Max Perkins' Death and the Decline of Hemingway

By Kelley Dupuis

On July 21, 1940, Ernest Hemingway turned 41 years old. He was just finishing For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was published to great acclaim a few months later. In fact by the time Max Perkins, who was both Hemingway's and Scott Fitzgerald's editor at Scribner's, had returned from Fitzgerald's funeral late that year, For Whom the Bell Tolls had already sold 189,000 copies. Three days after the book was published, a deal for nearly $150,000 was signed with Paramount for the film rights. The film was duly made in 1943, with Gary Cooper in the role of Robert Jordan and Ingrid Bergman, just a year off her appearance opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, as Maria.

In terms of his success as a writer, 1940 was in some ways the apotheosis of Ernest Hemingway. Critics and the reading public, who had been tracking and for the most part admiring his work since the publication of his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926, felt they had every reason to expect only further triumphs from the man who had become by then the most famous, and in the eyes of many, the greatest living American writer.

It didn't happen. In fact, in many ways and for a stew of reasons mixing everything from married life to geopolitics, the decade of the 1940s became Hemingway's version of the Lost Weekend. Though busy with a number of projects which included not only covering the war in Europe as a journalist, but also work on a massive, unfinished novel to be called The Garden of Eden (published in a heavily-edited edition in 1986) Hemingway produced no significant work of fiction between 1940 and 1950, and when he finally did, he might well have wished he hadn't.

As the decade began he was living in Cuba with his third wife, celebrated journalist Martha Gellhorn. However, not content to stay home in Cuba and be Mrs. Ernest Hemingway with a war raging in Europe, Gellhorn went off to cover the war as a correspondent for Colliers magazine, and Hemingway somewhat-reluctantly followed suit after a Huck Finn-like stint of hunting for German submarines in the Gulf Stream aboard his fishing boat, the Pilar. Hemingway had been an ambulance driver in World War I and a news correspondent in the Spanish Civil War. World War II would be the third and last war he would witness (and once again, ironically, Hemingway, who was so fascinated with war and all of its trappings, would participate only as a non-combatant.)

Hemingway's marriage to Gellhorn became one of the war's casualties. By the spring of 1946 he was married to his fourth and final wife, journalist Mary Welsh.

With the war over, Hemingway went back to Cuba and resumed the life of writing, boozing and marlin-fishing that it had interrupted. Without a doubt he felt that he had earned the right to "kick back" and enjoy himself for while after working hard in Europe as a war correspondent, and certainly he returned to Cuba more famous than ever. That was part of the problem. From the late '40s onward, Hemingway and the media "worked" each other increasingly, and energies that he should have devoted to writing were devoted instead to "playing the role of Ernest Hemingway" for a cavalcade of reporters and photographers.

Two separate, highly significant and not necessarily unrelated catastrophes struck Hemingway in the years immediately following World War II. The first was the death in 1947 of his beloved and trusted editor Max Perkins, and the second, three years later, was the publication of his first full-length novel since For Whom The Bell Tolls, the disastrous Across The River And Into The Trees.

Perkins had been Hemingway's editor since 1929, when he had worked with Hemingway on A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's father had committed suicide not long before Hemingway first met Perkins, and from the earliest days of their association, Perkins took on something of a fatherly role with Hemingway, much the same role he assumed about the same time for an ungainly young man from North Carolina named Thomas Wolfe, who had recently dumped an avalanche of manuscript on Perkins' desk which Perkins would eventually hew and carve into Look Homeward, Angel.

Over the nearly 20 years of their association, Perkins acquired the reputation of being the editor at Scribner's best qualified to handle the man who was well known as the touchiest author in the firm's stable. Perkins knew how to deal diplomatically with the vain, moody and mercurial Hemingway, could guage when it was "safe" to offer him honest criticisms of his work and when it was a better idea to soft-pedal. It was with Perkins' editorial "ruddering" that Hemingway brought out all of his fiction from A Farewell to Arms to For Whom the Bell Tolls, a decade which also included Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, the short-story collections Men Without Women and Winner Take Nothing and a play about the Spanish Civil War, The Fifth Column.

The '30s had been a busy and productive time for both men. But when Perkins died, Hemingway had not published a novel in seven years.

For many who pursue it, writing is very much like playing a musical instrument. You have to stay in practice or you get rusty. Hemingway loved to apply sports metaphors to writing-his remarks about having "outboxed" de Maupassant, Stendhal and Turgenev have been repeated ad nauseam-and indeed he seemed to have been one of those writers who needs to stay "in training" to keep his writing sharp, not surprising perhaps in view of the heavy emphasis Hemingway's writing always did put on pure sensory experience-seeing, smelling, tasting, touching and hearing. (Although he drank a lot throughout his life, Hemingway never smoked again after his early twenties-he didn't like the way it dulled his sense of smell.)

With all of this in mind, Perkins' death couldn't have come at a worse time for Hemingway. He was physically out of shape, overweight and soaked in liquor, (though he did often cut back on his drinking for one reason or another) and his body, including his head, was battered and tired from a long history of injuries and accidents. Journalism had taken up a lot of his time during the war years, and despite continued work on such projects as the ultimately-tabled Garden of Eden, Hemingway hadn't publicly strutted his stuff in a long time.

It was in this atmosphere that Hemingway decided to make his "comeback." Perkins was gone, and between being both out-of-shape and increasingly worried that after all these years he might not be able to perform like he used to, (and hence disappoint a world that, even without People magazine or eight-second sound bites, had turned him into a superstar) Hemingway was in no condition to be his own best editor. And so, as Hemingway worked away on a new tale, set in Venice, through a haze of booze shot through with the piercing stage lights of global adulation, he managed to persuade himself that he was writing a masterpiece, his best book yet. And there was no Max Perkins around any more to gently rein him in and persuade him to cut here, condense there.

The result was an unqualified disaster. A hopeless romantic despite his tough-guy posturing, Hemingway throughout his life was constantly falling in and out of love with one woman after another. He married four of them, but there were plenty of other "infatuations" along the way, and the older he got, the younger they got. In the late 1940s, the overweight, booze-bloated, celebrity-inflated Hemingway, pushing 50, became infatuated with a beautiful young Italian woman, Adriana Ivancich. The character Renata in Across the River and Into the Trees is based on her, and Renata's doomed love affair in Venice with a dying American army colonel, Richard Cantwell, plays out Hemingway's fantasy about himself and Adriana in much the same way that, 20 years earlier, the fate of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms had played out his wishful embroidering upon his disappointing relationship with 26 year-old hospital nurse Agnes von Kurowski after the then 19 year-old Hemingway had been wounded on the Italian front in 1918.

It is not my purpose here to write a review of a book that was published 50 years ago, but let me just mention the point at which Across the River and Into the Trees starts to "go wrong" for me.

The book starts out well enough. The duck-shooting scene in Ch. 1 has all of the old Hemingway magic. You hear that ice crack. You see those boats moving in the canal. Cantwell is thirsty; you're thirsty.

It's at the beginning of Ch. 2 that I detect the first warning signs of Ernest Miller Hemingway fading into the wings and the huffing and puffing "Papa" taking center stage. Twice on the same page he refers to Cantwell not as an "army colonel" or a "colonel in the army" as anyone else might, but as a "Colonel of Infantry in the Army of the United States." This is affectation, and the older Hemingway got, the more he swam in it. And from that point in the book, things just get windily worse.

In his controversial 1986 "psychobiography" of Hemingway, Kenneth Lynn raised the enticing question (buttressed by like-minded speculation from Canadian critic Northrop Frye) that had Perkins not died when he did, he might have tried to talk Hemingway into distilling this material into a short story. Frye pointed out, and Lynn agrees, that there is much good in the story, and had Hemingway boiled it down to say, 100 pages, it might have been his version of Death in Venice, with all the lyricism and power of Thomas Mann's 1911 mini-masterpiece.

One can speculate forever on such "fantasy baseball" issues, but the fact is that Hemingway's self-critical judgment had not deserted him entirely despite his catastrophic "bad call" on Across the River. Had Perkins still been around, it might indeed have been a better book. Surely Hemingway's ability to cut, compress and keep it short, always one of his strengths, was still there. Having been knocked to the mat (to use a metaphor he would have liked) by the critics over Across the River, he got back to his feet and two years later issued the short work that would clinch the Nobel Prize for him. Despite what you might think of The Old Man and the Sea, (and I have little use for its gooey sentimentality myself) it showed that Hemingway could still control his material if he wanted to. He would lose that ability within a few years as his physical and mental problems mounted. But it is tantalizing to wonder about what the quality of the work of Hemingway's final years might have looked like had not his good friend and most trusted editor died when Hemingway, to judge from what he subsequently produced, was just about to need him the most.

Kelley Dupuis. April 2000

MORE GREAT WORK FROM KELLEY. Kelley Dupuis is one of the most informative people on Hemingway we have ever come across. He can help students with their studies on Hemingway, but please respect his immense literary insight and knowledge and do not ask him to do your homework. Your understanding of Hemingway comes from your own personal research. Kelley Dupuis can help with his literary insight of Hemingway but his help is for serious students of Hemingway. Thanks. kelley@kelleydupuis.com

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