Wolfe, in his letter, agreed with Perkins that in some strange way they were in “complete and fundamental” agreement with each other. It was one of the greatest ironies of their artistic marriage, because, Wolfe asked, “Were there ever two men since time began who were as completely different as you and I? Have you ever known two other people who were, in almost every respect of temperament, thinking, feeling and acting, as far apart?” Wolfe did not know exactly how to label the two extremes they represented, but he thought Maxwell Perkins was essentially the “Conservative” while he was the “Revolutionary.”
In the last two months, Wolfe believed he had conceived of the highest challenge of his life, a great work of imagination. But he hardly dared speak of this work to Perkins “for fear that this thing which I cannot trifle with, which may come to a man but once in his whole life, may be killed at its inception by cold caution, by indifference, by the growing apprehension and dogmatism of your own conservatism.” This hesitation of Wolfe’s, this feeling of alienation from Perkins, seemed proof enough to Wolfe, he said, that there was already in effect a severance between them. If Max disagreed, Tom said, then he should “tell me what there is in the life around us on which we both agree: We don’t agree in politics, we don’t agree on economics, we are in entire disagreement on the present system of life around us, the way people live, the changes that should be made.”
Perkins had asserted repeatedly that he wanted to publish whatever Wolfe wrote. But Tom said he doubted Max’s honesty of intent:There are many things that I have wanted you to print which have not been published. Some of them have not been published because they were too long for magazine space, or too short for book space, or too different in their design and quality to fit under the heading of a short story, or too incomplete to be called a novel.
Without criticizing Perkins or the mechanics that made the publication of these works impractical, Wolfe said, he maintained that “some of the best writing that a man may do is writing that does not follow under the convenient but extremely limited forms of modern publication.” But as the “revolutionary” Wolfe had been telling Perkins, “the way things are is not always the way, it seems to me, that things should be.”
Wolfe now described the great work he had in mind. He was about to write his own equivalent of Ulysses, a work of enormous originality and power which would pay no heed to publishing restrictions. The first volume was already under way, entitled The Hound of Darkness. “Like Mr. Joyce,” Tom informed Perkins, “I am going to write as I please, and this time, no one is going to cut me unless I want them to.” Since the publication of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe said, he had sensed Max’s hope that the years would temper the author to a “greater conservatism, a milder intensity, a more decorous moderation.” To a degree, Wolfe said, this had already happened, but in yielding to this benevolent pressure, Tom said, he felt he had allowed himself to falter in his purpose—to be diverted from the destination toward which the whole impulsion of his life and talent was driving him. “Restrain my adjectives, by all means, discipline my adverbs, moderate the technical extravagances of my incondite exuberance,” Wolfe wrote Perkins, “but don’t derail the train, don’t take the Pacific Limited and switch it down the siding towards Hogwart Junction.”
Wolfe believed Perkins had become fearful about what he might write and about whom—and that these fears might cloud his editorial judgment. If this timidity persisted and were applied to everything Wolfe wrote from then on, it would strike “a deadly blow at the very vitals of my creative life.” Wolfe gathered that if he wished to continue writing books for Scribners, he must henceforth submit himself “to the most rigid censorship, a censorship which would delete from all my writings any episode, any scene, any character, any reference that might seem to have any connection, however remote, with the house of Charles Scribner’s Sons and its sisters and its cousins and its aunts.”
This was of course a reference to the brouhaha of the previous summer about the stories Wolfe had peopled with Scribners employees. After Perkins had told Elizabeth Nowell he would have to resign if the stories were published and she had passed this on to Wolfe, Perkins had had to explain his position to Tom. Perkins was “always with the man of talent,” he told him, and that rather than restrict Wolfe, he would indeed resign. Perkins’s offer was probably sincere. He did not want Wolfe to start censoring himself, and he felt that by resigning from Scribners he could take upon himself the responsibility for whatever Wolfe might write about that firm.
“Well,” Wolfe now wrote in his letter, “don’t worry, you’ll never have to.” In the first place, Tom said,your executive and editorial functions are so special and valuable that they could not be substituted by any other person on earth. They could not be done without by the business that employs them. It would be like having a house with the lights turned out.
Secondly, Wolfe said, he would let no man resign on his account “simply because I won’t be there to be resigned about.”
“Let’s make an end of all this devil’s business,” he continued in his letter to Perkins. “Let’s stand to our guns like men. Let’s go ahead and try to do our work and without qualification, without fear, without apology.” Wolfe said he was prepared to try to proceed with his work. “If that cannot be done any longer upon the terms that I have stated here,” he wrote Perkins, “then I must either stand alone or turn to other quarters for support, if I can find it.”
What are you willing to do? ... You yourself must now say plainly what the decision is to be, because the decision now rests with you. You can no longer have any doubt as to how I feel about these matters. I don’t see how you can any longer have any doubt that difficulties of a grave and desperate nature do exist.
Finally, on January 10, Wolfe put his twenty-eight-page, handwritten letter in the post.
There is no record of how Max Perkins’s face looked as he read the letter. It is known that as he perused it he made notes in the margins. He responded, over the next several days, in three separate letters.
The first was brief. Max merely wanted to state two basic principles. It was his belief, he said, that the “one important supreme object” was to advance Wolfe’s work.
Anything in furtherance of that is good and anything that impedes it is bad. What impedes it especially is not the great difficulty and pain of doing it—for you are the reverse of lazy, you work furiously—but the harassment, the torment of outside worries. When you spoke to me about the settlement, it was, and had been before, very plain that this suit was such a worry that it was impeding you in your work. It was only because of that that I gave the advice I did. I thought, then get rid of it, forget it, and clear the way for what is really important, supremely. Now this blackmail talk puts a new face on that matter altogether.
Secondly, he said, he stood ready to help if he could, whenever Tom wanted.
You asked my help on “Time and the River.” I was glad and proud to give it. No understanding person could believe that it affected the book in any serious or important way—that it was much more than mechanical help. It did seem that the book was too enormous to get between covers. That was the first problem. There might be a problem in a book, such as prohibited publication of Joyce for years in this country. If you wished it, we would publish any book by you as written except for such problems as those which prohibit—some can’t be avoided but I don’t foresee them. Length could be dealt with by publishing in sections. Anyhow, apart from physical or legal limitations not within the possibility of change by us, we will publish anything as you write it.
That night Max read Wolfe’s letter more carefully. He did not understand why Tom should have delayed its delivery for so long. “There was mighty little of it that I did not wholly accept,” Perkins wrote, “and what I did not, I perfectly well understood.” He thought it was “a fine writer’s statement of his beliefs, as fine as any I ever saw, and though I have vanities enough, as many as most, it gave me great pleasure too—t
hat which comes from hearing brave and sincere beliefs uttered with sincerity and nobility.” Perkins took issue only with the few things he thought Wolfe had greatly misunderstood. In his attempt to explain them, Perkins said, he realized he would first have to look within his own soul. “But what a task you’ve put me to to search myself—in whom I’m not so very much interested any more—and give you an adequate answer,” he wrote the day after receiving Tom’s letter. Two days after that, on Saturday, January 16, 1937, he embraced the task and responded in full.
Perkins completely subscribed to Wolfe’s credo as a writer. He said, “If it were not true that you, for instance, should write as you see, feel, and think, then a writer would be of no importance, and books merely things for amusement. And since I have always thought that there could be nothing so important as a book can be, and some are, I could not help but think as you do. But there are limitations of time, of space, and of human laws which cannot be treated as if they did not exist.” Perkins thought the writer should be the one to make his book what he wanted it to be, and that if because of the law of space it must be cut, he should be the one to cut it.
“But my impression was that you asked my help, that you wanted it,” he wrote Wolfe. “And it is my impression too that changes were not forced on you (you’re not very forceable, Tom, nor I very forceful), but were argued over, often for hours.” Unless Wolfe wanted help in the future, it would not be thrust upon him. “I believe,” Perkins wrote, “the writer anyway, should always be the final judge, and I meant you to be so. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.”
Perkins knew that Tom’s memory was miraculous, but it seemed as if Tom had forgotten the way they had worked together. Wolfe had never once been overruled during all the labor on the books. (“Do you think you are clay to be moulded!” Perkins wrote in disbelief; “I never saw anyone less malleable.”) There were indeed segments from the large manuscript of Wolfe’s life which had been deleted, but the cutting was always for artistic reasons. (At one point during the editing of Wolfe, Perkins had said to Jack Wheelock, “Maybe it’s the way Tom is. Maybe we should just publish him as he comes and in the end it will be all right.”) Perkins asked Wolfe now what he had often asked himself in the past: “If we had [refrained from cutting], and the results had been bad at the moment, would you not have blamed me? Certainly I should have bitterly blamed myself.” Perkins did not want the passage of time to make Wolfe “cautious or conservative” but to give him a full control over his talents.
Perkins turned to the question of whether or not they were in “fundamental agreement.” “I have always instinctively felt that it was so,” he explained to Wolfe, “and no one I ever knew has said more of the things that I believed than you. It was so from the moment that I began to read your first book. Nothing else, I would say, could have kept such different people together through such trials.”
Perkins’s concept of social change was indeed less radical than Wolfe’s:I believe that the only thing that can prevent improvement is the ruin of violence, or of reckless finance which will end in violence. That is why Roosevelt needs an opposition, and it is the only serious defect in him. I believe that change really comes from the great deep causes too complex for contemporary men, or any others perhaps, fully to understand, and that when even great men like Lenin try to make over a whole society suddenly the end is almost sure to be bad, and that the right end, the natural one, will come from the efforts of innumerable people trying to do right.
But on this issue, too, Perkins insisted they were essentially in agreement: “It is more that I like and admire the same things [you do] and despise many of the same things, and the same people too, and think the same things important and unimportant—at least this is the way it seemed to me.”
Perkins’s heartfelt, reasoned reply to Wolfe’s letter appeased Wolfe enough to delay his departure from Scribners. But inside Wolfe the separation had already taken place. Sometime in January, 1937, he started a letter (probably to his lawyer Cornelius Mitchell), which he never finished. “I know I am alone now,” began one paragraph. “As for Mr. Perkins—” he wrote in the letter’s final fragment, “he is the greatest editor [of] this generation. I revered and honored him also as the greatest man, the greatest friend, the greatest character I had ever known. Now I can only tell you that I still think he is the greatest editor of our time. As for the rest—he is an honest but a timid man. He is not a man for danger—I expect no help from ...”
After Perkins had written to Wolfe, he put Wolfe’s letter in his desk, not in the regular files. John Hall Wheelock said that Max often pulled it out during the day, trying to read between the lines. Max, he said, was hurt that Wolfe had complained of his timidity and weakness. “Tom had moved from thinking Max was a cowardly man to not a man at all,” Wheelock said. “That particular letter very nearly killed Max. But he never struck back. Thomas Wolfe was the ultimate editorial challenge, part of which meant dealing with his personal temperament.” One day that spring, Wheelock happened unexpectedly into Perkins’s office and found him almost in tears over the letter. When Max saw Wheelock, he slipped it furtively into the drawer and carried on with business. He never shared it with anyone or asked for sympathy.
XVII
A Sad Farewell
On January 2, 1937, Hemingway wired Max that he had finished his Gulf Stream novel. Max was already excited. The book, he felt, had one great “superficial advantage in being about a region that I think nobody has ever written well about, and a very rich and colorful scene.” He thought back to that first time he had sailed in those waters, eight years before, when Hemingway told him he would not be able to write about them until he understood even the pelican’s role. “But you did get around to it,” Max now wrote Ernest, “when you had absorbed a sense of it and knew what part everything did play in the scheme of things. So I am not more anxious for anything than to see this novel.” Because Hemingway generally gave himself several weeks away from a manuscript before he reread it himself for a new perspective, it would be another few months before Max could inspect it.
Hemingway’s immediate plan was to go to Spain to cover the war there as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. His new interest in Spain came from Martha Gellhorn, the striking twenty-nine-year-old author of a novel called What Mad Pursuit. Hemingway had met her that winter, just a year after she had been introduced to Harry L. Hopkins, Roosevelt’s Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Hopkins had assigned her to survey living conditions of people on relief in industrial areas. She wrote four sections of her report as short stories and grouped them into a book called The Trouble I’ve Seen. Miss Gellhorn’s social convictions extended beyond America. She was particularly well informed about the Spanish Civil War, and Hemingway hung upon every word she said. During a brief visit to New York, well before he was ready to relinquish his novel, he tipped Max Perkins off about the possibility of publishing Martha Gellhorn. She had, in fact, written a story called “Exiles” which she hoped might appear in Scribner’s. Max had admired The Trouble I’ve Seen, and days later the magazine bought “Exiles.”
On February 27, Perkins saw Hemingway, a friend named Evan Shipman, and bullfighter Sidney Franklin off on a liner bound for France. “I hope they won’t all get into trouble over there,” Max wrote Scott Fitzgerald. “They seem to be quite bloodthirsty.” Martha Gellhorn joined Hemingway in Madrid one month later. After six weeks in Spain, Ernest left, picked up the manuscript of his novel in Paris, and went to Bimini to revise it. There he was reunited with his children and Pauline. A few weeks later he came to New York again to deliver a speech before the Second American Writers’ Congress at Carnegie Hall. Martha sat by his side during the speeches that preceded his. Her influence perhaps explained a new political tone that his speech displayed. “Really good writers are always rewarded under almost any existing syste
m of government that they can tolerate,” he said before the writers’ congress. “There is only one form of government that cannot produce good writers, and that system is fascism. For fascism is a lie told by bullies. A writer who will not lie cannot live and work under fascism.”
While still in New York, Hemingway stopped off at Perkins’s house. Just before he arrived, someone told him that Scott Fitzgerald was also in town. Louise Perkins, never particularly smitten by Hemingway, cared even less for him after this visit. She resented his taking her husband for granted. “Ernest Hemingway came in here,” Louise later told Elizabeth Lemmon, “hardly looking at Max and barked, ‘Where’s the telephone? I have to talk to Scott. He’s the only person in America worth talking to.’ ” But Ernest did find time to talk privately to Max, and to him he expressed doubts about his new novel; he was afraid it was too short to stand alone, and he suggested beefing up the book with a few short stories. He promised to deliver his manuscript to Max for his opinion by July 5.
Flying south, Hemingway had a brainstorm. He thought he might come out with something entirely new—“a living omnibus.” Under the overall title To Have and Have Not, he wrote Max, the volume would include: Harry Morgan, his novel of 50,000 words; three of his latest stories; an article on the hurricane of 1935 entitled “Who Murdered the Vets?”; one of his news dispatches from Madrid; and the text of his recent public address. He said Perkins could plug the agglomeration as a “major work,” and it would give the buyers their money’s worth. Most of the task of its assembly would fall into Perkins’s hands, it seemed, because there was going to be a lot of blood spilled in Spain during the next several months, and Hemingway wanted to be there, ringside.
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