But most of the town paid homage to its famous son. People jammed into the First Presbyterian Church to sing hymns and hear the eulogy, which included a passage from Of Time and the River. Men lining the streets to Riverside Cemetery doffed their hats as the hearse drove by. At the burial Perkins did not see much, though he was an honorary pallbearer. He stood apart from all the rest, alone, in a cluster of trees. He hated the whole business. Exactly as he had during Wolfe’s lifetime, Perkins stayed in the background.
The next morning a great hurricane brushing along the Atlantic Coast blew northward, as though following Max Perkins’s train back to New York. Then it raged into New England. From the forests atop Mount Ascutney down to the riverbanks of Windsor, all was ravaged. Paradise was destroyed.
PART FOUR
XIX
To Everything a Season
Within a decade of the crash on Wall Street, warfare thundered around the world. Max Perkins’s family and friends observed that he was obsessed with the war. He did not believe Neville Chamberlain’s boast that the Munich agreement meant “peace for our time.” “I can’t help thinking about these things all the time,” he wrote Hemingway in December of 1938.
This preoccupation was perhaps an example of the old Yankee manner of dealing with emotion, transforming anxiety over a personal tragedy into concern for something distant or impersonal. Thomas Wolfe’s death, no doubt, had also sensitized Max to violence and destruction.
Another sign of his distress was that he again resorted to his instinctive remedy for grief: At fifty-four, aging, tiring, he enclosed himself within his job. “He came back to the office from Wolfe’s funeral,” Miss Wyckoff remembered, “and started working harder than before.” And there was a third indication. Once he had written Miss Lemmon: “I always found War and Peace a help in time of trouble.” Now, several times that season, John Hall Wheelock discovered Max reading from his office copy of the book.
Wolfe’s will, drawn up in the spring of 1937, designated Perkins as his executor. Perkins hated to take on the responsibility; but, as he wrote his mother, “there did not seem to be any decent way of not doing it.” Within days of Wolfe’s burial, he could already see that the appointment was going to result in endless trouble and abuse. “The Wolfes are strange people with many magnificent qualities,” he told his mother, “but full of suspicions and incapable of letting anything in their hands get out of them, even though it can be proven to be to their own advantage to do it.” That tangle of duties kept Perkins so busy that he barely had time for melancholy.
Wolfe’s death was followed by a profusion of articles and remembrances. The Carolina Magazine of the University of North Carolina asked Perkins himself to write about Wolfe, but Perkins sent his regrets. It seemed impossible for him to find the time or the emotional strength to do it. But the magazine was insistent, and so because he knew that the school had meant so much to Tom, he wired back: WILL BREAK MY NECK TO SEND YOU SEVERAL THOUSAND WORDS BEFORE OCTOBER TEN. Perkins wrote 3,000 words. At the core of his remarks was this paragraph:The one important thing in the universe to him was his work, and this was so simply because it was so. It was not due to ambition in the cheap sense, and it was not what is generally meant by egotism. He was under the compulsion of genius, and all the accidents of life that got in the way of its expression seemed to Tom to be outrages and insults. He knew in his mind that man was born to trouble—that everyone was beset with anxieties and thwarted by obstacles—but that this work which he was bound to do should be interfered with by trivialities, was maddening. And so was the struggle with the work itself.
For months poems, tributes, letters of sympathy, and requests for information about Thomas Wolfe poured into Perkins’s office. Max responded to each one. To those who were aware of his rift with Wolfe he sent a copy of Tom’s last letter, to prove the author’s loyalty in his final days. No one wrote Perkins with more perception than F. Scott Fitzgerald. He said he knew “how deeply his death must have touched you, how you were so entwined with his literary career and the affection you had for him.” It was all but impossible for Fitzgerald to imagine that “great pulsing vital frame” quiet at last: “There is a great hush after him.” Fitzgerald was struck by the irony of Perkins’s role as literary executor. He supposed that Perkins was, oddly enough, more in control of Wolfe’s literary destiny now than when Tom was alive.
Wolfe’s estate included the rough draft of his last novel, which was under contract to Harpers and was in their safe. It was Perkins’s job, as executor, to see to its orderly publication and to arrange for the publication of other work Wolfe had left behind. He approached the crates of manuscript, which Aswell sent over to him, as though Wolfe were still his author and reviewed the material methodically. He itemized every piece of manuscript as best he could, and clipped together pages which Elizabeth Nowell might sell as magazine articles.
The most immediate consideration was the disposition of the journal which Wolfe had written during his travels in the West. At first reading, Perkins found it difficult to get a coherent impression of the 10,000 words —mostly sentence fragments—which had tumbled onto the pages. Wolfe’s jottings were meant to be the raw stuff of a large, dynamic novel, but as soon as Max had the pages typed and read them again, he suggested publishing the journal as it was. He tactfully reminded Aswell and Miss Nowell that in all the editing of Wolfe’s previous books, no change had ever been made without the author’s approval. Since Wolfe could no longer approve changes, the material must be published as Tom had written it, with only those corrections which one could reasonably infer that Tom would have made himself. The sprawling diary of his trip through the great western national parks appeared the following summer in the Virginia Quarterly Review—incomplete sentences, spotty punctuation and all—under the title “A Western Journey.”
As for the novel, after Max had gathered and arranged the bulk of it, he turned the 750,000 words back to Aswell. “Studying the mass of his manuscript was something like excavating the site of ancient Troy,” the Harpers editor wrote of Wolfe’s unpublished treasure trove. “One came upon evidences of entire civilizations buried and forgotten at different levels. Some parts of the manuscript had been written as recently as four months before he died; other parts dated back to Look Homeward, Angel, and had, in fact, been cut from that book; still other parts had been written in each of the intervening years.” Aswell realized what Perkins had known for years, that Wolfe did not write “books” in the usual sense:Tom really wrote only one book, and that runs to some 4,000 printed pages comprising the total of his works. The individual titles that bear his name are only so many numbered volumes of this master book. The parts should be thought of as having been brought out separately merely for convenience.
Perkins often maintained that the whole conception of Wolfe’s work was clear in the author’s mind. Whether or not the labeled parts could now be assembled by someone else was open to question. Guided by Perkins’s rubrics—the notations he had made as he examined the novel—Aswell discovered the “wonderful thing about the manuscript—the really incredible thing—was that once the extraneous matter was removed, once the unfinished fragments and great chunks of stuff that did not belong in the books were taken out, the parts that remained fell into place and fitted together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”
At the end of the year Perkins, as executor, indicated that one mammoth novel called The Web and the Rock would be published by Harpers in the early summer of 1939. He also said that there seemed to be enough remnants of material for an anthology of stories, to be published still later.
Perkins found no portion of the material more curious than the long section Tom had written about Foxhall Morton Edwards. For almost 1,000 pages—in a script so sprawling and hurried that there were usually only about twenty-five words to a page—Thomas Wolfe caricatured his editor. Wolfe had always believed that the way to characterize a person was to observe him from the moment he got up in the morning, chr
onicling his everyday habits, no matter how trivial. In the course of this depiction, eccentricities became slightly magnified. His portrait of Perkins was a perfect example, except that it is most unlikely Wolfe ever saw him in bed or soon after arising. The author undoubtedly felt he knew his subject so well that he could safely extrapolate from what he had seen:The Fox asleep was a breathing portrait of guileless innocence. He slept on his right side, legs doubled up a little, hands folded together underneath the ear, his hat beside him on the pillow. Seen so, the sleeping figure of the Fox was touching—for all his five and forty years, it was so plainly boylike. By no long stretch of fancy the old hat beside him on the pillow might have been a childish toy brought to bed with him the night before—and this, in fact, it was!
Wolfe then imagined the Fox sitting up, grabbing his hat and yanking it down onto his head, swinging out of bed and heading for the shower.
Unpajamaed now, and as God made him, save for hat, starts to get in under shower with hat on—and remembers hat, remembers it in high confusion, is forced against his will to acknowledge the unwisdom of the procedure—so snaps his fingers angrily, and, in a low, disgusted tone of acquiescence says: “Oh well, then! All right!” So removes his hat, which is now jammed on so tightly that he has to take both hands and fairly wrench and tug his way out of it, hangs the battered hulk reluctantly within easy reaching distance on a hook upon the door, surveys it for a moment with an undecided air, as if still not willing to relinquish it—and then, still with a puzzled air steps in beneath those hissing jets of water hot enough to boil an egg.
Wolfe then had the Fox put his clothes on:They fit him beautifully. Everything fits the Fox. He never knows what he has on.... His clothes just seem to grow on him: whatever he wears takes on at once the grace, the dignity, and unconscious ease of his own person.
Wolfe trailed the Fox through every step of his workday:O, guileful Fox, how innocent in guilefulness and in innocence how full of guile, in all directions how strange-devious, in all strange-deviousness how direct! Too straight for crookedness, and for envy too serene, too fair for blind intolerance, too just and seeing and too strong for hate, too honest for base dealing, too high for low suspiciousness, too innocent for all the scheming tricks of swarming villainy—yet never had been taken in a horse trade yet!
Even his deafness was explicated:Deaf, hell! Deaf as a Fox, he is! That deafness is a stall—a trick—a gag! He hears you when he wants to hear you! If it’s anything he wants to hear, he’ll hear you though you’re forty yards away and talking in a whisper! He’s a Fox, I tell you!
Thus Wolfe, with the instrument of his exuberant imagination, revealed the man who was the fascination of his life. It is not known how Perkins took all this at first, except that he did say to Miss Lemmon with mild annoyance that he wasn’t aware that he, as Wolfe said the Fox had done, went around “sniffing scornfully.” It is known that he did not ask Aswell to alter or delete any of the Foxhall Edwards material; he had passed the ultimate test of his own policy of noninterference with an author’s work.
During the seven and a half months it took Harpers to assemble Wolfe’s book, Perkins tidied Tom’s estate. He answered all the questions of inquisitive scholars and suggested articles to others to keep Wolfe’s name alive. He haggled over medical fees and tried to take some kind of lead in directing the publishing activities without stepping on anyone’s toes. After weeks of not writing to Elizabeth Lemmon because he had been so busy, Max now confessed to her, and only to her, his emotional exhaustion. He often thought of her pastoral life in the Church House in Middleburg, and in a letter in December, 1938, he told her: “I wish I could get a touch of TB and have to go to Saranac for six months and then be all right again,” He said. “I’d like it if it were dull and I was bored and an afternoon seemed long. You’ve found the right way to live.”
That same month, Willard Huntington Wright—S. S. Van Dine—came up to the fifth floor and asked Perkins to be the executor of his estate. Merely the thought of it was like salt on Max’s wounds, especially as Wright was several years younger than Perkins. But Max agreed. He saw that Wright was in poor health and depressed about the world. Wright and Perkins had recently taken “tea” together, and, staring into a snifter of Courvoisier, Wright had said in a tone of resignation, “I’m so glad I’ve had all the brandy I’ve had. I’ve enjoyed the brandy. I only regret I didn’t drink more of it.”
Three months later, Wright suffered a mild heart attack. He had started to make a good recovery when another attack killed him. It seemed perfectly characteristic to Perkins that Willard Huntington Wright left, upon his death, the manuscript of a completed novel, The Winter Murder Case, flawless to the last comma.
Perkins continued to immerse himself in work, through the winter and into the spring of 1939. During that time the book that consumed more of his hours than any other was Artillery of Time, a Civil War saga about slavery and industrialism by Chard Powers Smith. As he had to so many other writers, Max had sent Smith a copy of War and Peace, and Smith had been inspired to try to capture the spirit of an entire nation at war. But for months he had been floundering. “It may be very good,” Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “but only long hard work will make it so. I’ve made trouble for a lot of writers—and for myself —by getting them to read War and Peace.” Smith was not an important author, and it was soon clear to Perkins that his book would never be great. Yet he labored for Smith as diligently as for any of his more celebrated writers, and suffered as much for him.
The manuscript had rambled to half a million words. Perkins felt that for all that verbiage there was too little story. For weeks he studied the manuscript; then he gridded it into plots and subplots, and looked for scenes which might be developed. “I am sure he never suggested the change of a word, unless an obvious mistake,” Smith recalled. “Instead, he would make shy little right angles in red pencil around the beginnings and the ends of passages, sometimes running to pages, and he would suggest diffidently that if it wouldn’t be too much trouble I might consider deleting them.” In detailed letters, Perkins gave his reasons. He reminded the author, for example, that his first responsibility was to tell a story and that the readercannot bear to be too much interrupted, and moreover he cannot absorb all the information and description you give from the middle of page 32 on throughout the chapter. You must generalize the description of the town. ... You must remember too that if you give the right impressions at the start, the knowledge of the reader will grow by gradual accretion as the story goes along. You try to tell far too much.
Perkins explained why Smith’s elaborate description of a train ride, however interesting in itself, did not help the narrative:It seems to be given almost wholly to show what a railroad journey was like in those days, and does not in many respects further the actual story of the book.
And so on ... and on. Smith, an author with an unusually serene ego, found Perkins’s proposals invaluable and, with trifling exceptions, he accepted them all. Picking up from his editor’s counsel, he went on to make a good many improvements of his own. Then, for Max, came eternities of the most extensive editing. At the end Perkins confided to Elizabeth Lemmon that Smith’s book “almost brought me to suicide.” Upon reading the proofs, however, he said, he realized “the book is magnificent and [I] feel ashamed that I should have despaired about it, or doubted the author. He never knew I did though, and he did his work wonderfully.” It was an example of two qualities that distinguish the professional editor: the vision to see beyond the faults of a good book, no matter how dismaying; and the tenacity to keep working, through all discouragements, toward the book’s potential.
Late in 1938 Ernest Hemingway had written Perkins from Paris about Thomas Wolfe. It was almost the last of the condolence letters that were still dribbling in. Hemingway said he had not written sooner because he found it never did any good to discuss “casualties.” He agreed that Wolfe’s deathbed letter was a good one—Max had sent him a copy—but said
that everybody writes fond letters to loyal friends when he thinks he is going to die. Hemingway imagined Perkins would therefore amass quite a collection, including many which he himself hoped to send during the next fifty years.
Hemingway’s The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories was published in late 1938. Perkins sent Hemingway all the reviews that were of any importance. Not many critics were as impressed with the play as Perkins was. Edmund Wilson particularly thought very little of it. Hemingway explained to Perkins that all the alleged revolutionaries who were really cowards and took no part in the defense of the Spanish republic, such as Wilson, felt a natural obligation to discredit those who had laid their lives on the line. Hemingway said that was all right with him, though he was full of animosity toward “the poor pricks.” Those guys could still gang up to put a book down, but he told Perkins, he would still be around and going “pretty good” after they had been superseded by a whole new generation of critics. When Ernest riffled through the 600 pages of his book, he said, he knew he’d be all right as a “sort of lasting business,” even if he should die the next day.
Hemingway had been caught up in the Loyalist cause in the last few years, but he was already viewing the revolution with his former objectivity. In this war that was ending in defeat for the Republicans, he told Perkins, there was a “carnival of treachery and rotten-ness” on both sides. Disillusionment had combined with his depression about the reception of his book and made it difficult to work. “Writing is a hard business,” he wrote Perkins, but, he said, nothing made him feel better. Before anything fatal happened, Hemingway said, he wanted to assure Perkins that he thought just as much of him as Tom Wolfe ever did—“even if I can’t put it so well.” Hemingway told Max he would take a final trip to Spain before coming home to work on a novel.
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