By the end of 1938, Perkins’s saddest year, friends could see the toll that sorrow had taken. His hair was completely gray now, except for the widow’s peak, and his depression showed in his eyes and in his remarks. Of Christmas and New Year’s, he wrote to Fitzgerald: “Whoever called these days the Holidays must have been a master of sarcasm.” In January, 1939, Perkins went to Vermont and saw the destruction of Windsor that had been inflicted by the hurricane of the preceding fall. Almost everything he truly cared about there was devastated. Max walked among the cracked limbs and uprooted remains of Paradise. In one part a fringe of pines had stood up to the storm, and Max told his daughter Zippy that those stalwart trees would make a good central image for a poem, but he never wrote it.
Back from Spain, Hemingway again passed through New York, where he saw Perkins before going to Key West. He told Max about three long stories he wanted to write. The clearest in his mind was about an old commercial fisherman alone in his skiff fighting a swordfish for four days and nights and vanquishing it, only to have sharks finally devour it because he had been unable to boat it. If he could write that and two war stories he had in mind, Hemingway said, he would make enough money to support his family for the rest of the year and could resume work on his new novel.
Meantime Hemingway waited to hear from the people who had promised to produce The Fifth Column. He figured they were hedging because the play read a little like yesterday’s headlines. After months of talk and no action, he regretted that he had not written The Fifth Column as a novel, especially now that he had a lot more to say about the war. (The play was eventually put on, and had a ten-week run.) In Key West he had recurring nightmares about the war, in which he got caught in the latest Spanish retreat. Perkins prescribed drinking a bottle of stout before going to bed. “It has made me go to sleep many a time,” he wrote, “and sleep well.”
Hemingway left Key West for Cuba—alone; his second marriage had broken up—and took a house that proved to be a wonderful place to work. There was no telephone and nobody could bother him. He began writing at 8:30 every morning and worked straight through until two in the afternoon. He had meant to start the three new stories he had outlined for Perkins, but got sidetracked. By spring, when Martha Gellhorn joined him, he had 15,000 words of a novel set in Spain during the civil war. He was reluctant to discuss it with Max—he thought talking about a book was bad luck. He did tell Max that, in order to be free to work on the novel, he had turned down Hollywood propositions and lecture tour engagements, and thus he might have to draw money from Scribners to keep going. If Max wanted collateral, he said, he could have it; but Ernest assured him that Scribners would not need it, because the book was going so well. Each day he would read every word over from the start, and each day he concluded that he was writing as expertly as he knew how.
Perkins told Hemingway that another of his authors, Alvah Bessie, who had fought with the Lincoln Brigade, was writing a collection of personal narratives about his experiences in Spain. Hemingway was not worried about competition. He thought Bessie was one of those “ideology boys,” while Hemingway himself, as he later admitted, was not a “Catholic writer, nor a party writer ... not even an American writer. Just a writer.” He held himself to no more than 1,000 words a day. Just as the thing to do with a war was to win it, he said, the thing to do with a novel was to finish it. He felt that he had lost a great deal in the last two years, and he wanted to win with this novel.
In Cuba, Hemingway happened upon a copy of Tender Is the Night and read it for the third time. He told Max he was amazed how “excellent” much of it was. He thought if Fitzgerald had “integrated” it more carefully it would have been a fine book. As it was, Hemingway said, it read better than anything Fitzgerald had done. “Is it really over,” Ernest wondered, “or will he ever write again?” He asked Perkins to include his great affection when he corresponded with Scott next, admitting that he had a very stupid, immature feeling of superiority toward Fitzgerald, like that of one little boy, tough and durable, sneering at another, talented but delicate.
At the end of 1938, Fitzgerald briefly left Hollywood to visit his daughter. Scottie, blonde and petite, was midway through her first year at Vassar College, a year behind Max’s fourth daughter, Jane. Scott was going with some idea of disciplining her. He feared Scottie had been taking too much interest in dates and dances, rather as Zelda used to do. En route, Fitzgerald saw Max and asked for advice, and Max offered the simplest but soundest philosophy he knew: “Never on any account ... allow any hostility to grow up between yourself and a child.”
On his way back from Vassar, Scott called on Max again. During the first visit Perkins had been delighted to see Fitzgerald looking younger and healthier than in years and appearing quite sure of himself and of his writing. But now Scott had something on his mind. This Side of Paradise had gone officially out of print, and Scott was worried that his literary reputation was lapsing too. Back in California he wrote Max:I am still a figure to many people and the number of times I still see my name in Time and the New Yorker ect. make me wonder if it should be allowed to casually disappear—when there are memorial double deckers to such fellows as Farrel and Stienbeck.
Perkins spoke to Whitney Darrow about keeping This Side of Paradise in print, but Darrow demonstrated that it was not economically feasible for Scribners to accommodate Perkins’s wishes. And so, as Max had done with Fitzgerald’s manuscript of the very same book exactly twenty years earlier, he brought it to another publisher. He urged the American Mercury House, a reprinter, to publish it in one of their very cheap editions, but they argued right off that it belonged to a bygone era. Perkins promptly spoke of the great demand for it in the libraries of Windsor, Vermont, Plainfield, New Jersey, and New Canaan, Connecticut, to name but three towns. They agreed to an edition of 25,000 copies, to be kept in active sale for only a month, but they never published it.
M-G-M also backed out of a deal with Fitzgerald. After eighteen months of farming his screenplays out to other contract writers for revision, they decided not to pick up his option. Despite the loss of a weekly paycheck, Fitzgerald regarded the pink slip as a blessing in disguise. He knew it was self-destructive to continue any longer on that “factory worker’s basis.” He explained to Max that the studios’ attitude was, in effect: “We brought you here for your individuality but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.”
Do you know [he wrote Perkins] in that “Gone With the Wind” job I was absolutely forbidden to use any words except those of Margaret Mitchell, that is, when new phrases had to be invented one had to thumb through as if it were Scripture and check out phrases of her’s which would cover the situation!
A year later he admitted to Perkins, “I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack—that, like everything else, requires a certain practised excellence.”
Fitzgerald was eager to get to work on several ideas and felt exhilarated to be writing again instead of just “patching.” He permanently buried Philippe and conceived a modern novel—“One of those novels that can only be written at the moment and when one is full of the idea—as ‘Tender’ should have been written in its original conception, all laid on the Riviera.”
Just when Perkins thought Fitzgerald was finding a new self-discipline in Los Angeles, Scott skipped town for a vacation with Zelda. He took her from Highland Hospital in Asheville, and they went on a drunken spree in Cuba. In the last few years Zelda’s condition had steadied enough to allow her to take short trips to be with her mother, daughter, or husband; but it seemed that whenever she and Scott confronted each other, she regressed into madness. This time, however, it was Scott who went to pieces. His binge landed him in Doctors Hospital in New York. While Scott was bedridden, Max spent a few hours with Zelda, who seemed much improved to him. “Anyone who did not know of her trouble would not have suspected it,” he wrote Hemingway, “but she looked as if she had been through plenty too.”
Perkins really b
elieved that Scott did have a novel in mind and the will to write it. Extremely secretive about the idea, Fitzgerald had only hinted of its substance to Max when he had visited him in New York. Shortly after Fitzgerald returned to Los Angeles, Charles Scribner wrote him a friendly note which suggested that Scott, having worked in Hollywood, would logically find it a vast source of material for his book. Scott wrote Perkins back in terror that “this misinformation may have been disseminated to the literary columns. If I ever gave any such impression,” he told Perkins, “it is entirely false; I said that the novel was about some things that had happened to me in the last two years.” The book was undeniably rooted in Hollywood, but, he insisted, it was definitely “not about Hollywood (and if it were it is the last impression that I want to get about).” This time Fitzgerald blocked the entire novel out, so that he would be able to drop it for a month, if he needed to earn money, and pick it up again “at the exact spot factually and emotionally” where he left off.
Weeks later Fitzgerald was bedridden again, with a touch of his recurring tuberculosis. His worries were compounded when his agent, Harold Ober, who had always been his lender of last resort, decided to bail him out no longer. Fitzgerald flew off the handle. Over the years he had borrowed heavily from Ober, but he had never welshed on him. In the last eighteen months alone, Fitzgerald had paid back to Ober his entire debt of $13,000, and enabled Ober to earn $8,000 in commissions.
Scott borrowed $600 from Scribners to tide him over and asked Perkins for the names of two or three of the best agents in New York, in case he wanted to leave Ober. Perkins recommended Carl Brandt as “an extremely shrewd, and an agreeable chap, if perhaps a little bit slick,” but reminded Scott that Harold Ober was one of the most loyal friends Fitzgerald had in the world. “I hope to God you will stand by him,” he wrote. Fitzgerald told Max he suspected that a tiff between Scottie and Mrs. Ober— in which Mrs. Ober had accused Scottie of visiting them merely to use their New York house as a pied-à-terre—lay at the bottom of the matter. (It is more likely that with the slate between Ober and Fitzgerald wiped clean at last, the agent simply did not want to begin lending money to Scott all over again.) Perkins’s final note on the subject was, “If there is a wife at the bottom of it, one ought to be charitable.... Wives have a strange effect upon their husbands at times, and husbands ought not to be held accountable.”
Perkins may have been thinking of his own marriage. His fellow workers noticed that when it came to the subject of religion, his sense of humor disappeared and he could become quite caustic. Louise’s conversion and Max’s reaction to it had all but destroyed whatever happiness they had shared. It became easier for them to avoid each other than to try to talk, for religion dominated Louise’s conversation and life. She went to church every day and spent most of Sunday there. It became increasingly common for Max to come home in the evening and find her entertaining a parlor full of priests and nuns. Max barely tolerated the situation. If forewarned of such an evening, he would usually remain in New York for the night. Not only Max but his daughters and the family’s friends wearied of Louise’s incessant proselytizing. If asked, Max grimly told people that she was a happier person because of her new religion. But to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings he remarked, at the end of Louise’s first year in the Church, that he looked forward to the day when she would no longer be a novice; more seasoned Catholics, he said, “do not take it nearly so hard.”
In early 1939, Max’s third daughter, Peggy, decided to marry Robert King, a good-looking doctor from Alliance, Ohio. Max liked him very much but found him so gentle that he was afraid Peg would dominate him. On the last Saturday of March, a few dozen guests went through twelve cases of champagne at the small private wedding in the Perkinses’ New Canaan house.
As the thirties drew to a close, Perkins began to urge Charles Scribner to hire more young people. He found those entering publishing better educated in literature than he had been at their age. And he realized his editorial hunches about manuscripts were not as accurate as they once had been. When he was younger, he had been able to predict an author’s brilliant future by a dramatic final page or a single catchy phrase. Sometimes he would promise to publish a writer after one witty conversation. He was always partial to reminiscences and autobiographical fiction by people he felt had lived interesting lives filled with colorful characters and dramatic events. But often, he eventually realized, these were the very people who lacked the perseverance or talent to write. Perkins gave a middling advance to one artist who was famous for his exploits and wanted to write his life story. The artist used the money to hire a succession of beautiful secretaries. “No matter what chapter from his life he set out to dictate,” Malcolm Cowley related in The New Yorker in the early forties, “he found that the only words he could say were, ‘Miss Jones, did anyone ever tell you that you were beautiful?’ The book hasn’t been started, but Perkins thinks the artist still has it in him, and that someday, barring accidents, he will get it out.”
As did every publisher, Scribners gambled away thousands of dollars on books that never materialized, and the responsibility for every one of them weighed heavily on Max’s conscience. When a manuscript came in and was unpublishable, Max felt even worse. “This is the way of it,” he explained to Elizabeth Lemmon. “All my life, always, I’ve got myself into a jam and had to get out of it or die, all because of carelessness and folly. So I take on these books from something in the writer and my response to it. Then comes the ms. or the first part of it. I can’t give it to anyone else. They would say it was rotten, or not worth labor. I have to do the work, and I do it over and over in desperation. Sometimes I’d be ashamed to show it.” Now, whenever he found himself with such a problem, he took heart by remembering the fix he was in with Chard Smith’s Artillery of Time, which turned out to be a best seller and was hailed as the “Northern Gone With the Wind.”
For Max, who listened to so many authors’ laments, his correspondence with Elizabeth was still his greatest emotional release. “I wish I could talk to you, but I never can or will,” he wrote one night in June of 1939 when he could not go home because Louise was entertaining her coreligionists. Alone at the Harvard Club he thought of the times he had spent with Elizabeth. “I’m so happy to be with you,” he wrote, “that I can’t say anything—not that it makes any difference anyhow. I mean truly that it makes no difference. I think you’ve found a good life in that house, with the garden and all. I think you’ve been good and unbeatable always, and that it wasn’t easy at all. And everything should have been easy for you by rights.” Since its beginning in 1922, their exchange of letters had remained pure and private, as was their love for each other. Louise knew they wrote, but not as often as they did nor what they had to say to one another; Elizabeth sent her letters to Max’s office. When one of the Perkins daughters learned of the relationship thirty years later, she smiled and said, “I’m so glad Daddy had someone to talk to.”
A great source of unrest for Perkins, in the spring of 1939, was the approaching publication of Thomas Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock. “Here I am with just as much anxiety about Tom as ever,—in fact, more,” he wrote Elizabeth Lemmon. Max’s primary worry was Aline Bernstein. After Wolfe’s funeral, she and Perkins found themselves drawn amicably to each other on several occasions. But the book Mrs. Bernstein had for years fought so hard to suppress was about to reveal the details of her love affair with Tom. “I’m so afraid that woman may kill herself,” Max confided to Miss Lemmon. “I like her and I admire her, but I can’t say anything to her.”
In the first 300 pages of Wolfe’s posthumously published manuscript, he retraced his steps to the beginning of his life story, though he wrote not about Eugene Gant of Altamont but about George “Monk” Webber of Libya Hill. Perkins saw evidence of the fresh vitality that had invigorated Tom since they worked on Of Time and the River, but he was sorry Wolfe felt compelled to avoid the lyrical and autobiographical. Perkins understood Wolfe’s reasons. One was:He knew t
hat his family had suffered very deeply, and certain other people too, because he had used them as characters, though transmuted from their real selves by his imagination. His family never complained but they did suffer, as they knew Tom had thought of them as “great people, great characters,” and had not realized the personal side of the matter. He brooded over this always, and in the end I think he thought he must find a way of using them and his friends and others under a complete disguise.
Wolfe, however, had only one story to tell. The names were changed, but when Wolfe caught up for the second time to his extraordinary shipboard meeting with Esther Jack, it was through Eugene Gant’s eyes once again that the reader saw Aline Bernstein:From that night on, Monk was never able again to see that woman as perhaps she really was, as she must have looked to many other people, as she had even looked to him the first moment that he saw her. He was never able to see her as a matronly figure of middle age, a creature with a warm and jolly little face, a wholesome and indomitable energy for every day, a shrewd, able, and immensely talented creature of action, able to hold her own in a man’s world....
She became the most beautiful woman that ever lived—and not in any symbolic or idealistic sense—but with all the gazing, literal, and mad concreteness of his imagination.
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