Near-Death Experiences_And Others

by Robert Gottlieb

  * * *

  AND YET, this is not totally fair to Look Homeward, Angel. Rereading it, I see real virtues—a voice that, however out of control, is sincere, rich, and, sometimes, moving; a considerable gift for descriptive prose; and a mind driven by fervent intellectual curiosity. The unendurable verbal torrent, the unbearable self-dramatizing—these are distorted reflections of the serious intentions and ardent convictions of a talented if wholly unsophisticated adolescent mentality. No wonder so many adolescents rose to the occasion. When Max Perkins first read Wolfe’s manuscript, he had no doubts about the largeness of his new writer’s talent. And as he got to know Wolfe personally (and intensely: There was no other way to know him), he grew more and more taken by the young man himself.

  Wolfe was twenty-nine when Look Homeward, Angel was published after an exhausting editorial process throughout which the editor proceeded with his habitual modesty and tact and the writer (at least at first) responded with intoxicated eagerness. Describing it all to Margaret Roberts in a letter so long it might have tried the patience even of this doting former teacher, he told her that at the first meeting of editor and author, Max “began cautiously on the book” but then went on to say that the book was “new and original” and that “these people … were ‘magnificent’—as real as any people he had ever read of.” This from the celebrated editor of Fitzgerald and Hemingway! Naturally, young Tom had been “wild with excitement.”

  In the event, some ninety thousand words were stripped from the book, which nevertheless weighed in at well over five hundred pages when it was published in the fall of 1929, instantly elevating Wolfe to the higher ranks of contemporary American writers. Yes, there were blemishes on this sprawling bildungsroman, but the general view was that the talent was prodigious, the ambition immense, the future limitless. And Wolfe himself was so different—not only an unlicked provincial despite his three years spent under George Pierce Baker, the famous professor of drama at Harvard, but physically so extraordinary: unkempt, clumsy, six feet four inches tall—a mountain of a young man, a phenomenon. The notion of genius was in the air.

  Actually, it had been in the air for some time. David Herbert Donald, Wolfe’s biographer, tells us that in college he was talked about as “an eccentric genius,” and Professor Baker referred to him as “a genius somewhat out of control.” Madeleine Boyd, the neophyte literary agent who steered him to Scribner’s, reading the manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel for the first time, “looked up to find that it was three in the morning. Thrilled, she began to run up and down the hall of the apartment, shouting at the top of her voice: ‘A genius! I have discovered a genius!’” Even the restrained Perkins would write to him in a moment of crisis, “You are one of the few men of genius writing in English today.” As for the genius himself, he wrote to his mother from Harvard, “I don’t know yet what I am capable of doing but, by God, I have genius … and I shall yet force the inescapable fact down the throats of the rats and vermin who wait the proof.”

  Did Wolfe ever doubt himself? Toward the end of Look Homeward, Angel: “But what, said Eugene very slowly into the darkness, if I’m not a Genius? He did not ask himself the question often.” And at least once he ups the stakes: In a 1928 letter to his lover, Aline Bernstein, he tells her, “I must find work that I believe in, and then I must believe in my own excellence and importance as a kind of modern Christ.”

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  LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL sold well, if not spectacularly, and Wolfe was now a famous writer and a figure. The expectations for his next novel were feverish, but it would be six years before the world would see Of Time and the River. The problem wasn’t that the author was blocked—no writer was ever less blocked than Thomas Wolfe. Tsunamis of words poured from him, all scrawled into large notebooks—perhaps five thousand words a day, day in, day out. The manuscript grew and grew, but it was formless. Look Homeward, Angel had been given shape by eliminating digressions that got in the way of its relatively direct if flowery account of a young man leaving home and beginning to find himself. Of Time and the River was writing by accretion, not trajectory—Wolfe just set down everything that occurred to him, with profuse detail and unabashed repetition. When, under Perkins’s prodding, he would go off to reduce and tame the profusion, he would come back with thousands and thousands of new words, equally unstructured. If something happened, he wrote it down: genius by blogging.

  Eventually Perkins insisted that Wolfe hand over the manuscript, and a few days later Tom delivered a crateful of pages, totaling five hundred thousand words—and a few days after this, brought in another five hundred thousand. Perkins dug in. Night after night, for many months, Wolfe would arrive at the Perkins apartment, Max having already put in an eight-hour day at the Scribner’s offices, and the two men would toil over the manuscript, at first pleasantly enough, eventually combatively, the editor deleting, the author furnishing new material. “For instance,” David Donald tells us in Look Homeward,

  in order to illustrate the tensions in the Gant family while Eugene was waiting to learn whether a New York producer had accepted his play, Wolfe composed an account that ran to 240 pages—about eighty thousand words, or the size of an average novel—that, covering a period of only about five minutes, recaptured every move, gesture, and word uttered in a long, and largely pointless, conversation designed to get Eliza Gant [Eugene’s mother] from the kitchen of her house into a car waiting in front.

  Whereas the editor knew that the book was still a hopelessly unwieldy morass, the author was certain that if only he were allowed six more months (and Lord knows how many more words), he would have the book he had always intended. The struggle continued until at last Perkins decided that he could start readying at least the first third of the manuscript for publication. Dispirited, Wolfe lost interest, the depleted Perkins could do no more, and Of Time and the River, in all its lack of structure and focus and with an inconclusive ending, went on sale in 1935, a mere 912 pages in length.

  Critics again heralded Wolfe’s large talents, comparing him to Dickens, Rabelais, Melville, Whitman, Joyce, Proust, and more, yet coming down hard on his all too obvious flaws. Clifton Fadiman in The New Yorker found his style “wondrous, Elizabethan” at its best, but at its worst “hyperthyroid and afflicted with elephantiasis.” Malcolm Cowley in The New Republic found that despite the novel’s tremendous virtues, all too much of it was “possibly worse than anything that any other reputable American novelist has permitted himself to publish.”

  Wolfe had got out of town before the book was published—off on one of his seven sojourns in Europe. He was startled and relieved by the generally admiring attention Of Time and the River was receiving back home, and the fact that it was turning into a considerable commercial success (number-three fiction seller for the year). When on his return he was met by Perkins at the dock, he swept up his usually decorous editor and they rampaged through the night, actually climbing up a fire escape to break into the scruffy loft apartment in which he had written most of Angel. It was, he was to say, the happiest day of his life. And no doubt one of Max’s happiest, too. The bromance was in full bloom.

  Of course this escapade features prominently in Genius, and why not? Not many dramatic incidents capable of being exploited on film punctuate the relationship between a writer and an editor. In place of drama, the movie gives us a good deal of weather. Apparently it was always raining in New York in the 1920s and 1930s, beginning with the rain that’s pouring down on young Tom as he squelches up and down Fifth Avenue, bracing himself to enter the Scribner’s building for the first time. And even when it isn’t raining, it’s dark, indoors and out—how Perkins could read in his gloomy office is a mystery.

  * * *

  ODDLY, GENIUS IS A BRITISH PRODUCTION, not one of its stars American. Tom is played by Jude Law, who despite being short and slight rather than hulking gives the film’s finest performance, unerringly capturing Wolfe’s intensity and passion and charm. Max is efficiently impersonated by Co
lin Firth, but Perkins was the opposite of a dramatic personality, and his inner conflicts don’t provide Firth with much to do except sport the fedora that Max was famous for wearing even at the dinner table. Finally, and most bizarrely, Aline Bernstein—well into her forties when she first meets Tom, a warmhearted, plumpish Jewish New York success story—is played by the Australian Nicole Kidman at her frostiest. What were they dreaming of?

  When Max meets Tom’s boat on that day in 1935 he’s forced to report that Aline, whom he’d barely encountered before, had recently turned up in the Scribner’s offices and made a scene, threatening to create trouble if Tom writes about their affair to the distress of her family. During their confrontation, Aline may or may not have mentioned a gun—Max, hard of hearing, thought she may have, but went on to qualify that he wasn’t sure whether she intended to use it on him, Tom, or herself. Needless to say, in Genius the unverified gun is front and center. The bromance has become a noir triangle.

  Maxwell Perkins was not a man prepared by temperament or inclination to participate in high drama. He had his idiosyncrasies, but the surface of his days was essentially unruffled: work, work, work—in the office, on the commuter train, at home. Even so, his emotional life was not unruffled. His wife, Louise, was a difficulty—he had damaged their marriage at the start by forbidding her the career in the theater that she longed for, and now she was both dabbling in the outskirts of the theater world and, to his rock-ribbed Yankee-Episcopal vexation, turning to Catholicism for comfort, while to her vexation, she was watching her husband more or less adopt Tom as a sixth Perkins child.

  There were Max’s other “children,” too: fragile Scott Fitzgerald, whom Max loved and struggled to support and protect, and Hemingway, wayward and ornery, perhaps, but at first supportive of Wolfe. (Later, he would refer to him as “a glandular giant with the brains and the guts of three mice” and “the over-bloated Lil Abner of literature.”) Both Scott (Zelda in tow) and “Hem” are given embarrassing cameos in Genius. On the other hand, the happy relationship between Max and his five girls is charmingly represented in the movie, even if there’s a touch of Life with Father to their encounters. If you want to love Max Perkins as well as admire him, dip into Father to Daughter, a collection of his letters to his little girls. One letter perhaps can stand for all, this one to six-year-old Elizabeth from a trip abroad in 1920:

  E, a daddy can’t have any fun without his children. There is no use his trying. Everywhere he goes he thinks, “Yes, this would be fun if only my little girls were here; but what good is it without them.”—He can’t get them out of his head. He may go to see statues of something, but they are not what he really sees:—he sees his little girls, playing, far away.—But when he gets their letter, then he is happy.

  Daddy

  The relationship between the mutually devoted Max and Tom began to fray seriously in the wake of Of Time and the River, Tom driven to break free of the mentor/father who was also the closest friend he’d ever had. A catalytic agent was a brutal attack in 1936 by the esteemed Bernard DeVoto in The Saturday Review of Literature. Wolfe, DeVoto wrote, was an “astonishingly immature” writer who had “mastered neither the psychic material out of which a novel is made nor the technique of writing fiction.… However useful genius may be in the writing of novels, it is not enough in itself.” Most shattering to Tom was the explicit allegation that it was Perkins who was really responsible for his success. Max came to think that this charge, gnawing at Tom’s precarious ego, was what ultimately led him “to believe he must prove that I was not necessary to him.”

  To leave Scribner’s or not to leave—for well over a year the question hung in the air, Tom torturing both Max and himself with agonized discussions about his publishing future. The ultra-patient Perkins finally snapped: “If you must leave Scribner’s, go ahead and leave, but for heaven’s sake, don’t talk about it anymore!” In November 1937, Tom formally left—signing a contract with a young editor, Edward Aswell, at Harper and Brothers, but not before sending Max a twelve-thousand-word letter explaining and defending himself—a letter that devastated Perkins, but to which he replied with his customary understanding and sympathy. And the writer and his former editor went on spending time together, each of them repeatedly expressing the loving admiration he felt for the other. Awkwardly, in his will Tom made Max the executor and trustee of his estate, so that when he died the grieving and conflicted Perkins was left in the unhappy position of overseeing Aswell as he dealt with the mountain of material Wolfe had left behind.

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  NO ONE WAS LESS SURPRISED by Tom abandoning Max than Aline Bernstein, who in 1930 had presciently written to Tom, “Some day your friend Mr. Perkins when he suffers at your hand the way I do now, will find you out. If you can hurt a dear friend once, you will do it again.” But then Aline, even at the height of her passion for Tom, had always seen him clearly. The two of them had met on a ship returning from Europe in 1925, were instantly smitten with each other, and soon fell into the most passionate relationship either would ever experience. Yet Aline was, and remained, contentedly married to a successful and wealthy stockbroker by whom she had a son and a daughter only a few years younger than Tom.

  She was also a leading figure in the New York theater world, one of the two or three most admired set and costume designers of her time, working through the decades for New York’s most distinguished directors and stars, from Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Company to Tallulah Bankhead in The Little Foxes, even Balanchine’s 1946 production of Ravel’s The Spellbound Child. She was a byword for distinction—as well as the first woman to be accepted into the tough Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators, and Paperhangers.

  She was also elegant, a perfect hostess, a virtuoso cook, and devoted to her family, whereas Tom was an indigent, unpublished, rough-mannered twenty-four-year-old, twenty years her junior. It didn’t matter: The sexual pull between them was overwhelming. Her love for him was total, open, and distressingly self-abnegating, while he adored her—and abused her. During the years in which he was becoming a novelist, she helped him stay financially afloat, slept with him, made his meals, and revealed herself to him completely, fully aware that he would one day use her life (and her) as “material.” When Look Homeward, Angel was published, the dedication read “For A.B,” but in the copy he presented to her, Tom wrote beneath the dedication:

  To Aline Bernstein[:]

  On my 29th birthday, I present her with this, the first copy of my first book. This book was written because of her and was dedicated to her. At a time when my life seemed desolate, and when I had little faith in myself, I met her. She brought me friendship, material and spiritual relief, and love such as I never had before. I hope therefore that readers of my book will find at least part of it worthy of such a woman.

  But by then he was already withdrawing. The next years were terrible for her, as she yearned for him physically and then for his mere presence in her life. He avoided her, wrote ugly letters to her, yet couldn’t make a conclusive break—the emotional dependency was as strong as the original sexual impulse had been. In 1931 he wrote to her, “I shall love you all the days of my life, and when I die, if they cut me open they will find one name written on my brain and on my heart. It will be yours. I have spoken the living truth here, and I sign my name for anyone to see. Tom Wolfe.” He wouldn’t return to her, though. In the three works of fiction Aline wrote during the 1930s, she gives three versions of their relationship, one of them—the first-rate The Journey Down—a powerful and moving account of her slow and painful recovery from a failed suicide attempt.

  * * *

  THE UGLIEST, SICKEST ASPECT of the relationship was Tom’s obsessive vision of Aline as “my Jew.” He both found it sexy that she was Jewish and hated and feared her Jewishness. From The Web and the Rock, about the Aline character, Esther Jack:

  Fixed in an arrogant power, her face as he saw it then flamed like a strange and opulent jewel.… He saw a dark regiment of Je
wish women in their lavish beauty, their faces melting into honey, their eyes glowing, their breasts like melons.… They were the living rack on which the trembling backs of all their Christian lovers had been broken, the living cross on which the flesh and marrow of Christian men had been crucified.

  Aline was not the only Jew he struck out at. His New York is filled with Jews—it’s Jew-ridden. In the short story “Death the Proud Brother” we find “a little gray-faced Jew, with a big nose, screwy and greasy-looking hair, that roached backward from his painful and reptilian brow”; “an assertive and knowing-looking Jew, with a large nose, an aggressive voice, and a vulturesque smile”; and more. Yet not all Jews are caricatured or derided; indeed, one of his most effective stories is “I Have a Thing to Tell You,” a barely fictionalized account, published in The New Republic, of a horrifying incident he had witnessed in Nazi Germany when a middle-aged Jewish man was torn from a railway car while trying to leave the country.

  Although as the 1930s progressed Tom’s social consciousness was expanding, his personal behavior was deteriorating. We learn from Carole Klein’s revealing biography of Aline (1979) that one night in 1937 she was summoned to the lobby of the Gotham Hotel where Tom, wildly drunk, was demanding to see her. “He started the most awful row about the Jews,” she wrote to her great friend the playwright Bella Spewack (Boy Meets Girl, Kiss Me, Kate), denouncing the entire race who “should be wiped off the face of the earth” and shouting “Three cheers for Hitler! Three cheers for Hitler!” “Bella … do you know what I did? I landed out [sic] and punched Tom in the nose!” He was so drunk he fell to the floor, and Aline had him thrown out of the building. “It was the most sickening experience of my life.” His rabid anti-Semitism, you won’t be surprised to hear, is not featured in Genius.