Yours Ever (15 page)

During much of this period, however, Rilke himself lacks any compelling artistic project. Poverty forces him into the reviewing and article writing he so dislikes, and keeps him from sending Kappus any more than the titles of the books he has managed to publish. Already married and a father, Rilke nonetheless imparts the most ethereal sort of sexual advice: “most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.” Depressed by springtime whenever it arrives, he recommends solitude, muses on the chance for a new androgyny in the world and talks about a state of mutual regard between lovers that sounds like D. H. Lawrence’s “star-equilibrium” without the preliminary fun: “this more human love (that will fulfill itself, infinitely considerate and gentle, and kind and clear in binding and releasing) will resemble that which we are preparing with struggle and toil, the love that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.” In fact, Rilke’s imagined lovers appear as if they’ll always be exchanging letters instead of kisses.

Letter writing was one more thing that came to him with difficulty. From Rome, in October 1903, he apologizes to Kappus for the delay in answering his last communication: “Forgive this dilatoriness—but I do not like writing letters while traveling, because I need more for letter-writing than the most necessary implements: some quiet and solitude and a not too incidental hour.” (There is also, he pleads, the state of Italian mail delivery to consider.) Even when in the mood to address Kappus’s tribulations, he will demur that he “can say almost nothing that is helpful, hardly anything useful.” As he’s told him before: “for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.” What he really has in mind here is the advice he requires, not dispenses. His great lessons about work are still coming from the man he sometimes serves as a private secretary, Auguste Rodin, and few things can upset him more than a break in the sculptor’s letters.

IF RILKE HAS
an erotic and self-confident opposite, it is probably Henry Miller, whose letters to New Directions publisher James Laughlin are so bumptious and bullying that there’s frequent confusion in a reader’s mind as to who’s working for whom. In 1936, before they begin the business association that Ezra Pound has been urging, Miller writes: “I am thinking, Laughlin, me boy, that you’re the guy I must count on over there. I was thinking about it all night. Shit, you’re a
Gentile
, which counts tremendously, in the first place, and you’re dogged (I can see that from your mug), and you don’t give a shit, and well, a lot of things combined.”

Laughlin
is
a boy—a Harvard alumnus not yet twenty-five—and Miller makes no bones about his own pissed-off, middle-aged poverty, or his unwillingness to stop writing dirty, if literary, books. Nearly two years after their negotiation begins, Miller finally decides that the whole thing won’t work:

When Laughlin offers some unexpectedly good terms, the author sends back a hymn of thanks (“You are the Jesus Christ of the publishing world!”), but Miller takes care not to sing it too long. He’s soon warning the young publisher that Laughlin will be the one, not the printers, to catch Miller’s ire if there’s any bowdlerization of
Tropic of Capricorn;
and Laughlin must “never ask … if I am in need—I am and will be for a long time.” After Laughlin turns down the author’s Greek travel book
(The Colossus of Maroussi)
, the only letter he’ll get from Miller for the next three years is an open
one in
The New Republic
, attacking him for timidity in the face of censors.

After they’ve reconciled, Miller insists, for the next few decades, that Laughlin do more to stimulate American demand for his books. He sounds rude even when he’s trying to be polite: “You don’t need to feel
obliged
to bring the book out. I’m writing to you first because you are entitled to first choice.” For his part in this up-and-down correspondence, Laughlin gently keeps Miller aware of practicalities—the need, for example, to have a new book from him now that backlist sales are slowing down, and the importance of distinguishing “the literary crowd” from “the non-academic reader.” But Laughlin himself—for a while the fiancé of that other literary sounding-board, Maria Britneva (St. Just)—can’t quite make up his mind about where Miller belongs: “I have never thought of you as a highbrow writer,” he declares in 1951. “To my mind, you belong in the great popular tradition of Cervantes, Rabelais and Balzac.” Seven years later he’s pronouncing his volatile correspondent “an important thinker as well as a brilliant writer of fiction.”

Laughlin realizes that his own moodiness allows him to understand and put up with Miller’s, but over the course of thirty years his letters—so many of them written in the teeth of Miller’s temper and presumption—never lose a feeling of distance, even formality. “All in all,” he writes in 1961, “it sounds as though you are having a marvelous time over there, and exerting a very stimulating effect on the European literary scene.” His signature “JL” or “J” can sometimes freeze back into “With best wishes, as ever, James Laughlin.”

The fluctuation was probably deliberate. When you have a reader who is likely to blow up over any letter’s content, formality can be an instrument of peacekeeping. Miller would have been
impossible
with e-mail, which has made the telegram’s instant high dudgeon affordable to all. One imagines him hitting the “Send” key three or four times a day, retracting and re-releasing sentiments with the same dosage of overstatement used in their initial dispatch. In the low-tech event, there was probably more than one occasion when he cooled down while rummaging for a stamp.

Maxwell Perkins, that earlier Harvard graduate come to Publishers’ Row, usually dealt with a more mainstream, though often no less high-maintenance, run of author than Laughlin had in Henry Miller. If Perkins were alive in today’s publishing culture, his colleagues would probably be approaching him to do a book on management style, given the deftness of his letters not only to the writers on his list but also to the occasionally ruffled purchasers of Scribner books.

He was a master of the passive-aggressive. “I detest argument,” Perkins assures Scott Fitzgerald in 1926, and it’s no wonder. He knows how to win one before it gets started. His general epistolary strategy toward authors is common enough—start off with some praise and then get to the problems—but Perkins has a knack for making his essential demands seem incidental to everything else. At times he comes off more Southern than Yankee, layers of sub-junction and subordination ballooning up like petticoats: “I don’t like to say … But I do think … Just the same … And I am inclined to think … But I should say”—all these phrases occur in one paragraph of a letter that advises its recipient to “trust your own instinct,” while making clear that this author should abandon his current subject and start another book entirely. The warmth with which Perkins declines an unsolicited manuscript matches the tact with which he rejects a commissioned one. The diffident pose, so elaborate and constant (“I don’t advance this view with much confidence”), always distracts from the cocking of the gun. He pretends to cede the whole field while securing the only square foot of it that counts.

His most famous challenge was the novelist Thomas Wolfe, who needed praise and reassurance and, above all, cutting. Perkins wrote by hand, his own posthumous editor informs us, “where the situation was delicate.” With Wolfe it often was. “It seems rather futile to write this letter,” Perkins admits on September 10, 1930, “in view of your having stopped all communications.” Wolfe is in despair over reviews of
Look Homeward, Angel
—a “few unfavorable” ones, Perkins reminds him, as opposed to “the overwhelming number of extremely and excitedly enthusiastic” ones. A few years later, in a letter to Hemingway, one finds Perkins outlining his and Wolfe’s continuing efforts on
Of Time and the River:

When they were through, Wolfe would offer Perkins the novel’s dedication; Perkins would refuse; and Wolfe would insist, thus commemorating what Perkins called “the most interesting episode of my editorial life”—one that didn’t end with the book’s publication. Perhaps inevitably, Wolfe went on to pour out long, private complaints to Perkins, biting the hand that had blue-pencilled him toward finishing a book he would otherwise never have completed. Perkins’s replies display a patience that sometimes seems more paternal, even psychiatric, than editorial:

Perkins’s epistolary manners took years to develop. A letter on the general subject of competition, written to Van Wyck Brooks in 1914, when Perkins was still in the Scribner’s advertising department, is by his own admission verbose (“I have not been able to say it fully or well, and now my pencil is used up entirely”), a far cry from the plain, perfect reassurances he would eventually learn to offer writers like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (“It is all simple, not complicated—don’t let anything make it complicated to you”) and James Jones: “Let me know occasionally how things go.”

In 1921, Perkins wrote to John Galsworthy about a young American novelist who “needs steering.” The editor had begun the effort to direct Scott Fitzgerald’s talents two years earlier, when Scribner’s
acquired
This Side of Paradise
and Perkins outlined publishing’s seasonal rhythms to the young author, explaining why “it would damage your book exceedingly to try to rush it out before Christmas.” When it comes time to help Fitzgerald revise
The Beautiful and Damned
, Perkins has very specific ideas about one of the novel’s crucial speeches, but opens his critique, typically, with some advice against advice: “Don’t ever
defer
to my judgment.” He claims no desire to control Fitzgerald the way William Dean Howells controlled Mark Twain.

Perkins recognizes
The Great Gatsby
as a novel of such near-perfection that in his editorial comments of November 20, 1924, he’s “ashamed” to make even the few suggestions he has about the best way for Fitzgerald to acquaint the reader with Gatsby’s past. In this letter, praise is not strategic prologue but the main agenda; Perkins is only too pleased to enumerate “such things [in the book] as make a man famous … You once told me you were not a
natural
writer—my God!”

Sixteen years later, only seven months before Fitzgerald’s death, Perkins would be writing to the novelist in Hollywood, invoking his great long-ago success in an effort to hoist him up from his current low point. “I never see an editor or writer, hardly, but they ask about you. It shows what you did, for think of all the writers who were thought to be notable, and whose output has been much larger, who have simply vanished without a trace. But we know the ‘Gatsby’ was a truly great book … You know that you are in almost all the school anthologies.” Three paragraphs later, at the close of the letter, Perkins seems to realize that this sort of praise might make a man of forty-three feel more depressed than encouraged, and so he decides, with lovely matter-of-fact courtesy, to sign off by looking not toward the golden past but to the active, if uncertain, future: “At the ‘sales conference’ about the fall books, the salesmen were all anxious to know what you were doing.”

FITZGERALD WAS
more naturally a taker of advice than its giver, but he had to assume the second role when his daughter reached
adolescence. Deprived of her mother (by then in a sanatorium) and of her “golden childhood,” Scottie Fitzgerald watched her father become a stern parent whose hard written admonitions could melt like ice cubes in the swirl of his own alcoholic behavior. At Christmastime in 1936, for instance, Fitzgerald insists on a hurdy-gurdy instead of a swing orchestra for the tea dance he’s giving his daughter, and he specifies exactly how the invitations to her friends should be written. On the day of the dance he winds up getting drunk in front of them all.

Many of his letters are mailed from Hollywood, where he is trying to earn money, to Scottie’s boarding school or college. He tells his “Dearest Pie” to stay away from fluff (“What purpose is served in teaching that second-rate Noel Coward at Vassar?”) and to concentrate on the Romantic poets who helped lyricize and sometimes even title his own novels: “For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.” He is honest about her own literary possibilities (“I do not believe that so far you are a ‘natural’ “) and confident of his artistic marching orders: “the above is really good advice, Pie, in a line where I know my stuff.” He proposes for her a regimen not unlike the young Gatsby’s self-improving daily schedule: “If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the
hardest
thing
first
at the
exact moment that you feel yourself fit for doing anything
in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration.”