Nancy Hale did not have Marcia Davenport’s difficulty with personal writing. Her novel The Prodigal Women, published alongside The Valley of Decision in Scribners’ colossal year of best sellers, was a crystallization of her own experience. The book did extraordinarily well. Beyond that, Perkins admired it for revealing female character so deftly. “From the very beginning,” he wrote her in reply to a letter of gratitude, “I believed in you and said so, and while I don’t believe that sales are in themselves a proof, they are the only proof and the irrefutable proof to a lot of people to whom I have to say things, booksellers and such. So don’t thank me for any pleasure. It is I who must thank you.”
Perkins disliked business dealings, but he had long since become well known as a shrewd negotiator. An overtipper in restaurants and a soft touch to any friend or stranger who needed to borrow money, he was a Yankee mule trader in business. In discussing advances and royalties with agents or authors, Max would sit in silence at his desk, poker-faced, doodling his portraits of Napoleon, while the other person stated his demands. With his words falling on Perkins’s almost deaf ears, even the toughest bargainer would gradually talk himself down. Old CS’s grandson George Schieffelin said, “Max would close the deal whenever his terms were reached or his drawing was completed—whichever came first.”
The seventh book in Scribners’ record-breaking season was Indigo by Christine Weston. She was introduced to Perkins in the spring of 1939 by their mutual friend Waldo Peirce. “I had been told that Perkins liked to have aspiring writers show up with enormous amounts of manuscript,” Miss Weston recalled, “and mine was certainly enormous. I was very green and timid, and had no confidence that the manuscript would ever be looked at by the great man, though Waldo Peirce assured me that once Max had undertaken to read something he never failed to do so.” Perkins admired her first novel and published her second as well. Together they sold 5,000 copies. Her third novel was set in India, where she was born and lived until she was twenty. Published in 1943, Indigo attracted 230,000 buyers in just a few months.
One did not have to sell like Hemingway, Davenport, Hale, Rawlings, Weston, or Taylor Caldwell to get Perkins’s backing. In fact, his heart went out most readily to the person who desperately desired to be a writer but who could not produce a good book. As it happened, many such were women, who, charmed by his manner, could not resist coming back to Scribners again and again. One woman dropped by every Thursday for months, always with a different hat. Perkins would take her to “tea,” not knowing how else to accommodate her persistence. When his colleagues asked why he spent so much time with so unpromising an author, he replied, “I’m afraid she might commit suicide if I didn’t.” Perkins would take her to the bar of the Chatham Hotel, where she usually became tipsy. One afternoon she started to fall down drunk. Max knew he could not leave her at the bar, so he led her upstairs to a room where she could sleep it off. Once inside the room, she unzipped her dress, kicked off her shoes, flopped on the bed, and passed out. Max placed the key beside her and left. Not until the moment after he quietly but firmly shut the door, automatically locking it behind him, did he discover his overcoat was caught in the jamb. A chambermaid eventually unlocked the door, poked her nose in, and gave Max a contemptuous stare that he never forgot.
Women: the gossip in publishing was that Perkins was as critical of them as ever. Christine Weston, for one, had been told that Perkins was much more relaxed with his own sex. Her view was thathe was more at ease with one sort of person than with another. I fancy he felt most at home with the big noisy egotistical types like Hemingway and Waldo Peirce, and that he had to feel his way cautiously with the shy intense ones who very likely made him feel self-conscious.... Personally, I found him attractive though emotionally remote.
Max still complained about women: “Lady writers expect you to do many things for them apart from their books,” Perkins wrote Professor Copeland in the early forties. The big novelists insisted that he host a tea upon publication of each of their books. Another woman called Max up in tears to say, “My cat, John Keats, is dying.” Perkins offered only sympathy. She said, “You must send a veterinary.” He replied he did not know much about animal doctors and asked if she couldn’t get one in her neighborhood. “But I haven’t any money,” she whimpered. “Will you pay for it?” In order to get her back to work, he did.
To persuade Michael Strange, the poet and former wife of John Barrymore, to finish her book of memoirs, Max had to dine several nights alone with her just to get her to listen to his suggestions. But she planned such sumptuous dinners and was so engaging a conversationalist that the evenings generally accomplished little. Most often the two of them indulged in political and economic discussions, for she was a radical and believed in a classless society. Michael Strange was sermonizing on that very subject one night over coffee while the maid was washing the dishes; suddenly the author interrupted herself, flinging over her shoulder, “God damn it, Kate, stop rattling those dishes.”
Despite his difficulties in dealing with the gender, Max found himself working with more women than he ever had before—novelists Dawn Powell, Edith Pope, Ann Chidester, and Catherine Pomeroy Stewart, all well-known names in their day. He urged Anaïs Nin to publish her diaries. Most of the women who worked with Perkins spoke of him adoringly.
One woman, who still writes, has carried the torch for Max since the thirties. She showed little ability but great desire. To her endless letters, full of grandiloquent literary ravings and amorous overtures, he responded crisply but courteously. He spoke to her in person only twice, and then for no more than fifteen minutes. “That wasn’t important,” she declared forty years later, “for ours was a love of the eyes. I came into his life when he was somewhat weary and he took a deep interest in my fortunes.... The glow of his genius left a flame in my head.” Year after year she continued to write poetry and prose; none was published, except by vanity presses. Still she worked on, because of Max’s “faith” in her talent. Indeed, Max’s faith was more than reciprocated. “From the day I met Max and we fell in love,” she confessed, “I never shared a bed with my husband again. I would not be unfaithful to Max.”
In February, 1943, Perkins attended Scottie Fitzgerald’s marriage. He and Harold Ober, who gave the bride away to Lt. (j.g.) Samuel Lanahan, paid for the ceremony. As Scottie walked down the aisle of the church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York, Perkins thought she looked very much as Zelda had almost twenty-five years earlier—“not as pretty as she was,” Max wrote Hemingway, “and yet she looked better than Zelda.”
The bride’s mother had been unable to attend the wedding, for she was patriotically employed as a machinist apprentice in Montgomery. (She soon got fired.) She wrote to thank Max for his letter detailing the beautiful ceremony. It gave play to her own remembrances of the “mica-ed attenuation of spring so many years ago when somewhat under your friendly auspices we were married,” she said. A few months later she wrote Max again. “I perform a great many foolish overtures to the past,” she said dreamily, “and greatly look forward to the Judgement day.”
Into his sixtieth year, Max passed several fascinating, poignant days reading his correspondence with Scott Fitzgerald. Edmund Wilson wanted some of the letters for a book of Fitzgeraldiana, the centerpiece of which was “The Crack-Up.” Scribners was not publishing it, because Max maintained that Scott would not have wanted those grim pieces in book form; nonetheless Perkins approved publication of the book by another house for the same reason he consented to infrequent requests to include F. Scott Fitzgerald in fiction anthologies. He wanted to do everything in his power to keep Fitzgerald’s reputation alive.
Another author whose writings Perkins was rereading was Thomas Wolfe. As Christmas, 1943, approached, he wrote Wolfe’s sister Mabel: “I think of Tom a great deal at this time of the year, and remember the old days when we might expect him to drop in at the office at almost any moment.” At home late at night Max would pore over the same favorite p
assages in Of Time and the River.
Thomas Wolfe had been dead for five years but his literary reputation was rising steadily. Generally, Perkins observed, even a noted author faded out shortly after his death. But the reverse had happened in the case of Wolfe, and the affairs of his literary estate still took up a great deal of Perkins’s time.
Aline Bernstein, who was living in Mount Kisco, New York, learned that William B. Wisdom, Wolfe’s friend from New Orleans, was buying up all of Wolfe’s papers. She was upset because her letters would be included. “There could be no need for it,” she wrote Perkins in the middle of 1943, “and I think I am not wrong in thinking that I should have been told. It is the one thing I have ever known you to do that was lacking in rightness, or what I consider rightness to be.”
The contents of her letters—the words on the pages—were hers and no one could publish them without her permission; but the documents themselves that were in Wolfe’s possession upon his death belonged to his estate. Perkins explained to Mrs. Bernstein, “It was my duty to sell whatever I could for the financial advantage of the estate.” Perkins was not interested in raising money so much as in making Wolfe’s papers available to writers and scholars. He thought this was essential for the reputation and influence of any important writer. It was the least one could do for Thomas Wolfe, who, Perkins said, would always be read, because “there will always be a new generation of sophomores to discover and delight in him.”
William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe’s writings for years. He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard—a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. Their sweetest and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, “My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits.” In June, 1943, Aline wrote Perkins,I daresay I will get used to the idea of my letters to Tom being sold, but I’m not used to it yet in spite of the fact that it is legal. It is all a shock to me, but amounts to little in the scale of people’s sorrow now on earth. So this is the end of it from me to you. I carry with me always though, the pain of the fact that our relationship, Tom’s and mine, was never resolved during his life. Maybe it never could have been. It held so much, for so long a time, time that was magnificent, and even at the end he must have known in his heart’s core, how we were to each other.
In due course Perkins asked Mrs. Bernstein to surrender her own letters from Tom for the collection. She consented, but would not give them to Wisdom—whom she suspected of profiting from the Wolfe material—for nothing. After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased the collection. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to Max about this stipulation, she said: “It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me.”
That summer Perkins saw the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was delighted when he first heard that Gary Cooper was going to play the lead role. Perkins admired him so much that he had seen him in Sergeant York twice. After seeing the new film, though, Max realized the limitations of his favorite actor and the medium itself. He wrote Evan Shipman: Of course Gary Cooper is just the way he always is—which is good, but is not Robert, nor anything like him. That is partly because all the subjective part of the story, or almost all, has got lost. Perhaps necessarily.
The only other motion picture that Perkins had ever shown any interest in was The Charge of the Light Brigade. He did not want to view the entire film, just the charge itself. Max made his middle daughter, Peggy, accompany him to the theater. He stationed her so that she could watch both the screen and her father, who stood in the lobby. They waited an hour and a half for the climactic moment. When she saw that Errol Flynn was about to lead the charge, Peggy signaled, Perkins advanced through the lobby, stood in the aisle, and observed the Brigade’s routing. Then Max and his daughter promptly retreated.
Ernest Hemingway had been in Cuba for the better part of the last year—“doing whatever it is he is doing,” Max wrote Evan Shipman. Papa was busy patrolling in his boat, searching for German submarines. This was important work, he said, and he could not write while the war was going on. Perkins wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt but knew there was more to it than that. Martha Gellhorn Hemingway had just sent Max a novel which Scribners was publishing, and she had spent the three years of their marriage traveling and writing powerful articles for Collier’s. “When we came home from the sea,” Hemingway’s youngest son, Gregory, recalled of that time, “Marty thought Papa would resume his writing. But he had other plans. ‘You’re the writer in the family now, Marty,’ he announced—and he meant it completely and wholeheartedly! ... Marty was flattered at first, then amazed, and finally disgusted. To help her career was fine, but for America’s foremost novelist to retire at forty-four [sic], two years after the completion of For Whom the Bell Tolls, was unthinkable—even for a pioneer women’s libber like Marty.” She wondered what had happened to the spirit in Ernest that had driven him to Spain some six years earlier. Already there were rumors that she and Ernest were estranged. While he moped around the Gulf Stream, she went to England to continue her war correspondence. In Ernest’s mind, she had turned her back on him. Hemingway wrote Perkins that he was “damned lonely” and “damned anxious to write again.”
Yet soon Hemingway, peevish, feeling unloved, erupted over a minor dispute concerning royalties for the reprinting of his books, and he came to believe that Charlie Scribner wanted to pick a fight with him. Hemingway said that was fine with him if Scribner thought old Papa was “insufficiently respectful” or more bother than he was worth. For a hotheaded moment, it appeared that his publishing relationship might follow the path of most of his others during the last decade. Gregory Hemingway said of his father, “He broke off with all the early friends who helped him: he split with Sherwood Anderson, he split with Gertrude Stein, he split with Scott Fitzgerald ... now his own Papa myth was getting too big for him to handle.” Even during the blossoming of Hemingway’s megalomania, however, Gregory recalled, “he never broke away from Perkins.” Max’s unwavering decency was the reason.
Hemingway said he would stay with Scribners on one condition. He demanded that Perkins never fight with him—“because you are my most trusted friend as well as my God damned publisher.” He pleaded with Perkins to realize that his inability to create was not because he had “run dry, become a rummy or a problem writer.” In fact, he wanted to write so much sometimes that it was “worse than being in jail not to have the time to do it.” He wished Perkins would believe that for one year he had literally not had the hours to put out a single word. He assured him that all this time he was gathering plenty to write about, so when he was ready, he would be able to invent out of what he had experienced and learned. He told Max it would take a while to “cool out,” as it always did, before he could get back to his work. Perkins never expressed any disbelief to Ernest, but he told a colleague, “I’m afraid Ernest’s believing his own legends about himself ... and that he might never be able to write truly again.”
By May, 1944, Hemingway realized that all his sub-chasing in the Gulf Stream was pointless. He decided to catch up with Martha and go see the war in Europe. He went to New York and visited Perkins, who found him looking well, sporting the magnificent gray beard he had raised for protection against the seafaring sun and wind. In June, as a correspondent for Collier’s, he reported from both sides of the English Channel, covering the D-Day invasion. Then he joined the Fourth Division and for weeks was near every action it took part in. If he got back alive, Hemingway promised Max, he would write Scribners a very valuable property, having hit “very fine pay dirt on this last prospecting trip.” The book, he said, would have “the sea and the air and the ground in it.” Hemingway also told Perkins that his recent activity had “cured” him of h
is wife. It was funny, he said, how it should take one war “to start a woman in your damn heart and another to finish her.”
Marcia Davenport once asked Toscanini how he endured an entire day of exhausting rehearsal. The maestro said he drew strength from the music of his composers. Max Perkins renewed himself from his authors, but Harold Stearns, James Boyd, and John Peale Bishop had recently died. He had been close to all of them. Max withdrew even more than ever. His privacy became a passion. In the early 1940s he received an increasing number of invitations to discuss publicly his role as an editor and he usually refused with a simple explanation: “An editor should strive for anonymity.” Now he was fervent about being left alone.
In the fall of 1943, one of Elizabeth Lemmon’s relatives thought of writing an article about Max Perkins for Town & Country. Perkins’s first instinct was to refuse to speak to him at all, but then he saw how Poyntz Tyler’s article in the small magazine might shield him from an even greater exposure. Max explained to Elizabeth that September:I hate to be written about at all. I wouldn’t dare say that to you if it were not true, for you know too much about me. I really have that passion for anonymity that Roosevelt talks about. What’s more, I think an editor ought to be anonymous. He should not be important, or known to be so, for the writers are the important ones in his life. But Mr. Tyler did point out what I myself had thought of—that if Town and Country had a piece, the New Yorker would not do a Profile. And a Profile has been hanging over my head like the Damoclesian sword for months. But I think it fell through.
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