Max Perkins

by A. Scott Berg

  I, in a way, have fallen upon evil days and that’s why I haven’t written you. I never could write when things were going wrong. That always worried me about the children, but they seem to be made on another pattern and only write if things go badly. And as for the evil days: we all have to have them, and what the hell, if we can take them. But I want you to know how it is, why I haven’t written. You were my friend and nothing pleases me more than to know that. The future be damned, I’ll remember the past.

  Louise Perkins had no intention of whiling away a quiet summer in New Canaan. She had been invited to join the great Shavian actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell and a theatrical troupe in Milford, Connecticut—as Mrs. Campbell’s understudy. Realizing such opportunities seldom knocked twice, especially at this stage in her unstarted career, Louise accepted. Unfortunately, the star was frustratingly healthy and Louise waited in the wings all summer. After that experience, Max wrote Tom Wolfe in a newsy letter that summer, “I think she’s pretty fed up with the thespian temperament.”

  By the end of the season, Wolfe’s “Chickamauga” ended up in the Yale Review, and Elizabeth Nowell successfully placed another half-dozen of his stories. Tom even received compliments from Scott Fitzgerald for his story “E” in The New Yorker. Scott laid out his admiration of Wolfe’s writing, calling his talent “unmatchable in this or any other country.” Then Scott tried to make “a good case for your necessity to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you....Now the more the stronger man’s inner tendencies are defined, the more he can be sure they will show, the more necessity to rarefy them, to use them sparingly. The novel of selected incidents has this to be said, that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe (in his case Zola) will come along and say presently. He will say only the things that he alone sees. So Madame Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with age.

  “The unexpected loquaciousness of your letter struck me all of a heap,” Wolfe wrote back to Fitzgerald. “Your bouquet arrived smelling sweetly of roses but cunningly concealing several large-sized brickbats.” He found Scott’s case against him not far from the common criticism of the day, and he expected better. Wolfe did not see what Flaubert and Zola had to do with his writing.

  “I am going into the woods for another two or three years,” Wolfe wrote Fitzgerald:I am going to try to do the best, the most important piece of work I have ever done. I am going to have to do it alone. I am going to lose what little bit of reputation I may have gained, to have to hear and know and endure in silence again all of the doubt, the disparagement, the ridicule, the postmortems that they are so eager to read over you even before you are dead. I know what it means and so do you. We have both been through it before.

  He thought he could survive it, but he would be looking for intelligent understanding from friends outside Scribners. “Go for me with the gloves off if you think I need it,” he wrote Fitzgerald. “But don’t De Voto me. If you do I’ll call your bluff.”

  That fall Scribners spruced up their library on the fifth floor with a new paint job and carpeting. Perkins told everybody the place “now resembles a boudoir,” but he knew that some of the women literary agents in New York would feel more comfortable there, and he seemed to be dealing with more of them every day. In fact, women were entering the profession in such rapid numbers that Max had suggested that Diarmuid Russell, the son of the Irish poet A. E. (George William Russell), and Wolfe’s friend Henry Volkening, a former English instructor at N.Y.U., join forces and start their own agency before “the damned women take over the entire business.” In the process of redecorating, three large packages were discovered at Scribners which contained manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe. One of them was a chunk of The October Fair, a novel Tom never finished. Wolfe thought that he or Scribners had lost that, but Max remembered that Tom himself had put those manuscripts in that very place. “So,” Max wrote Elizabeth Nowell, “everything of Tom’s that was in our hands is still in them and in fine condition!”

  Except Wolfe’s career. Back in New York after three months in his cabin in North Carolina, Wolfe was still reassessing his relationship with his publisher. Another potshot by Bernard De Voto, in the August 21 Saturday Review, criticizing both Wolfe and Melville for their “long passages of unshaped emotion,” made Tom even more determined to be published elsewhere.

  One late summer morning, Wolfe called several major publishing houses on the telephone, babbling to the first editor he was connected to at each place that he was Thomas Wolfe and asking if they were interested in publishing him. Some of the publishers assumed the calls were practical jokes. But Bernard Smith at Alfred A. Knopf said he would be delighted to talk to Wolfe about his publishing future. Alfred Harcourt paid a visit to Perkins and Charles Scribner and asked them if Harcourt, Brace could in fairness accept the offer Wolfe had made to him. Perkins said he “didn’t think there was any other possibility,” meaning that Wolfe was too great a writer to pass by. He and Scribner both assured Harcourt that they would harbor no resentment against him, for Wolfe was evidently determined to change publishers at last. Harcourt left Perkins with the impression that Wolfe would be signing with his firm. But after almost ten years of fidelity to Scribners, Wolfe wanted to revel in this new attention. He flirted with all the suitors for his hand.

  A few weeks later, Robert Linscott of Houghton Mifflin met Wolfe in their New York office. In no time they were calling each other by their first names. He and Tom arranged for the safekeeping of Tom’s huge trunk of manuscripts. As a business formality, Linscott gave the author a note acknowledging receipt of the trunk. That night Wolfe, lighthearted about having found himself a publisher he liked, reached into his pocket and found the receipt. It read, in part: “I hope you realize that, under the circumstances, it [the trunk] will have to be held entirely at your risk.” Wolfe broke off with Houghton Mifflin that instant, raging in an unsent letter, “It seems to me that you must assume the risk, that the entire and whole responsibility of safe-guarding an author’s property, once you have requested it, is yours and yours alone.” He went back to playing the field.

  For weeks Wolfe’s family remained unaware of the separation between Tom and Perkins. Max got a postcard from Julia Wolfe, who was worrying because she had not had word from her son for over a month. Max also heard similarly from Tom’s brother Fred. Perkins replied that Tom was all right but that mail should now be sent in Elizabeth Nowell’s care, not his at Scribners. In his letter to Fred, Perkins said: “He has also turned his back on me, and Scribners, and so I have not seen him at all, though I would very much like to.” It was not long before all the stories of the separation were passed among the garrulous Wolfes. Tom confirmed to them that he was no longer with a publisher and that the cause of his separation had its origin as far back as 1935. Wolfe now realized the ties between him and Scribners had not been cut cleanly. In a 5,000-word letter to Perkins, he tried to answer all the accusations he had heard attributed to his editor. “In the first place,” he wrote, “I did not ‘turn my back’ on you and Scribners, and I think it is misleading and disingenuous for anyone to say this was the case.” Secondly, he did not think it was truthful for either of them to assert he had no conception of what their separation was about. Tom believed Max knew all the reasons very clearly, for they had threshed them out hundreds of times.

  “You owe me nothing, and I consider what I owe you a great deal,” Wolfe said. “I don’t want any acknowledgment for seeing and understanding that you were a great editor, even when I first met you, but I did see and understand it, and later I acknowledged it in words which have been printed by your own house, and of which now there is a public record. The world would have found out anyway that you were a great editor,” Tom insisted. But when people now solemnly reminded him that Perkins was great, he found it ironically amusing to reflect that he himself was the first one publicly to point out that fact. “I, as much as any man alive, was responsible for pulling the light o
ut from underneath the bushel basket,” he bragged.

  “This letter,” he went on, “is a sad farewell, but I hope it is for both of us a new beginning.” And he added,I am your friend, Max, and that is why I wrote this letter—to tell you so. If I wrote so much else here that the main thing was obscured—the only damn one that matters is that I am your friend and want you to be mine—please take this last line as being what I wanted to say the whole way through.

  Perkins was glad to see Wolfe’s handwriting again. “I am your friend and always will be I think,” he replied. What had grieved Perkins most deeply in the last few months, he said, was that in making his move Tom had maneuvered behind Max’s back. All that dealing under the table had been “humiliating,” Perkins said. He had written Fred truly when he said he did not understand Tom’s action. In the end, Max said none of this made any difference. “I hope we may soon meet as friends,” he wrote, now that they were no longer associates. In December, Perkins learned from Robert Linscott that Wolfe was ready to sign with Edward C. Aswell, an assistant to Eugene F. Saxton at Harper & Brothers.

  The Christmas before, Wolfe had been with the Perkinses. This Christmas he was in Chappaqua, New York, with the Aswells and their friends, drinking champagne and exchanging emotional toasts with them.

  Wolfe regarded his move to a new publisher as “one of the most fortunate and happy experiences” of his life. Harpers was giving him a large advance, but more than money had been involved. Wolfe’s decision was based on a personal hunch, because he was to be associated with Ed Aswell, a fellow North Carolinian, exactly his age. “I think it’s going to turn out to be a wonderful experience,” Tom wrote a friend, Anne Armstrong, of Bristol, Tennessee. “I feel that the man is quiet, but very deep and true: and he thinks that I am the best writer there is.... However, I am still a little sad about the past.” But, he asked her, “You can’t go home again, can you?”

  Perkins accepted Wolfe’s departure with grace, for he believed in its inevitability—“I can easily imagine a biography of Tom written twenty years from now that would ascribe this action to his instinctive and manly determination to free all his bonds and stand up alone,” he wrote Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings a few months later. But Max already knew that an important part of his life was gone. At the end of the year he wrote Tom Wolfe, “I drink a lonely glass of ale every night in Manny Wolf’s while waiting for the paper.... We really had a mighty good Christmas, but we missed you.”

  XVIII

  By the Wind Grieved

  Shortly after Christmas, 1937, Thomas Wolfe, now a Harpers author, was forced to ask Max Perkins for help. The trial involving Wolfe and Murdoch Dooher, the twenty-one-year-old manuscript agent, was impending, and Tom wrote Max to ask him to testify, “not only for personal or friendly reasons, but just because it’s taking a stand in favor of the human race.” Perkins was glad to oblige, especially pleased that Wolfe showed neither remorse nor anxiety in asking him to appear. By now many of the specifics of the case had become fuzzy in Perkins’s mind, and on the evening of February 1 he and Tom met in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel—where Wolfe had recently moved, at Max’s suggestion—to clarify them. It was their first encounter in seven months, and it was painless.

  The case involved the manuscript of Of Time and the River. Earlier, Dooher had successfully sold a few small items of Wolfe‘s—books and papers—and so Wolfe had authorized him to sell the manuscript of this novel. Dooher picked up the heap of material at Scribners and set about to collate it. As he worked he discovered that what Wolfe had given him was not the manuscript that had been published but pages cut from that book. At Wolfe’s insistence he went to Scribners to work with the writer on sorting this unpublished material.

  As it happened, Wolfe’s English publisher, A. S. Frere-Reeves, had just arrived from London that day, and Perkins, who knew him only slightly, was to meet him at the Chatham at five that afternoon. Max thought it would be nice to have Wolfe join them briefly, and so he went into the room where Wolfe and Dooher were working and took Wolfe away “for just one drink.” But Wolfe had many drinks, and Dooher was kept waiting for hours. When Wolfe returned, Dooher was angry; then Wolfe got angry and discharged him. Dooher stormed out and sent Wolfe a bill of $1,000 for services rendered—specifically, lining up a buyer and working with the material—and for loss of commissions to which he felt entitled. Dooher still had in his possession many pages of Wolfe’s manuscript which he refused to return without payment. Whereupon, Wolfe began legal proceedings to recover his property. Max, in his way of bearing the brunt of responsibilities, later said: “I was to blame for Dooher’s having the wrong material, and also for getting both of them into an unreasonable frame of mind.”

  In the meeting with Wolfe to prepare for the trial, Max remembered that Tom, just before he went to Europe in 1935, had given Perkins his written power of attorney. Max’s recollection was greeted joyfully by Wolfe; he regarded it as a key to his defense, for to him it clearly indicated that Wolfe had never intended Dooher to act on his own and consummate any deal without approval—of Max, if not of Wolfe himself.

  On February 8, 1938, Perkins went to Jersey City for the trial. He found Wolfe “all fidgety and frowning under the slings and arrows and all” but thought Tom gave an overwhelming impression of sincerity and dignity in the courtroom. A procession of witnesses appeared in Wolfe’s defense, and soon it seemed so obvious to Max that Wolfe’s case was won that he believed he would not have to testify. But he was called to the stand just the same. By the time Max had his hand on the Bible, Wolfe could hardly contain his emotion; Elizabeth Nowell observed that Wolfe was moved almost to tears, because—for the first time in public—Max was wearing a hearing aid. He had stubbornly refused to use one on any previous occasion, even though everyone he spoke with had noticed how bad his hearing had grown. But Perkins felt a kind of duty to Wolfe, an obligation to understand all the proceedings clearly, that outweighed the embarrassment and the discomfort of the clumsy contraption. He proved to be the most scrupulously honest and least cooperative witness. The lawyer asked Perkins twice if the power of attorney had been given expressly for the purpose of controlling Dooher. “I felt like a silly little prig in saying that I could not actually say so,” Max recounted to John Terry. “I’m sure the lawyer despised me, as I sort of despised myself.” All Perkins could truthfully testify was that no such power had ever been given him before and thus it was evidently for that purpose.

  By lunchtime Wolfe was acquitted, and Perkins, relieved that his ordeal was over, considered his morning in court “good fun.” Perkins believed Wolfe’s vindication had “more or less restored Tom’s faith in at least one American institution.” Together, they ferried back to Manhattan and lunched at Cherio’s. Afterward, Max realized that there no longer remained any professional reason for his ever seeing Thomas Wolfe again.

  Max wrote several of his authors about the split between himself and Tom. He insisted it was in Wolfe’s best interests to leave, and so it was inevitable. Hemingway, for one, thought Perkins wrote “very chic-ly” about it all, while Wolfe had acted like an enormous baby. Ernest wondered why the man could not just write, then sneered that it must be very difficult to be a genius.

  In January, Hemingway returned from the Spanish Civil War. The Loyalist offensive had hardly made a dent anywhere. In fact, for months there was so little action that Ernest had not even bothered to write dispatches for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had taken advantage of the lulls to go back to his own work. By winter’s end he had finished his first play, set in the very hotel in which he was staying, the Hotel Florida in Madrid. Once word had got out, many people in the theatrical world called Perkins. Max wrote Ernest, “I cannot imagine your writing a play that would not be a sensation and a success,” though he knew nothing about it except its locale.

  Back in Key West, Hemingway admitted to Perkins that he was in an “unchristly jam of every kind.” He was concerned about the war in Spain but
was too far from it; he was eager to cast his fresh material from Spain into fiction but was too close to it. He was also engaged in a domestic battle with Pauline, who was trying to hold on to him as his relationship with Martha Gellhorn deepened. Perkins offered aid with the problems over which he had some control. If it would help get a production together, Perkins said Scribners would publish his play right away, even though the usual procedure was to publish when the play opened. (Robert Sherwood’s The Road to Rome, Reunion in Vienna, and The Petrified Forest were the most successful examples on Perkins’s list.) “But this play of yours,” Max assured Hemingway, “will sell without a production,” if only because of the public’s desire to find out the way things were in Spain.

  Hemingway’s yearning to get back to Spain took over. He told Max he felt like a “bloody shit” lounging in Key West when war threatened Aragon and Madrid. Against Pauline’s and Max’s wishes, he returned in the middle of March, 1938. He assured his editor that he had not forgotten the collection of stories that was to come out in the fall. He promised to mail it to Max from Paris, en route to Spain, and even to add several more stories just before the book went to press.

  The publication of Hemingway’s play was set for the fall. Ernest had left a copy with Perkins, though he still had revisions to make—among them, he said, a probable change in the title, The Fifth Column. GREATLY MOVED BY PLAY. IT IS MAGNIFICENT ALL GOOD LUCK, Perkins cabled Hemingway. “And by the way,” he wrote the next day, “I think that you will have a hard time beating the present title.” Unaware of the Hemingways’ domestic estrangement, Max wrote to Pauline. “That play,” he said, “made me see plenty why Ernest had to go back to Spain.” Speaking of the play as a work of literature, he said: “It shows what To Have and Have Not did, only more so, that Ernest has moved forward into new territory and larger territory, I guess.”