This Day in Literary History (Hemingway, Critic Fight in Editor’s Office)

August 11,1937—Ernest  Hemingway, unexpectedly face to face with a critic who, he believed, had impugned his manhood four years before, slapped him, then ended up tangled on the floor of his editor’s office with his adversary.

The incident took place at Scribners’ publishing house, where the reviewer, Max Eastman, had been conferring with his and Hemingway’s editor, Maxwell Perkins.  The “editor of genius”—who was used to handling such talented, touchy souls as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Ring Lardner, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—was startled that his most successful author and the man who had made him wish to quit writing were in the same room. But he determined quickly to keep matters on an even keel.

Easier said than done.

There have been other incidents of fiction writers taking theiir bitterness out on critics physically (e.g., Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead, Rick Moody hitting Dale Peck in the face with a pie at a fundraiser, Stanley Crouch slapping Peck—twice—at a restaurant), but none matched Hemingway’s for the setting and the characters of the combatants.

The temptation to use this photograph of "Papa" in trunks was irresistible. His pugnacity became part and parcel of his Byronic legend. Sometimes, it could take endearingly comical form ("I started out very quiet, and I beat Mr. Turgenev"). Other times, it underscored the silly pride and code of machismo that interfered with people's appreciation of his work. In other instances, his willingness to go to, in one form or other, scrap with others had real consequences for his relationships with friends. (See my prior post on how Hemingway blamed Fitzgerald for not keeping proper time in a 1929 loss he suffered at the hands of Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan.)

Eastman, 16 years Hemingway’s senior, befriended the young reporter in 1922, and became even friendlier with him several years later, as the rising star of the "Lost Generation" of writers was turning for good away from journalism to fiction. In 1933, however, a breach in their friendly relations formed when Eastman belatedly reviewed Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon for The New Republic. Already predisposed against bullfighting, the subject of that book, Eastman was also surprised by the revelation of his friend’s character in that “treatise in sentimental praise” of the sport.

The title of the review, “Bull in the Afternoon,” suggested a sarcastic spin, at some variance with the admiration Eastman frequently expressed for the younger writer. But the title probably reinforced the bad impression left by the following:

“It is of course a commonplace that anyone who too much protests his manhood lacks the serene confidence that he is made out of iron. Most of us too delicately organized babies who grow up to be artists suffer at times from that small inward doubt. But some circumstance seems to have laid upon Hemingway a continual sense of the obligation to put forth evidences of red-blooded masculinity.”

Eastman also had become alarmed by the way that the style that had impressed him originally in Hemingway’s short stories—“so rank with the savor of brute fact, so concise, so complete”—had spawned a whole group of imitators: “a literary style, you might say, of wearing false hair on the chest.”

The veteran editor and writer thought he had made plain that the trauma of war, which made Hemingway “scared to death” under fire, led the novelist to “overcorrect this trait.” But that wasn’t the inference that Hemingway, or many of his friends, drew from the piece. Instead, they—and, more to the point, Hemingway himself—thought there was a suggestion that he was not genitally well-endowed.

Eastman, though impolitic, had been right about one thing: Hemingway was preoccupied by the threat to masculinity, from the beginning of his career to his end. You could argue that The Sun Also Rises and “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” featuring protagonists unable to conceive, symbolized the novelist’s maimed post-WWI generation.

But there was no such possibility in his posthumous memoir, A Movable Feast, in which, according to Hemingway, a deeply troubled Scott Fitzgerald related a complaint from wife Zelda that “the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally.” The denouement of that scene –Hemingway leads his friend to a bathroom, carefully examines him, and reassures him that there is no problem with how he is “built”--has a major problem: there were only two witnesses to the event--one (Fitzgerald) dead, the other having alienated him nearly 30 years before.

Too many incidents, extensively documented by biographers and other memoirists, leaves the inescapable conclusion that the man who constantly reminded himself to "write the truest sentence you know” was a fabulist who concocted entire untrue chapters of books. This was the man whose particular preoccupation Eastman had unwittingly brought to the surface.

Hemingway, not pleased at all by what he saw as Eastman’s insinuation about "some circumstance," reacted in an over-the-top manner in a 1933 letter to Perkins: “I am tempted never to publish another damned thing.” Then his mood turned from self-pity to fantasies of bullying violence: “And it is a commonplace that I lack confidence that I am a man — what shit. … Whenever and wherever I meet any one of them their mouths will make a funny noise when they ever try to say it again after I get through working over them.”

Now, Hemingway vented on Eastman in particular, “a groper in sex … a traitor in politics.” (Ironically, Eastman—a backer of radical politics in WWI, when he edited The Masses and Liberator—was now not only turning against Soviet Communism as practiced by Stalin but even reconsidering the more benign political form of Socialism, while Hemingway was engaged increasingly with helping the left-wing regime in the Spanish Civil War). He promised to break the jaw of Eastman, 16 years his senior, the next time they met.

Hemingway’s encounter with Eastman four years later came against this background of deep resentment. But other factors also contributed to this particularly explosive situation.

First, the fracas occurred in a period when, for various reasons, the novelist alienated one friend after another—people dating back to his days in Paris, such as Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish and his wife, John Dos Passos and his wife, Gerald and Sara Murphy. So many of these friendships, noted Paul Hendrickson in his perceptive study, Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961, "would never be the same after the 1930s."

Often, the unraveling came in the form of things spoken or written by Hemingway far more hurtful than anything Eastman might have expressed.  

Second, the novelist really shouldn’t have been in New York at all. Of all the accounts of the incident I've come across, Michael Reynolds' Hemingway: The 1930s is the only one that has noted a particular conjunction of events: Hemingway was in the city with his mistress, Martha Gellhorn, preparing to fly back to the Spanish Civil War. Already high-strung over the lies needed to prop up his crumbling second marriage, he entered Perkins’ office only to find Eastman there.

After a perfunctory shaking of the hands, Hemingway bared his chest, asking “Is that false hair?” He then opened Eastman’s shirt to reveal the older man’s considerably less hairy one. The gentlemanly Perkins, trying to keep things light, then exposed his own.

Then, Hemingway to Eastman: “Look here, what did you say I was sexually impotent for?”

Eastman denied any such intention. The two took to arguing over the particular passage when Hemingway took the open book and pushed it in Eastman’s face.

Eastman, wrestling rather than punching Hemingway, ended up on the floor with him before Perkins was able to separate them. After some more words, Hemingway stalked out.

Predictably, the melee got into the newspapers three days later. Hemingway, on his way to Europe, told a New York Times reporter that his friend-turned-adversary “didn't throw anybody anywhere. He jumped at me like a woman, clawing.... I just held him off. I didn't want to hurt him."  He concluded with an offer to Eastman to meet him “in a closed room where no one can interfere,” and an offer to pay $1,000 to go to Eastman’s favorite charity or defray his medical expenses.

His last comment before striding up the gangplank was an offer to go into any room Eastman wanted, "and he can read his book to me.... The best man will unlock the door."

Eastman’s version, predictably, was different (“Tell Hemingway I fight when I’m attacked—either by a natural-born ruffian, or a self-made one.”)

Years later, Eastman left two different reminiscences of the man whose wrath he had provoked. Both recount essentially the same facts about the fight in Perkins’ office, but they end on far different notes. The chapter on Hemingway in Great Companions, published in 1959, concludes with a 1946 chance encounter between the two men in Havana that ended up in an unanticipated friendly conversation over drinks.

Five years later, his longer, career-length memoir, Love and Revolution, included dark speculations from two (unnamed) doctors that Hemingway’s “rapid shifts between smiling friendliness and explosive hostility” were occasioned by “alcoholic degeneration” or “alcoholic psychosis.”  

Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, surprisingly enough, had led Eastman to be less forgiving of his friend’s boorish behavior and more clinically judgmental. Hemingway's focus in the 1930s, however, had shifted in ways that would make readers of his time and ours uncomfortable. Far too many readers would come to agree with John Irving's recent carping about Papa's "macho crap." (For an effective rejoinder--and sharp analysis of Irving's own fiction--see this post from "Bark: A Blog of Literature, Culture, and Art.") It was all unnecessary, and all too tragically indicative of the forces that would eventually tear Hemingway apart.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Writing “Too Much of Everything”)

“I know I write too much of everything. The thing I am going to learn some day is that you might write one of the best things you ever put on paper, but it doesn’t necessarily belong in the book at hand. I am going to learn, though. I’ll work hard and I know I can do it.”—Thomas Wolfe quoted in “Brevity to be Goal of Thomas Wolfe,” The New York Times, July 5, 1935, in Thomas Wolfe Interviewed, 1929-1938, edited by Aldo P. Magi and Richard Walser (1985)

Thomas Wolfe, boisterous, needy man-child, overflowing with creative fecundity, had little time left to master the kind of Jamesian control over his material of which he was speaking here. Another 3½ years and he’d be dead, leaving behind another three books to be hewn from the mass he left behind for his second, final editor, Edward C. Aswell.

Truth be told, the kind of self-consciousness he was promising as he stepped off the boat from a trip to Europe wasn’t always everything it was cracked up to be. All that endless mulling and shaping of materials could leave aridity to one’s work—something that Marion (Clover) Adams, clever, suicidal wife of historian Henry Adams, noted when she observed, about the work of her husband’s friend, Henry James: “He’s chewed much more than he’s bitten off.”

That kind of self-control also implied the ability to sit still—and it was growing ever more obvious that the gargantuan, experience-hungry Wolfe didn’t possess this gene, either. Nevertheless, on the day before the above quote appeared in The New York Times, questions about his self-discipline were becoming increasingly constant, and eventually they would drive a wedge between himself and the man who met him on the dock that Fourth of July when he came back from a triumphant trip abroad, his first editor, mentor and friend, Maxwell Perkins.

Wolfe had become a kind of surrogate son for Perkins, father of five daughters, as the Scribners editor shaped the manuscripts of the hulking Southerner’s first two sprawling novels, Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, into print. The novelist had frankly acknowledged his debt in a nonfiction account of his writing process, The Story of a Novel, as well as three months ago in his dedication of the just-published Of Time and the River. (See my prior post on Wolfe, Fitzgerald and Hemingway—the trio that Fitzgerald called Max’s “sons”—and their competition for his attention and approval.)

But now the whispers were growing louder about how much Wolfe was a creature of his editor. Before long, critic Bernard De Voto would bring these concerns to a fever pitch—and damage Wolfe’s reputation so much that it never fully recovered—in “Genius Is Not Enough.”

The German intelligentsia hadn’t minded Wolfe’s headlong romantic spirit. This, after all, was the country that had practically invented Romanticism, and the writers Wolfe met there embraced him eagerly. He exulted to Perkins about having awoken one morning, Byron-like, to find himself “famous in Berlin.”

Guided through Berlin by the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany, Wolfe’s sojourn was a triumph. Biographer Andrew Turnbull wrote a glittering description of this American giant in a nation otherwise increasingly fearful about exercising its own creative energies:

“The might and music of his personality exalted everyone he met; striding the streets with head aloft and his body full of lumbering rhythm, he personified the freedom and promise of America. For the first time since Hitler’s rise to power the Romanische Café, a former gathering place of artists and intellectuals, showed signs of life.”

Try as you might, you can’t really understate Wolfe’s puppy-like yearning for adulation or naivete. At the same time, we need to give him some credit—no matter how much he hated to notice faults in a country that paid no attention to his biggest creative limitation, he had, by the end of his sojourn in Germany, begun to be alarmed by that nation’s anti-Semitism, which was so virulent that it exceeded his own. It all manifested itself, insidiously, in "the solid, liquid smack of booted feet, and young brown faces shaded under steel goose-stepping beneath the green arcades of the Kurfurstendamm, the army lorries rolling past, each crowded with regimented rows of young, formal, helmeted, armfolded, ramrodded bodies.”

Wolfe, let it be said, did not become blind to a country that had lionized him, as Charles Lindbergh was about to do with Hitler’s Germany, or willfully uncurious about why intellectuals he had befriended were suddenly disappearing, as Paul Robeson would react when faced with the toll of Stalin’s purges. Two years later, his short story “I Have a Thing to Tell You” would make unmistakably clear his break from the country he loved more than any other next to his own.

The novelist might have been talking about artistic self-control when he vowed “I am going to learn” when he stepped off the boat, but he did, in fact, learn something along the way before he died: not to allow ego or ideology to cloud his vision of the world before his eyes.

This Day in Literary History (Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise” Published)

March 26, 1920—This Side of Paradise, the first novel of 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald, was published by Scribners, garnering strong sales and acclaim for the author as the voice of a generation.

As a more world-weary Fitzgerald xplained in his 1937 essay “Early Success” (posthumously collected in The Crack-Up), his publisher had chuckled at the rookie author's expectation that the book’s sales would not exceed 20,000. Five thousand, he was quickly set straight, would be great for a first-time novelist. “I think it was a week after publication that it passed the twenty thousand mark,” Fitzgerald observed drily.

Let’s stipulate this up front: This Side of Paradise is not The Great Gatsby. But every author has to start somewhere (Shakespeare, after all, had Titus Andronicus), and the novel did give Fitzgerald a perspective that he never really lost, despite the epic battle with alcohol he was about to wage: that of a disciplined, professional author.

Even on its own merits, This Side of Paradise doesn’t lack for distinction. It would take hard experience and an obsession with aesthetics that began to take hold (though still fitfully) with the creation of The Beautiful and Damned, but even at this point Fitzgerald was demonstrating that he was incapable of writing a bad sentence.

In this novel and his two subsequent short-story collections, Flappers and Philosophers and Tales of the Jazz Age, he was already showing, according to the late novelist-critic Thomas Flanagan, an “uncanny ability to evoke atmosphere, moods, energies, through his deployment of sounds, colors, lights, shadows.”

From a cultural perspective, the novel might have been significant in another way: I can’t think of an earlier American work of fiction that became famous precisely for its picture of the younger generation. Before this, the public had not cared particularly how youth thought or behaved. After the Great Crash, it would take another two decades—until, I’d say, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye—before serious attention began to be paid to young people again.

Why the attention in the Twenties? The youth who came of age after World War I were different. The automobile gave them unprecedented freedom from their elders, including in sexual matters. Furthering their radical estrangement from traditional mores, the war disabused them of all notions of military glory, and Prohibition was creating a nation of lawbreakers.

Fitzgerald’s alienation took an additional form: the collapse of his Roman Catholic faith. The 1919 death of spiritual mentor and surrogate father Fr. Sigourney Fay, an Episcopal convert who had, for a time, heavily influenced the novelist, severed his last connection with the faith of his ancestors.

(Incidentally, Fr. Fay—who inspired the novel’s worldly Monsignor Darcy—also led a young, tall actress to choose a first name that would mark her as distinctive. We know Susan Weaver these days better as Sigourney Weaver.)

Any notion of becoming the voice of “The Jazz Age” was way beyond Fitzgerald (who, it should be noted, like future frenemy Ernest Hemingway, actually preferred classical music) as he wrote furiously in the summer of 1919 in his hometown of St. Paul, Minn. He was just a young guy who wanted to write—and to win the hand of a young Southern beauty he had fallen in love with but was in danger of losing because he didn’t have enough money.

A half-dozen years ago, I toured St. Paul, soaking in the atmosphere in which Fitzgerald grew up. In his childhood, the financial travails of Fitzgerald’s parents, Edward and Mollie Fitzgerald, took them to several residences. These homes remain privately owned, and the city does not have a Fitzgerald museum. (One residence, however—the apartment building at 599 Summit Avenue where Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise—made the National Register of Historic Places.)

Even without a museum, however, a half-day’s walk will take you through Fitzgerald’s childhood and early adult haunts around beautiful Summit Avenue and its network of side streets just below the Cathedral of St. Paul, in a neighborhood known as Ramsey Hill.

The gracious homes on this sweeping boulevard and its environs--one of the best-preserved Victorian neighborhoods in America--still attract St. Paul’s most famous citizens, including Garrison Keillor, who broadcasts his radio show A Prairie Home Companion out of a restored theater renamed in the novelist’s honor.

It is estimated that there were more than 100 structures in St. Paul associated with Fitzgerald, mostly in a 12-square-block area. Remarkably, approximately 80 still exist.

While Scott attended Princeton, Edward and Mollie relocated to 593 Summit Avenue, part of a brick rowhouse built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. Four years later, in 1918, they moved again, to the 599 unit on Summit.

Here Scott repaired in July 1919, at the end of a series of failures or anti-climaxes: dropping out of Princeton because of poor grades; an Army stint in WWI in which he never saw combat or even went overseas; a New York advertising job that he loathed; rejection by Scribners of his first attempt at a novel, The Romantic Egotist; the breakup of his engagement to southern belle Zelda Sayre, because she feared he couldn’t support her; and a week-long bender over this romantic failure. “I was in love with a whirlwind,” he later wrote, “so when the girl threw me over, I went home and finished my novel.”

Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, though rejecting The Romantic Egotist, had given Fitzgerald hope that it could be salvaged. In his parents’ “house below the average on a street above the average,” Fitzgerald, looking to stake his claim as a writer, worked tirelessly for the next three months.

When particularly consumed by his work, he’d use a speaking tube outside his room and order meals to be brought up. Onlookers gazing up at Fitzgerald’s guest room on the third floor would have seen the shadows of paper pinned to his curtains and walls – evidence of heavy revisions to his work.

And then…Success.

After he received Maxwell Perkins’ letter accepting This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald ran up and down the street, stopping cars to tell everyone. “That week the postman rang and rang,” Fitzgerald wrote, “and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning into a world of ineffable topflightiness and promise.”

Success brought him Zelda. Within two weeks after publication of This Side of Paradise, the two were married in the rectory of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

Ahead of them lay a celebrity so luminous that a Hollywood producer suggested that they should play their fictional counterparts from This Side of Paradise, Amory Blaine and Rosalind Connage, in a film version that never came to be. Also ahead, of course, were a nomadic existence, marked by a double tragedy that neither headstrong, lovestruck youth could anticipate.

Quote of the Day (Ernest Hemingway, on a Disastrous Boxing Match)

“Knew I would be asleep by 5—so went around with Scott [Fitzgerald] to get Morley [Callaghan] to box right away—I couldnt [sic] see him hardly—had a couple of whiskey’s enroute—Scott was to keep time and we were to box 1 minute rounds with 2 minute rests on acct. of my condition…Morley commenced to pop me and cut my mouth, mushed up my face in general—I was pooped as could be…Can still feel with my tongue the big scar on my lower lip…I slipped and went down once and lit on my arm and put my left shoulder out in the first round and it pulled a tendon so that it was pretty sore afterwards.”—Ernest Hemingway, letter to his Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, August 28, 1929, in The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins: Correspondence 1925-1947, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with the assistance of Robert W. Trogdon (1996)

A good deal more was injured than Ernest Hemingway’s left shoulder and lip in this incident, one of the most famous non-professional boxing matches of all time, at the American Club in Paris, a month before the account to Perkins. His pride also suffered a blow. The macho writer, a pugilist far more enthusiastic than skilled, hated the idea of losing, let alone losing badly, let alone losing badly to another amateur with a somewhat pudgy physique.

Instead of blaming his insufficient skills, or even his stupidity in drinking when he needed his reflexes, Papa blamed F. Scott Fitzgerald for not keeping proper time.

I’m not sure about the data of the photo accompanying this post, but my guess is that it was some years later than Hemingway’s now-legendary bout with 26-year-old Canadian expatriate writer Morley Callaghan. Hemingway himself had just turned 30. Gray would not have seeped into his beard at this point, nor would his weight have become so problematic. (By the time he liberated the Ritz Bar 15 years later, Hemingway weighed 250 pounds on his six-foot frame.)

The future Nobel laureate was always testing himself against somebody else. If he was writing a war novel, it was against Tolstoy. If it involved boxing, it would be whoever was at hand. He almost come to blows with Budd Schulberg a decade later after challenging him with, “What makes you think you know so much about prizefighting?”

Underlying tensions among Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Callaghan were brought to the surface by this match. Their friendships would never be the same.

Hemingway and Callaghan had become pals when they were correspondents for the Toronto Daily Star. This wasn’t the first time they’d fought, nor even the first time Callaghan had made him bleed—which should have taught Hemingway to be careful. Hemingway had become internationally known with his novels and short stories a mere three years before, but now the younger Callaghan was receiving attention. In other words, Hemingway had a rival.

The relationship between Hemingway and Fitzgerald was, by this time, even more fraught than that between Hemingway and Callaghan. When they first met, Fitzgerald was the older, more successful writer, and he lent Hemingway money and some excellent advice on The Sun Also Rises.

But Hemingway was surpassing Fitzgerald and had begun to view his friend cynically. Zelda Fitzgerald and Hemingway formed a mutual hatred society. Nor did it help that another in their expatriate circle, gay author Robert McAlpon, had spread a false rumor that the two men were lovers.

Fitzgerald made the mistake of agreeing to become the timekeeper in the match. He became so enthralled by the action that he forgot the prescribed limit, letting the round in which Hemingway was KAO’d go longer. “Oh my God!’ he cried out after Hemingway went down. “I let the round go four minutes!’

“Alright Scott,” Ernest said. ‘If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don’t say you made a mistake.”

It’s almost comical, this notion of a literary version of the Dempsey-Tunney “long count” fight, isn’t it? Only the results for the friendships turned out not so funny. The grievous blow to Hemingway’s pride was worsened when somehow the incident made it into the newspapers. Fitzgerald quarreled with Callaghan and, worst of all, Hemingway now had it in for Fitzgerald.

Really, that’s the only thing you can conclude after reading Papa’s A Moveable Feast. I didn’t think it possible that the highly effective malice on display in the originally published version of the memoir could be exceeded, but it appears to be now in the new version of the book.

Yes, yes—Hemingway allowed that Fitzgerald was a fine writer. But he also included an anecdote that 99 people out of 100 who’ve read the book will remember—i.e., Fitzgerald’s fear (pushed by Zelda) that he wasn’t—well, well-equipped.

The new account of the Hemingway-Fitzgerald friendship includes this conversation between Papa and son John, or “Bumby”:

“Monsieur Fitzgerald is sick Papa?”

“He is sick because he drinks too much and he cannot work.”

“Does he not respect his métier?”

“Madame his wife does not respect it or she is envious of it.”

“He should scold her.”

“It is not so simple.”

The beauty of this conversation is that Bumby, at only about five or six years old, would probably be too young to remember it years later—or, more important, dispute its truthfulness.

Hemingway did not write about the Callaghan bout in A Moveable Feast. The Canadian did, however, in his memoir, That Summer in Paris (1963). In old age, he was annoyed at the amount of attention this incident received at the expense of his work. “I want to be remembered for some story I wrote, not for this nonsense,” Callaghan said, in a clip included in the CBC documentary, The Life and Times of Morley Callaghan.

Hemingway should have kept away from boxing and literary assassination and stuck to fiction. There he really was a champ, as he was about to prove again with the novel he was proofreading at the time of his encounter with Callaghan: A Farewell to Arms.

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.”