Thomas Wolfe's Beautiful Deathbed Letter to Maxwell Perkins

This has to be one of the most moving letters ever written, the letter Thomas Wolfe wrote to Maxwell Perkins on his deathbed, by hand, against doctor’s orders, after Wolfe had had a falling out with Perkins and Scribners and had moved to another publisher, though Perkins remained loyal to Wolfe and was the literary executor of his estate:

August 12, 1938

Dear Max:

I’m sneaking this against orders—but “I’ve got a hunch”—and I wanted to write these words to you.

I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do, and I thought about you all 1000 times, and wanted to see you all again, and there was the impossible anguish and regret of all the work I had not done, of all the work I had to do—and I know now I’m just a grain of dust, and I feel as if a great window has been opened on life I did not know about before—and if I come through this, I hope to God I am a better man, and in some strange way I can’t explain I know I am a deeper and a wiser one—If I get on my feet and get out of here, it will be months before I head back, but if I get on my feet, I’ll come back.

—Whatever happens—I had this “hunch” and wanted to write you and tell you, no matter what happens or has happened, I shall always think of you and feel about you the way it was that 4^th of July day 3 yrs. ago when you met me at the boat, and we went out on the café on the river and had a drink and later went on top of the tall building and all the strangeness and the glory and the power of life and of the city was below—

Yours always,

Tom

(from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock)

"Seeing, Hearing, and Reading": Maxwell Perkins on How to Write

Here’s some excellent writing advice via Maxwell Perkins, gleaned from Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock:

The editor notes that this letter was written to a “writer of distinction” who had to stop working for a while and take a rest for health reasons.

March 11, 1941

Dear ---:

…And turning things over in your mind, and reflecting upon them and all, is something that a writer ought to have to do in quiet circumstances once in a while. That is one of the troubles with writers today, that they cannot get a chance, or cannot endure to do this. Galsworthy, who never over-rated himself as a writer, but was one of great note in fact, always said that the most fruitful thing for a writer to do was quiet brooding….

 

Being bitter about all the too-many accomplishments of your Facebook friends doesn’t count as brooding!

May 17, 1945

Dear Mr. Mulliken [a young man who was in the service at the time and wrote asking for career advice]:

…I think, in truth, that the best writing of all is done long after the events it is concerned with, when they have been digested and reflected upon unconsciously, and the writer has completely realized them in himself….Long ago I went to visit Ernest Hemingway, after he had been a couple of years in Key West. We went fishing every day in those many-colored waters, and then also in the deep blue Gulf Stream. It was all completely new to me, and wonderfully interesting—there was so much to know that nobody would ever have suspected, about even fishing.  I said to Hemingway, “Why don’t you write about all this?” and he said, “I will in time, but I couldn’t do it yet,” and seeing I did not get his meaning, he pointed to a pelican that was clumsily flapping along, and said, “See that pelican? I don’t know yet what his part is in the scheme of things.”  He did know factually in his head, but he meant that it all had to become so deeply familiar that you knew it emotionally, as if by instinct, and that only came after a long time, and through long unconscious reflection….

(It would be interesting to see if there's a pelican in The Old Man and the Sea, just for kicks.)

June 22, 1945

Dear Jim [another young man in the service who wrote for career advice]:

…You see plenty, and you hear plenty, and that is much more important even than reading. You remember how when Swift was a young man he would go to the inns on the highways and sit in the bars and listen to the teamsters and coachmen talk. He never used the language that he heard—and I suppose he really listened just from interest anyhow—but the rhythm, the tempo of living speech is in the talk of the regular run of people. And so, though you can’t write as you wish now, you are probably going unconsciously through the best education you could have.  Seeing, hearing, and reading….

 

And, to quote the master:

January 4, 1946

Dear Jim [the same man as above]:

I delayed answering your letter because I wanted to quote from Scott Fitzgerald, and it took me a long time to find the paragraph:

“So many writers, Conrad for instance, have been aided by being brought up in a métier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of material and, more important, an attitude from which to view the world. So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life.” …

 

Okay, seriously…no more Facebook today for any of us!

Nebraska Update #2

A hodge-podge of things I’ve done/thought/seen/ate during the recent days of my ongoing residency at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City:

--I finally had a runza, a Nebraska specialty that, despite the fast-food appearance of the Runza mini-chain of restaurants, is based on an old-time recipe.  Dough filled with seasoned ground beef and cheese and jalapenos…pretty darn good!  (The original, which I will have to return to try, is ground beef and cabbage.) Also, who can argue with the brilliance of “frings,” a mixture of French fries and onion rings?

--A fun night around the firepit...on one of the few non-rainy, non-cold nights.  Poets can build lovely fires.

--Mostly I’m doing simple cooking for myself, and in this back-to-basics mode, I’m being reminded that perfection of taste can be humble.  One night I had one of the best baked potatoes of my life—cooked exactly the way I like it by which I mean horribly overdone so the skin is a lovely crust with a slab of butter—and for lunch yesterday, the grilled cheese sandwich was elegantly gooey and delightfully buttery.  ( Maybe at this rate I WILL go through the four sticks of butter I bought at the store?)

--The Wheel is a fabulous bar with a good mix of leave-you-alone and so-are-you-from-around-here conversation.  Thursdays are dollar beer nights (in DC, I don’t even think you’re allowed to utter the word “beer” without paying a buck), and I had some fried jalapeno cheese balls that were so satisfying that I find myself dreaming of them.  (This was not on Wellness Wednesday, the day I eat hyper-healthfully!) I don’t really like the phrase “dive bar” because it sounds sort of condescending to me, but if you’re a fan of that word and of the concept, you need to get yourself to The Wheel.  Frankly, though, what I love most about The Wheel is meeting people from around town and getting a glimpse into Nebraska City life.

--I got to hold IN MY OWN HAND a letter written by TOLSTOY—his own hand!—to William Jennings Bryan.  Some Nebraska friends were going through the scary boxes at the back of the scary corner of the scary area where all the scary ancient ancestral clutter had accumulated, and lo and behold!  Tolstoy!  Pretty cool, I must say. And very casual…we were sipping drinks as we passed the letter around.

--I saw wagon traces from a section of the Oregon Trail.

--Nebraska City has a public charging station for electric cars.  Okay, one car at a time, so not cars, but still…I’m impressed. Will I be seeing Ed Begley Jr. at The Wheel one of these Thursdays?

--I’m in love with the Missouri River.  I try every day to walk down to the industrial area where I can stand at the river’s edge and watch the currents and ripples and the water’s fast, flat flow.  On the other side of the river is Iowa—not at all far away.  In fact, there’s a plaque at the post office about slaves who escaped over to Iowa at that point of the river.  The town was once a major port and did a big business in the freighter industry in the 1800s, provisioning wagon trains. Every day when I stare at that river I feel like I’m somewhere different.

--Train whistles in the dark soothe me. The days and night are criss-crossed with train whistles, some lonely, some companionable, each urgent…I like to think of them as I write.

Rejection Letters by Maxwell Perkins

What’s it like to be rejected by legendary Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins?  Here are two examples, both pretty cutting under that veneer…and both offering excellent advice on writing, relevant still today.

[Note: the redacted names and titles are due to the book’s editor, not me; I’m reading Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, edited by John Hall Wheelock, published (by Scribners,natch!) in 1950. I suspect later editions of the letters contained the recipients’ names.]

Jan. 10, 1936

Dear —:

            It is hard to be obliged to tell you that “----”does not seem to us acceptable for publication. The fact that we also feel that it is now unlikely that it can be made acceptable compels us to speak plainly about it.

            We ought to tell you at the outset that we think you are both creating and writing too hurriedly, which is not fair to your considerable talent.  Your novel seems to us to show the consequences of this in both conception and execution.  We were not disturbed by faults apparent in your original rough draft of the first half, because you told us that it was the product of the time you could spare from income-bringing writing in the course of several weeks only, and we felt that they would be taken care of in a more leisurely rewriting. But the faults, we think, are still there, in the second half of the story as well—which we now read for the first time.

            The story still seems superimposed upon its background , and not in any real sense to grow out of it.  Many characters are introduced who do not touch the story.  It is as if you had carefully gone over the local newspaper files of the [eighteen] eighties, made copious notes, and used this background material valiantly, with the result that much of it seems dragged in, and awkwardly handled. Very often, too, your exposition is disproportionate: things really important to the story are set forth briefly and indirectly , whereas some of the local and political detail, of no real consequence in the novel as such, is given the emphasis of exposition by dialogue.

            The fact that we were willing to pay you an advance, provisional upon acceptance, is evidence enough that we believed in your talent. Empathetically, we still do. But we apparently over-estimated your faculty for self-criticism. It seems to us now that you must have written this book when you were only half ready to begin it.

            If you were to rewrite it now, from stem to stern, we don’t think that it would come to life, even though you might succeed in integrating story and background more effectively.  Your right course—unless we are wrong in our opinion of this manuscript—seems to us to be to put it aside, take up one of the other novels in the plan you outlined to us, and then write this entirely anew a few years from now.  If you write another novel, we believe that you ought to put it away, once you have finished it, until the impulse that led you through it has gone quite cold; then take it up again and see if you are ready yourself to accept it.

            All of this gives you brutally less than your due; you have created some sympathetic characters, and done much effective writing.  But we think that your rapid writing for income has got you into an attitude toward your material that you will have to lose….A novel of this kind should come out of long reflection upon the characters and upon the scene, so that the background and the people and the events all, in the end, become part of a true unit. It is a harder kind of novel to do quickly, perhaps, than any other. …

March 6, 1936

Dear —:

            I have read over your “----” several times. I do not think it is successful, but it is very hard to explain to you why, except that it has the technical disadvantage of being told by a character within the story. That always somewhat diminishes the vividness and sense of actuality by removing the reader further from the things recounted. But it is, of course, a method that has been followed by the best writers.* Otherwise, I think the story failed mostly in not giving the reader a keen enough sense of the reality of what happened, so that he is moved in reading.  This has nothing to do with technique, or structure, or anything of the kind, but only in the ability of a writer to feel with intensity himself, and then so express himself as to make the reader feel in that way too.  If this is the case, I do not know of any way of telling a writer how to get the result. Some men can do it by nature, even though in every technical way they write badly. It has been learned by many, too, who did not seem to have it at first, but they had to teach that to themselves entirely, for it is not at all a technical matter.  Many of the very best writers of narrative, such as history, etc., have been unable to succeed with fiction. You write very well, but this story is not successful, in spite of that.

            It is also true that it is hardly the material for a short story, from an editor’s standpoint, but that has nothing to do with its intrinsic interest.

Ever sincerely yours,

*The Great Gatsby, perchance, Maxwell?

Maxwell Perkins: Great Guy, But He Didn't Think Much of Women and Huck Finn

Okay, my incendiary headline has done the trick and gotten your attention!

As I mentioned, I’ve moved on from Robert Lowell and legendary literary Boston to literary legends: I’m about a third of the way through Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins, selected and edited by John Hall Wheelock.  It’s one of those cool, old paperback Scribners editions with the gray cover and green and white rectangles that I love, published in 1950, so kind of hot off the presses, since Perkins died in 1947.

There are some frustrations, including a bad habit of redacting the titles of the books that (apparently) readers have written in to complain about—nasty language, immoral behavior, the general nastiness of life!—in the letters Perkins writes back to defend the author, Scribners, and writing/art in general.  I guess trolls were around before the internet age.

And I was taken aback by this snippet, early on, which sort of crushed my personal fantasies of having lived in another age and been discovered by Perkins:

March 31,1924

To Edward Bok:

…You have practically confessed, I think in The Americanization [of Edward Bok], or in one way or another, to a rather low opinion of woman (an opinion to which I have no objection, since I share it) but this would make still more interesting a chapter by you upon “Women who have impressed me.”  Of course, you have talked about various distinguished women whom you have met, but mostly you have associated with men and have written about them.  Could you not make a fine chapter on remarkable women you have known? I have known some extraordinary ones in vitality and will power and intellect too.  I think this would have a tendency to round out this book, and to once more bring out your views in these concrete terms….

 

[Oh, so sorry, Edward Bok, that the book Perkins is writing about, Twice Thirty, seems to be no longer in print…!  Though I confess to being impressed that Bok is the one who coined the word “living room.”  And I should note that Perkins does champion female authors, including (so far) Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Caroline Gordon. I'll imagine he was just trying to establish some ground so that Bok would listen to the editorial suggestion.]

It’s quite humbling to see that many of the books Perkins is writing about are ones I’ve never heard of.  It wasn’t all Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe…Steeplejack by James Huneker seemed to be a big deal.  And Perkins’ acumen was not infallible:

December 5, 1924

To Will James [suggesting what type of book to write for a follow-up to Cowboys North and South]:  

…Really, the book I have in mind—for unsatisfactory as comparisons are, one can never altogether avoid them—is “Huckleberry Finn.”  There was very little plot to it, you probably remember.  Its great interest was simply in the incidents and scenes of the trip on a raft down the Mississippi, told in the language of a boy.  Of course, “Huckleberry Finn” is primarily a boy’s book and it would be better if what you would do were not altogether that…

 

It’s also interesting how often the word “sales” comes up—and Perkins did start at Scribners in the advertising department—but it’s instructional that during this “golden age” of publishing, there was always much concern about how the book would sell and the various pressures of the industry:

June 3, 1930

To Thomas Wolfe:

…Everything is much as usual here except that the fiction market, which was bad enough as things were , has been rendered still worse by the Doubleday announcement that they are to publish novels at one dollar.  I am glad you worked hard  and we were able to get out “Look Homeward Angel” before this collapse came….

 

More to come…I haven’t even yet mentioned The Great Gatsby!!

Anne Sexton + Elizabeth Bishop = PoBiz

I’ve moved on to a new book, the letters of Maxwell Perkins—and I’m sure some snippets from that will find their way here—but I have to leave with a little bit more from  With Robert Lowell and His Circle (by Kathleen Spivack, who may, by this point, think I’m stalking her!):

Here’s what happened the only time (assumes the author) that Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop met.  Spivack, friends with both women, was put into the role of organizer/negotiator:

…  “I’m shy,” each protested.  Well, that was only partially true, as I watched the prima donna aspects of each poet surface.  Finally, a restaurant was agreed upon, a time and a date.  There were, of course, several cancellations and postponements.  Also, each poet insisted I pick her up and accompany her.  Anne was afraid to meet Elizabeth Bishop because Lowell had touted her as the best woman poet in America, and because Anne admired Bishop’s work so much.  But Elizabeth was afraid to meet Anne because she feared that Anne would be “confessional,” and she was repelled and appalled by what she considered Anne’s raw and sexual outpourings, and because of Anne’s openness in writing about her breakdowns, a topic Elizabeth feared and about which she could never bring herself to write directly.

However, Lois Ames [a friend] agreed to serve as Anne’s second, to pick her up and bring her into Cambridge to the Iruna, a Spanish restaurant where we would all meet.  After I had met Elizabeth Bishop in her apartment and we had played a rousing set of Ping-Pong games, the four of us actually managed to sit down at a restaurant table.  I waited for great words of literature to fly about my ears.  Here were my favorite women poets meeting.  What a wonderful conversation would ensue, I thought.

“Tell me, Anne,” Elizabeth leaned over, “How much money do you get for a reading nowadays?”  “At least a thousand,” was Anne’s immediate answer.  And the two poets were off, talking about contracts and money and publishers who had or hadn’t done them wrong.  Lois and I sat there amazed.  If we had thought one word about poetic process was to be exchanged, we were mistaken.  The two women talked about business with relish all through lunch until the dessert course, when Anne dramatically turned to Lois and exclaimed, “Lois, did I ever tell you much it hurt, having my babies?” Now it was Anne and Lois’s turn to talk, while Elizabeth Bishop and I sat silent, as Anne and Lois outdid themselves on each gory, painful detail of their various childbirths. As I walked Elizabeth back home, she was thoughtfully silent. “Well, really,” she said at the door, dismissing the whole encounter.  As far as I know, the women never saw each other again.

 

If you’re lucky enough to be a Converse MFA student who has been following this series of posts, you should know that our own Richard Tillinghast is quoted in the book and thanked in the acknowledgments…and I’m pretty sure we can convince him at the summer residency to share a few of his own Robert Lowell/literary Boston/back in the day stories!

Speaking of Robert Lowell, here’s a poem that I like a lot, from Life Studies.  The last four lines are absolutely killer:  “Sailing Home from Rapallo.”

Anne Sexton Spent Her Grant Money on a Swimming Pool: Here's Why

There was some interest yesterday about Anne Sexton spending grant money to put in a swimming pool, so I thought I'd excerpt that part of the book (With Robert Lowell and His Circle, by Kathleen Spivack).  I only have 40 pages left, and I'm really going to be sad when I'm done!

“Anne had used her fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute of Independent Study (given at least partially to women on the basis of need) to build herself an outdoor swimming pool. This fact did not please the worthy ladies of Radcliffe!  Nevertheless, that swimming pool gave Anne a great deal of pleasure, as well as the frequent presence of friends. At the first faintly warmish days of spring, Anne moved her visitors outside under the weak New England sunlight, sheaves of paper around us, books open to thrilling lines of poetry.  It was cold, but we dove into the chilly water, pushing aside the dead leaves and new pollen that floated on the surface.

“I remember swimming nude in the pool, looking at trees, and drinking Anne’s newest drink discovery, Champale, giggling over vague poetic jokes.  Or drying off, sitting in the sun, reading each other’s poems.  Maxine Kumin and her children would arrive.  Maxine dove into the pool, cool, competent, and graceful.  Anne, on Thorzine, would move a bit into the shade.  The phone rang and was dragged outside.  Anne’s children came home from school.  The Dalamation dragged its puppies outside.  Figures were commented on: hips and waists. I had a baby. Lois got her divorce.  Maxine’s daughter entered Radcliffe.  Anne’s children grew up.  Poems were shared and magazines passed around.  We wrote and wrote and read and read and revised and wrote.  We read aloud to each other.  Steam rose from the pool; the light grew thin; the leaves fell.  And we swam until late October…”

I'm going to file that under "Writing Tips"....  Just a thought, new Guggenheim Fellows!