Before The Story of a Novel was set in print, to be published on April 29, Perkins and Wolfe at last discussed the contractual details of the book. Because the slim volume would be much shorter than normal trade books—to say nothing of normal Wolfe books—it would have to be priced lower, which made it harder for Scribners to cover its costs. Perkins, therefore, had offered Wolfe a reduced royalty on the initial printing. Tom agreed to cut his usual 15 percent to 10 percent for the first 3,000 copies. Just before publication, however, Wolfe learned that the book was to be sold for $1.50, not the $1.25 he had been led to expect. He was furious. Scribners was paying him a lower royalty, yet selling the book for more. Tom met Perkins that evening to discuss the situation. It was not long before Wolfe began one of his tirades of ugly name-calling and insulting bombast. The following morning he wrote a note of apology. “The language that I used was unjustifiable and I want to tell you that I know it was,” he wrote his editor, “and ask you to forget it.”
Wolfe nonetheless felt strongly about the issue. He did not wish to rake up the embers of the night before, but he had accepted the lower terms because Max said that even though Scribners was not likely to profit from so small a book, its publication was worthwhile in itself. To prove he had not been taken advantage of, Wolfe thought Perkins should restore his former royalty.
“You have been my friend for seven years now and one of the best friends that I ever had,” Tom wrote Max. “I do not want to see you do this thing now which may be legally and technically all right, but is to my mind, a sharp business practice.” Wolfe granted that it was probably not Perkins himself who fixed the book’s price and royalties; but, he added, “I also know the way I expect and want you to act now as my friend.”
Wolfe became more and more outraged and more and more adamant. “If your refusal in this matter is final and you insist on holding me to the terms of the contracts I signed for The Story of a Novel,” Wolfe queried, “don’t you think I, or anyone else on earth for that matter, would be justified henceforth and hereafter, considering my relations with you and Scribners were primarily of a business and commercial nature, and if you make use of a business advantage in this way, don’t you think I would be justified in making use of a business advantage too if one came my way? Or do you think it works only one way? I don’t think it does and I don’t think any fair-minded person in the world would think so either ... you cannot command the loyalty and devotion of a man on the one hand and then take a business advantage on the other.”
The following day Perkins dictated that Wolfe’s royalties on The Story of a Novel be reckoned at 15 percent from the start. The difference Wolfe would receive amounted to $225. “We certainly do not think that we should withhold that sum of money if it is going to cause so much resentment, and so much loss of time and disquiet for all of us,” he wrote Tom. Perkins believed in the author’s freedom to act in his own best interests, but he knew that Wolfe had blown up this incident far beyond its just proportions. “I certainly would not wish you to make what you thought was a sacrifice, on my account ... ,” he wrote Wolfe, “and I would know that whatever you did would be sincerely believed to be right by you,—and I know that you sincerely believe the contentions you make in this letter to me, to be right. I have never doubted your sincerity and never will. I wish you could have felt that way toward us.”
The moment after Perkins restored the royalty of 15 percent, Wolfe said he preferred to stand by his signature on the contract. “That goes for all my other obligations as well,” he wrote Max. It occurred to him now that “life is too short to quarrel this way with a friend over something that matters so little.” He said he had made up his mind the day before he received word from Perkins. He had even called him up and gone around to see him, just to tell him “that all the damn contracts in the world don’t mean as much to me as you friendship means.” Wolfe wanted to bring his next book to life. For that, he told Perkins, “I need your friendship and support more than I ever did.”
On Perkins’s stroll home from work one afternoon a short time later, Tom caught up with him and said he wanted to talk. His voice sounded unusually insistent, and they turned off Forty-ninth Street at the Waldorf Hotel instead of their regular place, Manny Wolf’s. Once seated at the bar, Wolfe referred to the latest criticism against him. Then he said again that he wanted to write a completely objective, unautobiographical book.
“Tom was in a desperate state,” Max wrote years later of that afternoon. “It was not only what the critics said that made him wish to write objectively, but that he knew that what he had written had given great pain even to those he loved the most.” He referred to Wolfe’s family in Asheville.
Wolfe went on to describe the project; Perkins became excited about it. When Tom expressed doubts as to whether or not he would be able to write such a book, Perkins told him at once that there was no doubt that he should do it, that he had known for years that someday Wolfe would have to do it, and that Tom was the only person in America who could do it.
Wolfe was calling the book The Vision of Spangler’s Paul. He got to work, and soon he was making up a story largely out of imagination. Many of the characters he started to develop had no actual models in reality. For whole chapters the style was consciously lean, so free from embellishments that it read like nothing else Wolfe had ever written. It had lost the lyrical and poetic bounty of his earlier writing, but gained compactness along with objectivity.
Tom had, in his own words, “begun to go again like a locomotive.” At three o‘clock one morning that spring, when Wolfe was living near the Perkinses, another of Max’s neighbors, his author Nancy Hale, heard a monotonous singsong, which grew louder. She got up from bed and looked out the window of her apartment, which was on East Forty-ninth Street near Third Avenue. There was Thomas Wolfe, wearing a black slouch hat, advancing in his long mountaineer’s stride, with his billowing black raincoat, chanting, “I wrote ten thousand words today—I wrote ten thousand words today.”
“God knows what the result will be,” Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon that season, “but I suspect it will be the end of me. A worse struggle than Of Time and the River, unless he changes publishers first.” The protagonist of Wolfe’s book assumed the name Paul Spangler, then Joe Doaks, then George Spangler. Later he adopted the family name Joyner, which was dropped for Webber. With each change, Wolfe slipped into the more familiar mode, autobiography. Except for some physical characteristics, George Webber was, in fact, practically the same person as Eugene Gant, the hero of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River.
But at least Wolfe was happily engaged in a new book, and it might have seemed to Max that his troubles with Tom were behind him, except for his deep-seated Yankee fatalism which surfaced whenever things were going too well. Days later, in the April 25, 1936, issue of the Saturday Review, Thomas Wolfe’s long-time nemesis, Bernard De Voto, justified Perkins’s anxieties.
Illustrating his lead article, “Genius Is Not Enough,” was a photograph of De Voto, with a Cheshire-cat grin, lowering a revolver into cocked position. It was Wolfe he was shooting at. After a few paragraphs De Voto observed that to a large extent, Wolfe’s growth as a writer had remained in darkness. “Well,” De Voto wrote, “The Story of a Novel puts an end to speculation and supplies some unexpected but very welcome light.
The most flagrant evidence of his incompleteness is the fact that, so far, one indispensable part of the artist has existed not in Mr. Wolfe but in Maxwell Perkins. Such organizing faculty and such critical intelligence as have been applied to the book have come not from inside the artist, not from the artist’s feeling for form and esthetic integrity, but from the office of Charles Scribner’s Sons. For five years the artist pours out words “like burning lava from a volcano”—with little or no idea what their purpose is, which book they belong in, what the relation of part to part is, what is organic and what irrelevant, or what emphasis or coloration in the completed work of art is being served by the job
at hand. Then Mr. Perkins decides these questions—from without, and by a process to which rumor applied the word “assembly.” But works of art cannot be assembled like a carburetor—they must be grown like a plant, or in Mr. Wolfe’s favorite simile, like an embryo. The artist writes a hundred thousand words about a train: Mr. Perkins decides that the train is worth only five thousand words. But such a decision as this is properly not within Mr. Perkins’s power; it must be made by the highly conscious self-criticism of the artist in relation to the pulse of the book itself. Worse still, the artist goes on writing till Mr. Perkins tells him the novel is finished....
Mr. Wolfe can write fiction—has written some of the finest fiction of our day. But a great part of what he writes is not fiction at all: it is only material with which the novelist has struggled but which has defeated him. ... Mr. Perkins and the assembly line at Scribners can do nothing to help him....
One can only respect Mr. Wolfe for his determination to realize himself on the highest level and to be satisfied with nothing short of greatness. But, however useful genius may be in the writing of novels, it is not enough in itself—it never has been enough, in any art, and it never will be. At the very least it must be supported by an ability to impart shape to material, simple competence in the use of tools. Until Mr. Wolfe develops more craftsmanship, he will not be the important novelist he is now widely accepted as being. In order to be a great novelist he must also mature his emotions till he can see more profoundly into character than he now does, and he must learn to put a corset on his prose. Once more: his own smithy is the only possible place for these developments—they cannot occur in the office of any editor whom he will ever know.
In a single blow De Voto had destroyed Wolfe’s pleasure of accomplishment. It was one thing for Wolfe to give Perkins his due. It was quite another for the critics to turn his gesture against him, to make his books seem the product of a “factory.” Wolfe lashed out against De Voto to anyone who would listen, but on a deeper level the rage was probably directed at Max. The fact that Perkins, far from seeking this public credit, had yearned to elude it made no difference to Tom when his emotions were running. Max had taught him, by implication, that the editor remains in the background; now Max, thanks to De Voto, was forever to be out front. It was something Tom could not indefinitely abide, and no one knew this sooner or more surely than Max.
XVI
The Letter
Wlolfe’s Story of a Novel is unbearable ... ,“ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote Max Perkins. The honesty, ferocity, and beauty of expression of the writer’s anguish made it painful for her to read. ”When a little of the torment has expended itself he will be the greatest artist America has ever produced.“ In the same letter, she wrote Perkins of another opinion of which she was at least as sure: ”When all of us are done for, the chances are that literary history will find you the greatest—certainly the wisest—of us all.“
With her last novel, Golden Apples, long since forgotten, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was finally able to give herself to the boys’ book Perkins had suggested some years earlier and had tenderly encouraged ever since. In March, 1936, she holed up in an abandoned cabin to write a book for children about a boy raising a young animal in the scrub. She asked Max if he liked the title The Fawn. “I am glad you have the book well thought out,” Perkins replied; “I think The Fawn is a good title, but I am not sure that it would be a wise one for it might seem too poetic, or even a little sentimental.” The author agreed to reconsider it.
Mrs. Rawlings found her first attempt at the book difficult, and she often wrote Perkins for advice. She also kept harking back to the letters he had written her in 1933, especially one in which he said: “A book about a boy and the life of the scrub is the thing we want.—It is those wonderful river trips and the hunting and the dogs and guns and the companionship of simple people who care about the same things which were included in South Moon Under.” After a while, three of Perkins’s points began to sink in. The first was that her book should not be written for a boy so much as about a boy. She also realized that her forte was not complex plotting but stringing small episodes together. And she came to understand that the material she handled best was the raw, regional tales she had dug right out of the scrub swamplands, rather than anything she might derive from flights of imagination. She wrote scenes about alligators, rattlesnakes, wolf packs, the dance of the whooping cranes, the Northeaster of 1871, and the floods that followed.
Marjorie Rawlings wanted a bear hunt in the story, so she prowled the countryside for someone with the appropriate experience. Finally she met a briary old pioneer living on the Saint Johns River, a famous “bad man” in those parts. She lived with him and his wife until she had gathered enough of his anecdotes and hunting yarns and details of the ways of the wilderness people to expand her cast of characters and add some basic dramatic situations. When she returned to her homestead she worked out the concept of the book and then wrote Perkins about it:It will be absolutely all told through the boy’s eyes. He will be about twelve, and the period will not be a long one—not more than two years. I want it through his eyes before the age of puberty brings in any of the other factors to confuse the simplicity of viewpoint. It will be a book boys will love, and if it is done well enough otherwise, the people who liked South Moon will like it too. It is only since Golden Apples that I realize what it is about my writing that people like. I don’t mean that I am writing for anyone, but now I feel free to luxuriate in the simple details that interest me, and that I have been so amazed to find interested other people—probably just from the element of sincerity given by my own interest and sympathy....
Now please don’t write me another of those restrained “You must do it as seems right to you” notes. Tell me what is really in your mind.
Perkins replied:When I write in that do-it-as-it-seems-right-to-you way, it is because it has always been my conviction—and I do not see how anyone could dispute the rightness of it—that a book must be done according to the writer’s conception of it as nearly as perfectly as possible, and that the publishing problems begin then.—That is, the publisher must not try to get a writer to fit the book to the conditions of the trade, etc. It must be the other way around.
Perkins told Marjorie Rawlings he wanted her to rely on her own resources, but he threw in occasional suggestions. He encouraged her to write about going down a river—“because the rivers there are so good, and the journey element in a narrative is always a fine one, particularly to youth.” Perkins said he knew the book would work well if she would just keep it simple and unaffected. “I would not be a bit surprised if it were the best book you have done,” he declared, “and it might well be the most successful.”
Like many of Perkins’s writers, Mrs. Rawlings often had spells of doubt and depression. She asked him to help her through them:I am one of your duties, you know, Max, and you really must write me at least every couple of weeks. Sometimes a letter from you is the only thing that bucks me up. When everything else fails, I can know that it really matters to you whether or not I get a piece of work done, and how well.
He never neglected her.
Six months into the writing, Marjorie Rawlings was still hunting for a title. She sent a list of alternatives to Perkins and asked for his opinion. He did not care much for The Flutter Mill. Of Juniper Island he said: “I do not think place names are good for a book. There is not enough human suggestion in them.” Of her third title he wrote, “I would think one which carried the meaning of The Yearling was probably right.” The more he spoke of it, the better it sounded to him. He wrote her in the spring of 1937, “It seems to have a quality even more than a meaning that fits the book.” It stuck.
After almost a year on the book, Mrs. Rawlings abruptly decided that what she had written was poor, and she threw out the manuscript. Perkins was shocked when she told him. There was nothing for him to do but to try to get her going again. He kept sending heartening letters, and eventually she resu
med writing, more slowly but with more confidence.
In December, 1937, she sent the manuscript off to Perkins. He took days to read it, but, as he told her, that was a good sign. “The better a book is, the slower I go,” he explained. “I think the last half is better than the first and that the book gets increasingly good. But the very beginning now is perfect, it seems to me, and of course the father and mother, and all about that life, and Jody’s on the island, are as good as can be.” He felt a few parts of the book were tainted with theatricality and romanticism and suggested that they be sacrificed in order to maintain the book’s naturalism, its honest depiction of a world that was sometimes cruel and terrifying. The Yearling was full of very tough people, he reminded Mrs. Rawlings, “and the toughness ought to be more evident.”
Marjorie Rawlings’s previous books had had hard luck, but everything went right for this one. The Book-of-the-Month Club made The Yearling its main selection in April, 1938. In general, book sales that year were only a third of what they had been before the Depression, but The Yearling became a runaway best seller overnight. It also won the Pulitzer Prize.
Two years before this bonanza, in June, 1936, Marjorie Rawlings had gone game-fishing in Bimini with a friend. There she learned that Ernest Hemingway had become the hero of the most popular legends down there. The latest story concerned Hemingway’s knocking a man down for calling him a big fat slob. “You can call me a slob,” Hemingway had said, “but you can’t call me a big fat slob.” Then he struck him down. The natives of Bimini set the incident to music, and if they were sure Hemingway was not within earshot, they would sing in a calypso beat, “The big fat slob’s in the harbor.”
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