This Day in Literary History (Max Perkins Lunches with “Sons” Fitzgerald and Wolfe)

July 7, 1934—What game was Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins (in the photo accompanying this post) playing when he went to lunch with his first major literary discovery—F. Scott Fitzgerald—along with a younger one with his own set of emotional issues, Thomas Wolfe?

On prior occasions when he met Fitzgerald, Wolfe evidently wondered the same thing. So I think the thought had to have crossed his mind again, given what was happening between him and Max.

The two of them had been going back and forth for the last several years over Of Time and the River, Wolfe’s follow-up to his acclaimed debut, Look Homeward, Angel. Now, at last, Perkins believed he had wrestled the behemoth manuscript into shape, and he wanted to ship it out to the printer fast, before Wolfe changed his mind.

Wolfe was reluctant to go along with the decision. He thought he could add something else. Fitzgerald listened, then—and I’m not sure at this point how many drinks, if any, he had had—offered unsolicited advice to the junior novelist: “You never cut anything out of a book you regret later."

Or, as a friend of mine from a past writers’ group said, quoting his college creative writing teacher: “Kill your darlings.”

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall during this conversation, wouldn’t you? I’m not necessarily talking about the brilliant conversation (if the trio were in their cups, how elevated could the talk get?), but even to get a look at their faces—Fitzgerald rolling his eyes over the big Southern boy, Wolfe doing a slow burn over this novelist, not doing a whole lot better than he was, offering his views and getting in the middle of his intense dealings with Perkins.

Four years after that lunch, Fitzgerald chuckled, in a letter to his long-suffering editor: “What a time you've had with your sons, Max -- Ernest gone to Spain, me gone to Hollywood, Tom Wolfe reverting to an artistic hill-billy.'' (Ernest, of course, was Scott’s frenemy, Ernest Hemingway.)

An epistolary collection edited by the indefatigable Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli with Judith S. Baughman, The Sons of Maxwell Perkins, lays out the relationship between the man dubbed the “editor of genius” by biographer A. Scott Berg and his three most famous authors. Perkins wanted these “sons” to be friends.

You can see why, in a sense: they could provide the mutual support network that creative types have always needed so badly, not to mention editorial advice. (Yes, he had the real say, but another pair of eyes never hurt.)

But if the Scribners author stable was a family, as Perkins desired, it was like a crowd of siblings at Thanksgiving.

Okay, let’s be more precise: it was less like a Waltons Thanksgiving in the Depression than like the bickering progeny of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the medieval times of The Lion in Winter, in which everyone engages in a battle of “He (or she) always loved you best!”

When the three acclaimed writers weren’t competing for readers and critical accolades, they were competing for the attention of poor Max.

The circumstances at this particular lunch were charged. Fitzgerald was feeling more raw and vulnerable than usual. The novel in which he had invested not only so much of his craft but so much of his heart, Tender is the Night, performed adequately for a Depression-era piece of fiction, but that wasn’t enough to help him reduce his mountain of debt.

The third “son,” Hemingway, didn’t make Fitzgerald feel any better with an exasperated letter about his labor of love. (“You see, Bo, you’re not a tragic character. Neither am I. All we are is writers and what we should do is write.”) So Fitzgerald, seldom disinclined to offer an opinion—and often, let it be said, generous when he did—felt he was entitled to school the junior author.
(I have to keep reminding myself, however, that though Fitzgerald was older, it wasn’t by that much—only four years. What widened the age gap, at least emotionally, was that a marriage, a child, and payments for his wife’s institutionalization had saddled Fitzgerald with a good deal more responsibility—not to mention debt—than Wolfe.)

The relationship between the two men—annoyance on one side, suspicion on the other—hadn’t always been this way. Five years before, after reading Look Homeward, Angel, Fitzgerald had been impressed enough that he wrote Perkins, “John [Peale] Bishop [a Princeton classmate and poet] told me that he [Wolfe] needed advice about cutting ect [sic], but after reading his book I thought that was nonsense. He strikes me as a man who should be let alone as to length, if he had to be published in five volumes.”

At some point, however, Fitzgerald had a change of heart. Maybe it was inevitable, given the difference between the two men in appearance, temperament and working methods.

At five-feet-six-inches, Fitzgerald was a bit undersize to achieve his college ambition—to star on the Princeton football team. He was delicate, almost feminine-looking, and when sober could be the soul of thoughtfulness and sensitivity. He scrutinized his own work relentlessly. In a fine essay in the Summer 2004 issue of Tin House (unfortunately, not linked on the Web), Susan Bell showed how, with a few hints from Perkins, Fitzgerald revised and amped up the already brilliant The Great Gatsby.

Even when sober, Wolfe could be a bear to handle with his emotional neediness. The major thing you noticed about him, inevitably, was his size. He was so large, Fitzgerald joked, that he once put out power lines in Switzerland with one of his gestures.

His manuscripts matched his height and bulk in ambition and quantity of pages. For Wolfe, writing at warp speed, revision meant less deleting or even substituting and more expanding. This put him at loggerheads with Perkins, he had to balance keeping his author happy with delivering a salable product for a firm that still possessed a somewhat stodgy, conservative reputation.

A meeting in Paris between the two in 1930 did not go well. Wolfe, highly sensitive to imputations of provincialism, could only take so much of Fitzgerald’s prep-school, Ivy League airs, confiding in a letter:

“I finally departed from his company at ten that night in the Ritz Bar where he was entirely surrounded by Princeton boys, all nineteen years old, all drunk, and all half-raw. He was carrying on a spirited conversation with them about why Joe Zinzendorff did not get taken into the Triple-Gazzaza Club. I heard one of the lads say 'Joe's a good boy, Scotty, but you know he's a fellow that ain't got much background.' — 1 thought it was time for Wolfe to depart, and I did.”

Worse, at the height of his paranoia, Wolfe wrote in his notebook a passage about an older man (Perkins) regarded as “brave and loyal,” who had disillusioned his protégé by putting him in touch with “a drunken and malicious fellow, who tried to injure and hurt his work in every way possible.” Fitzgerald’s ulterior motive, Wolfe concluded, was not friendship but simply scouting out the youngster on Perkins’ behalf.

Perhaps Wolfe was right—perhaps Perkins was up to something. Maybe, underneath his courtliness and generosity, Wolfe’s artistic “father” was using older “son” Fitzgerald to reinforce the message, Trust me. You’ll be better for it.

If you want to understand the dynamics of the relationship, consider another strapping young galoot who showed incredible stuff on his debut before resisting good advice. Yes, I’m talking about the New York Yankees’ gifted but erratic pitcher, Joba Chamberlain.

Here, the Bronx Bombers’ manager, Joe Girardi, fills the role of a Max Perkins with more bite (all for the big lad’s good, don’t you know!). And, just as Perkins used Fitzgerald to drill his message into the youngster, Girardi employs pitching coach Dave Eiland on the same mission with their raw-boned fireballer.

Three years after the 1934 luncheon, in an increasingly desperate situation of his own (plummeting sales were sending him to Hollywood), Fitzgerald still couldn’t resist offering more unsolicited advice to Wolfe, urging him in a letter about “your necessity to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you.” He urged the value of repression and held up Flaubert as a model of self-conscious craftsmanship: “So Mme Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with you.”

Wolfe was having none of it: “You say that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe will come along presently and put in. Well, don’t forget, Scott, that a great writer is not only a leaver-outer but also a putter-inner, and that Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dostoievsky were great putter-inners—greater putter-inners in fact, than taker-outers—and they will be remembered for what they put in—remembered, I venture to say, as long as Monsieur Flaubert will be remembered for what he left out.”

Wolfe continued to puzzle the older writer. Fitzgerald looked with consternation upon Wolfe’s decision to leave Scribners and Perkins. After Wolfe’s last novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, was published posthumously, Fitzgerald noted drily to daughter Scottie that Perkins must have had “mixed emotions” over his thinly disguised appearance as “Foxhall Edwards.”

(Strangely, Fitzgerald was silent about his own, briefer appearance in the book as “Hunt Conroy,” who is “very fixed in his assertion of what he calls ‘The Lost Generation.’”)

While allowing that Wolfe had “a fine inclusive mind” and could “write like a streak,” Fitzgerald finally showed his exasperation: “he did not have anything particular to say!”

Judging from the response of academe over the years, the critical establishment follows Fitzgerald’s lead on this. Wolfe can indeed be trying. And yet, I don’t think the argument ends there.

For one thing, Fitzgerald did not always practice what he preached. The Susan Bell article from Tin House showed a striking instance when Fitzgerald bulked up The Great Gatsby, much to the book’s improvement. Compare the following passage in the original manuscript submitted to Perkins:

“I was thirty—a decade of loneliness opened up suddenly before me and what had hovered between us was said at last in the pressure of a hand.

Now see how Fitzgerald recast it:

“Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, the thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.”

Wolfe, I think, was correct in one respect: A highly self-conscious style is not the only one for a writer. Leo Tolstoy would certainly not fall into the same school as Flaubert or Henry James, but Anna Karenina certainly lives as a book. He had an almost Wolfean ability to soak up details of character—and recapitulate it at startling length. His greatness lies in the fact that he, simply, a great storyteller.

Compared with Fitzgerald, Wolfe is not taught much in colleges. But in the end, his work can’t be dismissed. Fitzgerald knew it, too. In the end, he told his daughter, You Can’t Go Home Again “doesn’t commit the cardinal sin: it doesn’t fail to live.”