When Hemingway heard that one of Max Perkins’s authors was in the same waters, he called on her. “I should have known from your affection for him that he was not a fire-spitting ogre,” Marjorie wrote back to Perkins, “but I’d heard so many tales in Bimini of his going around knocking people down, that I half-expected him to announce in a loud voice that he never accepted introductions to female novelists. Instead, a most lovable, nervous and sensitive person took my hand in a big gentle paw and remarked that he was a great admirer of my work.”
The day before she left, Hemingway tussled six hours and fifty minutes with a 514-pound tuna. When his Pilar cruised into harbor at 9:30 that night, the whole population of the island flocked to see his fish and hear his tale. “A fatuous old man with a new yacht and a young bride had arrived not long previously, announcing that tuna-fishing, of whose difficulties he had heard, was easy,” Mrs. Rawlings wrote to Perkins. “So as the Pilar was made fast, Hemingway came swimming up from below-decks, gloriously drunk, roaring, ‘Where’s the son of a bitch who said it was easy.’ The last anyone saw of him that night, he was standing alone on the dock where his giant tuna hung from the stays, using it for a punching bag.”
In just her short stay in Bimini, Mrs. Rawlings detected an inner conflict in Hemingway. “He is so great an artist that he does not need to be ever on the defensive. He is so vast, so virile, that he does not need ever to hit anybody,” Mrs. Rawlings wrote Perkins. “Yet he is constantly defending something that he, at least, must consider vulnerable.” She thought the conflict might be due in part to the company he was keeping, mainly sportsmen.
Hemingway is among these people a great deal, and they like and admire him—his personality, his sporting prowess, and his literary prestige. It seems to me that unconsciously he must value their opinion. He must be afraid of laying bare before them the agony that tears the artist. He must be afraid of lifting before them the curtain that veils the beauty that should be exposed only to reverent eyes. So, as in Death in the Afternoon, he writes beautifully, and then immediately turns it off with a flippant comment, or a deliberate obscenity. His sporting friends would not understand the beauty. They would roar with delight at the flippancy.
Hemingway was having what he called a “belle époque” that year, 1936. He had written two short stories whose background was Africa, and he was pleased with them. After he got back from Bimini, he traveled to Wyoming, where he got back to work on his new novel. All Perkins knew about the book was that the setting was the Florida Keys, Havana, and the waters between, and that Harry Morgan, the hero of two of Hemingway’s Esquire stories, would be the central character. “I cannot give any idea of the plot,” Perkins wrote the English publisher Jonathan Cape; but he imagined that the “characters will some of them be the boatmen who live by fishing and smuggling, and have a finger in the Cuban revolutions, etc. and one of the important episodes will be a hurricane. I think it sounds very fine indeed, and am looking forward to it with great impatience.”
The green hills of Wyoming proved to be an adequate substitute for those of Africa. There Hemingway bagged two antelope, three grizzly bears, and 55,000 words. His plan was to complete the first draft, deposit it in a vault, and then go to Spain. Perkins worried every time Hemingway threw himself into the eye of danger—he had even told Ernest to let the grizzlies alone until he finished his book. But he knew that nothing could keep Hemingway from the Spanish Civil War. Just from what he had read in the newspaper, Perkins told him, he imagined that a magnificent tale could be written on the recent defense of the Spanish fortress, the Alcázar. “If you had been there, and got out of it safely, what a story! But I wish you would not go to Spain.... Anyhow, I hope you will let nothing prevent the publication of a novel in the Spring. And it should be early too.” Hemingway was determined to go to the battle-front, but he was in no great hurry. He suspected the Spaniards would be fighting for a long time.
During the spring of 1936 Hemingway had resumed his bullying of Scott Fitzgerald. In several letters to Max and to Scott himself, Ernest jabbed at the now staggering Fitzgerald. He said he did not want to believe that Scott had become the “Maxie Baer” of writers, down and out; but now the man seemed so hell-bent on wallowing in his “shamelessness of defeat” that Hemingway had no choice.
In June, 1936, Fitzgerald was back in Baltimore, living in a seventh-floor apartment across the street from Johns Hopkins. Zelda, sick as ever, had been moved to Highland Hospital, a rest home near Asheville, North Carolina. Scott was still too rattled to start any major writing, but he was full of ideas for books, mostly republications of his old works. He needed money badly, but he resisted asking for it for a time. Then, in July, he addressed a plea for $1,500, this time to Charles Scribner himself, the president of the firm. Scribner sent the check, but he also sent for the company director—Max. The two of them examined Fitzgerald’s account and computed that the author’s debt to the company had grown to $6,000, not including this last payment. “All this is rather painful and I hope it will not give you a headache,” Scribner wrote Fitzgerald in sending a detailed reckoning of all his advances. “Max and I thought it only fair, however, by you as well as ourselves to get the figures on paper, to make sure that we agreed with you.”
In addition to the company loans, Fitzgerald received dozens of loans from Perkins himself. Fitzgerald never owed Perkins at any one time more than $3,000, but it was that much on several different occasions. There had been seven loans in just the past eighteen months, for a total of $1,400. Perkins once wrote Thomas Wolfe’s friend John Terry that he advanced the money “because there simply was no business justification in this house running his debt up further. I wanted to enable him to keep at writing and avoid Hollywood and that sort of racket.”
In mid-July Perkins went to Baltimore and saw Fitzgerald briefly. Scott’s own writing of the period is the best record of what Max found. His essay “The Crack-Up” had described Scott’s deep depression of the preceding winter; now he wrote a piece for the August Esquire, “Afternoon of an Author,” describing an upswing:When he woke up he felt better than he had for many weeks, a fact that became plain to him negatively—he did not feel ill. He leaned for a moment against the door frame between his bedroom and bath till he could be sure he was not dizzy. Not a bit, not even when he stooped for a slipper under the bed.
In his 1938 story “Financing Finnegan” an editor named George Jaggers, who is constantly bailing out the “perennial man of promise in American letters” with personal loans, says: “The truth is Finnegan’s been in a slump, he’s had blow after blow in the past few years, but now he’s snapping out of it.”
Into the summer of 1936, Fitzgerald rode the upswing. He lived in Baltimore or North Carolina, close to Zelda, feeling well. Then, in July, swimming in a pool near Asheville, he did a swan dive from a fifteen-foot board. Scott was in no shape for that kind of diving. He struck the water awkwardly, breaking his clavicle and pulling his left shoulder out of its socket. He was fitted into a special halter which allowed him to write but which kept him in the rigid position of a fascist salute.
While his shoulder was healing, Scott concerned himself with a new version of Tender Is the Night that he had urged Bennett Cerf to consider for his Modern Library. He began the labor of revision by reviewing the criticisms of the book that Perkins had made when it was first serialized two years earlier. He saw now that Max had been right when he had said that the beginning of the book lacked clarity. Fitzgerald heeded the comment this time and switched Part One, on the Riviera, and Part Two, Dick Diver’s history, so that the story was presented chronologically, without flashbacks. The only other significant alteration was the omission of one sentence: Dick’s saying, “I never did go in for making love to dry loins.” Scott now thought it was “a strong line but definitely offensive.”
As Fitzgerald turned back to already written works for new publication, he also withdrew socially. “Me caring about no one and nothing,” he confessed to
his Ledger.
Eight pages preceding Scott Fitzgerald’s “Afternoon of an Author” in the August Esquire was Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” which Max now saw for the first time. It was the story of a writer on safari in Africa, who hoped to “work the fat off his soul” so that he could write “the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well.” The protagonist thought to himself—... you said that you would write about these people; about the very rich; that you were really not one of them but a spy in their country; that you would leave it and write of it and for once it would be written by some one who knew what he was writing of.
There was, of course, a similarity between this writer’s self-doubts and those of Hemingway. But toward the end of the story, Ernest drew a bead on his real target. Again writing about “the rich,” he said:He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
Arnold Gingrich, editor of Esquire, later said: “That dig at Scott went right by me. I didn’t think twice about it.”
Fitzgerald, though, never forgot it. In all fairness, he told Hemingway, writing from Asheville, he thought “Snows of Kilimanjaro” was one of Hemingway’s finest stories, but he felt it was written in malicious response to his own “Crack-Up” articles. He resented Hemingway’s writing about him with all the solemnity of a pallbearer. “Please lay off me in print,” he said, adding:If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate [the story] in a book would you mind cutting my name?
As an afterthought, Fitzgerald wrote, “Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.”
Hemingway in turn wrote Perkins about Fitzgerald’s reaction. Here Scott had been exposing those “awful things about himself” for the last half-year in Esquire, but the moment Hemingway reproved him for his alleged breakdown he got sore. For five years, Ernest said, he had not written a line about anybody he knew because he felt so sorry for them all. He finally realized that time was getting short and he was going to cease being a gent and go back to being a novelist.
Fitzgerald also wrote to Max. Hemingway, he said, had replied to his request not to use Fitzgerald’s name in future printings of his fiction:He wrote me back a crazy letter telling me what a great Writer he was.... To have answered it would have been like fooling with a lit firecracker. Somehow I love that man, no matter what he says or does, but just one more crack, and I think I would have to throw my weight with the gang and lay him. No one could ever hurt him in his first two books. But he has completely lost his head and the duller he gets about it, the more he is like a punch-drunk pug fighting himself in the movies.
The exchange between Fitzgerald and Hemingway about the very rich, with Ernest trumping Scott’s line, survives as one of the notable literary anecdotes from that time. But it is spurious, for, as Max Perkins well knew, the truth was otherwise. Perkins had been present when the rejoinder had been made—in a New York restaurant. Scott Fitzgerald was not there. Those present were Hemingway, Molly Colum, and Perkins, and it was Hemingway, in fact, who spoke of the rich. “I am getting to know the rich,” he declared. Whereupon Molly Colum topped him, saying: “The only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.” Bested by a woman, Hemingway salved his ego by expropriating the witticism, having it come from his own lips, and making Scott, once again, the victim. Perkins thought Hemingway’s behavior contemptible, and told Elizabeth Lemmon as much in a letter. He did not write Hemingway to correct him, but he saw to it that Fitzgerald’s name did not appear in Hemingway’s next book of stories.
Hemingway’s attack ended another sorry summer for Fitzgerald. In September Scott wrote to Max about all that had happened to him since his shoulder had been cast in plaster. “I had almost adapted myself to the thing when I fell in the bathroom reaching for the light, and lay on the floor until I caught a mild form of arthritis called ‘Miotoosis’ which popped me in the bed for five weeks more,” he said. During that time, adding further to his anguish, Fitzgerald’s mother died. He tried to reach her deathbed in Washington but he could not manage the trip. Similarly, he had been within a mile and a half of Zelda all summer in Asheville, but he had not been able to visit her more than a half-dozen times. Affectionate words still passed between Zelda and Scott, mostly letters revealing their love of their former love; but Zelda was now often embarked on flights of fantasy and had taken to carrying a Bible everywhere she went.
The $26,000 in cash and bonds that Scott was inheriting from his mother’s estate was less than he had hoped for. He planned to use some of it to pay off his creditors and take two or three months’ rest. Finally, Fitzgerald admitted to Perkins, “I haven’t the vitality I had five yrs. ago.” His total accomplishment for the summer was one story and two Esquire articles.
With this latest decline in Fitzgerald’s health, Perkins thought of sending in some reserves to boost his spirits. He wrote Marjorie Rawlings, who in her search for a quiet place to get on with The Yearling had settled in Banner Elk, North Carolina, not far from Asheville. He thought a visit from her would do Fitzgerald a great deal of good.
The day after he wrote her, there was another disheartening development. On the occasion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fortieth birthday the New York Post ran a front-page article under the headline “The Other Side of Paradise.” It consisted of a long interview conducted by Michael Mok, the purpose of which was apparently to determine just how cracked up Scott Fitzgerald actually was. It gave Perkins a chill just to read it, for it seemed as if Scott were bent upon destroying himself. Mok evidently had maneuvered his way into Fitzgerald’s confidence, gotten him talking, then published all Scott’s comments, even those that Scott felt had been off the record. “He was trusting the reporter,” Perkins wrote Hemingway, “and so was his nurse—when a man gets himself a trained nurse, it’s time to despair of him—and both of them said things which the reporter must have known were not meant to go into print.” Perkins got the impression of a “completely licked and very drunk person, bereft of hope, acquiescing in his ruin.”
“It might easily be the last straw for Fitzgerald,” Marjorie Rawlings wrote Max after reading the article. She said she was appalled that a reporter could perpetrate so cruel an article, although she was just as tempted to damn Fitzgerald without sympathy. But, she wrote Max, “I know how that state of mind creeps up on you and I have had to fight it myself.” She had had her own years of stormy marriage and alcoholism, so she understood why Max wanted her to see Scott: “The man has taken a licking and ... you know I too have been through a great deal but that I refuse to be licked.”
At Perkins’s insistence, Fitzgerald agreed to meet with Mrs. Rawlings, though he was sick in bed with arthritis and a high temperature the afternoon she visited him. He perked up from the moment of her arrival. “Far from being depressing,” she reported to Perkins afterward, “I enjoyed him thoroughly, and I’m sure he enjoyed it as much. He was as nervous as a cat, but he had not been drinking—had had his nurse put his liquor away.” At lunch they drank only sherry and a table wine, and they clinked their glasses to Max. They proceeded to talk their heads off until, at five-thirty, Fitzgerald’s nurse fussed about his not resting, and Marjorie Rawlings left. Later she sent Scott a note urging him to fight depression. She closed with the admission, “If anyone knew how good my little .32 revolver has looked to me sometimes.”
Max thanked Mrs. Rawlings deeply for seeing Scott. “I have known him so long, and have liked him so much,” he explained, “that his welfare is very much a personal mat
ter with me too. I would do anything to see him recover himself.” But for months Fitzgerald still believed he was washed up.
Perkins asked another of his novelists who lived in North Carolina, Hamilton Basso, to run bedcheck on Scott. Under Max’s supervision Basso was writing Courthouse Square, an autobiographical novel. (Twenty years later, Max himself would become a character in Basso’s most successful book, The View from Pompey’s Head.) For Basso the meetings with Fitzgerald were difficult, but he was eager to oblige their editor.
The root of Fitzgerald’s trouble was, as usual, his empty bank account. He figured a new book would require two years’ leisure and there was no way he could see to reduce his annual expenses below $18,000. Little would be left from his inheritance after he paid his debts. And after the financial failure of Tender Is the Night, he could not hope to be advanced any such sum as $36,000. Fitzgerald guessed that he would have to do piecework for the Post or go panning for gold in Hollywood again. But, Scott observed to Perkins: “Each time I have gone to Hollywood, in spite of the enormous salary, has really set me back financially and artistically.
I certainly have this one more novel, but it may have to remain among the unwritten books of this world. Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to public school and putting my wife in a public insane asylum have been proposed to me by intimate friends, but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil end of a point of view.
“My God,” Fitzgerald moaned, “debt is an awful thing.”
That November, Fitzgerald gave his publishers a “business justification” for any future emergency requests by transferring all his rights, title, and interest in and to the estate of his mother to Charles Scribner’s Sons.
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