Max Perkins

by A. Scott Berg

  Perkins’s letter touched Anderson deeply. At the same time, he told Perkins, “I can’t live by merely being thought of as a sometime master of my craft.” It was Anderson’s conviction that books were not bought by the American people; they were sold to them. A publisher had to “back” his books. “I had a feeling when I went to Scribners,” he wrote Max, “that I might get this kind of interest. I have a suspicion that perhaps I didn’t get it because Mr. Scribner thought of me as a man too old to spend money on.”

  A few months later Anderson, Scribner, and Perkins met in the Scribners offices. The sales ledger showed that the three Anderson books published by the house had totaled no more than 6,500 copies. The author excoriated his publishers for the puny figures. Perkins understood Anderson’s disappointment, that “even if the question of money were not necessarily involved, an author writes his books to have them read, and wants to have them read by as many as possible, and ought to.” But he did believe the slickest huckstering in the world could not have put those books across.

  Anderson remained adamant and went to Harcourt, Brace. Only months later, in June, 1941, he died of peritonitis. (Harcourt, Brace later published the memoirs he and Perkins had discussed for so many years.) At about the same time Max was upset by the suicide of Virginia Woolf, whom he had never met but admired. With her death, Perkins thought, a great part of a literary era had passed away. “Writers are certainly dying like flies,” Hemingway commented stonily.

  In October of 1939, Scott Fitzgerald had given Perkins reason to believe he and his career were very much alive. He wired Max: PLEASE LUNCH IF YOU CAN WITH KENNETH LITTAUER OF COLLIERS IN RELATION TO SERIAL OF WHICH HE HAS THE OUTLINE OBER TO BE ABSOLUTELY EXCLUDED FROM PRESENT STATE OF NEGOTIATIONS I HAD MY LAST DRINK LAST JUNE IF THAT MATTERS TELL LITTAUER THAT I FOOLISHLY TURNED DOWN LITERARY GUILD OFFER FOR TENDER NIGHT LETTER ME IF YOU CAN NOVEL OUTLINE ABSOLUTELY CONFIDENTIAL AS EVEN A HINT OF IT WOULD BE PLAGIARIZED OUT HERE.

  The hero of the novel was a motion-picture studio mogul named Monroe Stahr. The character was based on the head of M-G-M, Irving Thalberg, who had fascinated Fitzgerald for years. Scott assured Max that after outlining “every scene and situation ... I think I can write this book as if it was a biography because I know the character of this man.” From just the outline, Perkins tried to persuade Littauer “that no [other] human being could handle such a scheme as this one.” Littauer, naturally wary of Fitzgerald’s reliability, said Collier’s was interested but would have to see some piece of manuscript before they could make an offer for it.

  After having been all but emotionally and financially ruined, Fitzgerald had had two strokes of good fortune: He had found happiness with the Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham; indeed, he was contemplating marrying her, Miss Graham later wrote, if Zelda “recovered sufficiently to live for the rest of her life with her mother or if she went so permanently mad that she lost all contact with the real world about her.” At the same time, Fitzgerald had been selling a series of short stories to Esquire about a Hollywood hack writer named Pat Hobby. Fitzgerald received only $250 per Esquire piece, less than a tenth of what the Post had formerly paid him. “When you’re poor,” he said, “you sell things for a quarter of their value to realize quickly.” The money helped keep him going. But, naturally, Fitzgerald was banking as much as ever on Perkins.

  By November 20 he was ready to show Perkins the first 10,000 words of his new novel. “A lot depends on this week,” he wrote Max. The material was “strong,” so it was even money whether Collier’s would take it. “Of course, if he will back me it will be a life saver,” Fitzgerald wrote of Kenneth Littauer, “but I am by no means sure that I will ever be a popular writer again. This much of the book, however, should be as fair a test as any.”

  The editors at Collier’s deliberated for a week before they rejected it. In an instant Perkins received a hasty telegram from Fitzgerald to rush the copy to the Post. Scott added: I GUESS THERE ARE NO GREAT MAGAZINE EDITORS LEFT. Perkins read the material and wired Scott: A BEAUTIFUL START, STIRRING AND NEW, CAN WIRE YOU 250 AND A THOUSAND BY JANUARY. The next day he wrote:I thought the book had the magic that you can put into things. The whole transcontinental business, which is so strong and new to people like me, and to most people, was marvelously suggested, and interest and curiosity about Stahr was aroused.... It was all admirable, or else I am no judge any more.

  The $1,000 Perkins promised in his telegram was to come from a small bequest he was receiving at the end of the year from the estate of his godmother. It was “what they used to call ‘velvet,’ ” Max wrote Scott, “and you are welcome to it if it will help with this book. I can believe that you may really get at the heart of Hollywood, and of what there is wonderful in it as well as all the rest.” He instructed Fitzgerald to “push on with courage for you have a right to.”

  “Your offering to loan me another thousand dollars was the kindest thing I have ever heard of,” Scott wrote his editor. “When Harold [Ober] withdrew from the questionable honor of being my banker I felt numb financially and I suddenly wondered what money was and where it came from. There had always seemed a little more somewhere and now there wasn’t,” he explained.

  The Post then rejected Scott’s novel. Perkins immediately told Scott that if he was in a desperate pinch, he could call for the loan anytime after Christmas. Fitzgerald wrote Perkins for the money on December 26.

  Perkins decorated his next letter, written at the turn of the decade, making it into a New Year’s card. Ever proud of his ability to draw (especially his profiles of Napoleon, which still retained a recognizable touch of self-portrait), Max sketched a man standing with a drink in his hand, smiling and saying, “Here’s how!” As an afterthought, Perkins labeled the drink Coca-Cola. Fitzgerald’s paranoia got the better of him and he sent Perkins a starchy response. “Beneath the surface of your letter and in the cartoon of the man with coca cola I detect a certain perturbation,” he said, then hastily went on to defend himself. “What happened the first part of December or thereabouts was that I quarreled with Sheilah Graham, and then encountered a New Orleans prick ... from Collier’s who told me my novel was no good.... That was all ... after about five heavy days in which I stayed close to home, Sheilah Graham and I were reconciled.” He had not had a drop for four weeks and insisted even a jiggerful made him deathly sick.

  Perkins expected no such response to his letter. “I am not a subtle fellow. I am a simple fellow,” Max wrote back. “There was nothing implied by that drawing. I thought you would admire the art.—And the man was not meant to be you. It was meant to be me, and to indicate my own good resolutions. Don’t read any hidden meanings into what I write or draw. I only wanted to reveal to you another talent.” Max could not resist repeating the story to a few friends. “See what a guilty conscience will do to a man!” he wrote Struthers Burt. Fitzgerald apologized for reacting as he had done and admitted that he insisted on reading into things. He reminded Perkins of the time he accused Max of sending him Grant’s memoirs to show him the life of another failure.

  Fitzgerald’s career dwindled to grinding out quick stories and taking on pickup screen-writing assignments. Buying his way through the weeks one day at a time, he could see no farther ahead than to the completion of this one book and getting Scottie through Vassar. “The greatest privilege,” he wrote Max, “would be to be able to do work so absorbing that one could forget the trouble abroad and at hime.”

  During Fitzgerald’s years in Hollywood he made a lot of money and mixed with the rich and famous, but he felt himself to be an outcast, a has-been that the literary world had given up on and forgotten. He told Max he imagined how odd it would be in a year or so when Scottie “assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable.” Whatever the reasons for that, he knew it was no fault of Perkins’s. “You (and one other man, Gerald Murphy) have been a friend through every dark time in these 5 years,” Scott wrote Max, adding, “Once I believed in friendship
, believed I could (if I didn’t always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian’s cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.” Scott asked his friend:Would the 25¢ press keep Gatsby in the public eye,—or is the book unpopular. Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers—I can maybe pick one—make it a favorite with class rooms, profs, lovers of English prose—anybody. But to die—so completely and unjustly after having given so much. Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bare my stamp—in a small way I was an original.

  After three years in California, Fitzgerald’s illusions were shattered; it was a land of dreams imprinted on celluloid strips. Throughout his letters to Max Perkins, the Murphys, and Edmund Wilson (with whom he had renewed his friendship) ran expressions of hope and belief that he could still create despite the many fallow years behind him and the paucity of time ahead. He wrote his daughter, Scottie, that fall:Anyhow I am alive again—getting by that October did something—with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggle. I don’t drink. I am not a great man but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort.

  Faithfully, Scott wrote Zelda, who was hospitalized again in North Carolina. In one letter that summer he broke down in a few sentences and noted ruefully:Twenty years ago This Side of Paradise was a best seller and we were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling for us much too early.

  Never had Fitzgerald felt so removed from the life in the East that had always enthralled him. He relied on Perkins for his news about all their friends, including Hemingway and Elizabeth Lemmon: “the lovely and unembittered and sacrificed virgin, the victim of what I gradually found was the vanity of her family.” Scott himself had given up all contact with her, but he could not forget what he considered some of the graceless characters around Welbourne parading as aristocrats. “And in the midst, the driven snow of Elizabeth. It was too sad to bear,” he said. After years of closing his letters to Max with an “Ever yours” or “Always yours,” Scott signed this once with “Love to all of you, of all generations.”

  Miss Lemmon had been on Perkins’s mind too. He and Louise had just seen her, during one of her short visits to New York; she was showing some of the pedigreed boxers she raised. The Perkinses seemed to her more remote from each other than ever. “Louise always played the misunderstood wife,” Elizabeth recalled. Once when the two women were alone, Louise had impulsively asked, “Elizabeth, if I divorce Max will you marry him?” There was never a serious question of their separating. It was just her way of venting frustrations. As for Miss Lemmon, her friends in Middleburg insist she never met a man who she felt measured up to Perkins. She never married.

  Before she returned south, Elizabeth reminded Max that the astrologer Evangeline Adams said everything would go to ruin for America in late 1941 or early 1942. “I wish you hadn’t told me,” he wrote Elizabeth. “I can’t forget it.” By then Perkins felt fatalistic even about his friendship with Miss Lemmon. “Elizabeth, I don’t think I’ll ever see you again,” he wrote her in May, 1940. “But I remember everything about every time I ever did see you and there was mighty little in my life to compare any of it to. I’ve always thought of you and all the time.”

  They did see each other again. In 1943 Elizabeth came to New York and met Max at the Ritz Bar. They sat at a small table and for the first time he started to speak about their relationship. “Oh, Elizabeth,” he said, reaching toward her hand but not quite touching it. “It’s hopeless.”

  She looked him in the eyes. “I know,” she replied. That closed the last and only discussion they ever had on the subject. They continued to correspond.

  In October, 1940, Perkins went to Windsor to visit his mother. Days later, Elizabeth Perkins, the last of Senator Evarts’s children, died at eighty-two.

  Perkins had noticed that people around New York were finally “very much alive to the war and anxious we should get prepared and should help England in all ways ‘short of war’ in the meantime.” Hemingway, on the other hand, usually bellicose, happily isolated himself in what he called his “joint on top of a hill.” His large, breezy Finca Vigia overlooked Havana Harbor. It was supposed to be a secret, but Max told Scott Fitzgerald that Martha Gellhorn was living with Ernest. “You know, I guess that Pauline and he are to be divorced, and presumably he will marry Martha Gellhorn,” Max wrote Scott. “This is so well known about that you must have heard of it, but otherwise it ought to be regarded as strictly confidential.” Fitzgerald thought it “odd to think of Ernest married to a really attractive woman. I think the pattern will be somewhat different than with his Pygmalion-like creations.” Hemingway and Martha passed through New York in late November on their honeymoon. No sooner were they made “legal” than she headed for the Burma Road, to cover for Collier’s the war that was marching into China. Ernest had some plan to join her in the Far East a month later.

  By then, For Whom the Bell Tolls was published. Perkins sent complimentary copies to almost everyone he knew; everyone else in the country seemed to be buying his own. Perkins gloated at the dozens of critics who had so much crow to eat. “They should have seen that [Hemingway] was going through a confused time,” Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon, “and while he might not come out of it and go forward, he could only go forward by going through such a time.” The book’s sales were skyrocketing, and the Book-of-the-Month Club anticipated selling no less than a quarter of a million copies as well.

  Ernest inscribed a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls to Scott Fitzgerald “with affection and esteem.” Fitzgerald did not think the book was all that Perkins and everyone seemed to be claiming. He confidentially told Sheilah Graham that it was “not up to [Hemingway‘s] standard. He wrote it for the movies.” But Fitzgerald responded to Hemingway without a hint of resentment. “It’s a fine novel,” he said, “better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication.” After picking out his favorite scenes and equating some of the paragraphs with Dostoevski’s “in their undeflected intensity,” Fitzgerald included his congratulations on the book’s great success. “I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this,” he wrote. (Years before, in his notebooks under “L” for Literary, Scott had scribbled, “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.”)

  Fitzgerald could not afford it, but he decided to give himself entirely to his book about Hollywood. On December 13, 1940, he wrote Max that the novel was progressing rapidly. “I’m not going to stop now till I finish a draft which will be sometime after the 15th of January,” he said. “However, let’s pretend that it doesn’t exist until it’s closer to completion. We don’t want it to become—‘a legend before it is written’ which is what I believe Wheelock said about ‘Tender Is the Night.’” In a postscript Fitzgerald asked, “How much will you sell the plates of ‘This Side of Paradise’ for? I think it has a chance for a new life.”

  The printing plates of Paradise were theoretically the author’s to take to another firm, if he would pay for their cost, approximately $1,000. Max replied: “I would hate to see the book leave us.” It was where their history together had begun. Maxwell Perkins and Scott Fitzgerald had come full circle: His oldest book had expired and a new book was about to be born. The hopes of the two men rested on the novel that Fitzgerald said would be completed in draft by the middle of the next month. With Christmas but eight days away, Perkins wrote, “Well, I hope that ‘some time after January 15th’ will come soon
.”

  XX

  Diminutions

  Toward the end of the year Scott Fitzgerald had moved into Sheilah Graham’s apartment. On December 20, working there, he began Chapter Six of his novel, a crucial point in the development of his hero, Monroe Stahr. It contained a scene in which Stahr drank heavily, an early sign that the original portrait of Irving Thalberg was taking on qualities of Fitzgerald’s own life. By the end of the day he was able to tell Miss Graham: “I’ve been able to fix it. Baby, this book will be good. It might even make enough money for us both to leave Hollywood.” The next day, in her apartment, Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack.

  It was a Saturday, and Perkins was at home. He heard the news from Harold Ober, who had been notified by Miss Graham. There is no record of his wiring Zelda, but that is what he would have done. Her letter to him, which he received a few days later, reads like a reply. In the course of it she says:I want to convey the height of my affections for you, and the devotion and pleasure with which [Scott] always looked forward to “getting in touch with Max.” ... Scott was courageous and faithful to myself and Scottie and he was so devoted a friend that I am sure that he will be rewarded; and will be well remembered.

  Zelda wondered if the 50,000 words of his unfinished novel could somehow be published. “Scott cared so deeply about his work,” she said, “and would so have liked to reach his public again—and it would be so nice for Scottie.”