The day after Christmas, Perkins replied. It was too soon to know exactly what Scott’s financial situation was at Scribners, or what the prospects were for publishing the novel; these matters would be looked into right away. “Everything will be done that possibly can for Scott’s sake,” Max assured her, “—and yours and Scottie’s.”
Zelda did not come north for the funeral. Her doctors thought it would be too great a strain on her.
Perkins did his best to inform all Scott’s friends of the services but only a few could reach Baltimore in time. Louise and Max rode the train from Wilmington to Baltimore with Gerald and Sara Murphy and John Biggs, a Princeton friend of Scott’s and a former Perkins novelist who had become a federal judge on the Third Circuit bench in Philadelphia. It was a distressing day for Perkins, especially awful because, as he told John Peale Bishop, Fitzgerald’s was one of those terrible “funeral-home” funerals. There was no alternative because the Catholic Church would not permit Scott—who died a nonbeliever—to be interred in the Catholic cemetery in Rockville, alongside his father’s family. At the burial in the Rockville Union Cemetery, Mrs. Bayard Turnbull, a friend of the Fitzgeralds from their days at La Paix, near Baltimore, observed Max. “He didn’t say a word to anyone ... ,” she said later, “and then, several times, without even paying attention to what was going on, he shook his head, lifted it slowly, and looked at the sky.”
Upon his return to New York, Max sat down to a duty he had put off: writing to Hemingway about Fitzgerald’s death. “I thought of telegraphing you about Scott but it didn’t seem as if there were any use in it,” he wrote Ernest, who was in Cuba and could be assumed not to have heard the news. “Anyhow, he didn’t suffer at all, that’s one thing. It was a heart-attack and his death was instantaneous—though he had some slight attack, as they realize now, a short time before.”
Fitzgerald had borrowed heavily against his life insurance in recent years, but, Max told Ernest, it was still worth $40,000—enough, Perkins supposed, to get Scottie through college and pay off her father’s debts. The will, however, was confused. In his original testament Fitzgerald had nominated Harold Ober as his executor. After their recent rift Scott crossed out his name and penciled in Perkins’s. The legality of the change was in question, and for the moment Max was enmeshed. “I am afraid this ends my last chance of getting to Cuba for a while,” he wrote Hemingway, “for it will take some weeks to clear up confusion in the will.” In due course Perkins and Harold Ober both simply renounced their claim as executors in favor of Judge Biggs. As it turned out, for the next several years Perkins was called upon to make every decision regarding Fitzgerald’s literary legacy.
Perkins then addressed himself to a handful of letters of condolence. The dearth of mourners underscored the pathos of Scott’s death. Frances Kroll, Fitzgerald’s secretary in Hollywood, wrote Perkins to say: “I was with him through the conception and writing of the novel and perhaps questions may come up when you read the finished manuscript.” Mrs. Turnbull’s son Andrew, then a junior at Princeton, also wrote Perkins. “I often heard Mr. Fitzgerald speak of you during the 18 months he spent here in 1932—1933, when I was eleven years old,” he said. He told Perkins that upon Fitzgerald’s death he had set down his memories of the writer for fear of forgetting them. He hoped Perkins might help him get them published, because Fitzgerald’s name had become “so largely identified with a dissipated and decadent generation; and I know from personal experience that no kid could hope to find a kinder companion or truer friend this side of paradise.” Perkins replied that he had read the pages with appreciation and regretted that he knew no way to help them into print. (Turnbull later became one of Fitzgerald’s principal biographers.)
In early January Max wrote again to Zelda. “In a way he got caught in the public mind in the age that he gave a name to,” he said, “and there are many things that he wrote that should not belong to any particular time, but to all time.” It was important, however, to proceed cautiously, to produce a work that would honor Scott and demonstrate that he ought not be identified solely with the Jazz Age. The painful part, he wrote Miss Lemmon, was “that this book which might have vindicated him—for the first part of it was extremely promising—was far from finished.”
While the estate was being probated, Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, had no income, so Perkins arranged with Judge Biggs, Gerald Murphy, and Harold Ober to loan her enough to pay her way through Vassar and provide her with a monthly allowance besides.
“I can’t thank you enough for the flowers,” she wrote Max, “for coming down to Baltimore, and most of all for your kindness in lending me the money to go to college.... If the world hasn’t completely collapsed by 1944, I’ll be able to repay the loan. I hope by then to have produced a novel for your inspection too.” Max sent Scottie some literary advice, the same dictum he gave every college student who called on him. He stressed the importance of a liberal arts education but urged her to avoid all courses in writing. “Everyone has to find her own way of writing,” he wrote Scottie, “and the source of finding it is largely out of literature.”
Scottie had become conscientious in her studies, but she was talking now of dropping out of Vassar and going to work. Max knew how important it had been to Scott that she become the first in her family to earn a college diploma. In the same subtle tone he used to prod Scott on to the end of a novel, Perkins wrote Scottie at the end of her junior year, “You have practically one more year in college now, and that will go quickly, and then you will still be very young and equipped with a degree.”
Zelda’s financial situation was also poor, and she wrote to ask Perkins if there was any way he could send her some money so she could pay her board;—she was now living with her mother in Montgomery, Alabama. She wondered if this might be “the most auspicious time to get the book under way: if you are still in mind to publish it.” She wrote:The book was a story of Irving Thalberg, as Scott may have told you. Those minds which so nearly control the direction of public sentiment engaged Scott deeply. He wanted to render tangible the indomitable constancy of purpose and the driving necessity to achievement and the capacity for judicious and dextrous juggling of mysterious forces that distinguished such men from others.
It was still too soon for Perkins to respond with a definite plan.
Sheilah Graham—who for appearances’ sake had not attended Fitzgerald’s funeral—visited Perkins in New York that January. For Max it was a great pleasure to see her, even under such circumstances. “I think she was mighty good for him, and a mighty good girl herself,” Perkins wrote Hemingway after their meeting. She spoke at length about Scott’s novel. Max had already begun to think that there might be parts of the incomplete manuscript that could be published separately in some fashion.
Three weeks after Fitzgerald’s death Sheilah Graham sent Perkins a typed copy of the original of the unfinished work, tentatively titled The Love of the Last Tycoon, and many of Scott’s notes. She directed Max to one memo in particular, which revealed Fitzgerald’s intention to recapture his readership. This book, Scott remarked, was aimed at two different generations, two readers specifically—“for seventeen as symbolized by Scottie, and for Edmund Wilson at 45.” Also enclosed was an unsent letter that Fitzgerald had written to the actress Norma Shearer, the wife of Irving Thalberg, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s chief officer until his death at the age of thirty-seven in 1936.
Dear Norma:
You told me you read little because of your eyes but I think this book will interest you—and though the story is purely imaginary perhaps you could see it as an attempt to prererve something of Irving.
My own impression of him shortly recorded but very dazzling in its effect on me, inspires the best part of the character of Stahr—though I have put in some things drawn from other men and inevitably, much of myself. I invented a tragic story and Irving’s life was, of course, not tragic except his struggle against ill health, because no one has written a tragedy about Holl
ywood—(a Star is Born was a pathetic story and often beautiful story but not a tragedy) and doomed and heroic things do happen here.
Miss Graham also found a fragment Fitzgerald had addressed to himself which was so moving in its irony that she sent it to Perkins.
I want to write scenes that are frightening and inimitable. I don’t want to be as intelligible to my contemporaries as Ernest, who as Gertrude Stein said, is bound for the museums.
I am far enough ahead to have some small immortality if I can keep well.
At the end of January Max sent Miss Graham a progress report. He regretted that he still had not come to any definite conclusion about printing the novel. “All I know,” he wrote, “is that it promised to be the most completely mature, and rich, and in a deep sense the most brilliant book he ever did. I think Stahr, though incomplete, is his best character.... It would break a man’s heart to see what this book would have been, and that it wasn’t finished.”
Perkins’s words brought Sheilah Graham to tears. “Please do something with it,” she begged the editor. “It drives me simply crazy to remember his enthusiasm and plodding work on it and then for him to die.” She agreed with Max that nobody except Scott could conceivably finish the book, but it seemed that if it were published as it was, eliminating only the most unrealized parts, which Fitzgerald himself would most likely have altered or cut anyway, there would be an important piece left to publish as “a sort of unfinished symphony.”
As he had done when Ring Lardner died, Perkins consulted Gilbert Seldes, who, Max thought, had “very good practical, as well as critical judgment.” Seldes read the manuscript and the next week Perkins reported to Scott’s executor, John Biggs, that he and Seldes were of the same mind.
The unfinished book is most interesting. It is a tragedy it is unfinished. It was a clear step forward. I don’t say that it was better in actual writing itself, or even that it would have been, than The Great Gatsby. But it has the same old magic that Scott got into a sentence, or a paragraph, or a phrase. It has a kind of wisdom in it, and nobody ever penetrated beneath the surface of the movie world to any such degree. It was to have been a very remarkable book. There are 56,000 words. If they were published alone it would only be read as a curiosity and for its literary interest, because people won’t read an unfinished book. But it ought somehow to be published for the sake of Scott’s name. My idea was to publish The Great Gatsby, five or six of the best stories and then this unfinished novel.
Perkins and Seldes also agreed that Edmund Wilson, whose opinion, Max believed, Scott respected more than anyone’s, was the best person to write an explanatory introduction. After disagreements and discussions—mostly about “The Crack-Up” pieces, which Wilson wanted to include—Perkins finally got Wilson to consent to all his terms. Max even persuaded him to edit the manuscript and to write a summary of the plot Fitzgerald had in mind for the remainder of the novel. The book would include The Great Gatsby and Scott’s most enduring stories—“May Day,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “The Rich Boy,” “Absolution,” and “Crazy Sunday”—together with the unfinished work.
Wilson first called upon Sheilah Graham, to extract every memory she had of what Scott had said about the book. He then spent months examining Fitzgerald’s notes. Within a half-year of Fitzgerald’s death Wilson had finished the anthology. He had done more than prove his loyalty to Fitzgerald in this, his first collaborative effort with Scott since the Princeton Triangle Club production of The Evil Eye in 1915. In his introduction Wilson wrote,The Last Tycoon is ... Fitzgerald’s most mature piece of work. It is marked off from his other novels by the fact that it is the first to deal seriously with any profession or business. The earlier books of Fitzgerald had been preoccupied with debutantes and college boys, with the fast lives of the wild spenders of the twenties.... In going through the immense pile of drafts and notes that the author had made for this novel, one is confirmed and reinforced in one’s impression that Fitzgerald will be found to stand out as one of the first-rate figures in the American writing of this period. The last pages of The Great Gatsby are certainly, both from the dramatic point of view and from the point of view of prose, among the very best things in the fiction of our generation. T. S. Eliot said of the book that Fitzgerald had taken the first important step that had been made in the American novel since Henry James. And certainly The Last Tycoon, even in its unfulfilled intention, takes its place among the books that set a standard.
While Wilson wrote, Max labored to try to revive interest in Fitzgerald. He had heard a rumor that influential people at Princeton had come to look upon Fitzgerald with disfavor; hoping to squelch that rumor, he wrote Princeton to suggest that it bring out a book to honor Scott. He had no success. Not for fifteen years would the Friends of the Library of Princeton University produce a volume of Fitzgerald’s work.
Max also attempted to launch a biography of Fitzgerald; he realized that it might be considered a bit early for that, but the eclipse of Fitzgerald’s reputation was alarming enough to embolden him. He urged Matthew Josephson, a former staff member of the New Republic, to undertake the story of a “brilliant figure of a period ... the whole background of that strange period, with Scott very distinctly in the foreground.” Josephson took up his pen but soon had to throw it down. He later explained, “I knew the story of Zelda, and planned to tell it all as the central tragedy of Scott’s life.... I learned that she had just been released from another institution where she had been confined for a couple of years and declared entirely ‘cured.’ So I halted; for the time being I could not tell her story in public, though I was sure she would be back in again; and decided to wait.” While he waited, Arthur Mizener, a Princetonian who was then a professor at Carleton College in Minnesota, studied Fitzgerald’s career and came to know his family. His biography, The Far Side of Paradise, the first of several of Fitzgerald, appeared in 1951.
So much of Perkins’s spring had been devoted to Fitzgerald that Ernest Hemingway felt Max was giving him short shrift. He had gone to Hong Kong to cover the Sino-Japanese War, and since he had been in the Orient, he complained, four China clippers had flown in carrying not a word from Scribners. “What the hell is the matter?” he asked Perkins. Max wrote five times in the next month, mainly about the progress of For Whom the Bell Tolls. Sales were fast approaching the half-million mark. Concerned about the war in Europe, Perkins wrote Hemingway that he wished he “had the temperament of Van Wyck Brooks, who surveys the world like Buddha, with complete detachment apparently—and yet he really is deeply interested. He is able to do his work and not be bothered.”
Despite his friendship with Brooks, Perkins privately maintained that America’s most astute critic of contemporary literature was Edmund Wilson. The assertion may have been a bit painful for Perkins to make, for after The Last Tycoon he was no longer Wilson’s publisher. The Perkins-Wilson relationship was irreparably ruptured over Wilson’s most recent collection of essays, called The Wound and the Bow. In one of these essays Wilson had attacked Hemingway. Wilson charged that as the quality of Hemingway’s writing diminished, his craving for personal publicity increased, and that his work was now dominated by fantasies. Wilson examined Hemingway’s attitude toward women, especially toward the “amoeba-like little Spanish girl Maria” in For Whom the Bell Tolls. “This love affair with a woman in a sleeping bag,” he wrote, “lacking completely the kind of give and take that goes on between real men and women, has the all-too-perfect felicity of a youthful erotic dream.”
Perkins defended Hemingway. He thought Wilson’s essay on Ernest was “fascinating” but dead wrong. Word around New York was that Perkins felt Wilson was hitting below the belt and that he refused to publish anything so derogatory to Hemingway. Caroline Gordon Tate remembered hearing that Wilson and Perkins had long conferences about that particular chapter of the book.
Meanwhile, Perkins met another literary critic, Maxwell Geismar, a thirty-two-year-old professor at Sarah Lawrence College,
who was conducting a study of the modern American novel. He was proposing to examine the works of a half-dozen authors between the wars, in a book called Writers in Crisis. At the suggestion of a mutual friend, Geismer had sent Perkins chapters he had written on Ring Lardner, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck. Perkins was delighted that a scholar was at last recognizing Lardner’s talents, and he thought Geismar’s piece on Wolfe was “about the best that has been written.” Perkins knew that the young critic had previously written favorably about Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring, but, cautious now, he would not accept Geismar’s book for publication until he had seen his essay on Hemingway. Perkins suggested that Geismar include William Faulkner in his book, and Geismar agreed.
Perkins’s dispute with Wilson grew more intense. During one debate, he mentioned Geismar’s work to Wilson. Wilson looked up Geismar and they became friendly. The two of them noted that Perkins had them both in the same spot—he was stalling about accepting their books. Wilson complained to Geismar about publishers in general and remarked that editors were not terribly busy people yet took outrageous amounts of time in making up their minds.
Then came the climax. Caroline Gordon Tate remembered hearing that, in one meeting with Perkins, Wilson shouted that “all publishers were sons of bitches.” Shortly thereafter he took his book to Houghton Mifflin, and since Scribners was still delaying about Geismar’s book, he was able to punish Perkins further by getting Houghton Mifflin to take that book too.
When Geismar showed Wilson his Hemingway essay, he was delighted to find that it met with approval. Geismar noted years afterward: “I hardly slept a wink all night. Wilson descended portentously and said in his slight high stammer: ‘I think your essay on Hemingway ... is better than mine.’ ” Geismar believed it was, for Wilson “did not get at the depth wound in Hemingway, or the complete social-historical ignorance that did him in as much.” After the book was published, Ernest and Martha Gellhorn Hemingway visited the Geismars at Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, New York. “They came in from a walk along the Bronx River,” Geismar recalled, “talking as if it was a safari in deepest Africa and full of dears and darlings.” Over dinner at an Italian restaurant, Hemingway, who had few kind words for any critics of his work, remarked, “You know what I liked best in that essay of yours ... was the quotations you used. I never realized how good they were.”
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