In the last few months of 1941 Perkins’s correspondence with Hemingway had slackened again noticeably as well. Max had been thinking about some kind of anthology of Hemingway’s shorter works, but the idea was so nebulous to him that he could not define it, he told Ernest in September, much less urge it upon him. Perkins said he had heard from the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who was assembling an anthology of fiction for college use. Warren wanted to include Hemingway’s “The Killers” and follow it with a study of the story. Perkins imagined the essay would be “altogether too elaborate and theoretical,” but, he said to Ernest, “there is nothing better to make a writer permanent than to have him read in the schools.” Hemingway agreed about the importance of having it in the classroom, “no matter how hard it is on the poor students.”
As for Scott Fitzgerald’s claim on posterity, Max prayed it would be strengthened by The Last Tycoon. It was published in November, 1941, and Max’s hopes were somewhat fulfilled. A number of reviewers said the novel made it plain that Fitzgerald was something more than just a Jazz Age chronicler. The New York Times reviewed the book well, and Stephen Vincent Benét, writing in the Saturday Review, declared: “You can take off your hats now, gentlemen, and I think perhaps you had better. This is not a legend, this is a reputation—and, seen in perspective, it may well be one of the most secure reputations of our time.”
To a few old friends Zelda expressed her dislike of Scott’s heroine, an Englishwoman named Kathleen Moore, but said she liked the novel as a whole. “I hope the book will sell,” she wrote Max, “—at least enough to repay your interest.” Despite all the praise and prayers, The Last Tycoon sold only 3,268 copies in its first year.
For a while Hemingway was not sure if he should tell Perkins what he thought of The Last Tycoon. When he did, he was brutal. He said he found some very fine parts in it but felt that most of the book had a “deadness” which he thought was unbelievable coming from Fitzgerald. He likened the novel to a slab of bacon on which mold had formed. One could scrape off what was on top, but the meat still tasted like moldy bacon. Still smarting from Edmund Wilson’s criticisms of his own work in The Wound and the Bow, Hemingway, while conceding that Wilson had done a “very credible job” in explaining, sorting, padding, and arranging, said that Scott would never have finished the work according to that “gigantic, preposterous outline” that Wilson had fabricated.
Hemingway knew that Perkins would be impressed by the novel’s thrilling “stuff about riding in aeroplanes.” But, he said, that was because Max had traveled so little. Fitzgerald had flown so recently that it had impressed him too, and he had managed to instill something of the “old magic” into his writing about air travel. When he wrote about the relationships between men and women, however, Scott’s skill had faltered badly. Fitzgerald, he said, had thoroughly failed to understand his people and the characters had come out as very strange. Perkins, he knew, had recently written Martha Gellhorn that Hollywood had not hurt Scott. Ernest guessed perhaps it had not, but that was because he was long past being hurt before he went out there. Scott’s pulse had faded out in postwar France, he said, and the rest of him “just went on dying progressively after that.” For Hemingway, reading The Last Tycoon was like watching an old baseball pitcher with nothing left in his arm coming out and working with his intelligence for a few innings before getting batted out of the box.
Years later, in A Moveable Feast, Hemingway summed up Fitzgerald’s career with an image that had first struck him when reading The Last Tycoon: His talent was natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
Exercising restraint, Perkins told Hemingway that he found his criticism “very interesting,” then called Hemingway’s attention to the intelligent and often favorable reviews Fitzgerald was getting. “I am glad we did the book,” he said simply. “People did not give Scott proper credit for Tender Is the Night.”
Ernest and Martha had been in Sun Valley, Idaho. Early in 1942 they returned to the finca in Cuba, and Max wrote that he hoped they would both be able to “work in some degree of calm.” Hemingway got detoured from his short stories, however, by a man from Crown Publishing Company who asked him to write a foreword to an anthology of great writing on war, accounts from Thermopylae to Caporetto. The book was to be called Men at War, and to Hemingway the assignment sounded worthwhile. But he told Max he thought that the selections to be included were terrible, and so he had insisted on including other pieces.
In time, his introduction lengthened, and he became the book’s anthologist. He was sorry to disappoint Perkins by not having the manuscripts for his stories in early July as he had planned, but the “damned war anthology,” he kept insisting, was holding him up.
The Men at War book fascinated Perkins. When he saw that Crown was going about it in a slapdash way, the editor in him was dismayed. He could not refrain from offering his own advice and did so at every opportunity. He recalled for Hemingway some of his favorite war passages—from Stephen Crane, Ambrose Bierce, Winston Churchill, and Thomas Nelson Page. He urged him to include at least one excerpt from Thomas Boyd’s Through the Wheat, and he directed him to Tolstoi’s most dramatic passages. Eventually Max became annoyed that Hemingway was so involved with the anthology that he was neglecting his own short-story writing. But the result, especially Hemingway’s patriotic essay at the start of the book, made him feel better. “When I read the introduction,” he wrote Ernest in September, “I was mighty glad of it. I can’t forget it. It raised my morale a good many points.”
Perkins’s morale needed raising. That April his nephew Robert Hill Cox, his sister Fanny’s son, had been killed in the battle for Tunisia. Afterward Max had come across a story the young man had written and seen that he was talented; he felt sorry he had never had the chance to talk to him about it. The boy’s death saddened Max enormously and continued to affect his spirits. And then, in August of 1942, Will James died. Not just a prolific Scribners author but a close friend of Max’s, the cowboy who had sent him a ten-gallon hat, James was fifty—eight years younger than his editor. Another beloved author gone.
XXI
Portrait in Gray and Black
Daddy, don’t you drink too much?“ Max’s youngest daughter, Nancy, asked him one day in 1942.
“Churchill drinks too much,” Max replied. “All great men drink too much.”
There was no question that this particular great man was drinking too much. More and more often he ducked out of the office in the late morning “to buy a newspaper”—and a drink—returning calmer, face flushed. At his round table at Cherio’s, Max’s preprandial martinis had become doubles, and the more of them there were, the less he ate. He often dined alone, reading a newspaper from beginning to end, examining every page for war news. “Always the same from one day to another,” Cherio, the proprietor, remembered. “He like quiet. He never say one word unless you speak to him. He talk very delicate, very soft, and you won’t want to miss a word.”
Max, in his behavior, never showed the slightest indication of heavy drinking, according to friends and colleagues, and none of his powers appeared impaired. But his appearance showed his years and the strain. Below the brim of his hat, now battered and worn and pulled even lower on his head, his face had paled. Often the blue washed from his eyes, leaving them gray. Under his eyes the circles had deepened and darkened. He frequently wore the benign grin of the deaf person who has not heard a word that has been said but wants to seem friendly and attentive. The hacking cough from a lifetime of cigarettes was growing more severe. His hands sometimes trembled visibly.
In July, 1942, Max wrote Elizabeth Lemmon: “We are having a lonely summer, Louise
and I.” The differences between Max and his wife had become even more pronounced. Their conversations were now shorter and their arguments keener. Louise would say anything to break Max’s Yankee composure, and Max would say anything to silence Louise. His behavior was now typical of the unhappily married man. He would delay going home. First he would stop off at his regular spot, the Ritz Bar, for a few drinks. Then he often would drop in on a married daughter—Zippy, who was living in the city, or Bertha in New Canaan—and visit with her and her family. Some evenings he never got all the way home, having spent the night in an armchair; next morning he would arrive at work wearing the same rumpled shirt and suit he had worn the day before.
And he went even deeper into his work. He complained that the Scribner Building was locked on Saturdays. “A two-day weekend ... ,” he wrote a friend, “is too much.” At home, reading became his only passion. If Louise suggested going out somewhere, he would reply, “I have work to do,” and spend most of the night reading manuscripts. If she invited friends to the house, Max would try to excuse himself, complaining that he was “stuck” in a manuscript. Some evenings he would not descend the stairs to greet the guests.
At the office he grew irascible. He took to commenting tartly on small matters such as a colleague’s departing from work a few minutes early. His humor turned mordant, sarcastic. When his devoted secretary, Miss Wyckoff., asked for her annual vacation, his retort was a cruel insult: “What would you need a vacation for?” Once one of his authors wrote to say that Miss Wyckoff deserved a medal for diligence and efficiency. Max called in the selfsame Miss Wyckoff and dictated his reply: “No secretary was ever treated with more indulgence and affection. And after all, though she does work hard ... she only works five days in the week.”
Sometimes Perkins sat stock-still at his desk, mooning into space. Periodically he dozed off, and Miss Wyckoff would gently close the door to ward off intruders. One afternoon while Perkins was thus disposed, one of his more obtrusive authors came by. Miss Wyckoff said Mr. Perkins was busy. Hearing no sound from within the office, the writer determined to see for himself, dragged a chair over to the door, stood on it, and looked through the transom. Miss Wyckoff scolded him indignantly: “Don’t you know he doesn’t get much sleep?”
Even when the door was open, Perkins was not very approachable. His customary silences were now accentuated by forbidding stares that intimidated many of his authors. “That silence could on occasion be terrifying,” said John Hall Wheelock, “and when driven to desperation by some long-winded speaker, Max would sometimes puncture it with an irritable, ‘Well, what about it?’ which usually served to bring things to a head. He was not by any means always amiable.” And yet Perkins’s testiness became part of his charm.
Late in the summer of 1942 Hemingway wrote Perkins that he had an opening for a “good old Dry Tortugas man.” It had been almost ten years since Ernest had been able to cajole Max into vacationing with him, and he did not succeed this time. Scribners was somewhat short-staffed-some men were in the service, some had been let go because business was not good, and some of those who remained were themselves on vacation. Max felt he had to stay in New York. “Honestly, Ernest,” he wrote, “I couldn’t.”
With rare exceptions Perkins was seeing no one outside the office. In the last few months, however, he had renewed his friendship with Alexander Woollcott. They had been young reporters together on the New York Times, and when Max had gone off into publishing, Woollcott had gone on to become a famous drama critic and a flamboyant figure of his time. The two men had a mutual attachment to Vermont. Since the twenties, Woollcott had held court at his summer place on a small island in Lake Bomoseen. More recently, he had chosen to live there year-round. In January, 1943, Woollcott told Max that he was abandoning his country home. “I am sorry you have had to leave Vermont, the best place there is to be,” Perkins wrote him on January 18. “I have already given it up myself because too many people have died. There are too many ghosts where I come from.” Perkins told Woollcott that he wished they could turn the clock back, that their whole pack of young reporters could be together again on the seventeenth floor of the Times Building. One week after Perkins’s letter arrived, Alexander Woollcott died.
Perkins for years had talked of retiring to Vermont and editing his own country gazette. He wanted to print all the news he saw fit to print, perhaps reaching millions of people through his writing as the paper won fame beyond its precinct, and perhaps—a daydream about which only his closest friends knew—making him a national power ... even president. “Of course, Max never really wanted to be president,” John Hall Wheelock said; he merely held himself in secret readiness, articulating his positions on the issues to whoever would listen, maintaining perpetual concern for his country. The notion of retiring to Vermont had evaporated. (“I had always meant to end up there,” he had written Woollcott, “but I can’t do it.”) The concern, however, had not lessened.
As the New Deal moved farther and farther from his Jeffersonian principles, Max became greatly irritated. The purest tenets of American democracy, as he understood them, were being undermined by “that man in the White House.” In February, 1943, Perkins wrote to a Mr. Raymond Thompson:I think these extreme New Dealers are for the most part men of the best intentions, but that if they have their way it will inevitably lead to the concentration of all capital, and all power, in the hands of a government, and that that government must then necessarily become a dictatorship, whether it will or not. And then it will rule the nation through a bureaucracy which will become, as has happened in Russia, a kind of aristocracy, a privileged class.
Perkins believed that the only hope of man lies “in the diffusion of power. If it ever gets into the hands of any single group we are done for in every way excepting conceivably a material one. Everyone might get enough to eat, etc. but he would have no freedom. But then, on the other hand, it may be that Capitalism cannot function any longer, and that we shall have to acquiesce to communism.”
Perkins’s politics were reflected in Scribners’ forthcoming publication of The Fifth Seal, Mark Aldanov’s staunchly anti-Soviet novel. In a concluding passage the Russian émigré author had one of his characters say:“Yes, of course I hate Hitler more than I hate the Bolsheviks. But if freedom and human dignity are to be defended, they must be defended honestly: against all tyrants and all corrupters.”
That was just how Perkins felt. The American Communists did everything they could to scare Scribners out of publishing The Fifth Seal, and the book became a cause celebre early in 1943. It was a strong best seller.
Publishing companies, unlike toothpaste companies, do not produce identical products year after year. Each book is a brand-new product, with individual qualities and requiring individual attention. A toothpaste company creates a market for its product and then needs only to maintain that market. A publisher must make a new market for each book—several hundred, perhaps, each year. (This hard fact of publishing life partially explains why so few books are sold—in a nation of over 200 million people, a mere 5,000 copies is an excellent sale for a first novel—and also why publishing is not an especially lucrative endeavor.) Furthermore, while the toothpaste manufacturer can forecast his sales with some accuracy, the publisher seldom can, because each book—except for those by well-established authors—is a different sales problem. Sales may be unpredictably low—or the publisher may be surprised by sudden bounty. Books contracted for years earlier and labored upon in obscurity may suddenly skyrocket. That is what happened to Scribners in 1943. The Fifth Seal was one in a string of no fewer than seven best sellers. In the first nine months of the year their combined sales totaled 2 million copies.
Only one of the seven was nonfiction: Paris Underground, a book of personal narratives about the war in Europe, by Etta Shiber. The others were all novels, a fact that led Perkins to attribute the surge of prosperity to the public’s being “cut off [by the war] from their former ways of amusement.” One novel w
as For Whom the Bell Tolls, which in its third year sold 150,000 copies. There was also Edmund Gilligan’s The Gaunt Woman. And there were three others whose success was especially cheering for Perkins.
Marcia Davenport’s The Valley of Decision, which had come out in the fall of 1942, sold 300,000 copies within twelve months and eventually reached twice that figure. She was overwhelmed by the sales and flabbergasted by the favorable press. One evening when she was at dinner with the Charles Scribners and Max, the conversation veered to Thomas Wolfe and his problems, and Max said that Tom could have advanced with his work only by leaving Scribners, as he had done. “Oh no!” Mrs. Davenport said. “He needed you as much as I do. I couldn’t write a book without you.”
“If that were true,” Perkins replied, “you would not be worth the work that has gone into you.”
Perkins believed Marcia Davenport would not discover her full talents until she revealed more of herself in her writing. He wanted to help her to overcome her resistance against writing autobiographical fiction, for he felt she was denying herself a deeper integrity and passion in her material. He kept urging her toward it and after a year or so she capitulated. In 1945 she began a novel the theme of which was drawn from her own life in Manhattan: East Side, West Side.
Marcia Davenport had once made Charles Scribner shudder by divulging her dearest wish: She wanted to write a book that might sell only 1,200 copies but would be called a work of art. Under Perkins’s aegis, she felt that was attainable. When she talked with him, he never stressed financial results. Once, she knew, when he had listened to someone complain about the commercial emphasis of a certain publishing house, Perkins had commented: “What you mean is, those people don’t love books.”
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