Max had gone through the proofs and once again was impressed by them. “They show how objective you can be, and how varied you can be,” he wrote to Tom. As it was, he said, the entire book would be an effective refutation to earlier adverse criticism.
As Wolfe toured the West, spending time with, among others, Edna Ferber and, in Hollywood, Dorothy Parker, Perkins kept sending him reminders about the unmarked proofs. Wolfe’s only replies were postcards exclaiming about scenic wonders or relaying anecdotes. Finally, on September 1, Wolfe decided that his vacation, which had expanded to six months, enough for anyone, was over. He felt almost guilty enough, he told Max, to get back to work.
While on the road, Wolfe had mulled over his future projects. At Boulder and elsewhere the author had discussed a “book of the night” which was beginning to take hold of him. He explained to Perkins:I have told how much of my life has been lived by night, also the chemistry of darkness, the strange and magic thing it does to our lives, about America at night, the rivers, plains, mountains, rivers in the moon or darkness.
Wolfe believed his realization that Americans were a “nighttime people” was one of the most precious ideas he had conceived, one to which he wanted to devote a special book. At last he wanted to try writing from the outside rather than from within, to invent a universe in which he himself was not the absolute center. He wrote Perkins, “I want to assert my divine right once and for all to be the God Almighty of a book, to be at once the spirit to move it, the spirit behind it, never to appear, to blast forever the charges of ‘autobiography’ while being triumphantly and impersonally autobiographical.”
“What are we to work on next?” he wrote Max as he started east. There was The October Fair, the “Pentland book,” The Book of the Night, short stories.... Or should he respond to numerous offers to lecture? Max had plenty of time to formulate his answer, for Wolfe was still loitering. In mid-September, for example, he stopped off in Reno and was bedazzled by the town with its casinos and bars and dance halls eternally ablaze in neon.
Perkins continued to believe that the volume of short stories must come first. He had corrected the proofs as much as he dared and returned them to the press to be sent back in revised galleys. “The moment Tom gets here I am going to try to make him read them,” Perkins wrote Frere-Reeves in London. “If he will not, I shall try to get them away from him and put them into pages unread.” The book now contained 95,000 words, a normal amount, and Perkins was afraid only that Wolfe would want to add stories yet to be written. “I shall fight hard against this,” he wrote Frere-Reeves. “He seems to feel a certain shame at the idea of turning out a book of reasonable dimensions.”
On Friday, July 25, Perkins had gone to Baltimore for an appointment with Dr. Bordley. The last time he had been in Baltimore he had made what he now considered a rash promise to Elizabeth Lemmon—to visit her home and spend the night, his first in Middleburg. She met him Saturday afternoon, and for only the second time in their thirteen-year friendship, Max went to Welbourne. Later in the day, Elizabeth drove him in her shiny new Ford coupe along the recently paved Skyline Drive, which ribboned among the peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Mile after mile, Max’s pouched, unblinking eyes swept the lovely vista. He looked very tired to Elizabeth. She had never pushed him to discuss his work, but this day she did gently remark that she knew almost nothing about what his job actually entailed. Max said he would tell her someday, in a letter.
Max did sleep over at Welbourne, but early the next morning he was packed and clearly ready to leave. Elizabeth persuaded him to stay long enough to meet several of her friends and relatives. Then he departed for New York. Afterward, safely distant from her most affecting presence, he wrote her:You really have had a wonderfully happy and good life, and have kept out of all the grime, and you always represented that to me.... Elizabeth, you always looked sad when you were thinking—maybe you haven’t been happy in the cheap sense—you wouldn’t be—but you have done good. If I survive in another life I’ll remember your comings to Baltimore in all the heat and I’ll thank you for them.
Perkins disliked being indebted to people, “but not to you—” he wrote Elizabeth, “which is fortunate for me because I owe you more than I ever could repay. After I have been with you I always feel again that those things that now generally seem to be an illusion really do exist.... As for last weekend, I’ll always have it to remember and shall think about everything and everyone there with gratitude and pleasure.” Max never visited Welbourne again, and its perfection never dimmed for him.
True to his word, Perkins described for Miss Lemmon a typical workday: Tuesday, July 29, 1935. As always, Max said, he began with the heap of mail waiting on his desk. “One letter,” he wrote Elizabeth, “was from an agent asking us to take over a young East Side ... author [named Henry Roth] who wrote Call It Sleep.” Perkins had skimmed the novel and wished that he had had a chance to publish it. From its tight, eloquent opening pages describing the huddled masses on Ellis Island, Max admired Roth’s penetrating recreation of a pocket of American life near “Avenyuh D” in New York City. Perkins told Elizabeth that “such a writer would make no end of trouble for me on account of his complete contempt for any conventional restraint—much worse than any one we have published. Still, I wrote encouragingly and sent for [his next] book. We are publishers after all.”
Later that day, Perkins told Elizabeth, he spoke to Charles Scribner about a book on the training of bird dogs, which they decided to accept. Then he and Scribner discussed a limited edition of William Butler Yeats’s works. Scribner was by nature skeptical of poetry, but Perkins thought Yeats was the most important twentieth-century poet in the English language, and contended there was a need for such a book. He reminded Scribner that they had profited from an equally unpromising set of O‘Neill’s plays. Scribner yielded and told Max to arrange with Macmillan for the reprint rights to the material.
Then, Max wrote, S. S. Van Dine called “to give notice” that he would bring in his newest manuscript—The Kidnap Murder Case—by the first of August. “Good,” Perkins remarked, “but why the ultimatum?”
“Because,” Van Dine replied, “you said I was not punctual after I got married.” Perkins did tease people who waited so late as their forties to marry, as Wright had done. “After all that time, why bother?” he would say.
For the rest of the morning Max dictated letters. He and Scribner went to the nearby “air-cooled” Longchamps for lunch, over which Perkins told him about that wonderful road that snaked across the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Back at the office, Max managed to dictate the rest of his letters just before the tennis champion Helen Wills Moody strode in. Scribners had published her instructional book on tennis. She now launched into a volley-by-volley account of her recent match with Helen Jacobs. “Certainly she is beautiful in her way, and strong and healthy, and natural in a way you like to think is American,” Max wrote Elizabeth. And, he conceded, her first book was successful. But, Perkins told Miss Lemmon, “Helen Wills can’t write.” He wanted to tell her “to have some children before it was too late, and forget writing.” Instead he looked up the sales figures on her book and ordered a new edition. “I don’t work properly on that kind of thing,” Max said, meaning nonliterary works, “because it bores me.”
Her appointment was followed by several others. Before the afternoon ended, Max also heard from Thomas Wolfe’s lawyer. Wolfe, he reported, had burrowed into his papers and found his correspondence with Madeleine Boyd, the agent who was suing him. To Max it looked as though that would end their trouble with her. Later Wolfe asked Max to help him in every way possible to keep him from this kind of “shameful and ruinous invasion” in the future. Perkins could be counted upon to do his best. He wrote Tom, however, that such assaults were a part of life. “Like fleas to a dog, as the fellow said, they are probably good for us.”
That day Perkins did not have to go off for a late-afternoon drink with anyone, so he stayed in the
office and read, interrupted only by a little trouble with some advertising copy. On the whole, he told Miss Lemmon, “it was a fair day.” For his evening reading he stuffed into his briefcase a narrative by an old hunter in the Southwest who had fought Apaches.
“I have much more variety in work than most people,” Max once wrote Miss Lemmon, explaining how he talked himself out of taking vacations. In fact, he said, the work so suited him that he could see no reason not to do it seven days a week. “No one thinks a very good job was done with the Creation,” he told Elizabeth. “It was probably rushed to get the seventh day off. That’s why we don’t work on it and I hate it, and all other holidays, and also nights.”
In September, 1935, Louise and the two girls returned from Europe. Peggy had left behind her a European race-car driver who had proposed marriage, after knowing her less than a week, then attempted suicide because she turned him down.
In late September there was another important arrival. Tom Wolfe returned to New York. Max had been braced for a scrap with Wolfe over the proofs of the short-story collection. To his amazement, Wolfe corrected them immediately and without fuss or demand. Perkins’s arguments that the book must be brought out quickly had apparently been convincing. Within a month the book was in the stores.
Wolfe now moved into a new apartment at 865 First Avenue, just two blocks toward the East River from the Perkinses’ house. Soon Max was once again spending a great deal of time with him. Wolfe had already become a fixture at the Perkinses‘, but now, as Tom’s agent, Elizabeth Nowell, observed,he all but lived there as a member of the family——or as Perkins’s son, which to all intents and purposes he was. Perkins never seemed to see enough of him, and Mrs. Perkins fed him, cared for him, listened to his problems and entertained his friends with the patience of a saint.
In the fall of 1935, Scott Fitzgerald sank into his deepest troubles yet. It began when Edwin Balmer of Redbook lost interest in Philippe, the Count of Darkness after printing the third installment. Scott fell heavily into debt, then grew ill and could not work. For weeks he languished. Perkins received only telegrams and brief requests for money. “I know that he has been sick and poor,” Perkins wrote Hemingway, “but maybe this sickness is partly his old hypochondria.”
That winter Fitzgerald expressed his anguish in a long article entitled “The Crack-Up.” It appeared in three monthly installments in Esquire.
I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone.... I saw that even my love for those closest to me was becoming only an attempt to love, that my casual relations—with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend were only what I remembered I should do from other days.
Perkins did not know what to make of Scott’s article. Scheduled to see his own doctor in Baltimore, he paid a visit to Scott and found him in bed with the grippe, wheezing and gasping for air. “I saw Scott, but it did not do any good at all, maybe harm,” Perkins wrote Hemingway after his house call. “It was not possible to talk to him, and I finally left him asleep, if you could call it sleep.”
Oddly enough, Fitzgerald’s depressing Esquire pieces proved to Perkins that Fitzgerald’s case was not hopeless. He explained to Hemingway:Nobody would write those articles if they were really true. I doubt if a hopeless man will tell about it, or a man who thinks he is beaten for good. Those people I should think would not say anything at all, just as those who really intend suicide never tell anybody. So I thought that in some deep way, when he wrote those articles, Scott must have been thinking that things would be different with him. He may have lost that passion in writing which he once had, but he is such a wonderful craftsman that he could certainly make out well if he were able to control himself and be reconciled to life.
Perkins agreed with John Peale Bishop’s suggestion that only returning to the Catholic Church could save Scott. “I know and always did, from his very first writing, that he has a fundamental inclination that way,” Max wrote Ernest. Fitzgerald’s public confession of a crisis of the spirit made Perkins guess such an announcement might be forthcoming.
Desperate for money, Fitzgerald spent the spring writing sketches for Esquire and a few forgettable stories for the Post. His income that year plummeted to $10,000, the lowest it had been since the publication of This Side of Paradise.
Ernest Hemingway thought the “Crack-Up” pieces were “miserable.” People experienced emptiness many times in life, he said, and he thought they should come out of it fighting, not whining in public. He wrote Scott a few times to cheer him up but found him taking pride in his “shamelessness of defeat.” Ever since he first met F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway said, he had thought that if the man had gone to that war he always felt so bad about missing, he would have been shot for cowardice. Hemingway was convinced that Scott’s troubles were self-inflicted. It was a terrible thing for Scott to love youth so much that he leapfrogged from childhood to senility without experiencing manhood.
Hemingway made one of his infrequent visits to New York that season. He was nervous about the reception of Green Hills of Africa, and with just cause. As fascism rose in Europe in the thirties, leftist “essayists,” as many American literary critics preferred to call themselves, proclaimed that the purpose of literature was to remedy the world’s social ills. They were angry that Hemingway, one of the best-known voices of America, had not joined their cause. He remained unaffiliated with any group, committed only to his writing. His reputation was in great shape, he told Perkins—André Gide, Romain Rolland, and André Malraux, he pointed out, had just invited him to an international writers’ congress—but he was not deceived; the critics would have their knives out. He doubted, however, that they could kill him off for a while yet. “Papa is pretty durable,” he assured Perkins.
When Perkins received the proofs of Green Hills of Africa from Ernest in late August, 1935, he thought everything about them was all right, except for a backhanded swipe at Gertrude Stein which Ernest had inserted. “I think it was better not to call the old girl a bitch,” Perkins wrote Hemingway of the indirect reference to her. Hemingway pointed out that he had not mentioned Miss Stein by name and there was nothing that proved it was definitely she. Besides, he asked Max, what should be put in place of “bitch”? Certainly not “whore.” Hemingway offered to modify the noun with “lousy” or “lesbian,” but if anyone was ever a bitch, he said it was Gertrude Stein. He did not see what Perkins was fussing about, unless he thought the word would just give the critics something else to “burp about.”
In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway pointed out that writers who read the critics practically destroyed themselves.
If they believe the critics when they say they are great then they must believe them when they say they are rotten and they lose confidence. At present we have two good writers who cannot write because they have lost confidence through reading critics. If they wrote, sometimes it would be good and sometimes it would be quite bad, but the good would get out. But they have read the critics and they must write masterpieces. The masterpieces the critics said they wrote. They weren’t masterpieces, of course. They were just quite good books. So now they cannot write at all.
Hemingway had discussed Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe with Perkins in almost identical phraseology.
At last he made what, for him, was a conciliatory gesture, by altering his reference to Gertrude Stein, calling her a “female.” He thought that would anger her the most, and please Perkins.
Max expected a cold critical reaction to Green Hills, but not because of the vendetta Hemingway predicted. Max had observed enough careers to believe in their natural ebb and flow. He knew that if the critics did not have an issue at hand on which to take Hemingway to task, they would invent one. “Every writer seems to have to go through a period when the tide runs against him strongly,” Perkins wrote Fitzgerald, “and at the worst it is better that it should have done this when Ernest was writing books that are in a general sense minor ones.”
And indeed, the reviews
of Green Hills of Africa were tepid. Charles Poore in the New York Times wrote that it was the “best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere” and that Ernest’s writing was “better than ever, fuller, richer, deeper and only looking for something that can use its full powers.” Edmund Wilson took what Max called a “Marxian crack” at it in the New Republic, calling it Hemingway’s “weakest book.” Wilson had been one of Hemingway’s earliest admirers, but over the next few years he became one of his most outspoken critics.
Ernest took the reviews hard. It had been some six years since his successful A Farewell to Arms. He believed his new book was ruined by two specific flaws, both of which could have been avoided. The first, he maintained, was that he had offended the daily critics in the book by referring to the New York crowd as “angleworms in a bottle” and to critics as the lice that crawl on literature; they ganged up on him for it. But Perkins did not think there was anything either of them could have done about that. He explained, “I knew, and I never dreamed that you did not, that you were telling plain truths to the reviewers in Green Hills. I could have warned you about that, but I did not think you wanted it, and I do not believe you would have heeded it for an instant. Nor do I think you should have.... You told the truth about them and it won’t act against you over a fairly long space of time, but only momentarily.”
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