Everybody Behaves Badly

by Lesley M. M. Blume

  “It was the most genteel and the most tradition-encrusted of all the publishing houses that had survived from Victorian days,” as writer Malcolm Cowley put it. “No word unfit for a young girl’s ear could appear in a book that Scribner’s published.”

  It was an exaggerated assessment but not an entirely unfounded one. In the early days, Scribner’s had turned out religious publications: The Puritans and Their Principles was the first book to roll off the Scribner’s presses in 1846, and subsequent lists showcased the works of the more fashionable preachers of the day. Gradually Charles Scribner’s successors expanded into fiction and scored some enormously popular authors. Edith Wharton published her first work of fiction—The Greater Inclination—with the house in 1899 and remained one of its star writers. Her presence on the Scribner’s list indicated that despite the house’s puritanical roots, its editors did occasionally push the boundaries of convention. After all, Wharton was a divorcée who wrote about society scandal, adultery, and overdoses.

  But by the 1920s, even Wharton no longer felt particularly modern. Among the postwar generation, she and her contemporaries were deemed “dreary” and “weary,” as expat writer Kay Boyle put it. Wharton’s press photo—featuring the ballroom-ready author festooned with pearls, her hair in a tidy Victorian coif—told you everything you needed to know. “The most highly respected American authors of the past century were given no quarter,” Boyle added; Wharton was on that blacklist. For Boyle and her crowd of young writers, James Joyce was in; Henry James was out. Emily Dickinson was passé; William Carlos Williams was now. Sensibilities were shifting quickly.

  That decade, then, had laid a particular challenge at the feet of Maxwell Evarts Perkins and his more forward-looking colleagues. It was a tightrope challenge, which involved keeping traditionalist readers happy—Wharton still sold many thousands of books each year—while bringing in a new generation of authors, most of whom openly railed against anyone who carried the scent of Victoriana.

  At first glance, Max Perkins seemed an unlikely candidate to revolutionize a publishing house, much less to help usher in a new era of modern literature for mainstream readers.

  “Max was a combination of extreme gentleness and feminine sensitivity and craglike obstinacy and puritanical severity—a mixture of the Puritan and the Cavalier,” recalled his former Scribner’s colleague John Hall Wheelock.

  Like Charles Scribner’s Sons, Perkins’s background was marked by New England uprightness; his family—which at one point commanded fourteen pages in the Dictionary of American Biography—was stocked with notables from the realms of academia and public service. Born in New York in 1884, Perkins had gone to Harvard and joined the usual prestigious clubs. Understatement seemed his defining quality—that, and his distinctive way of speaking out of the side of his mouth, a tic peculiar even now to at least one of his descendants.

  Despite the grandeur of his clan and résumé, Perkins had given early signs that he was a man who was interested in all walks of life. After finishing Harvard, he took a job as a junior reporter at the New York Times; his stories at the paper revealed a predilection for zaniness and risk. For one story, he accompanied a race car driver on his quest to break a speed record. Flames and smoke shot out of the car at one point, giving Perkins plenty to write about. For another story, he volunteered to be tied to an electric chair at Sing Sing prison. As Hemingway’s reporting background gave him both material and style guidance for his stories, Perkins’s time as a journalist gave him a sense of ordinary people’s sensibilities; he understood the appetites of both the ivory tower and the street. Even if Perkins wasn’t a daredevil himself, he relished being a close-proximity observer, and was always ready to give extraordinary, even outlandish feats a platform.

  Eventually Perkins and his fiancée decided that he needed a somewhat saner existence. He first joined Charles Scribner’s Sons as the firm’s advertising manager—experience that would prove as invaluable as his Times adventure. If reporting taught Perkins how to identify a good story, this advertising savvy would help him discern a saleable one. Not only did he have “a great [editorial] instinct, like a musical ear, he had a commercial streak to him,” says Charles Scribner III. After a year in advertising, Perkins became a Scribner’s editor. For nearly a decade he lay low. But then an incident took place that revealed Perkins to be an agent of change.

  The Scribner’s editorial team held monthly meetings in which each editor would present a book that he wished to publish. Arguments of varying intensity would ensue; the final decision, of course, lay with Charles Scribner Sr. (“Old C.S.”) and his son, Charles Scribner Jr. One September afternoon in 1919, Perkins brought up a book that he wanted to publish. The firm had already rejected it twice, but Perkins had worked closely with its author on revisions and the manuscript was now ready to be reconsidered. It was a highly original work, Perkins thought. The book was titled This Side of Paradise and its author was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Instantly, Scribner’s was a house divided.

  “This Side of Paradise seems innocent enough today, but then it was the terrifying voice of a new age,” recalled writer Malcolm Cowley. One Scribner’s editor who had read an earlier incarnation of the manuscript “could not stomach it at all.” But another employee, who felt it had “serious flaws,” saw that it was “obviously an outstanding work, something belonging to a new order.”

  Charles Scribner Sr. remained among the unconvinced.

  “It’s frivolous,” he proclaimed in the meeting. “I will not have a frivolous book like that on my list.”

  Perkins had been standing behind him. Scribner looked up at him.

  “How do you feel about it?”

  Perkins was silent for a moment. Then, with characteristic quietness, he responded, “My feeling, Mr. Scribner, is that if we let a book like this go, we ought to close up and go out of the publishing business.”

  The comment upset Scribner. “What do you mean by that?” he demanded.

  Perkins replied that the firm simply could not go on publishing old guard authors such as Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Harding Davis, and Henry Van Dyke forever.

  “We’ve got to move on with the times,” he said.

  Scribner was reportedly impressed by this logic, and told Perkins that he would think it over. Ultimately he allowed Perkins to publish the book, provided that certain changes were made to the manuscript. And thus Perkins let the first of the modern “bad boys of letters into one of the citadels of Victorian publishing,” as Malcolm Cowley later put it.

  He soon lowered the drawbridge again for “bad boy” writer Ring Lardner, a friend and former Long Island neighbor of Fitzgerald’s. There was a kerfuffle in-house over Lardner’s 1924 book How to Write Short Stories, and yet another fight broke out over the acceptance of The Great Gatsby, which contained the scandalous phrase “son of a bitch” and other objectionable material. Perkins prevailed in both cases.

  But now a third prospective bad boy was coming his way—this time one with flagrantly modern sensibilities. Fitzgerald’s fictional worlds might have disturbed the fustier editors at the house, but at least his style of writing was still reassuringly romantic. Lardner was an accessible humorist and had long been a familiar, jovial figure to readers.

  Hemingway, however, was a stranger from a strange land, intent on confronting the masses with a terrifyingly modern world bereft of any comforting stylistic trimmings. His was bare, savage content rendered in a bare, savage style. There was no shelter in that writing, nary an adjective to shade readers from a harsh sun. Not to mention that Lady Brett Ashley made Fitzgerald’s characters Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker seem chaste in comparison.

  Even if Perkins could wrench Hemingway away from Horace Liveright and triumph over the rival house, he would have to face down his own house again. And if he could land this novel, he would push Charles Scribner’s Sons further into the strange, hard terrain of the twentieth century than any commercial American publisher had ever ventured.


  ON FEBRUARY 9, 1926, the day Hemingway’s ship, the Mauretania, docked in New York, nearly a foot of snow fell on the city. Yet nothing would halt his mission.

  The moment he set foot in Manhattan, Hemingway was deep in Fitzgerald territory. Though Fitzgerald himself had been gone for a year, his imprint was evident all over the city. A play adapted from The Great Gatsby had just opened on Broadway; a film adaptation would soon be brought out by Paramount. Perkins attended a preview performance of the play and reported back to Fitzgerald that he had been called a “wonder” and a “genius” by other attendees.

  As with Paris, New York’s social worlds carved out distinct spheres for themselves. Affluent uptown Manhattan resembled the glitzy Right Bank, with the regal Plaza standing as its patron saint hotel instead of the Ritz. Greenwich Village served as New York’s Left Bank, teeming with similarly bohemian aspirations, glamour, and squalor.

  Hemingway made his way to the Hotel Brevoort on lower Fifth Avenue, in the heart of Greenwich Village, whose terrace was that neighborhood’s answer to the Dôme in Montparnasse. Like the Dôme, the Brevoort was often skewered as ground zero for artistic pretension and posturing; still, it was popular among the upper ranks of New York’s literary crowd and visiting international luminaries. At any moment, patrons might glimpse Vanity Fair founder Frank Crowninshield dining in its restaurant several tables away from fashion editor Carmel Snow. Other patrons included the sexually liberated redheaded poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, playwright Eugene O’Neill, and assorted European royals and statesmen. This was definitely the right place for an ambitious young novelist to make his debut in the scene.

  Hemingway’s first order of business: cutting ties with Boni & Liveright. Despite the snow, he charged forty blocks north from the Brevoort to the brownstone housing Liveright’s operation. Given Hemingway’s hostile feelings about the Torrents situation, one might have expected him to challenge Horace Liveright to settle the matter with a bloody boxing round—or, at the very least, a heated confrontation. But their final meeting was almost anticlimactically civilized. A handful of house editors—presumably the same ones who had spurned Torrents—gave Hemingway an amicable reception.

  Horace Liveright himself firmly but graciously reiterated his rejection of Torrents. He told Hemingway that he still wanted to publish The Sun Also Rises when it was done.

  This, obviously, was a nonstarter. Hemingway firmly replied that Liveright had no legal claim to his other books. In his letters leading up to the meeting, Liveright had made it sound as if he intended to fight tooth and nail to keep Hemingway. Yet once he was sitting across from Hemingway in person, all of Liveright’s bravado appears to have faded away. He conceded. Hemingway was officially free. The two men may even have had a few drinks together before parting.

  “We’re Horace and Ernest now,” Hemingway wrote to Louis Bromfield afterward. “[I] told him how sorry I was etc.,” without a hint of remorse.

  Horace Liveright, though, would soon be very sorry indeed. On that freezing day in 1926, relinquishing Hemingway for Sherwood Anderson surely seemed like the safe—even the sane—thing for the publisher to do. It would take a decade before the gravity of the misstep was revealed. By the early 1930s, Hemingway had become a literary icon, while Anderson’s stardom had shriveled to near obscurity.

  Liveright’s own star was destined to sink even further. In 1930, after years of reckless management and bad investments, he was forced out of his own house (which retained his name). Afterward, he devolved into a shabby spectacle.

  “A poseur to the last, he could be found tapping his long cigarette holder nervously at a table at the Algonquin, a mere shadow of his former jaunty self,” recalled fellow publisher Bennett Cerf.

  When Liveright died three years later of pneumonia and complications of alcoholism at the age of forty-six, only a few of his former authors attended his funeral. Hemingway was not among them.

  “It was,” Cerf recalled, “a dismal last curtain to a spectacular career.”

  THE DAY AFTER his meeting with Liveright, Hemingway once again made his way uptown through the snow, this time to the offices of Charles Scribner’s Sons on Fifth Avenue at 48th Street. The publishing house—like the rest of New York—was consumed with all things Fitzgerald. His third story collection, All the Sad Young Men, was about to be launched. As Hemingway walked into the building to meet with Perkins, the windows of the ground-floor Scribner’s store were filled with Fitzgerald’s books and pictures of scenes from the Broadway Gatsby.

  Hemingway had originally planned to play Scribner’s and Harcourt off against each other, but by the time he left Perkins’s office, that plan had been abandoned. Perkins had read The Torrents of Spring; in the meeting, he offered Hemingway $1,500 for both the satire and The Sun Also Rises with a plush royalty rate of 15 percent.

  “He wrote an awfully swell contract and was very damned nice,” Hemingway wrote to Louis Bromfield.

  Not only did Hemingway accept on the spot; he even offered Perkins options on future works, which the editor declined. Presumably the men did not end their meeting in a speakeasy, as the Hemingway-Liveright meeting had reportedly concluded; Hemingway was likely on his best behavior, a trait that Perkins’s New England manners tended to bring out in writers.

  Perkins enjoyed the meeting. His new author amused him. “He is a most interesting chap about his bull fights and boxing,” he wrote to Fitzgerald. For his part, Fitzgerald was thrilled with the outcome of his latest matchmaking. “I’m glad you got Hemmingway,” he replied to Perkins. He had now brought Perkins successes and failures in exactly equal numbers.

  “Ernest will decide whether my opinions are more of a hindrance or a help,” he added.

  After sealing the deal with Perkins, Hemingway sent a jubilant missive off to Bill Smith and Harold Loeb, regaling them with details of the new arrangement with Scribner’s. He still made no mention of the content of The Sun Also Rises, although he told his friends that he was “crazy” to share Torrents with them. By the way, he informed Loeb, In Our Time was performing quite well—as well as Doodab, in fact. “Neck in Neck,” he wrote. “Us writers ought to stick together.”

  He also made a lame-duck visit to Alfred Harcourt. “I should have done the business man and tried to see what Harcourt Brace would do in opposition,” Hemingway wrote to Bromfield, who had paved his way to that house, “[but instead] I just told Perkins I would take it and went over and told Mr. Harcourt the news.”

  Harcourt left the door open for Hemingway to come to his house should Scribner’s displease him as Liveright had. The house had already championed other midwestern writers, like Glenway Wescott—whom Harcourt personally admired—and there was always room for more.

  When Harcourt mentioned Wescott, Hemingway’s good behavior went out the window. He had met Wescott in Paris and immediately disliked almost everything about him, especially his affected British accent. (Wescott actually hailed from Wisconsin.) In fact, Hemingway’s antipathy ran so deep that it earned Wescott a cameo as an insufferable up-and-coming writer named “Robert Prescott” at the beginning of The Sun Also Rises—the very novel Alfred Harcourt was trying to buy. (Hemingway later, at Perkins’s urging, changed the character’s name to “Robert Prentiss.”) Hemingway informed Harcourt that he found Wescott’s work unsound.

  “I felt sorry as soon as I said it,” he later confessed to Bromfield. “But I know so well what a literary fake his prose is.” Thus ended Hemingway’s brief flirtation with Harcourt, Brace.

  There was a certain irony that Hemingway abandoned a publishing house that itself was a product of modern times for a venerable old firm that got its start peddling Puritan ethics. After all, tiresome American Puritanism had helped motivate Hemingway’s generation to flee to Europe in the first place.

  In any case, the decision was made. Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel was going to be brought out by Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publisher of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and
Theodore Roosevelt.

  It was rather romantic company for such a determined, self-hardened realist, but Hemingway was getting what he wanted at long last: a big advance, a big publisher, and a shot at a big future.

  FATEFUL LITERARY MATTERS now concluded, Hemingway embarked on a celebration worthy of Bacchus. In the past, he had felt no great fondness for New York City. A few years earlier, he had written to Gertrude Stein about the streets rendered lightless by skyscrapers and the town’s grim-faced citizens. “All the time I was there I never saw anybody even grin,” he wrote. “Wouldn’t live in it for anything.”

  Yet for a charismatic young writer who had found a top-shelf publisher for his all-important first novel, New York was a different matter entirely. The city’s Prohibition-era giddiness provided the perfect backdrop to celebrate the imminent debut of The Sun Also Rises. That winter, everyone in town may have been drinking underground, but they appeared to be drinking a lot more than ever before, and there were suddenly twice as many places to do so. When Prohibition went into effect in 1920, New Yorkers had fifteen thousand drinking establishments to choose from; just a few years later, that number had more than doubled. Even respectable families had private bootleggers; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s was said to be quite good.

  Now blissfully unencumbered not only by Horace Liveright but also by his wife, mistress, and offspring, Hemingway went on a weeklong bender. “Everybody [was] cockeyed including myself,” he later told a friend, adding that it had been a fog of bootleggers, cocktails, ale, champagne, and—perhaps the greatest evidence that he had gone straight to the heart of the most debauched party in town—Dorothy Parker’s scotch. Just as Hemingway had arrived in Paris with entrée to its most fascinating literary lights, in New York he was immediately admitted to that city’s own literary Olympus, the Algonquin crowd, thanks to his friendship with Donald Ogden Stewart and Robert Benchley. He met “hells own amount of people,” as he put it, including Mrs. Parker.