Perkins occasionally lunched with Elizabeth Nowell, but now the meals were not as cheery as they used to be. Perkins’s remarks were tinged by wistfulness. One afternoon in June, for example, while Wolfe was away, Max dolefully asked her about Tom and all that he was doing. Thirteen years later Miss Nowell remembered Perkins that very day as seeming “terribly old and tired and discouraged and tragic.” She wrote Wolfe a complete report of the luncheon and all that was discussed. After sealing the envelope she realized that she had described their conversation in a somewhat tattling, though certainly not malicious way. “I just felt very sad that Perkins should seem so old and tragic, about Tom and about the world,” she recalled. She sent the letter anyway.
By the third week of June, Tom had passed through the Midwest and was on his way to Seattle. After long battles with his conscience, he decided to extend his trip. He was enthralled with the West, but he was still tired and depressed. Miss Nowell’s letter about Perkins grieved him, and Wolfe was soon brooding again, this time over the literary gossip concerning his leaving Scribners. Tom’s imagination acted up and he began thinking about Perkins in a different light. He wrote his agent:For six years he was my friend—I thought the best one I ever had—and then a little over two years ago he turned against me—everything I have done since was bad, he had no good word for it or for me, it’s about as if he were praying for my failure.... What is this thing in life anyway that causes people to do things like this?
When he began hearing stories about Scribners salesmen running him down all across the nation as some kind of turncoat, he believed they had “been instructed to pass around” that accusation and assumed they had taken their cue from Perkins who, “under this mask of friendship, is doing the same thing.
It’s almost as if unconsciously, by some kind of wishful desires, he wants me to come to grief, as a kind of sop to his pride and his unyielding conviction that he is right in everything—the tragic flaw in his character—that keeps him from admitting he has wronged anybody or made a mistake. That is really his great weakness, and I believe it is at the root of his failure —his growing reaction, his sense of defeat, his personal tragedy in his own life and in his family life that has been so marked in recent years.
By the time he reached Portland, Oregon, Wolfe was convinced Max Perkins stood against him and his work. “I want to sever the connection entirely. Someday, perhaps, if he is willing, I’ll take it up again,” he wrote to Miss Nowell, “—but meanwhile, let’s not play with fire.” He gave her explicit instructions: “Tell him nothing about me or what I’m doing: that’s the only way, believe me, to avoid trouble.” It was no longer a matter of personalities. “If I am wrong it will show in my work,” he wrote Miss Nowell; “if he’s wrong it’s going to show in his life.”
In the last two weeks of June, Wolfe traveled the entire Pacific Coast from Seattle to the Mexican border, then journeyed inland 1,000 miles, and then northwest to the Canadian border. Meanwhile Edward Aswell had journeyed through the material Wolfe had left with him. YOUR NEW BOOK IS MAGNIFICENT IN SCOPE AND DESIGN, WITH SOME OF THE BEST WRITING YOU HAVE EVER DONE, he wired Tom in Seattle on July 1, 1938. I AM STILL ABSORBING IT, CONFIDENT THAT WHEN YOU FINISH YOU WILL HAVE WRITTEN YOUR GREATEST NOVEL SO FAR. HOPE YOU COME BACK FULL OF HEALTH AND NEW VISIONS.
The author wanted to stay in Seattle a few more weeks to work on his notes of his trip and get them typed. He described his western journal to Aswell as “a kind of tremendous kaleidoscope that I hope may succeed in recording a whole hemisphere of life and of America.” Aswell replied: “Not since Whitman has anybody felt America in his blood and bones, and been able to voice the feelings the way you do.”
On July 12, 1938, Dr. E. C. Ruge in Seattle sent Aswell a telegram: THOMAS WOLFE IS QUITE ILL AND CONFINED IN SANATARIUM WIRE INSTRUCTIONS AS TO FINANCE. Aswell promptly replied that Wolfe’s bank account was sufficient to cover all reasonable expenses, and that the doctors should give him the best care possible. Ruge soon wired again: THOMAS WOLFE TAKEN SICK IN VANCOUVER PNEUMONIA DEVELOPED EXHAUSTED FROM STRENUOUS SIGHTSEEING HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE AND FEVER RAPID HEART AND BREATHING TERRIFIC COUGH AND TEMPERATURE 105 MONDAY NIGHT WEDNESDAY MORNING TEMPERATURE 100 SEEMS TO HAVE PASSED CRISIS MUCH BETTER KIDNEY COMPLICATION ALSO MUCH BETTER.
Miss Nowell decided she had to tell Perkins something about the illness, but in remaining vague about the condition, she worried him all the more. On July 25 Max wrote to Fred Wolfe asking him for at least a postcard about Tom. “I haven’t been able to find out anything that one could depend upon,” he explained, “but I know he must have been mighty sick, and maybe still is.” Perkins wanted to write Tom himself, but Miss Nowell intimated that even a letter from Perkins might upset Tom’s convalescence.
Fred Wolfe joined his brother in Seattle. From there he wrote to Perkins that Tom had a bad case of bronchial pneumonia. By August the doctors were indicating that Wolfe was coming around, though his strength was slow in returning. When he was well enough, Fred told him of Perkins’s concern. Tom asked Fred to send Max his love and best wishes. “I guess the plain truth is old Tom just wore himself down so that he had to get sick,” Max wrote Fred again, adding, “I shall wait until I hear that Tom is really recuperating and then I am going to write to him, whatever they say.”
Perkins heard nothing for days, but wrote anyway. He thought Wolfe might like to hear “some of the gossip” about New York. “As I am once more a commuter, as I was born and always should have been,” he wrote Tom, “I do not get around so much. But whenever I do go to any of the old places like Cherio’s or Chatham Walk or Manny Wolf’s, everybody asks for you.” In New Canaan, Max said, he found himself with a houseful again. Visiting grandchildren—Bertha now had a daughter and Zippy a “fierce looking” son—stayed in the empty bedrooms. Everything in business was looking up, Max said, and he thought it might stay that way for another year. Marjorie Rawlings’s The Yearling remained Scribners’ great success. Everyone at the office was just as Tom remembered except for John Hall Wheelock who, Max said, was threatening to “commit the folly” of getting married. All of Wolfe’s friends there were “mighty concerned” about his illness. “But honestly, Tom,” Perkins wrote in closing, “it may well be the best thing that ever happened to you, for it will give you a fresh start after a good rest.”
Before mailing his letter, Perkins heard from Miss Nowell that Tom had suffered a minor setback, so instead of sending it directly he addressed it to Fred and asked him to decide whether it would do Tom good or harm. “If you think he ought not to see it for any kind of reason,” Max wrote, “throw it away.”
Perkins’s letter stirred Wolfe. He rallied what strength he had and called out for paper and a pencil. In a wobbly hand he wrote:Dear Max:
I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.
—I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all a 1,000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window had been opened on life. I did not know this before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and wiser one—If I get on my feet and out of here, it will be months before I walk back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back
—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city were below
Your
s Always
Tom
“I was most happy to get your letter,” Max wrote back to Tom in Seattle on August 19, “but don’t do it again. That is enough, and will always be valued. And I remember that night as a magical night, and the way the city looked. I always meant to go back there, but maybe it would be better not to, for things are never the same the second time.”
The next week Fred told Perkins that perhaps Tom should not have written him. Wolfe’s effort ran his fever up and set him back. Tom’s condition appeared more serious than bronchial pneumonia, but he seemed to be reviving. “Let us pray together that he will,” Fred wrote Max.
Hemingway had come home from Spain on Memorial Day and met Perkins at the Stork Club. Perkins found him “weary and worried but otherwise well.” Hemingway flew to Key West that night. Through the summer Max deliberated about how to publish Ernest’s play, The Fifth Column, and his short-story collection. The decision, arrived at while Max was on tenterhooks over Wolfe’s failing health, was to publish it all as one book under the title The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories. Perkins arranged the book’s contents and checked to see that Scott Fitzgerald’s name had been cut from “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” He found Hemingway now identified him only as “Scott.” Knowing how sensitive Fitzgerald was, he urged Ernest to use another name altogether.
Hemingway arrived in New York again on August 30 and breakfasted with Perkins at the Hotel Barclay. He agreed to change “Scott” in his story to “Julian,” then asked Max what he thought about his starting a novel and several short stories about the Spanish war. He wanted to take one more look at Spain, then write in Paris, where he could work in peace but keep an eye on the fighting.
Perkins realized that the left-wing American intellectuals supporting the Loyalists kept Hemingway from doing any real work while he was in the United States. They regarded him as one of themselves now, and they kept pestering him to make public appearances. So Perkins thought well of Ernest’s idea of getting out of the country.
Max had been kept informed of Scott’s summer activities through Harold Ober. He heard Fitzgerald’s plans for a new novel and praise of his screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades. “I knew you would be mighty good out there, and only feared you would be too good,” Max wrote him. “I still do fear that too because if you get deeply interested it will keep you from getting back to writing.”
Max told Scott that he had just heard from Elizabeth Lemmon. She was moving into a house bordering the grounds of Welbourne which had once been the chapel for the estate’s servants. The modest Church House would be her home for the rest of her life. “She seems very happy,” Max wrote Scott, adding reflectively: “But it seems all wrong that she should be living alone.”
In the late summer, Max asked both Scott and Elizabeth if they could not find the time to write to the old “lone Wolfe.” Tom had run a high fever for seven weeks, and the doctors were gravely concerned. By the end of the first week of September they suspected that he had some type of brain disease, a condition more serious than they could treat in Seattle. At the urging of the hospital staff, the Wolfe family arranged to transport Tom across the continent by train to Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, where Dr. Walter Dandy, an eminent neurosurgeon, might be able to save Tom’s life.
Wolfe’s trip eastward began on the night of September 6. He was wheelchaired aboard the Olympian, and a doctor gave the attending nurse, a girl from Asheville, a tube of morphine to keep him “snowed under” should the pain or any convulsions get out of control.
By September 10, Wolfe was resting at Johns Hopkins, his mind sometimes alert enough to understand what was happening to him. Dr. Dandy operated that afternoon. When he trephined Wolfe’s skull, cranial fluid spurted across the room from built-up pressure. Tom’s severe headache went away and for a while he thought he was cured. Dr. Dandy diagnosed Wolfe’s condition as tuberculosis of the brain. The only hope for him was that instead of many tubercles, there might be just one, which could be removed in a second operation.
Fred Wolfe arrived in Baltimore at four o‘clock Sunday morning and sent Perkins a telegram: PLAN OPERATING ON TOM TOMORROW MORNING FEEL YOUR PRESENCE WOULD HELP IF YOU CAME TONIGHT. As soon as Perkins got the wire, he left for Baltimore alone. Aline Bernstein wanted to go as well, but Max dissuaded her, knowing how much her presence would upset Tom’s mother, who despised her. Aswell, who had been at the hospital since Saturday, went back to New York to prepare the people at Harpers for the worst. Wolfe was so heavily sedated that Perkins could not bear to see him. He never even let Wolfe know he was there but just sat quietly as one of the family, cramped in the small waiting room, anxious about the results of the operation. Tom’s sister Mabel and Fred and their mother were all in a highly emotional condition. Max went up to Mabel and said, “Oh, gee, let’s go somewhere and get a drink.”
“We can’t,” she told him. “There’s not a drink to be had in Baltimore. It’s Election Day ... and they close everything in Baltimore on election days.” They sipped cups of coffee, waiting. After several hours, Dr. Dandy and the nurse who had been with Tom since Seattle came in. The doctor explained that he had hoped to find only one tumor, but when he uncovered Wolfe’s brain he discovered “myriads.”
Perkins’s gentle blue eyes looked from person to person. Wolfe’s mother took the news stoically. The others went to pieces. Max had never heard such wailing in his life. He tried to calm Mabel, placing his hand on her shoulder. Dr. Dandy said Tom might possibly live a month and that during that time he might return to a state of mental lucidity. All that anyone could do for him was to try to make his last days as free from pain and fear of death as possible.
Perkins saw no point in lingering and he left for home. “It was a harrowing day,” Max wrote to his own mother, “... exactly like the scene in Look Homeward, Angel. They are fine people, but superhuman in their energy and the power of their emotions. But the old mother is wonderful, like a New Englander.”
Three days after the operation—on September 15, 1938, eighteen days short of his thirty-eighth birthday—Thomas Wolfe died. Perkins’s telegram to Fred was all that he could put into words: DEEPLY SORRY. MY FRIENDSHIP WITH TOM WAS ONE OF THE GREATEST THINGS IN MY LIFE. GIVE MY LOVE TO MABEL AND YOUR MOTHER. I ADMIRED YOU ALL SO MUCH ONE CAN SEE HOW TOM CAME BY HIS GREAT QUALITIES.
A line from King Lear kept drumming in Max’s ear as a kind of consolation. “He hates him that would upon the rack of this tough world stretch him out longer.” Perkins believed Wolfe “was on the rack almost always, and almost always would have been,” for his task as a writer was Herculean, beyond even Wolfe’s mighty grasp.
He was wrestling as no artist in Europe would have to do, [Perkins wrote afterward for The Carolina Magazine] with the material of literature—a great country not yet revealed to its own people. It was not as with English artists who revealed England to Englishmen through generations, each one accepting what was true from his predecessors, in a gradual accretion, through centuries. Tom knew to the uttermost meaning the literature of other lands and that they were not the literature of America. He knew that the light and color of America were different; that the smells and sounds, its people, and all the structure and dimensions of our continent were unlike anything before. It was with this that he was struggling, and it was that struggle alone that, in a large sense, governed all he did. How long his books may last as such, no one can say, but the trail he has blazed is now open forever. American artists will follow and widen it to express the things Americans only unconsciously know, to reveal America and Americans to Americans. That was at the heart of Tom’s fierce life.
Given twenty years and perhaps just as many volumes, Perkins thought Wolfe might have achieved a proper form. But just as “he had to fit his body to the doorways, vehicles, and furniture of smaller men, so he had to fit his expression to the conventional requirements of a space and time that were as surely too small for his nature as
they were for his subject.” Perkins revealed his personal feelings about Tom’s death only to Elizabeth Lemmon. And to her he imparted little more than: “It is hard to think that Tom wouldn’t have been utterly tortured as things are in the world. It was in him to do more than he ever did, but he would have suffered all the time.”
Louise and Max went down to the funeral in Asheville in K19, the same Pullman car on the express night train that Tom had written so much about. After they had arrived at their hotel, they hired a taxi and drove along the ridges of the mountains that walled in the town. Upon seeing them, Max instantly realized how great an effect they had had upon Tom’s development. Perkins wrote years later: “A boy of Wolfe’s imagination imprisoned there could think that what was beyond was all wonderful—different from what it was where there was not for him enough of anything.” All the vast world that he had read and dreamed about lay beyond those surrounding hills. Later Max and Louise walked to the town square and asked directions from a man in front of a gas station. The man said he had known Tom when he was young, and Louise asked what Tom was like then. The man replied, “Just like it says in the book.”
It was a thoroughly miserable day for Perkins. “It is probably better to be emotional on occasions like that,” Max said long afterward, “but it is wholly contrary to our Yankee and Episcopalian ways.” Max felt that he had to go to the Wolfe home and look at Tom’s body in the coffin. Wolfe was powdered and wearing a wig to cover the wounds left by the brain surgeon. Max thanked God that the corpse did not look much like Wolfe. Fred implored him to say something to Tom, but Perkins could not bring himself to do it. He stood in rigid silence.
That same morning, Louise went to the Catholic Church to ask that a Mass be said for Tom’s soul. The priest was reluctant. “Ah,” he said, “they were a rowdy family.” Perkins knew they could not help but be, what “with all that tremendous energy in them, and the other ingredients. They must have been somewhat of a scandal.” Max told John Terry, “I am sure that Tom was very sensitive to this fact, much more than any of the others were. It affected his entire life.”
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