Hemingway’s second point was about the book’s advertising. Scribners’ former best-selling author John Fox, Jr. once wrote old Charles Scribner, “A publisher is a man who is blamed if a book fails and ignored if it proves a success.” Now Hemingway beefed that Scribners was not playing up Green Hills enough. “Advertising,” Perkins said, “is a matter that nobody can ever speak of positively, and it would be silly to say they might not have done wrong about it.” But Green Hills got the same backing in advertising as Perkins’s other offerings that season, including Mark Sullivan’s latest installment of Our Times, S. S. Van Dine’s Garden Murder Case, and Robert Briffault’s controversial best seller, Europa. After years of experience, Max found that one could not “answer unfavorable reviews by following them up two or three days later.... It is stupid that this is so, but we have been convinced of it.”
After two months and a piddling sale, Perkins explained the book’s failure to the author this way:It was mostly due to something that often happens in publishing: the public gets a superficial impression of what a book is and the one they got of this book was that it was an account of a hunting expedition to Africa, covering a short space of time, and was therefore a distinctly minor piece of work.
“I should have foreseen it,” Max wrote. “The public regards you as a novelist.” Once again, as he had several times that year, he told Hemingway that he must produce a novel.
Hemingway started right in on the kind of writing the public expected from him. He wrote Perkins that it would become a short novel or a “hell of a long story” set in the Gulf Stream. Max wished he could get down to Key West for a while, where they might discuss it, but the sudden temporary loss of his right-hand man prevented that. John Hall Wheelock had to go off for a rest, and nobody could tell for how long. “One of those mysterious breakdowns,” Max confided to Hemingway.
The pressures of the last few years, working through the Depression, had imposed a strain on Wheelock. Waves of fear made him feel ineffectual, unable to edit his authors or even complete his own book of poetry. Max had talked a great deal with Wheelock before his going off and guessed that “his feeling that people here think that he ought to brace up etc. is more or less part of the illness.” In fact, nobody at Scribners did feel that way about it. Wheelock went to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for a rest; Max assured him there was nothing for him to worry about at Scribners. “You went at the very best time of year from the point of view of work. So don’t worry about that. I am telling you the truth.” It was a white lie. Within days he had written Elizabeth Lemmon, “I don’t see how I can do without him, but somehow I shall.”
In a complete reversal of their roles of just a few years earlier, Van Wyck Brooks visited Wheelock at Stockbridge in January, 1936. As before, Max remained the one person with whom all parties could discuss the situation. Brooks thought their friend’s condition was more critical than anyone supposed. “The illness is invisible,” he wrote Max; “I think Jack has a feeling that the general impression is that he is somehow playing possum.” Van Wyck suggested that Scribners get the manuscript of Wheelock’s poetry off to the press at once. “It will give him a strong outside interest during the spring months, and make him feel how much good work he has done.” Perkins acted on the idea immediately.
By February, Wheelock felt strong enough to return to work. His doctors said that he really was not well yet, and his return was mostly experimental. “He will find it mighty hard not to get submerged in work though,” Max wrote Van Wyck. “It is impossible to prevent it unless he does it by refusing to work except during certain hours. That is what he ought to do, and I hope will.” Perkins sat Wheelock down and worked out a limited schedule with him. Wheelock stuck to it and was practically as good as new when his book of poetry came out. The volume helped him win the Bollingen Prize.
With From Death to Morning, Thomas Wolfe’s first collection of short stories, Wolfe began to experience the same sort of critical backlash that Hemingway had. The reviews complained of his flabby emotionalism and lack of polish. Deep antagonisms surfaced and affected his behavior with Perkins. On November 29, 1935, Max and Louise joined Tom for a nightcap at a restaurant called Louis and Armand’s. It turned out to be a mistake because Tom was not a one-drink man, and after two or three he could become abusive. That night he got to ranting about “capitalistic injustice.” He elected Max the “King Capitalist” and said insulting things about him. Wolfe came to his office at one o‘clock the next day, contrite and affectionate, saying that he must get to work and that Perkins must help him decide what to work on. Max agreed to meet him the next night to discuss it—not in his house or a café but in the very middle of an East River bridge, where there would be no whiskey within half a mile.
A few weeks later, Wolfe squabbled again with Perkins. The dispute grew out of a renewal of Tom’s cockeyed plan to pay Mrs. Bernstein for past favors. On a Thursday night, he demanded that Max come up with $1,050 in cash by eleven o‘clock the following morning at the latest. Max said it could not be done; Tom said it had to be done. Perkins delivered the money by the appointed hour, but when he saw Wolfe again at seven that evening, he learned that Tom had snoozed the afternoon away. The wad of bills was stuffed in his pocket. Max made him promise to go directly to the Hotel Gotham, without stopping for any drinks, and lock the money in their safe until he could get to his bank on Monday. Afterward Perkins laughed over the episode.
Then came the dreadful evening when Tom showed himself at his very worst. The Countess Eleanor Palffy was an American friend of Louise and Max’s. She had recently lost an eye because of a tumor that resulted when her husband, out of jealousy, struck her with the butt of a revolver. On her first day out of the hospital the Countess phoned Max to ask if she could come to dinner. Eleanor had always been interested in writers, and Louise suggested they invite Tom as well. Max knew that would be like combining glycerin and nitric acid. He pleaded against it, knowing how this woman’s social attitudes, her title, and her cosmopolitan manner would infuriate Tom. Louise insisted that the evening would be fun.
Wolfe warmed up for the occasion with a good many drinks, and as Max feared, by the time he arrived he was very drunk. Hardly inside the door, he lashed out at Eleanor. The point of his tirade was that she wasn’t any better than anybody else, that he was as good as any man. Tom was so sure she was a snob and therefore anti-Semitic that he even told her that his father, the stonecutter W. O. Wolfe, was a rabbi. That only fascinated her. At one point, in frustration, Tom sprang up from the dinner table, pulled off his jacket to exhibit the label, and said, “From the best tailor in London!”
Max tried to stifle Tom’s vulgarity by joking as best he could, but he realized nothing short of Tom’s departure would put an end to it. Then Wolfe himself, almost in tears, got up and stomped toward the front door. Perkins caught him in the hall and persuaded him to come back and be civilized. That was a mistake. Tom returned to his chair but also the same line of talk. He pounced upon Eleanor’s every word, growing ever more vitriolic until, after one comment that infuriated him, he brandished his long index finger in front of her face and said, “That’s as false as—as that eye.”
Eleanor said it was time for her to return to the hospital. Tom volunteered to escort her there, but Perkins insisted that he was taking her back. Both men went, then stopped at Manny Wolf’s for a drink over which Tom resumed his invective. Perkins finally reached his boiling point. “I for that one time in my life,” he remembered ten years later, “lost my temper with him and told him off. When I do that, I always get to shouting, and it attracted a lot of attention.” Max laced into him so vehemently that the barman gave out a small cheer. A few weeks later Eleanor was asked again to the Perkinses’ for dinner. Max invited Tom to come in before, just to say something to make amends. “He did come very humbly, with a big bunch of roses,” Perkins recalled. Tom tried to apologize and did stammer out some well-intentioned words, but it later became apparent that forever af
terward he resented Max’s having dragged him on the carpet that way.
All that year it was obvious to Perkins that Tom was testing him: Max’s friendship, his patience, and his confidence in Wolfe’s work. Once he even told Perkins that an editor at the Viking Press had read a carbon of his latest manuscript and had warned him that it must certainly not be published. Wolfe was overjoyed when Perkins responded violently to this false provocation. “I ought not to have believed this,” Perkins said, “but Tom always could fool me with such statements.” Max realized “Tom had a strange distrust of himself which made him apparently actually believe that no other publisher would take him, and he often intimated that he would leave us, but I think merely to observe my reaction, until the late spring of 1936.”
Perkins perceived that Wolfe was seeking excuses for disputes. “I don’t mean that Tom was deliberately and consciously inventing reasons for leaving us,” Max wrote years later, “but the underlying reasons were working so strongly in him and yet were not consciously acknowledged, that he thought the pretexts were true reasons.”
Wolfe was now working on a book that would combine Of Time and the River’s original preface with notes from his lectures and seminars in Boulder. It would not be fiction at all, but a short factual work, entitled The Story of a Novel.
Actually, The Story of a Novel grew from another notion that Perkins had planted in Wolfe’s mind, as the author acknowledged in the book’s opening lines:An editor, who is also a good friend of mine, told me about a year ago that he was sorry he had not kept a diary about the work that both of us were doing [on Of Time and the River], the whole stroke, catch, flow, stop, and ending, the ten thousand fittings, changings, triumphs, and surrenders that went into the making of a book. This editor remarked that some of it was fantastic, much incredible, all astonishing, and he was also kind enough to say that the whole experience was the most interesting he had known during the twenty-five years he had been a member of the publishing business.
Wolfe told the whole story, and a short book developed, which the Saturday Review of Literature offered to serialize. Perkins privately worried that Tom would embroider on his dedication to Of Time and the River. He felt he had received enough public exposure already. Wolfe detailed his editor’s work but never mentioned Perkins by name. Max’s only contribution to the editing of The Story of a Novel was to persuade Tom to cut out two or three paragraphs that seemed unnecessarily political and therefore “extraneous to the purpose of the book which in itself showed how his heart was wrung by the poverty and injustice that he saw all about.” But, as Max had feared, everything that Tom had been unable to express about Max in his dedication of his last novel was spelled out in this book. It was as if Wolfe, by bestowing elaborate tribute upon Perkins, was attempting to pay him off, the easier to get rid of him—just as he had tried to assuage his conscience about Aline Bernstein by forcing money on her.
It now became part of Wolfe’s daily routine to walk to Scribners at four-thirty and fetch his mail. It was a good excuse to break from his work, and it was important to him to observe the people at Scribners who had been part of his life for the last six years. Although his publishers did not yet know it, he was evaluating them as both business partners and future literary material.
Wolfe realized that while he had been alone most of his life, he had never been independent. He had now entered one of those periods when he had to put his house in order—sweeping aside everything and everyone he thought he could live without. Such a decision would of course first and most particularly affect Aline Bernstein and Max Perkins. And so he seized upon the book that both had had so great a role in creating, Look Homeward, Angel. Tom calculated that the sale of the manuscript would forever clear the debt he owed Mrs. Bernstein. During the following months, he persisted in making it an issue with Aline and sought to involve Perkins in the negotiation. That manuscript had been a present to Aline, but Wolfe now perversely wanted her to write Max that it had been given in repayment of moneys that had passed from her to the author. Aline knew that simply was not the truth. “I understood at the time you gave it to me that it came as a gift of love and friendship, a token of the feeling you had for me at the time,” she wrote Tom. “I cannot regard it in any other light.” Within the week, though, Tom had bullied her into writing Perkins all that he dictated. She realized, she told him, that she was a fool to let Tom persuade her, but, she explained to Wolfe in another letter, “I love you a lot.”
Wolfe’s meetings with Perkins became sharp-tongued and humor-less. Even when Louise tried to heal the wounds by inviting Tom to the house, Wolfe continued his attacks at Turtle Bay. One evening the arguing grew so violent that the two men almost came to blows. Max soon regained his poise and retired for the evening. Tom slammed out of the door. That night Louise wrote Wolfe a note. “Listen Tom,” she said, “if anyone else were as man to man as you were tonight you would fight him! You know that he is your friend—really your friend—and that he is honorable. Isn’t that enough? Please don’t behave that way. It is partly because I have been so horrible and disappointed him so much that I beg you not to do it.”
The long hours that Max had spent with Wolfe in recent years had not helped to bring Max and Louise any closer. At heart she could only resent the attention her husband lavished upon Tom. To compensate for her hours alone, Louise still flirted with acting. She kept up a repertoire of classical roles and could perform monologues, speeches, and poems from memory. The dramatist Edward Sheldon, one of Max’s Harvard friends, said Louise had “talent galore for a career on stage.” One evening, at a small dinner gathering at which the Perkinses and Wolfe were present, Max and Tom embarked upon an intense discussion about literature. Eager to be a part of the conversation but seeing little chance to break in, Louise nudged her dinner partner and whispered, “Ask me to recite, ask me to recite.”
Elizabeth Lemmon said, “Louise was jealous of Max; she always wanted to be the center of attention.” But it is perhaps more accurate to say that Louise’s personality reached out and grabbed people, while it was Max’s remoteness that attracted them. Max generally kept any adverse opinions of people to himself; once when someone remarked that an author was a son of a bitch, he said, “Yes, but an unconscious one.” Louise, on the other hand, had her emotions on the surface, and it was not uncommon for her to make her disdain known. Toward the end of another small party, during which she had needled Tom Wolfe all evening, Louise sat staring at her adversary. She finally said to a friend, “God, how he hates me, and how I hate him.” The remark was barely audible, but Tom’s ears perked up. “No, Louise,” he drawled in a low voice, “I have great admiration for you.” Max’s hearing was too weak to pick up either comment. It was just as well. On other occasions Tom and Louise had spoken far into the night about their mutual love and respect for Max, and as they came to understand each other their rivalry faded.
To please Max and to fulfill her own creative needs, Louise returned to her writing in the mid-thirties. It delighted Max to see her report regularly to the studio she had rented on Second Avenue. She sold several new stories and poems. She had written children’s plays before (an anthology of them called Magic Lanterns has been selling ever since it was published in 1923), but in 1936 Louise put her mind to a more challenging work. She was inspired by the fact that their next-door neighbor was Katharine Hepburn. For Miss Hepburn, Louise wrote a play in nine scenes about Pauline Bonaparte. It was an ornate costume drama with stiff dialogue and few concerns weightier than the character’s jewels and gowns. Max’s lifelong obsession with Napoleon no doubt drew Louise to the period, but her own research led her to a fascination with the ravishing Pauline. She found the relationship between Pauline, the most exciting woman in court, and her older brother Napoleon very like her own feelings toward Max. Like Louise, Pauline Bonaparte was “capable of quick, kitten-like rages”; she had a childlike understanding of politics and a passion for theatricals. She lived under the sway of a man whom sh
e exalted, though he had stunted her development. In Scene Five, when Napoleon sends away Pauline’s love, De Canouville, she says: I am so tired of disappointment and unhappiness. I have only been dragged along behind Napoleon’s chariot and crushed and battered by the stones. All the intensity that I have put in my life has come to nothing.
Still, as Louise was to Max, Pauline remains Napoleon’s most ardent champion. “When people hate me,” she says, “I am sorry and try to make them like me again. But when they hate Napoleon, I loathe them with all my heart and could kill them.” Pauline’s comment on her brother’s abdication for the good of the country somewhat parallels Louise’s feelings, especially after having seen her husband subjected to years of authors’ abuse and personal sacrifices.His soul is like a flash of lightning.... No matter what they do to him, they can never destroy his light. I love him now more than anyone in the world and I shall remain faithful to him until my death.
“She was a lovely-looking creature—reaching for something on her own which she never could attain, I felt—living in the shadow of a remarkable man,” Katharine Hepburn said of Louise Perkins. The actress thought Pauline was a “charming play,” with remediable flaws. But Louise’s dedication to it was at best fitful, and she never solved its problems.
“Mother was a woman of great energy,” her daughter Peggy said, “but she hated drudgery and was incapable of forcing herself to do it, which is probably why she didn’t write more.”
The two women, Louise and Katharine Hepburn, became friendly, but Miss Hepburn never got to know Max Perkins at all. “He used to walk up and down Forty-ninth Street either conversing or in happy silence with my driver ... who was known as the ‘Mayor of Forty-ninth Street,’ ” she recalled. “I always hoped that someday he would speak to me,” Miss Hepburn wrote of Max Perkins. But he never did.
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