Max Perkins

by A. Scott Berg

  For the next 600 pages every emotion and event of their love affair was recorded with unflinching intimacy. Perkins went so far as to warn some of his writers not to read The Web and the Rock at all, even though he thought the first half contained some of the very best stories Wolfe ever wrote. Max told Marjorie Rawlings:It is true that the last half of the book—the love affair—is and always was not what it ought to be. It should have been written fifteen years later maybe—And there was Tom’s predicament. He had caught up to himself in time, and when he wrote about things too near, he could not make them what they should have been. It was a real predicament, and I don’t know what could have come of it.

  By the time The Web and the Rock was published, in June of 1939, Perkins finally understood what had taken Aswell so long to compile it. The manuscript Tom left behind had been so enormous that it was necessary to divide it arbitrarily into two books. Also, it was built from blocks of writing intended to be used in half a dozen different books. Wolfe’s inchoate attempts at his novel The Vision of Spangler’s Paul, for example, turned up in the first section of The Web and the Rock. What Tom had designated as People of the Night, containing the portrait of Foxhall Edwards, would be worked into the sequel of The Web and the Rock, which would pick up exactly where that book left off. Its final line would serve as the next volume’s title: You Can’t Go Home Again.

  The threat of public exposure as the Fox made Perkins uneasy, and he admitted to friends that he was concerned about it. It was not that Wolfe had maligned Perkins in his portrait. “I just hate to be written about on any account,” Max wrote Scott Fitzgerald, “and it seemed odd that with all the designs he had upon Scribners, the only part that he wrote that fits into the book—and it’s pretty long—should be about me.”

  Harpers published You Can’t Go Home Again in 1940, hailing it as Wolfe’s “latest and maturest” work. Perkins, who had seen the manuscript earlier in sections, remained less than enthusiastic about the book, partly because it suffered from the same jerry-built construction as The Web and the Rock, more because it would indelibly make him “the Fox,” the hero George Webber’s editor. Perkins wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “I was never a Fox. Do you think I was? I don’t mean for you to answer unless just ‘Yes’ for I don’t think you should ever speak to me again. But I never was. Maybe something worse, but not that. Not Machiavelli ever.” Two weeks later Max saw all those chapters in print and read them through. “I was wrong about the Fox business,” he wrote Elizabeth again. “I had shrunk from reading it all, and the part I did read, I got the wrong impression from I guess.” Once Perkins realized the portrait was mostly sympathetic, he wrote Fitzgerald, “In reading some of it I even thought if I really were like that man I would be quite proud of myself.” In time he told Miss Wyckoff, “I didn’t make out so bad after all.”

  Max’s daughter Peggy remembered her father reading You Can’t Go Home Again and shaking with laughter at the Fox’s behavior. But Max wrote agent Henry Volkening, “I see where we will lose all our lady writers if they read it, on account of the way he has me going around muttering curses against the women.”

  Especially ironic, for it had been composed just months before Wolfe fell ill in the Northwest, were the final lines of Thomas Wolfe’s great twin-volumed novel. It concluded a thirty-six-page open letter from George Webber to Foxhall Edwards.

  Dear Fox, old friend, thus we have come to the end of the road that we were to go together. My tale is finished—and so farewell.

  But before I go, I have just one more thing to tell you:

  Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year: something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:

  “To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing: to lose the life you have, for greater life: to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving, to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth—

  —Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.“

  On September 1, 1939, German troops marched into Poland and war broke out in Europe. At the peaceful L-Bar-T Ranch in Montana, Hemingway was writing his novel about Spain. Once he received the news, Ernest wrote Perkins that he had various commitments in regard to this war, but none would be honored until he finished his manuscript. He was in no hurry to get over there, because he thought there would be “war enough for all of us from now on.” With the fatalism he felt whenever he smelled battle, he wrote Max that he would certainly not expect to survive this one.

  Perkins hoped that England would accept Winston Churchill as its leader at least for the duration of the war. “Maybe he might be a Fascist,” Max had written Ernest in July, 1939, “but he would be good in a war.” Months later Perkins heard a fascinating rumor that Churchill was writing a history of the English-speaking people. This took Perkins aback at first because it was he, almost ten years earlier, who had suggested that Churchill write such a book. During the last decade, Scribners had published what Perkins considered Churchill’s “magnificent” histories of the last war and his “truly great biography” of the Duke of Marlborough, which “would have been a little better if he had not been somewhat partisan as a descendant.”

  When Churchill had visited America in 1931 to lecture about “this new tyranny” Soviet Russia, and the need for greater cooperation between England and the United States, Perkins and Charles Scribner had a long talk with him. Max never saw a man whom he liked better in the instant of meeting him.

  He is much more an American than an Englishman [Perkins wrote Professor Copeland]. He got up and walked around the office with his cigar sticking out from his mouth, and talking. I suggested to him then that he do a history of the British Empire. It was then that he got up and began walking about rapidly, and it seemed as if at that moment he hit upon a project—a history of the English race, which was to include us. He must truly have thought of it previously, but it was as if he took the idea from the Empire and immediately enlarged and changed it.

  While Churchill was in New York thinking about Perkins’s suggestion, he asked for the services of a secretary for just one day. Max offered his own. Irma Wyckoff was naturally intimidated by so awesome a presence as Churchill, but she realized what most of Perkins’s authors did: “When there was work to be done, Mr. Perkins could convince you you were the only person in the world to do it.” The day before she was to report for duty at the Waldorf, Perkins reminded her that Churchill dictated most of his letters from bed in the morning, and that he did not wear pajamas. And, he joshed, “He’s liable to jump out at any time—without warning.” But Irma Wyckoff was game and Churchill was a gentleman.

  Perkins found Churchill to be one of those who “thinks very little about money but needs a great deal.” And so instead of publishing in the regular fashion, by negotiating a contract, Churchill would propose a book and sell it in advance for a huge sum to an English publisher. He did just that with the scheme for the history of the English race, signing with Cassell’s in London for the very considerable advance of £20,000. The English publisher then auctioned it to American houses. Scribners was on a tight budget then, and for the family-operated business to put up $30,000 or $40,000 for a book not even on paper was beyond consideration. Dodd, Mead got it. Perkins remained so ardent an admirer of Churchill that he always kept a photograph of him in his office.

  Churchill would have to table his project for many years, but Hemingway did not delay his. Ernest moved from Montana to Sun Valley, a new resort village in Idaho. Soon he had over 90,000 words done on his Spanish novel, which would tell how the war there really had been. If he was ever going to bring off a “hell of a big book with all sorts of people in it,” he told Max, he thought it best to get it done before going off and possibly getting killed. If Perkins would visit before the close of the gaming season, he added, Hemingway promised to paddle him down a trout-filled stream an
d introduce him to “very beautiful glamour girls” who were getting their divorces in Idaho. Martha Gellhorn was covering the war in Finland for Collier’s. So Ernest, now separated from Pauline, named his bachelor suite at the Sun Valley Lodge “Hemingstein’s Mixed Viceing and Diceing Establishment.”

  Perkins could not budge from New York until Tom Wolfe’s estate had satisfied the state tax officials. Then he saw that he had to be on hand to prepare his spring list, which he hoped would include Hemingway’s novel. He wrote Ernest, “I would give anything if I knew just a few of the elements in it to make a note from, and the title.” In January, 1940, when Hemingway was back in Cuba, he sent Perkins the first eight pages of the book and some thirty more from the middle. In them, the protagonist, an idealistic American college professor named Robert Jordan, has gone to Spain to fight for the Republican army. His duty is to blow up a bridge of strategic importance. Perkins wired the author almost immediately: EXTREMELY IMPRESSED STOP OPENING PAGES BEAUTIFUL AND CHAPTER 8 TREMENDOUS. WILL SEND CONTRACT.

  As the novel approached completion, Hemingway’s generally solid work habits crumbled. Weekends, he indulged himself with friends and liquor. Every Sunday began with a hangover and a soggy note to Perkins. He hoped Max would make allowances for occasional incoherencies and would agree that it was better for him to write personal letters in that condition than “hung over” pages of the novel. Nothing really made things right for Hemingway until Martha Gellhorn arrived from Helsinki in the middle of January. His weekend binges continued, but her enthusiasm for his novel made the final pages of work on the book seem easier. After several more Sundays—“damned if they don’t go fast”—Hemingway arrived at the end of his story. But he was temporarily stumped by the conclusion of this, his longest novel. Perkins said he supposed Ernest knew what the outcome was to be but did not know how to express it. “Well,” Max wrote him, “endings are mighty difficult anyhow.”

  Meantime, Hemingway hunted for a title, as Perkins had persistently requested. The author wanted a big one, and he was not worried about “over-titling” this book. “She’ll carry quite a lot,” he said. Hemingway often searched for titles in anthologies of English literature. When he had delved as deep into his Oxford Book of English Prose as the close of John Donne’s “Meditation XVII,” which began “No man is an Island,” he decided he had found the right one. In meeting Perkins’s arbitrary deadline of April 22, Hemingway sent him the first 512 pages of the manuscript under the provisional title For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway thought it had the “magic” that a title had to have and that the book itself might make it quotable. If it did not seem that way to Perkins, the author had some thirty others. But this, Ernest said, was the first that made the bell toll for him—unless people thought of tolls as long-distance charges and of Bell as the telephone company. ALL KNOCKED OUT, Perkins wired, THINK ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT AND NEW ... TITLE BEAUTIFUL CONGRATULATIONS.

  Much of Perkins’s excitement came from the fact that more than a decade had passed since Hemingway had written a big novel. More came from Hemingway’s superb depiction of war. Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls became an actual battle experience for Perkins. He wrote the author, “It has got so these things go through my head as if I had seen them. It is truly amazing.” Perkins was convinced, he told Elizabeth Lemmon, that “Hem has written his best book. That’s sure.”

  On July 1, 1940, Hemingway wired BRIDGE ALL BLOWN. That meant he had found the way to complete For Whom the Bell Tolls. He hand-carried the conclusion of his book to New York and applied the finishing touches there, handing each completed section of manuscript to Perkins, who in turn sent it to the printer. Perkins told Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings that he read it with intense concentration even though most of the time Ernest was standing behind his chair and reading it over his shoulder. When Hemingway was not in the Scribner Building, he was at the Barclay Hotel, roistering. By August the harried weeks with Hemingway in town were over.

  Perkins and Hemingway, who was in Havana again, were soon working over their respective sets of the book’s proofsheets. The editor’s marginalia were mainly questions on points of style but there were a few substantive matters—several passages, for example, which Max and Charles Scribner thought should be toned down. Scribner found the old woman Pilar’s foreboding speech about the “smell of death to come” definitely horrifying; Ernest insisted it was neither gratuitously obscene nor unpublishable. Another scene portrayed Robert Jordan masturbating on the eve of an attack; Hemingway reminded Perkins that it was the small things of that sort that made the man credible, not just a hero. In the end, Hemingway trimmed the onanism scene. Perkins assured him the “death” speech was “right as written” and the other passage as corrected.

  Then Hemingway got the idea of concluding his book with an epilogue. He wrote two new chapters that recapitulated the failure of the Segovia offensive, discussing the blowing up of the bridge and Jordan’s disappearance, and accounted for all the rest of the characters. He said that they read well but seemed like going back into the dressing room after the fight. “Should I put on the epilogue? Is it needed?” he wrote Perkins. Or, he wondered, would it just be rhetoric and detract from the genuine emotion on which the book originally ended? Perkins felt the first ending was tremendously effective. He decided against the epilogue, and the pages were dropped for good.

  Scribners converted their bookstore that season into a Hemingway shrine, filling up all their Fifth Avenue windows with copies of the novel. “It has got all round town that this book is a truly great book,” Perkins wrote the author, “and that its publication is a great event. People outside all publishing and writing circles know about it.”

  As Hemingway’s career reached its brightest point since his association with Perkins, another of Max’s publishing relationships burned out altogether. That season, twenty years after writing his renowned Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson informed Perkins that he was dissatisfied with Scribners’ handling of his books. “I have felt all the time Max, a curious lack of interest in what I am doing, what I propose to do,” he wrote.

  Anderson’s career at Scribners had begun in 1933, the year Horace Liveright died and his firm went bankrupt. Perkins had then written Anderson immediately, suggesting that Scribners become his publishers. They met in New York. Max proposed that Anderson should write either a personal novel or some continuous personal narrative, something after the fashion of Anderson’s A Story Teller’s Story. When the author returned to his farm in the hills of Troutdale, Virginia, he wrote of his decision to join Perkins’s company of writers—“not because of any advance you might give me on a particular book, any amount of advertising of my books you might do, etc., but because of a genuine respect I have long had for the position of the house of Scribner’s in the publishing world, and also, may I say, because I instinctively liked you, Mr. Perkins.” Writing under the tentative title I Build My House, Anderson started his memoirs. In the same letter, Anderson spoke of his desires and expectations in working with his new editor:I think I should feel free to come to you from time to time and talk of plans as to a friend. I have a certain conception of what I conceive to be the right relationship between a writer and publisher, a relationship that might be, at its best, a kind of intellectual marriage....

  Anderson’s subsequent letters, however, revealed that he was more interested in a silent partner. And in the ensuing years, he used Perkins mostly as a sounding board. In one letter he indicated his superstition against even talking about novels while he was in the middle of them.

  Anderson delayed working on his memoirs, as though a book of reminiscences would be the swan song of his career. He had several other ideas for books, which he fitfully attempted. In 1934, for example, he sent his editor batches of unrelated essays to be compiled into a book. Perkins pieced some of them together, and they were published under the title Puzzled America. Anderson worked next on a novel, Kit Brandon. Scribners published it in 1936, exactly as Anderson wrote it.
Then the author wandered into another project which he thought of as “a novel without a purpose, not intended to reform anyone or make any new world, just the story of a rather shy little man and his half-amusing, half-tragic adventures.” He told Perkins, “Most of the time as I write I sit giggling.” After approaching the novel from several angles, he set off in another direction, coming back toward Perkins’s original suggestion. There were several other false starts and returns.

  Anderson’s years at Scribners were his most restless. Like Scott Fitzgerald, he could not fulfill the promise of his brilliant early reputation. He peregrinated from one project to another, fiddling for seven years with the autobiographical work. By the summer of 1940, at the age of sixty-four, Anderson was suffering from dissatisfaction with his career. He blamed his publishers, specifically Max Perkins.

  As you know, Max I have come to see you from time to time, being fond of you personally, as you must know, but rarely, when I have been with you have you made any inquiry at all as to what I am up to. You have indeed Max, on such occasions shown a great deal of interest in some of your other writers and I cannot blame you if you have not been interested in my own work. But in the meantime other publishers have certainly shown interest.

  When people asked Anderson if he was content with his present publisher, he said, he answered, “I would be but feel they are not much interested in me.” He felt “that it would be better for me to go to some house that makes me feel they really want me.”

  Perkins hoped that would not be Anderson’s next step. In one of the most self-abasing letters of his career, Perkins explained his behavior by saying that he did not feel Anderson needed to be watched like some novice writer. “It all came only from my feeling that you knew so very well indeed what you were about and had so much your own way of doing things,” wrote the man who denied he was a fox, “that it would be almost an impertinence for me to question you, or urge you, or certainly to try to direct you. I had looked upon you for so long as a master, and as the father of so many of these other people who became notable, that I could not help talking to you about them for my own enlightenment largely.”