Perkins had become well informed on the ways authors reacted to criticism. Hemingway, for one, usually protested too much about his indifference to assaults. Thomas Wolfe, on the other hand, had taken to saying frighteningly little of late. Wolfe had spent months in silent torment, and Perkins was sure that images of Perkins and the Scribners “factory” assembling his books continued to plague him. Max knew that Bernard De Voto’s questions still haunted Wolfe: Was genius enough? Had he developed as an artist? Could he write a book by himself?
At first Wolfe took De Voto’s article as a challenge. Encouraged by Perkins to continue his “objective” book, he wrote thousands of words a day. By the summer of 1936 his anger had inflamed him into believing he was equal to “all the De Votos in the world.”
Wolfe bickered constantly with Perkins that summer, principally about the writing he planned to do. He now talked of basing his new set of characters on the people he had known at Charles Scribner’s Sons. “When Tom gets around to writing about all of us, look out!” Max had joked for years. But now he admitted real anxiety to John Hall Wheelock and Charles Scribner and his other associates. “Charlie reacted humorously,” Perkins recalled some years later, “though I daresay he was worried secretly. He apparently took the matter very lightly, and as if it were amusing more than anything else. In fact, I was the only one who was very much worried, and that was largely because I personally had let us in for it.”
Much of Tom’s material was the result not of direct observation but of inside information he had absorbed from Max after hours when they were unwinding after long days over Of Time and the River. “Max was a sturdy drinker,” John Hall Wheelock said, “and though he never spoke carelessly, he drank enough with Tom to open up and speak to him trustingly as a man might to a son—the son Max never had.” The first transcription of this material was “Old Man Rivers,” a story which Elizabeth Nowell called a “bitter portrayal of Robert Bridges,” the retired editor of Scribner’s Magazine. Another was “The Lion at Morning,” which portrayed Charles Scribner II. The third was “No More Rivers,” based upon editor Wallace Meyer. The last showed the working of a publishing house—James Rodney and Company, and it was the first story Tom tried on Perkins. Max read it in Elizabeth Nowell’s presence; and, the agent remembered, “At first he sat bolt upright at his desk, with unusually pink cheeks and blazing eyes, and refused to discuss the story.” Soon he relented enough to take Miss Nowell to the Chatham for a drink, and there he began to talk.
Perkins felt like kicking himself. “I should have known batter,” he admitted to her, “but I’ve told Tom all kinds of highly confidential things about the firm and about the people there.” Wolfe knew, for instance, of one Scribners executive who “never was much good.” There was another, more venerable company official whom Max encountered one night in the arms of his equally venerable secretary. Perkins did not object to Tom’s writing about Perkins himself. But he was distressed by what Wolfe might divulge about his colleagues.
“Can’t you see,” he said to Miss Nowell, “if Tom writes those things up and publishes them, it’ll ruin those people’s lives, and it’ll be my fault!”
Perkins persuaded Miss Nowell to request changes that would make Wallace Meyer less recognizable. Then, after a moment of thought, he blurted out: “I’ll have to resign when that book is published.” Suddenly realizing what he had said, Perkins insisted that she never repeat it to anyone—least of all to Tom.
Miss Nowell later said that “the idea of Perkins’s resigning from Scribners was as unthinkable as that of God’s resigning from heaven.” But she tactlessly told her author exactly what he had said, and that set Wolfe off again. “He seems to think that while it was all right to write about those humble people down in North Carolina ... his own friends at Scribners are a special race,” Tom replied in anger. If that was Perkins’s attitude, he said it was too bad, because he was going to write what he damn well pleased. He revised “No More Rivers” by making the editor a concert pianist and eliminating the inside gossip about the publishing company. But Perkins knew that Tom “brooded over this, and that it got to seem worse and worse, and anyhow it was at this time that it became perfectly evident he would leave us.” Wolfe actually drafted letters to other houses earnestly asking if they wished to print his works. “At the present time, I am engaged upon the completion of a long book, and since I have no obligation, whether personal, financial, contractual, moral of any kind soever to any firm of publishers, I am writing to inquire if you are interested in this book.... Frankly with no disparagement of any connection I have had—I feel the need of a new beginning in my creative life,” he wrote in a letter he thought of sending to Macmillan, Harpers, Viking, W. W. Norton, Little, Brown, Houghton Mifflin, Longmans-Green, Dodd, Mead, and Harcourt, Brace.
Both friends needed a respite from the other. Wolfe returned to Germany at the end of July. The towns were mobbed with visitors to the Olympic Games, but the whole country seemed wonderfully clean and cool after New York. In Berlin he saw phalanxes of soldiers goose-stepping. “We can never learn to march like these boys,” Tom wrote Max on a card of Die Wachtruppe am Brandenburger Tor, in Berlin, “and it looks as if they’re about ready to go again.” He met a woman named Thea Voelcker, a divorced artist. Into just a few days they crammed a tempestuous love affair, exploding with the passion and torment that accompanied all his relationships. For weeks after leaving Berlin, Tom thought of marrying her, until he found the difficulties of bringing her to America too great to make it worthwhile. They separated as friends.
While Wolfe was away, Max went to Quebec with Louise for two quiet weeks. In September he gave his daughter Zippy in marriage to Douglas Gorsline, a handsome painter she had introduced to Max in Boston the previous year. Her four sisters were attendants. Fitzgerald and Hemingway were invited but could not attend. Thomas Wolfe had set foot on American soil just the day before, and Louise asked a mutual friend to see that he arrived at the church in New Canaan on time and properly attired. He chose his tie on the train from an assortment he had hastily stuffed in his pocket, but all was not perfection. In the quiet just after the ceremony, the guests heard his Southern voice boom, “You didn’t tell me my hatband stank of sweat.” At the reception Louise gushed about losing another of her babies. Max felt the same way but went around saying, “That’s two down, and only three to go.”
Wolfe had returned from Germany especially to vote in the 1936 presidential election, the most important, he felt, since 1860. Wolfe considered himself a “social democrat” but to get Perkins’s goat often played the soapbox Communist, and he believed that Franklin Roosevelt’s reforms should get the largest mandate possible. Perkins was an independent Democrat. He feared the New Deal was becoming a juggernaut which needed the restraints that only a vigorous opposition party could impose, and so, believing that FDR was certain to be reelected, he decided to vote Republican. That appalled and angered Wolfe. He called Perkins a “conservative,” denouncing him as a member of the managerial class who was removed from the struggles of life because of inherited money.
The deterioration of the Wolfe-Perkins relationship became more rapid. Wolfe acknowledged he had once needed Perkins; in his novel You Can’t Go Home Again, his protagonist, George Webber, says to his editor:For I was lost and was looking for someone older and wiser to show me the way, and I found you, and you took the place of my father who had died.
But Webber adds: “The road now leads off in a direction contrary to your intent.”
By November, Wolfe’s impulse to sever himself from his father figure had all but overwhelmed his feelings of loyalty and gratitude. That month a woman named Marjorie Dorman unwittingly became the instrument of schism.
“I always felt somewhat guilty about the Marjorie Dorman affair,” Perkins confessed a decade later.
Miss Dorman had been Wolfe’s landlady in Brooklyn and was the model for “Mad Maude” Whittaker in Wolfe’s story “No Door.” Wolfe told of Maude
’s intermittent insanity and of the mental illness of her father and three sisters. Though slightly unstable herself, Maude had kept her whole family going since she had been a girl. The story was first published in Scribner’s, then in From Death to Morning, the collection of Wolfe short stories. Miss Dorman had come to see Perkins shortly after the story appeared in the magazine. She wanted him to read an article she had written—Max later examined it and returned it to her—and while there she took the opportunity to tell Perkins how deeply hurt she had been by what Wolfe had written.
Many months passed, and nothing more was heard from Miss Dorman. Perkins assumed that since she had not sued for libel when the piece appeared in the magazine, which was read by 300,000 people, she would not do so when the piece reappeared in a book that would be read by perhaps only 30,000. In December, 1936, however, Miss Dorman and her family filed suit. Perkins told John Terry he imagined they had sued because they were hard up and had been told they could get money from the publishers.
Since almost every word Wolfe wrote was autobiographical, nearly all his characters based closely on real people, there had always been a risk of prosecution. “I doubt if Tom thought about the matter at all,” Perkins later said to John Terry, “but of course it was up to me to guard Tom from legal dangers insofar as possible.”
Perkins thought Scribners could win in court. But lawsuits drove Tom frantic, and while they waited for the case to be docketed, he became so tormented that he spent his days brooding or raving. His writing came to a halt. As the Dorman family fished for a settlement, and Max fretted about the unpredictability of juries, Wolfe grew even wilder. Perkins and Charles Scribner knew that they had to free their author of this crippling worry. One day Wolfe came up to the fifth floor of Scribners and the three men stood by the window in Perkins’s office overlooking Fifth Avenue. Charles Scribner explained that it would cost far more to win the suit and that the publicity of a trial might provoke libel suits from other quarters; several others had already been threatened. Wolfe agreed to a settlement, but soon he was telling everyone how angry he was with his publishers for refusing to defend him.
Toward the end of the year Wolfe spent an evening with Perkins and ranted about the injustice done him on all hands in this “blank blank country,” while Germany in contrast was “white as snow.” He often spoke of “dear old Adolf” and his SS, who knew what to do with thugs who picked on artists. America was the place, he said, “where honest men were all robbed and bludgeoned by scoundrels.” Then, shaking his finger at Perkins, he shouted, “And now you have got me into a $125,000 libel suit!” Wolfe and Scribners finally settled with the Dormans for $3,000. The legal fees amounted to $2,000 more. According to Tom’s contract, he should have borne the entire expense, but Scribners volunteered to pay half.
On November 12, 1936, Wolfe wrote the final draft of a letter he had been contemplating for many months and mailed it to Perkins:I think you should now write me a letter in which you explicitly state the nature of my relation with Charles Scribner’s Sons. I think you ought to say that I have faithfully and honorably discharged all obligations to Charles Scribner’s Sons, whether financial, personal or contractual, and that no further agreement or obligation of any sort exists between us.
In view of all that had happened in the preceding year, Wolfe said, the differences of belief, the fundamental disagreements that they had discussed “so openly, so frankly, and so passionately, a thousand times, and which have brought about this unmistakable and grievous severance,” he felt that Perkins himself should have long since written this letter that he was now asking for.
Wolfe’s letter arrived just before the monthly meeting of Scribners’ board of directors. The meeting lasted through the entire afternoon, and so Perkins did not have time that day to respond at length. But he did get off a handwritten note which said in part: “I never knew a soul with whom I felt I was in such fundamentally complete agreement as you. What’s more, and what has to do with it, I know you would not ever do an insincere thing, or anything you did not think was right.”
The next day Perkins dictated a letter which said that Wolfe had “faithfully and honorably discharged all obligations to us, and no further agreement of any sort exists between us with respect to the future.” He went on to say:Our relations are simply those of a publisher who profoundly admires the work of an author and takes great pride in publishing whatever he may of that author’s writings. They are not such as to give us any sort of rights, or anything approaching that, over the author’s future work. Contrary to custom, we have not even an option which would give us the privilege of seeing first any new manuscript.
In a third, more casual, reply to Wolfe’s declaration of independence, Perkins wrote Wolfe by hand on his personal stationery to say:I can’t express certain kinds of feelings very comfortably, but you must realize what my feelings are toward you. Ever since Look Homeward, Angel your work has been the foremost interest in my life, and I have never doubted for your future on any ground except at times, on those of your being able to control the vast mass of material you have accumulated and have to form into books. You seem to think I have tried to control you. I only did that when you asked my help and then I did the best I could do. It all seems very confusing to me, but whatever the result I hope you don’t mean it to keep us from seeing each other, or that you won’t come to our house.
Two days later, as requested, Scribners sent Wolfe what moneys were due. “I wish I could see you,” Perkins wrote in a covering letter, “but I don’t want to force myself on you.”
Perkins did see Wolfe, without untoward incident. Tom came to the Perkinses’ for Christmas dinner and spoke happily of his leaving for New Orleans the next day. He said nothing of a long personal letter he had written on December 15, 1936, in which he had outlined his reasons for breaking with Perkins completely. Nor did he mention a supplement to that letter, a “business” letter, which he had written on December 23. He held onto both letters for weeks, carrying them with him on his trip, and debated with himself for weeks as to whether or not he should send them. He never mailed the business letter, but, as December of 1936 passed into January of 1937, he was resolving to send the personal letter.
He was at last provoked to do so by an unfortunate misunderstanding. A lawyer named Cornelius Mitchell, who was representing Wolfe in another legal matter, wrote him in New Orleans. Tom assumed that Perkins had given Mitchell Wolfe’s New Orleans address, contrary to Tom’s request. Mitchell’s letter reached Wolfe the day that Wolfe was to dine with a newfound friend and admirer of his writing, William B. Wisdom. Tom drank at dinner and kept drinking that evening after Wisdom left him. On January 7, the morning after, he wired Perkins, HOW DARE YOU GIVE ANYONE MY ADDRESS? and lapsed back into stupor. Two days later Tom awoke to find himself reclining in his hotel bathtub with the knee of his trousers torn and his mind still a muddle. For reasons unknown he sent another telegram to Perkins asking, WHAT IS YOUR OFFER? Perkins did not understand either message and replied, IF YOU REFER TO BOOK WE SHALL MAKE IT VERBALLY WHEN YOU RETURN AS ARRANGEMENTS WILL DEPEND ON YOUR REQUIREMENTS. He went on to say, in his wire, that he had not carelessly given out Tom’s address but that when Mitchell, Wolfe’s own lawyer, had told Max it was important for Wolfe to communicate with him, Max had felt the disclosure justified.
Wolfe, now sober, apologized for telegraphing as he had; in fact, he had been so drunk that, he said, he could not recall what he had wired. Seeking sympathy he wrote: “All this worry, grief, and disappointment of the last two years has almost broken me, and finally this last letter of Mitchell’s was almost the last straw. I was desperately in need of rest and quiet—the letter destroyed it all, ruined all the happiness and joy I had hoped to get from the trip—the horrible injustice of the whole thing has almost maddened me.”
Mitchell’s letter concerned what Wolfe called a “blackmail” threat from an autograph dealer named Murdoch Dooher, who had been involved in selling Wolfe’s manusc
ripts and had withheld some that Wolfe had wanted back. Perkins suggested paying a settlement at whatever cost; he felt it crucial to put an end to these suits, which were having such an awful effect on Tom. Full of self-pity and self-doubt, Wolfe denounced Perkins for choosing to settle, seeing it as proof that Max wanted to weaken him. He wrote in still another letter, which he mailed with his “personal letter”:Are you—the man I trusted and reverenced above all else in the world—trying, for some mad reason I cannot even guess, to destroy me? How am I going to interpret the events of the past two years? Don’t you want me to go on? Don’t you want me to write another book? Don’t you hope for my life—my growth—the fulfillment of my talent? In Christ’s name, what is it, then? My health is well-nigh wrecked—worry, grief, and disillusionment has almost destroyed my talent—is this what you wanted? And why?
At the base of all Wolfe’s anger was the general belief that without Perkins, Wolfe was unpublishable—a writer manqué. Wolfe himself had given currency to that notion, by making public facts that Perkins had fought to keep private. Wolfe had written the dedication of Of Time and the River and the extensive sections of The Story of a Novel that detailed Max’s contributions to strengthen the bonds between the two men, but they were having the opposite effect. They now were impelling Wolfe to strike out on his own. In his personal letter Wolfe cited the charges of the critics that Wolfe was dependent on Perkins’s “technical and critical assistance” and branded them so “contemptible, so manifestly false, I have no fear whatever of their ultimate exposure.”
Wolfe granted that “you gave me the most generous, the most painstaking, the most valuable help.” But, he contended, “that kind of help might have been given to me by many other skilful people.” It was rather the understanding of “a fellow creature whom you know and reverence not only as a person of individual genius but as a spirit of incorruptible integrity—that kind of help I do need,” Wolfe admitted, “that kind of help I think I have been given, that kind of help I shall ever more hope to deserve and pray that I shall have.”
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