To everyone’s surprise, when Max returned from his rest he said his recent exhaustion had made him resolve to take a real vacation. He decided to take more time off in October and go visit his daughter Peggy in Alliance, Ohio. Her husband had bought two saddle horses that needed exercising. “That’s something I’d like to attend to,” Max wrote Mrs. Rawlings, “—the first idea of a vacation that has interested me for many years.” By October, however, Max was afflicted with another ailment—eczema, which spread up from an ankle over much of his body and kept him from getting around. Again doctors told him he was run-down. “I am absolutely well,” Max protested, though he admitted, again to Marjorie Rawlings, “I keep getting worse, and worse, and worse.” He remembered Arthur Train’s once telling him, “Never change your habits.” Now he swore that changing his ways for some doctor had brought on this illness. He canceled his vacation plans and went back to working, eating, and drinking as he always had, resuming the rate of four or five martinis a day.
In spring 1944 Scribners published a novel by Taylor Caldwell, The Final Hour, which gave a picture of the room in which Max was playing out his life. One of its characters was a gray-haired, frosty-blue-eyed descendant of New England Puritans named Cornell T. Hawkins, an editor who was seldom without his weathered hat. In depicting his office Miss Caldwell exactly described Max’s own:Here was no pretense, no thick rugs and fine furniture to impress the vulgar. Heaps of manuscripts lay on the splintered desk, overflowing ash-trays, disorderly piles of letters, scattered pens and pencils. The floor was grimy and discolored. Chairs with squeaking legs were thrust back against the mildewed walls. Yet, out of this disorder, this untidiness and indifference to elegance, had come some of the world’s finest and noblest literature. There was an air about this man, in this casual room filled with stark sunlight, of greatness and simplicity. One knew instinctively that the veriest tyro of a frightened author would be accorded the same courtesy and consideration as the most gilded and popular writers who could boast ten or twenty “large printings.”
Perkins was amused by this portrayal of the editor’s milieu but feared the sordid details would frighten authors away. He commissioned Miss Wyckoff to oversee a general renovation. Even after it, the office was hardly elegant, just neat enough to make Max uncomfortable. He told Malcolm Cowley, “I was lucky to get off without a carpet on the floor.”
By the mid-forties, World War II dominated America’s reading. In 1944, for example, seven of the nation’s ten most widely read nonfiction selections were war books, from Bob Hope’s amusing front-line chronicles to Ernie Pyle’s war reportage. They sold by the hundreds of thousands, but publishing was also affected adversely by the war. There were shortages of paper, for example, that made it very hard to keep books in stock. To make sure there was paper for the best sellers—the books that paid the rent—Perkins had to cut back on less commercial books, and he found himself saying to some authors what he had been obliged to say to Scott Fitzgerald twenty-five years earlier regarding The Romantic Egotist, that Scribners could not undertake any new ventures. That hurt. Perkins was already depressed about the state of publishing. The values of the culture were changing, and works of pure literature seemed unwelcome. A new world of materialism and expediency seemed to be corrupting serious book people. “I wish all this were over, and that there would be a quiet life again,” Perkins wrote Hemingway early in 1945.
But I know there never will be, and that what seemed to be was illusory. I even thought after the other war that things would get that way, and I thought you would, for instance, just live quietly somewhere, and fish and shoot and write.—But that became impossible, and I suppose it may always be so.
When Hemingway returned from Europe, he stopped in to see Max and then went on to the Finca Vigia in Cuba. He soon began to send Max letters stating how hard it would be now for him to write a fine book; it got tougher every time, he explained. In the old days Max would have gently exhorted Ernest to get back to his typewriter. Now he was uninspiring, indulgent. “I think you ought to take it easy ... ,” he wrote. “Get out into that old Gulf Stream where things always seem to be right—not necessarily for you yourself, but in the big way.”
But if Max’s vitality and hope were ebbing, his reputation was not. He was well known to everyone who wanted to write, and unpublished authors continued to think of him as a miracle worker. When turned down, some writers thumbed through You Can’t Go Home Again to find which traits of “Foxhall Edwards” had kept Maxwell Perkins from responding to their work. The rejected often harassed him for explanations, and it was not uncommon for Perkins to spend entire days answering them.
There was one woman in particular, an aspiring author whose novel had been declined, who railed at Perkins in a number of letters, each more inflammatory than the last. She felt she had been spurned because of her politics, that her ultraliberalism, as expressed in her book, had conflicted with Max’s conservative beliefs. She complained that Max was depriving her of her right to give the world her message. She attacked him as arbitrary, a man so blinded by his prejudices that he had become an irresponsible publisher. For two years she maintained a running assault on Perkins.
Max thought the woman’s manuscript had some merit, despite certain serious defects in her mastery of the English language. He kept on replying, at first out of politeness, then for the sake of justice, finally in sympathy. His many letters articulated an informal credo for publishing in America and conveyed his editorial criteria.
The ideal of publishing would be a forum where all sections of humanity could have their say, whether their object was to instruct, entertain, horrify, etc. Nevertheless, there are certain rules of quality and relevance, which can only be determined by some sort of selection and this the publisher, representing humanity at large, attempts—with many mistakes—to make. Or, to put it differently, artists, saints, and the other more sentient representatives of the human race are, as it were, on the frontiers of time—pioneers and guides to the future. And the publisher, in the capacity mentioned, must make some sort of estimate of the importance and validity of their reports, and there is nothing he can base this on but the abilities to judge that God has given him.
The woman accused Perkins of being afraid to publish her work for fear of public reprisal. But Perkins knew he was not a censor. He pointed out that Scribners had published Ben Hecht’s attack on anti-Semitism, A Guide for the Bedevilled, and Beatrice and Sidney Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.
At one point in the debate, fed up with the woman’s continuing vituperation, Perkins stated: “Our correspondence is futile and had better be ended.” The furious author asked Perkins just who he thought he was. Max took the question literally. “I am,” he said in a letter dated May 19, 1944, “or at least should be if I fulfilled myself, John Smith, U.S.A.” He went on to develop his view of himself in some detail:He is the man who doesn’t know much, nor thinks that he knows much. He starts out with certain ambitions but he gradually accumulates obligations as he goes along, and they continually increase. They begin with his inherited family, and grow with the family that results from his marriage, and further increase with his associates, and those whom he represents. He soon finds that about all he can do, and that not too well, is to fulfill those obligations. He knows that he is a failure, and is bound to be, because he is not in the confidence of God, like some, and does not know God’s plan. He does know what he has undertaken to do, and he hopes to Heaven that he will manage, to some considerable extent, to do it. That’s what he is serious about, for he can’t, in view of his observation of the rest of the world, be very sure about himself, or think that his fate is a matter of moment. He can accept the kiss of death too, as long as he doesn’t let himself in for it by his own negligence, which would mean the betrayal of others.
John Smith, U.S.A. is always aware of the fact that he may be, and probably is, wrong. That is tolerance. He simply does his simple best in the world and hopes to God tha
t he will never let anybody down or betray any principle in which he believes.
For Perkins, then, the path of aspiration that had started in Paradise had darkened before his great objectives could be reached. He knew it, yet he carried on, maintaining a convincing impression of steadiness even as personal disappointments and professional pressures increased. There was no Gulf Stream for Perkins to glide off in, just a multiplying burden of anxieties. His authors’ plights, laid upon him, became more horrific, often macabre: One wanted Perkins’s counsel regarding her daughter who was having a breakdown; another sent him glimpses from her own traumatic childhood—true Gothic tales of being forced to dig up a dead sister’s corpse and dress her in doll’s clothes. There were distant relatives who had to borrow money or were seeking jobs, marriage problems of inlaws, women’s clubs campaigning against smut in literature, ethnic and political groups protesting certain characterizations, young people constantly seeking advice on becoming published writers, more family war casualties, authors whose books demonstrated that the earth was round but that we lived inside of it, or who had written five-volume novels entitled God. Through it all he kept his head while all about him were losing theirs.
Once again, only Elizabeth Lemmon knew. In May, 1945, she sent him several letters Tom Wolfe had written her, thinking Max might want them for an anthology of Wolfe’s letters that Scribners was compiling. Max replied: “I myself would have written you often, except that unlike Tom I cannot write letters when I am in despair. I have got myself into too many things outside of my work here, and I really should have avoided them.” Perkins said his susceptibility to entanglements stemmed from that resolution he had made on the brink of manhood, the day he almost let Tom McClary drown—“never to refuse a responsibility.”
“I did not do this formally,” Max told Elizabeth, “but I know just when I did it, half-unconsciously, and it got to be like an obsession of General Grant’s which made it impossible for him ever to retrace his steps, and so he did get into Richmond in the end.”
XXII
A Toss of the Hat
James Jones of Robinson, Illinois, enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1939, transferred to the infantry, rose to the rank of sergeant, and was twice busted to private. He was stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii when he discovered the writing of Thomas Wolfe. Jones found a number of parallels between his family and the fictitious Gants. “[Wolfe‘s] home life seemed so similar to my own and his feeling about himself so similar to mine about myself,” Jones later recalled, “that I realized I had been a writer all my life without knowing it or having written. Once I made up my mind, it seemed inevitable, something that fate had directed ever since my birth.” In 1944, having been awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, he was honorably discharged and set out upon his writing career.
By February, 1945, Jones, now living in New York, had a finished draft of a very Wolfean novel called They Shall Inherit the Laughter. The next step was obvious: He would take it himself to Charles Scribner’s Sons and the legendary Maxwell E. Perkins. He marched into Scribners, carrying a string-tied Eaton Bond box containing his manuscript, and went to the fifth floor. There an elderly receptionist brought him to a halt. She told him that Mr. Perkins was not in the office but if the manuscript was left with her, it would get a proper reading. Jones said if Maxwell Perkins was not there, he would just leave with his manuscript. The woman disappeared briefly, then reported that Mr. Perkins had just returned to his office through a rear door. She took Jones back to meet him. It was not until a long time later that Jones realized there was no rear door.
The short, stocky twenty-four-year-old entered Perkins’s office expecting to see the face that Wolfe had described in his portrait of Foxhall Edwards. It was quickly apparent to him that Wolfe had exaggerated. Jones found Perkins’s features much more subtle—except for the smile. “That,” he said years afterward, “was as sly as the Fox’s.”
Immediately Perkins steered the conversation to the young man’s army service. They soon were deeply involved in a discussion of the war, and the novel was set aside before Jones had even described it. As their conference on military matters continued, it got late and the staff went home. At last Perkins rose, tugged his hat down over his ears, and led the author to the Ritz Bar for tea.
Perkins did not read the manuscript that night. Instead he gave it next day to two other editors at Scribners, both of whom found it thinly plotted. Perkins was about to decline it on Scribners’ behalf when, impelled by his favorable impression of the author, he browsed through it himself. He found a good deal to admire. “It is a serious attempt to do a big piece of work and the author has the temperament and the emotional projection of a writer,” Perkins wrote the agent Maxwell Aley, who had taken the author under his wing after Perkins had met Jones. “We do not feel however that They Shall Inherit the Laughter quite comes off as a novel, nor does it turn out to be anything for which we could make you an offer.”
Jones, undeterred, devoted most of 1945 to reshaping the novel, then resubmitted his manuscript to Perkins the following January. “I have a number of plans I’m champing to get into action, and all of them hinge on this book,” he explained to Perkins this second time around, sounding much like Fitzgerald in 1919, “whether it is accepted or rejected, whether you will consider that it needs more work (personally, I’m sure it doesn’t but it’s just possible my judgment may be biased) and of course the money angle, how large an advance and how soon. I’m stony broke right now.” While waiting for Max’s reply, he went off to hitch-hike around the country.
Perkins took as much interest in the ideas Jones described in his letter as in the revised manuscript. Among other things, Jones wanted to start another book about the peacetime army just before Pearl Harbor. The type of man he wished to portray in this second novel was somewhat like the reprehensible Flagg or Quirt in What Price Glory?, Maxwell Anderson’s and Laurence Stallings’s drama of World War I. As Jones explained: “Enlisted men spent their entire time in the army pissed off at the officers. And in my army, regimented as it was, men like Quirt and Flagg were made officers again. That class distinction infuriated me, and that was what I wanted to fight in my book.”
In February, 1946, one month after Scribners had received the revised version of They Shall Inherit the Laughter, Jones arrived at his hometown in Illinois. A telegram from Perkins was waiting for him at the home of friends, offering a $500 option on the newly proposed novel, with some further payment to be made after the first 50,000 words had been submitted. WISH TO COOPERATE, Perkins’s wire continued, BUT HAVE MORE FAITH IN SECOND NOVEL AND HAVE FURTHER REVISION TO PROPOSE FOR LAUGHTER. Jones greeted the proposal with mixed emotions. “My vanity was hurt and I didn’t want to throw the first book away after all the work I had put into it,” he said. “But I knew the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe and how Max Perkins had taken chances and worked wonders with their first novels.” After a day or two of deliberation, he telegraphed back: PLACING MYSELF IN YOUR HANDS AND AWAITING LETTER HERE ... WIRE $500 ANY TIME.
Perkins was pleased with Jones’s decision. The new novel was to be the story of a young “go his own way” private named Prewitt coming into contact with First Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden. Perkins believed that Jones had chosen to portray a “perennial character,” and said: “It seemed to us from what you said, that you saw something truly important, and that you were right in your interpretation of the nature of that type of man, and that he had never been portrayed in a way to make him understandable.”
Jones balked at discarding his first manuscript but finally wrote Perkins:I trust your judgment from past knowledge of your work and your tremendous experience with such things that I don’t have. And I’m willing to ride along....
I think you probably know a lot more about it than I do, which is why I’m willing to lay it aside for Prewitt. As I said, I’m putting myself in your hands, not Scribners’ exactly, but you personally, because I have more faith in your
ability to see further and clearer than anybody I’ve met or heard of in the writing game.
Perkins was as eager as Jones was to present the book to the public. Max expected there would be a new postwar literary movement and he wanted to get Jones’s novel published before the new writers would start appearing and begin to crowd the field with second-rate works.
I don’t know that the form of the novel will change much [Perkins wrote Jones], but the spirit and the expression will. Some sense of direction will come in young men who are real writers, almost unconsciously, and as it does, they will formulate it.
Jones had half a dozen private meetings with his editor. “Perkins had an iron control,” he recalled. “From the steady way he walked, you could never tell that he was drunk.” Max seemed eager to instruct him in writing, using the curriculum he had devised over his decades of experience. Perkins’s first piece of advice came from Hemingway, the only survivor of his great triumvirate of the twenties: “Always stop while you are going good. Then when you resume you have the impetus of feeling that what you last did was good. Don’t wait until you are baffled and stumped.” During his first few months of work on the new novel, Jones found the suggestion invaluable.
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