Aboard ship, Hemingway wrote Perkins a long letter apologizing for having been “trying” during the last few weeks. In a funereal tone Ernest thanked Max for being so loyal to him through all the times of bad temper and “general shittiness.” Max assured him that no thanks were necessary. “I think you have treated us swell. We all do. I owe you plenty,” he wrote back. But Perkins could not shake a feeling of depression. The letter upset him all through the weekend because it sounded as if Hemingway did not think he would ever get back from Spain. “But I haven’t much faith in premonitions,” Max wrote Fitzgerald, trying to dredge up some optimism. “Very few of mine ever developed. Hem seemed very well, and I thought he was in good spirits, but I guess he wasn’t. I thought I would tell you that he especially mentioned you.” Fitzgerald was touched that he too had been remembered in Hemingway’s “premonitory last words.” He was fascinated as always by the man’s “Byronic intensity.”
Scott Fitzgerald had come through New York early in 1938. Max had lunched with him and an attractive thirty-year-old blonde whom Scott introduced as his “girl friend” from Hollywood. Perkins was pleased to learn she was not an actress. The “girl friend” was Sheilah Graham, an Englishwoman who wrote a column about Hollywood for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Perkins knew little more about her, except that she seemed to have a good effect on Scott. Sporting a California tan, he had not been drinking, looked wonderfully healthy, and acted lively. Fitzgerald had also paid off most of his debts—including all he owed Max—and had an even better film contract for another year, which promised to get him out of debt altogether.
Upon his return to Hollywood, Scott immediately sent Max a check, the first portion of the sum he still owed Scribners. “I’d said he would do it but nobody would believe it,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “—and sometimes I didn’t either.” In a letter accompanying the check, written from his hotel room at the Garden of Allah on Sunset Boulevard, Fitzgerald confessed to having gone on a binge in New York after he had left Max. He swore that this bender had lasted only three days and that he had not had a drop since. As long as he was confessing, however, he thought he should admit to one other, back in September, likewise for three days. Save for those two lapses, alcohol had not passed his lips for a year. “Isn’t it awful that we reformed alcoholics have to preface everything by explaining exactly how we stand on that question,” he wrote Perkins. Scott said he was working on the script for a motion picture for Joan Crawford called Infidelity. Perkins’s steady flow of letters from New York were Fitzgerald’s only evidence that he existed, albeit barely, in the literary world there.
Scott felt even more estranged that spring when Scribners’ vice-president in charge of sales and promotion, Whitney Darrow, informed him that This Side of Paradise was officially “out of print,” eighteen years after it had ignited the youth of the twenties. Fitzgerald was disappointed but not surprised. “Looking it [the novel] over,” he told Max, “I think it is now one of the funniest books since ‘Dorian Gray’ in its utter spuriousness—and then, here and there, I find a page that is very real and living.” He knew that, to the generation that had replaced his, the children of his contemporaries, the concerns of the book were remote and that escapades which were startling then would now be considered tame. “To hold them [the new generation] I would have to put in a couple of abortions to give it color,” Scott said, “(and probably would if I were writing it again).” Its faults aside, he wanted to know exactly what “out of print” meant. Did it mean, he asked, that he was now free to find another publisher to reprint it? And if he did, would that have the effect of suddenly making the book valuable again to “Whitney Darrow or Darrow Whitney, or whatever his name is?”
When a book was declared out of print, it meant that the publisher, because of lack of demand for the book, had decided not to print any more copies and to let the current inventory run out; the author was indeed free to seek a new publisher. But, said Perkins, he had his own plan for keeping the book alive at Scribners. “I ought not to even breathe it to you because it will probably never turn out,” he wrote the author, “but I have a secret hope that we could some day—after a big success with a new novel—make an omnibus book.” It would combine This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby,4 and Tender Is the Night, complete with a lengthy introduction by the author. “Those three books,” Perkins wrote, “besides having the intrinsic qualities of permanence, represent three distinct periods.—And nobody has written about any of those periods as well.” Perkins did not want to spoil an opportunity with the premature publication of the three-in-one volume. He explained:There comes a time and it applies somewhat now to both Paradise and Gatsby, when the past gets a kind of romantic glamour. We have not yet reached that with Tender Is the Night and not to such a degree as we shall later even with Paradise, I think. But unless we think there never will be good times again—and barring a war there will be better times than ever, I believe—we ought to wait for them.
Perkins wished Fitzgerald would turn back to his novel about the Dark Ages, Philippe, but Scott had no time for that. He said the amazing business of movie-making had a “way of whizzing you along at a terrific speed and then letting you wait in a dispirited half-cocked mood when you don’t feel like undertaking anything else, while it makes up its mind.” Hollywood studios were filled with a “strange conglomeration of a few excellent overtired men making the pictures and as dismal a crowd of fakes and hacks at the bottom as you can imagine.” The consequence, Scott said, “is that every other man is a charlatan, nobody trusts anybody else, and an infinite amount of time is wasted from lack of confidence.” It was a peculiar stretch in Fitzgerald’s career, he thought, but as he looked around, he realized that he was not the only literary fish out of water. “What a time you’ve had with your sons, Max,” he wrote Perkins on April 23, 1938, “—Ernest gone to Spain, me gone to Hollywood, Tom Wolfe reverting to an artistic hill-billy.”
As for Max himself, it was an opportunity for him to catch his second wind and redistribute his energies. After a peaceful summer in New Canaan, the Perkinses moved back there permanently. Max hoped to keep Louise in the country for good, but again she found herself with an excess of energy, a surplus that city life had used to burn off. Her passion to perform on stage had eased, but a restlessness still flickered within her. She searched for a life of her own outside the house, and soon she found it.
Early in 1938 several nuns from the local Roman Catholic parish came to the Perkinses’ door to speak to their Catholic cook. Louise chatted with the sisters for a few minutes, then wrote their church a generous check. The nuns stayed to talk some more, and by the time they left, Louise had become impressed with Catholicism. She looked into it a bit further, and several weeks later she found herself in earnest conversation with the parish priest. “What means the most to you apart from people?” he asked her. Her reply came without hesitation: “Talent in the theater.” The priest told her to “take that and lay it on the altar of Jesus Christ.” At age fifty, Louise emerged from the wings into her new holy theater with all the vitality of an ingenue and the enthusiasm of a convert. As Elizabeth Lemmon noted, “Louise always had a passion for purple.” Whether or not her motivation was truly religious, it was strong. Friends and relatives indicated that Louise’s conversion had more than theatrical implications. Several people said it was her “rebellion against the family.” One daughter suggested it was another stage in “Mother’s lifelong struggle to be creative.”
Max was not convinced by Louise’s new devotion. Once, when she began one of her crusades, attempting to reform her entire household, he pointed out, “Your voice takes on a phony tone whenever you talk about the Church.” When she asked for the umpteenth time, “Max, why won’t you try it once?”—as though it were some new headache remedy—he responded, “And have you tried Buddha?” The harder she fought to save his soul, the harder Max resisted. It was a new version of their perennial battle—silent reserve versus unrestraine
d enthusiasm. Louise proselytized wherever she went, often to Max’s embarrassment. She sprinkled holy water all over the house, dousing Max’s pillow several times a week. With a sigh he would ask his daughters if they could not “do something” about their mother. One evening, when she was running low on reasons why Max should convert, she told him if he did not start confessing his sins and taking Communion he would burn in hell. “Thank God I’m not going to heaven—” he came back, “with all you Catholics.” By June she was cloistering herself on week-long retreats. Max continued to observe his wife’s interest in Catholicism with disdain, but, he told John Hall Wheelock, he did not especially want it to wear off entirely. He tired of her relentless attacks on the Protestants but saw how fulfilling the Church was for her.
Because of the intensity of their working relationships with Perkins, many of his women writers felt that they understood him better than Louise did. Too quickly concluding that his discordant marriage was the cause of his evident unhappiness, and unaware of his deep love and respect for Louise, some of them readily offered unsolicited comfort and advice, especially during Louise’s period of religious fervor. Marjorie Rawlings wrote Max that year that his wife “is very sweet and a little pathetic, and I understand her. You are so much wiser than she—you must not be intolerant. The Catholic matter will probably fade away.” Max may have thought that too, at first; he had once written Elizabeth Lemmon that “Louise feels things passionately but soon gets over them to a great extent, which is the best way; but that is so different from the way I do that it always frightens me.” But a few weeks after his wife’s introduction to the Church, Max wrote Elizabeth, “Louise is now a complete Roman Catholic; the house is full of Roman Catholic literature and now and then a nun blunders in, and I always think there may be a priest on the back stair.”
With Louise completely wrapped up in church affairs, Max’s correspondence with Elizabeth Lemmon picked up considerably for a while. “Whenever I get a pen into my hand I can’t resist writing you,” he told her in February. But a few months later he said: “I could write you about a thousand things, but I am so busy. I always supposed I worked pretty hard, but I have more to do all the time and other people like me seem to have less, and I don’t understand it. I work faster too and I always was good that way. I can’t make out what has happened.”
One thing that had happened was the advent of a talented but time-consuming new author, an English-born woman named Janet Reback. Since childhood she had been accumulating stacks of her own unpublished manuscripts. In 1937, as she approached the age of forty, she submitted a novel to the Macmillan company and had it refused, leaving her despondent. One of Macmillan’s associate editors insisted that Max Perkins at Scribners would give her work, Dynasty of Death, a fair reading.
From the first few pages Perkins was captivated. Charles Scribner and he had lunch while he was still reading it, and Scribner remembered Max expressing his certainty even then “that this was the first book of an author who would make her name as an outstanding novelist.” Perkins wrote Nancy Hale that Mrs. Reback’s novel was “a regular fine old-time novel, full of characters,” covering three generations—“one of those books which is good even when it is bad.”
Perkins wanted to meet the writer before accepting her manuscript because he had quite a number of changes to propose. Mrs. Reback eagerly came to New York City from her home near Rochester, but left her interview extremely embarrassed. When she tried to express herself in the presence of strangers, an old speech impediment asserted itself, and all her energies were absorbed in suppressing it. The result, she feared, was “that I appeared subnormal in intelligence, and close to imbecility.” The taciturn editor, whose hearing missed much, was favorably impressed anyway.
Perkins’s criticisms had largely to do with overstatement. He suggested cuts in scenes where she exposed more plot than was necessary—“because I thought they could be spared and were superfluous”—and where she was more descriptive than she had to be—“It is better they should see for themselves that he had a hard, literal, inflexible nature, than that you should tell them.” Wherever she posted comments like traffic signs, directing actions and emotions (“Then May did the most heroic thing in her life”), Max suggested cutting, “for the reader will know what she is doing, and will feel it poignantly without an intervention of the writer.” Max’s great-grandfather used to say: “One should always leave the dinner table a little hungry.” Similarly, Perkins often told writers: “It is always better to give a little less than the reader wants, than more.”
Mrs. Reback was also partial to melodrama. Many of her plot developments were too fortunate and neatly arranged. This was a fault common to many of Perkins’s authors, who often argued that such coincidences truly reflected reality. Mrs. Reback agreed to make the events in her novel appear somewhat less contrived and to play down the melodrama, though she insisted, “I do love a death with thunder and gestures!”
Janet Reback decided to publish her novel under a pseudonym. “Foreign names seem rather suspect in the United States at the present time,” she wrote Perkins, “and Reback is rather foreign.” She proposed combining the surnames of her grandparents—Taylor and Caldwell. Perkins thought highly of the idea, not so much for the reason she cited as “for the fact that a book so largely about business affairs stands a better chance under a name that might be a man’s.”
Taylor Caldwell “worked and stewed” over the changes her editor had suggested. “Whatever else happens,” she wrote Perkins, “this book has taught me more than a college course in fiction-writing.” Perkins warned her, “Editors are extremely fallible people, all of them. Don’t put too much trust in them.”
After extensive revision Dynasty of Death was published in the fall of 1938. It received a number of superior reviews by critics who had gobbled it up for the pure pleasure of it. Perkins was furious when other critics and even some pedantic editors at Scribners attacked Taylor Caldwell as a pulp writer. He had generated excitement over her book because, whatever one said about her writing, she was a wonderful storyteller. The book became a best seller, giving Charles Scribner fresh reason to believe that Perkins’s judgment was exceedingly sound. Taylor Caldwell was worth the extra hours that Perkins had devoted to her book, time that probably would not have been available if Thomas Wolfe still had been on the Scribners list.
Max and Tom Wolfe had reached a parting of the ways, but Wolfe was under his usual compulsion to masticate every experience, in this case his years with Perkins. To Belinda Jelliffe, whose autobiographical novel, For Dear Life, Perkins had published in 1936 at Tom’s suggestion, Wolfe wrote that the working relationship with his former editor was “so completely and sorrowfully over that it can never be brought to life again; and now, since I have finally won through to a strength and repose that I have never had before, it can surely serve no good purpose on the part of those who count themselves my friends—and I know you are one of these—to attempt to revive it.” Wolfe dismissed all the gossip swirling around New York that said Perkins was secretly wishing for Tom’s failure, which would underscore his own importance. Wolfe believed Perkins had all but performed wizardry over his manuscripts, but that those days of magic had ended. The author could now think of no more appropriate shrine to his working relationship with Maxwell Evarts Perkins than to immortalize him in fiction. So Wolfe began creating a new character, an editor. He called him Foxhall Morton Edwards, “the Fox,” for short.
The Fox would figure in the book Wolfe was writing for Harpers, for Tom was thinking of concluding that book by recapitulating his own career. The recapitulation would end with an open letter entitled “A Farewell to the Fox.” That last section, Wolfe wrote Elizabeth Nowell, “would be a kind of impassioned summing up of the whole book, of everything that has gone before, and a final statement of what is now.... If I succeed in doing ... ‘A Farewell to the Fox’ as I want to do it, it will stand most tremendously on its own legs.”
In Ma
y, 1938, Wolfe told his editor, Edward Aswell, that he had reached the “same state of articulation as with Of Time and the River in December, 1933”—the time when Max Perkins saw the manuscript in its entirety for the first time. ”What he saw, of course, was only a kind of enormous skeleton,“ Wolfe wrote Aswell, ”but at any rate, he was able to get some kind of articulate idea of the whole.“ Wolfe warned Aswell that this new work would make an even bigger book than Of Time and the River. He guessed it would take him a year of uninterrupted work to produce the final draft.
By the end of the month, he declared himself “dog-tired” from all the writing he had done and from legal ordeals, personal upheavals, and public outcries. He needed a change of scenery and knew that the “old beaten path” was no good anymore. Wolfe was going west again, to take in America’s tallest trees, largest mountains, and cleanest air. In his absence he wanted Aswell to familiarize himself with his manuscript. Tom promised him, “I will not be gone for long and will see you early in June, at any rate.”
The week before he was to leave, Wolfe approached with trepidation the job of assembling his manuscript. As he arranged the material, he became less certain that he should let Aswell read it. “I know where I stand,” Wolfe wrote his agent, “but it is like presenting someone with the bones of some great prehistoric animal he has never seen before—he might be bewildered.” Tom wavered for days but, before he left, the manuscript went to Harpers.
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