed since Aline Bernstein’s fears regarding Wolfe’s writing about her had possessed her, and she was becoming hysterical again. She impulsively visited Perkins to demand justice. Her screams could be heard through the walls of his office. The following day she was more in control of herself, but her feelings still ran high. “I wish I could have been able to show you a better side, that part of me which my friends love,” Mrs. Bernstein wrote Perkins. “It is not easy for me to be hard, and I had to push myself in that direction, in order to speak to you at all of what was in my mind.” She was not acting out of vengeance, she explained.
I still love Tom and wish him no evil, what I demand is only because of my feeling for my own family, and I sincerely believe that my love for Tom, and his for me, while it lasted, is not a matter for public consumption, nor do I think that he has any right to use material that I have given him, since he has chosen to break every tie that bound us.
“I know nothing of the way the publishing business is handled,” she wrote Perkins.I do not know if you yourself make all the decisions for your firm. If not, if there is some committee or some individual who shares the responsibility with you, I want to state my case, though I have little hope that anyone, in this vale of tears, would come to any decision contrary to his own best interests.
A point is reached where one has literally to choose between good and evil. I know the complexity of duties and friendships, of all the threads that bind us to life, how complex a man’s relation is to himself. Whether or not this book is published by you, or another, you are faced with your own decision, whether a family and a
human being is to be destroyed or not.
Aline was more convinced than ever that Perkins had tampered with her life, that he had told Tom to break with her. Days later she wrote him again, “I trust that never again will you try to play providence.”
Perkins did his best to inject some reason into this affair. He would not allow Mrs. Bernstein to assume that he had meddled with her life. He wrote:I do not interfere in people’s private affairs. Certainly anyone who has lived for any length of time would never venture to interfere in a situation of that sort.
I have every wish to do anything that would be of advantage to you in so far as I can do it rightly in view of the various obligations which I am compelled to fulfill, even if they are to my own personal disadvantage.
Mrs. Bernstein took Perkins’s advice and tried appealing to Wolfe in a letter, which she sent in Perkins’s care.
As near as Perkins could guess, Wolfe was due to return to America on Independence Day. For the week Wolfe was still aboard ship, Max fretted about his recent exchanges with Mrs. Bernstein. At one point she had mentioned a gun, but whether it was to be aimed at him, or Tom, or at herself Perkins did not know. “I’d much rather it was aimed at me,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. “I’m so fed up on contention, and struggle with irrational people.” Max first thought he should prepare Wolfe for trouble, then decided it would be easier to mind his own business and go to Windsor.
Thomas Wolfe arrived on a blazing-hot Fourth. By then Mrs. Bernstein’s protestations about the publication of Tom’s next book had become utterly illogical. Max believed the effect on Wolfe of this sudden tirade might be to ruin his entire future, and so he stayed in New York and went to the pier to break it to Tom gently. He found Wolfe’s baggage already on the wharf and waited by it, long after everyone else had come ashore. When Tom finally disembarked, Perkins was sitting on one of the valises with his head down. Max was pondering the problem of Aline Bernstein when he heard a low Southern voice say, “Max, you look so sad. What’s the matter?” Max said nothing immediately about Aline Bernstein’s hysteria. They stored Tom’s baggage and went to the Mayfair Yacht Club. There on the East River, with boats scudding up and down, Tom asked to hear everything that concerned him. Max then told him all about Mrs. Bernstein. Wolfe, however, did not seem to take the matter too seriously. He asked if that was all. When Max assured him it was, he said, “Well then, now we can have a good time.”
They were on their way to the Lafayette Hotel when Tom stopped at Eighth Street and pointed. “There, Max, is the place where I lived in the attic and wrote Look Homeward, Angel,” he said. “Let’s go up and see if we can get in.” They climbed the stairs and knocked on the door, but there was no answer. While Tom was still rapping, Max looked out the window at the rear of the building and saw a fire escape that ascended to the open dormer of Wolfe’s loft. “Well, Tom,” Max said, “if you really want to see the nest where the young eaglet mewed his mighty youth, it can be done!” And so the editor-in-chief of Charles Scribner’s Sons, in fedora and suit, led the way on a second expedition of breaking-and-entering. He crawled out to the fire escape, clambered up to the window and stepped in. Wolfe followed. “You could call it an attic,” Perkins wrote John Terry years later in trying to reconstruct the scene, “for it was at the top of the house and there was a certain amount of slope to the upper halves of the walls, but it was magnificent—not the kind of attic you think of poets residing in at all. In fact, I would say it was the best place Tom ever did live in.” Before leaving, Wolfe scrounged for a pencil, then scribbled on the wall of the vestibule: THOMAS WOLFE LIVED HERE.
After a drink at the Lafayette they crossed the East River into Brooklyn. The sun was setting, and Max and Tom went to the Saint George Hotel, where from the rooftop they looked down upon the city. It was like a spectacle about to begin. The sunlight dimmed to darkness and Manhattan came to life in a million twinkling lights.
They left Brooklyn and returned to the Lafayette for another drink, then walked uptown through the heat, with their coats slung over their shoulders. They talked all the way. Around three in the morning, they parted in a bar on the East Side, near Forty-ninth Street. At nine o‘clock, Perkins, red-eyed, his head swimming, was sitting in a Pullman seat of the White Mountain Express, as the train chugged northward to Windsor.
XV
Critical Times
Perkins spent only a few days in Vermont. Tom Wolfe was back in town, and that meant legal and romantic problems in addition to editorial duties. Max felt his presence in New York was essential.
After Wolfe had been back for more than a week and still had not answered Aline Bernstein’s last letter, she swallowed her pride and asked Perkins’s support once again. “I am in distress,” she wrote Max, “and I would be grateful if you will ask him to answer me. He must be in a great rage.” Then she left another letter without an envelope for Tom, so that Max could also read it.I want you and Mr. Perkins to know that I will have nothing to do with the law in connection with you or your publishers, for what you may write of me or what you use of my material. This may or may not relieve your minds, I do not care. If I cannot come to a personal and human agreement with you, I may as well quit.... When we were together I believed that if you wrote this book about us, you would stand by me, as you often promised. Steadfast was your word. I know enough to know that I cannot command love of any sort, if what I am is not enough to hold it. Maybe I am a fool to expect honorable treatment: I had faith in you, Tom.
Thoroughly confused about how to proceed, Wolfe did nothing, not even his work. To get him thinking about his writing again, Max told him of the sacks full of mail waiting for him at Scribners. Perkins had seen the fan letters of many authors, but no one had received as many as Wolfe. His readers worshiped him and wanted to express their gratitude. Tom began coming to Scribners every day to work in the fifth-floor library, writing cordial responses to his admirers.
Perkins felt that Wolfe was adjusting to his return pretty well, though he still had not worked on the proofs of his book of short stories. Wolfe was just killing time until his writers’ conference in Colorado. Max knew Tom well enough to worry that he might stretch out his upcoming travels, leaving the anthology in limbo. So almost daily, over lunch or a drink, he urged Wolfe to get on with his writing. One afternoon not long after Wolfe’s arrival in America, while they were having “tea” at the Chatham Bar, Mrs. Bernstein appeared.
Aline was seated alone at a small table by the wall, with her head bowed down and her face partly covered by the brim of her hat. Perkins recognized her and pointed her out. Tom rushed over, but the bar was too public a place for a reunion like that, so he and Mrs. Bernstein and Perkins went back to Max’s office. There, Wolfe tactlessly spoke of compensating Aline in dollars for all the help she had given him. He asked Max if he might see him alone for a minute and in Perkins’s office he spoke of giving her some payment out of his royalties from Of Time and the River—the book had by then sold 40,000 copies. Mrs. Bernstein, meanwhile, was waiting in the railed-off receptionist’s area by the elevator. When Tom returned to her, Aline had a vial of pills at her lips. He lunged toward her and slapped the bottle from her hands. Aline swooned into his arms. Perkins, suspecting she had already swallowed an overdose of barbiturates, rang the elevator bell for the night watchman, who directed them to a dermatologist working late in her office in the Scribner Building. The doctor counted the pills, phoned the pharmacy, and ascertained that all of them were still there. Thus began a reconciliation of sorts between Tom Wolfe and Aline Bernstein.
A few days later Aline apologized to Perkins:I have been on the rack for a long time, and I am taking punishment for two things I cannot help any more than the color of my eyes. I was born too soon, and I love too well. I wish I could show you what is in my heart, how I understand what you have done for Tom and how I understand your special quality. I have said things to you I should not have said for I know the road you have travelled with him.
What she could not make clear to Wolfe she explained to his editor: While Tom wanted to cancel his debts with cash, she would never accept any kind of reimbursement.
Whatever I did for him in those early years of his work was done from the fullness of our love and my faith in him. Let me keep that, it is the one best thing in my life. There will never be a question of any claim, there surely can be no question of repayment in money.
During this time Aline Bernstein was working day and night in the theater and was tired and sleepless. From time to time she saw Wolfe, but never with much satisfaction; his mind was on other things and they were uncomfortable together. In the last week of July she collapsed and remained unconscious for three days. She had developed pleurisy. “It is awful, I am gasping for breath in an oxygen tent and the pain is awful,” she wrote Wolfe when she came to. “I was never so sick but I’m going to get well, I have a lot to finish. I hope you never get pleurisy.”
Wolfe went west on July 27, to the writers’ conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and in mid-August Max received his first letter from him. “This has been, and is going to be, an extraordinary trip,” he wrote Max just before leaving for Denver and points south. After all the discussions, lectures, readings, and parties, he too was exhausted.
Perkins was most concerned about Tom’s anthology, now titled From Death to Morning. Still distressed by all the mistakes in Of Time and the River, Wolfe wrote Perkins, “You must not put the manuscript of a book of stories in final form until after my return to New York. If that means the book of stories will have to be deferred till next spring, then they will have to be deferred, but I will not consent this time to allow the book to be taken away from me and printed and published until I myself have had time to look at the proofs, and at any rate to talk to you about certain revisions, changes, excisions, or additions that ought to be made. I really mean this, Max.” He added: “I propose rather to prepare my work in every way possible to meet and refute, if I can, some of the very grave and serious criticisms that were made about the last book.”
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